The Blue Suitcase

Postcard from 2011: A Look Back

2011-12-31T22:00:00.000+01:00

Fora last post of 2011, I’m taking a page from baby Louisa’s book: Stop crawling.Sit up, turn around. Make sure the stuff behind you is the same stuff that wasthere a minute ago. (Even if it’s just daddy eating leftovers.) Louisa’sfrequent backward head-checks remind me to stay oriented with the past as Ichart my way forward.

A littleover a year ago, here on The Blue Suitcase, I mentioned that my big challengein repatriating would be to import the good things I learned about living well,finding ways to fit those lessons into a new American life. I’m so proud of myfamily for continuing to meet those challenges. For one thing, our bikes getnear-daily use, and of course on every outing, the boxbike brings a half dozenadmiring and curious comments from folks in our neighborhood. Our healthyeating habits and addiction to fresh air and devotion to our local economy allremain intact. Josie continues Dutch-language Saturday school, and attends acommunity-minded Montessori school during the week. More and more, over ourshared weekend coffee, and sometimes in the dark before sleep, and once andawhile with a few tears of regret or longing or frustration, Dan and I haveshared conversations that reveal to us the more complicated culturaldifferences between the contemporary cultures we’ve traded. Many of ourdiscussions revolve around major social issues that make the difference betweenfamilies thriving or simply surviving: education, nutrition, health care, gunlaws, discrimination, child care, environmental toxins, and livablecommunities, to name a few.

Theseissues are taking root in my mind and cropping up more and more prominently inthe writing I’m doing now. Somehow, the pieces all fit together. I have thesetwo beautiful girls and a head full of wishes for the world in which I want toraise them. Over naps and with the help of a good babysitter, I’m tapping thoseideas and shaping new essays. At the same time, I’m continuing with otheraspects of my work: editing, teaching, and traveling for speaking engagements.Sometimes, when I get overwhelmed between running a family and running a careeron the fumes of sleep deprivation, my head does somersaults: I’m spending timeaway from my family in order to maintain the pilot light for my career. I wantthis work I love to support my family. I’m having this family to find greatermeaning in my life. I use this meaning to fuel my work. I want my family tofind my work meaningful.

TheBlue Suitcase has been a fairly quiet, as my work time is quite limited lately,and I’ve been doing a lot of new writing for other projects which I hope willsee publication in 2012. Each of these new pieces considers the American futureI dream of, thanks to the lessons behind me.

Nowfor a head-check at the ground we covered in 2011: January: A visit to Rocky Bay, reminding us why we moved. A trip to St.-Martin as a family of three-and-a-bump. February: Josie settling in at Pacific Crest, her perfect-fitof a new school. March: Boxbiking with big-bellied mama, to all the parks andmarkets and bookshops the neighborhood. At the playground with a view of the Seattleskyline, getting to know the Wheedle on the Needle. Anticipating baby. April: On the first sunnymorning after days and days of gray, Louisa Jean was born at home and greetedby her mother, father, and sister (as well as doula-auntie Amanda, dear friend and photographer Jessica, and two helpful midwives). She seemed to catch that morning's sunrays,and still beams approximately ten smiles a minute. (Oh, and Carrier won a Minnesota Book Award!)May: Josie’s fabulous fourth birthday party, complete with live performingpigs! June: Dan and Josie traveled to Amsterdam on a father-daughter trip. Sheremembers her old city very well, certainly due in part to the reinforcement ofthis special weeklong visit to dear friends and favorite places. July: Josie’sprogress: climbing trees, riding a bicycle, crossing the monkey bars, gainingthe crawl stroke, learning to pump on a swing, showing the sprinklers who’sboss. For me: an unforgettable soiree, my fancy dream come to life. August:Cycling every day of summer with both girls, Louisa wrapped to mommy’s chest.Orcas Island, my beach-brown daughter reflecting my girlhood back at me. Warmblackberries and cold seawater in Port Townsend. September: Outside constantly,reveling in our Indian summer, sampling the sweet life in Walla Walla for the second time in 2011. October: Thelong-awaited stuffage-of-baby-inside-jack-o-lantern. At just six months, our toweringtot was almost too big for the plumpest pumpkin in the patch. November:Co-hosting Thanksgiving with my sister, sixteen of our closest family memberswarming my home. Now, that we couldn’tdo in Amsterdam, or Minneapolis, or Iowa City. December: The return ofSinterklaas (and, regrettably, the Pieten). Our family’s first Christmasmorning, together at our own hearth.

Returningmy eyes to the road ahead, the only thing I can think is slow down, slow down. I don’t want to miss a thing.

Postcard from Seattle: One Year

2011-10-29T17:45:00.002+02:00

It’s been a year. Four full seasons since we awakened to our first Seattle sunrise after leaving Amsterdam.

The night we arrived, Josie and I took a windy walk outside in the dark, six blocks to the grocery store. It was late, but I needed to stretch my legs, and give my growing belly a good sway after a day of travel.

“Why is it so quiet?” Josie asked. “Why aren’t there any people on the sidewalk?”

It wasn’t as if Josie hadn’t spent any time in the U.S. She lived most of her first two years in Minneapolis, and visited Seattle at least twice a year while we lived abroad. But at age 3, she somehow understood that this was different. We would be making a new life, starting over, learning and re-learning a different culture.

Wind sent leaves skittering around our feet. We passed a bus stop. “Mommy! Look! This is where we wait for the tram.”

As she unwrapped her new world in terms of her old home, my heart swelled and sunk, swelled and sunk. I loved that she considered foot, bike, and tram traffic commonplace. I was sorry that there were no trams in our new neighborhood. Certainly we ought to have had them.

A few cars passed, a tabby crossed the street, wind pressed papery maple leaves in great heaving bunches.

“Oops, sorry Mommy!” Josie said, both of us startled as she jumped to my hip.

“Sorry for what?” I asked.

“I walked in the road!” she said, pointing behind her at a change in the pattern of sidewalk squares. Where a planting strip usually bordered the foot path and the curb, here it had been paved over, making a long, smooth stretch alongside us. She thought she had strayed into a bike lane.

I felt so proud of her learning, her vigilance, the responsibility she felt for her own safety. I barely had the heart to tell her that here in our new city, bike lanes were few and far between, and always lay below the curb. In a moment of despair, I thought our family was about to undergo a period of unlearning—a regression.

But as I worried, Josie delighted herself. We had come from one urban center to another, but the Seattle sidewalk might as well have been a mountain trail. Like a billy goat, she stripped every yard we passed, yanking dandelions and laurel leaves, reaping lavender stalks and sedum flowers, gathering pine cones and bark, raking up sticks and the micro-daisies only her shining eyes could find in the dark.

The neighborhood corner store provided another odyssey: carts that tipped if you stood on them, sugar cereals the likes of which my child had never seen. (“Mommy, look at this,” she said with equanimity, pointing at a box of Cocoa Puffs. “These look like something I would like.”) We turned for home with milk, eggs and pancake mix. At bathtime, she sang about her friends from Amsterdam, naming them all: Zadie and Lilou and Amelie and Jemima and Luc and Pedro… and then she played with her bath-toy friends and spoke the best Dutch I’d ever heard her use, full sentences, ending with one toy describing for another a moeilijk (difficult) task.

Difficult, yes, but the work of repatriation was a task we chose. Last Halloween, the whole neighborhood poured onto a central avenue to parade their costumes, and our very social little girl buzzed from person to person, commenting on their disguises. As she addressed whomever she wished, friendly conversations bubbled in English, the native language my daughter had always, almost feverishly, loved.

As she flitted down the sidewalk ahead of us, her little red ladybug wings ever so slightly parted our curtain of jet lag and sadness. Just beyond: the glimmer of our path into a year of precious wonders.

Postcard from Orcas Island: Checking My List

2011-09-08T06:23:00.000+02:00

It had been sixteen years since I laid eyes on the campground at West Beach, the fishing resort on Orcas Island where my girlhood friend Jessica goes every year in August with her family. Jess and I had just finished our junior year in high school when she invited me to join her family in the San Juans. I needed to find something from that trip: a way in to the bright young mind that this busy-brain mom can't always seem to find.

This year when Dan and I brought Josie and Louisa to West Beach, Jess and I waited with cameras ready to record our kids’ busy bare feet charging through the web of imagination we strung along everywhere we walked (or fished or biked or ran or kayaked) at age seventeen. Josie and Abby—little Bonnie and little Jess—switched shoes at the beginning of the week as some kind of love pact, trading back only when it was time to leave the island. As much as we relished watching them play—testing sand’s stickability to s’mores goop, for example—I suspect we also both felt a bit dark about the too-fast tug of time. No matter how full each day, I think we both felt time yanking itself from beneath our feet as if we were teapots on a whisked tablecloth.

But finally, on our last day, I found the moment I needed in order to open the Black Book, an 8.5 x 11 journal I kept during the last two years of high school and the first two years of college. More than anything, it had served as a catch-all for meaningful scraps. Today, half of its pages are blank and about a hundred mementos tucked inside have the spine crumbling like a sugar wafer. I opened it carefully at the beach, reclined in a lounger as Dan walked with Louisa and the four-year-old girls became Sand Things.

It took some searching, but eventually I found what I was looking for: The List. I remembered sitting down with Jess, plus pen and paper, at the beginning of an island week. Together, we made a checklist of those things we needed to accomplish:

Kayaking

Climb Mt. Disney

Moran State Park

Mt. Constitution

Bike ride to cemetery

Gather flowers

Gather seashells

Make pottery

Write letter/postcards

Take our pictures

Write in journals

Bike ride to Eastsound

Fishing

Go around West Beach and look for interesting things like boys our age

Play volleyball

Look underwater for skates [flashlight]

Look for veins [flashlight]

Look at phosphorescence

Jessica sign Bonnie’s yearbook for a long time

Read [triple underlined]

Row in the dinghy

Swim/float

...

I actually gasped as I read the tasks we set for ourselves. So creative, exploratory, and worthy (mostly). Many represented meaningful challenges. Most stunning of all: I had actually checked off every item.

This year, my checklist began like this:

Odds & Ends to Remember:

Cast iron skillet

Ice

Sunscreen

Quarters for laundry and showers

Books and activities (Did I mean for me? Or for Josie? Or for both of us?)

Josie’s sleeping bag

Sports gear: Frisbees, balls, wiffle bat etc.

Josie’s swimsuit, sand toys, floaties

Sun hats and rain boots

Diapers and wipes

Breast pump and bottles

Hiking boots (?)

Black book from high school

...

I also brought pastels and art paper, but never really found the right moment—or maybe the confidence—to make a picture. In an echo of our pottery-making past, Jess poured cement into stepping-stone molds, which the girls collaged with treasures from the beach (or from wherever; Josie set in stone a fir sprig and half an orange peel. I do wonder how to arrange it in the garden…). Dan and I biked the girls into town over hills far more dramatic than I remembered—or maybe I didn’t appreciate how much difference it makes to have a four-year-old and a four-month-old added to my own weight on the cycle. So as we whizzed past the old cemetery on a final, rewarding downhill spin, we certainly didn’t stop to peruse the gravestones, roll those old names around in our mouths, poke at the weird skin of our mortality, hardly ever uncloaked.

After leaving the Black Book unopened for almost 15 years, I was surprised. The journal used to feel heavy with emotion; it housed the artifacts (mostly poems, narratives, and letters) of many a heartbreak. But as afternoon sun blazed off the water and I peered into my girlhood wondering how on earth it happened that I became a woman, the book seemed pure wonder. Glancing up from its pages at Josie digging for treasure and baby Louisa watching the evergreen boughs sigh in the breeze, I felt something new—exactly the opposite of time flying by. On this long continuum of time, a human life is the briefest flare: a flash of sun on the glitter square stuck to my husband's neck. Years are only seconds, generations mere breaths. It is for good reason, I realized, that so much of life feels like yesterday. Up and down the beach, familiar heads bobbed at play, ordinary voices chattered, and the same old cabins and stones and trees held down the earth. My childhood was not such distant history from my daughters’, after all. In fact, it was just right here.

Postcard from A Good Place: Plaisir

2011-08-10T20:40:00.000+02:00

My goal, when we moved back to the U.S., was to find how the puzzle pieces of our Dutch lifestyle could fit into American days. It’s taken awhile, but now, pregnancy and childbirth are four months into the past. The last of our moving boxes has been emptied and sorted. Summer sun, though weak, has drawn our family outside. The yard is trimmed and inviting. My body is back in action; we bike everywhere, baby strapped to my chest and Josie riding in the box or behind me, depending upon which bike the day calls for. Meanwhile, when Mama’s bike is parked, Josie is a daredevil on her own miniscule two-wheeler, all skinned knees and overflowing basket and whoops and hollers. She practices her turn signals and stands on her pedals just the way I do to let the hem of my skirt fall.

The boxbike is in the hospital at the moment, to have a manufacturing issue corrected. We’ve been sprinting around Queen Anne Hill on my springy Civia Loring—something a little challenging, balance-wise, with baby tied on, cargo on the handlebars, and four-year-old on the back, but it's still darn good for all of our physical and mental states.

“I love peace and quiet,” Josie says as we pedal up Seventh West. “Do you hear that, Mom? All that peaceful tweeting from the birds? That’s just my favorite kind of life.” I ask her if it reminds her of Vondelpark in Amsterdam. “No,” she says, “It just reminds me of when my heart smiles. And when my teeth smile.”

Fair enough. And what makes Mama’s heart and teeth smile? A summery lesson from life in Europe: Pointless pleasure is never really pointless. This month, after a winter and spring spent daydreaming (and some serious planning), I threw a little dinner in our garden for no purpose other than shameless, sumptuous enjoyment. Our January trip to St.-Martin had impressed me with an image: a group of retired Francais reveling together, in various states of (un)dress, always with good food and that rapturous accordion music of the French countryside. I told Dan a few months later, “I know what I want for my birthday.”

“Oh?” he asked, probably imagining a bike accessory or kitchen gadget.

“I want an accordionist.”

That was the seed of an evening that became a five-course French country meal, cozy in the green grotto of our tiny backyard, amber with a hundred bright candles, warm with the laughter of 23 friends, alive with the music of a chanteuse from Toulouse and her accordionist accompanist, cozy with blankets flopped over our chair backs and shoulders, crumbly with bread broken by hand and spread with salt-crystal butter, all awash in ruby red wine.

There was no reason for it, but then again, here was the point: A somewhat moody, oft-grumpy mother has been smiling and smiling. She smiled as she ordered sausages and bought lavender to dress the table. She smiled as she made friends with a darling French singer, smiled as she melted chocolate for fondue, as she planned a menu, as she daydreamed about who might sit by whom and hoped for sweet flirtations. She smiled as she glimpsed the whole glimmering scene from the back window of the house after laying down Baby, and continued smiling, as she returned rental chairs and borrowed platters, as she ate precious leftovers and glanced over snapshots. And still she smiles as she hops back onto the bike to catch some wind and sun and pick up a preschooler who has yet to unlearn pleasure as part of a balanced life.

Postcard from Here and There: About a Dad

2011-06-09T23:24:00.005+02:00

Before we left Amsterdam last fall, Dan already had plans to return. With Josie, he would fly back for a father-daughter trip. And that is where they are this week.

Oftentimes it seems that father-daughter trips are called father-daughter bonding trips. But it’s difficult for me to imagine any way in which Dan could be more connected to his children.

One thing I’ve appreciated, since returning to the U.S., is that Dan and I mourn the same things about living in Amsterdam. Together, we miss the delicious foods of the Noordermarkt on Saturday mornings, hot koffie verkeerd steaming in the morning rays, sharing fresh-squeezed orange juice with Josie, pedaling the canals in the late afternoons which we both recall as perpetually sunlit. He misses the same foods I miss, the same bike paths, the same delicious biertjes, the horse chestnut tree where Harriet lived, the festive party boats with bass echoing down the canals, and any excuse to pop downstairs and out onto the street for a quick errand or day’s exploration. Yes, we each had our own lives and friends—he with his very close team from work, and I with the parents of Josie’s schoolmates—but it has been sweet to discover that the city we love and remember looked and sounded and smelled much the same for both of us. Our best memories, in other words, were the many times we spent together as a family. Judging by the activities on her wish list for the trip, Josie feels the same way.

True to the design of this vacation, Dan has heard, and is following through with, Josie’s specific desires for the trip. She wanted to go to the zoo—check. She wanted to attend her old school for a day—check. She wanted to visit the butcher shop where she was always offered a free piece of bologna—check. She wanted to bakfiets through Vondel Park, play in the wading pool, and eat at the pancake house around the corner from our old flat—check, check, check. She hoped for mango gelato, La Perla pizza, and a return to the toddler park where we spent countless afternoons—checkity check, check. She has not forgotten her friends, and Dan has not forgotten to phone each of their families to arrange playtimes in the park. He’s stocking up on Dutch storybooks for our collection, drop (licorice) for her Seattle Dutch-preschool teachers, and hagelslag (decadent toast-topping of pure chocolate sprinkles) for friends and our own pantry.

I’ve been at home, reading and resting with baby Louisa, whose first trip to Amsterdam, we’ve decided, will have to be soon. And while Dan and Josie have been away, I’ve felt a strange and wonderful split. I feel I am with them in Holland, even as I read in the sun on the back porch in Seattle. Envoys of a sort, they are keeping the city, our friendships, and countless memories alive for the whole family.

Dan’s adventurous spirit and determination to give his children an extraordinary life shows every day in one way or another. He wonders aloud: What kind of house/street/neighborhood would be best for our kids to grow up on? How can we get them into the great outdoors as much as possible? How to be sure we’re visiting grandparents enough, enjoying physical activities enough, exploring the world enough, and grasping every opportunity to enrich their lives? Recently, he has planted flowers with Josie, helped her learn to swim, and taught her to ride a bike. But what a special gift this week: a trip back to the city where most of her growing up has taken place, just in time to solidify her memories instead of letting them slide into the murk of the past. He reports that she can now slide down the fire pole at her toddler park, now having officially outgrown the playground's offerings.

Thank you, Dan, for caring so deeply about our daughters’ childhood memories. Happy Father’s Day.

Postcard from Home: New Beginning

2011-04-22T20:48:00.004+02:00

The same thing happened when Josie was a newborn. It didn’t matter where I was—chatting with a friend on a walk around the lake, perhaps, or stepping out onto the back porch with a stolen moment to water the impatiens. But across my field of vision would gallop a faraway place I had once visited. Down at the lake, as we passed a rock retaining wall, I saw suddenly the mountains around Bozeman. Josie cried in her stroller and I tried to keep up conversation with my friend Kelly as we walked off those months of pregnancy. And the back porch—it could have been Budapest in spring, fragile tulip and daffodil petals exploding egg-dye bright all over an old, staid, stone cityscape.

Since giving birth to Louisa Jean two weeks ago, my Amsterdam is with me ever more strongly. Changing a diaper, I am on Westerstraat, parking the boxbike on the sidewalk to peruse the bulk bins at Delicious Food with Josie, who restrained herself from pulling the shop cat’s tail. Nursing, I find myself in farther reaches of the city, places I didn’t visit so often: the corner of the Rijksmuseum where the 2 tram stops, a halfway point to meeting my friend Wendi so she can hand off a borrowed raincoat from the previous night’s dinner party, which ended in an unexpected deluge.
I am still resting and recovering. Aside from a nutty short trip to Minneapolis as a family of four last week to attend the Minnesota Book Awards (Carrier won!), I’ve been spending most of my time in the house, which is perhaps why I keep thinking I hear canal coots making their tin-can squawks outside, and why I think I could pull aside the curtain and see the swishing street sweepers, the humming tour boats, the flood of spring tourists (Excuse me? Anne Frank Huis?).

This is the most spectacular month of the year in Holland. Right now, Easter Weekend, it’s quiet, as shops are closed for holidays. But spring itself is operatic, clanging, with spearmint green leaves and prismatic blooms catching the sun from every windowsill and shop display. In the parks, each bed sizzles red and blue and yellow-white.

I think of the Amsterdammers, too, as I dress my sweet tiny baby, then kiss her big sister good morning. It’s late afternoon there, and they crowd the sidewalk cafes, their chairs turned to the sun, sipping fresh-mint teas and biertjes. They are in love, I tell myself. With one another, with mates proper and crushes secret, with their kids and their friends, with their plans and their jokes and their cheeks reddening in the weak sun. They are in love with 80’s music drifting from inside the café, and the cigarette in their hand, and the friend’s canal boat they’ll board in a few hours for a night cruise with wine and kaas. Holding my little girl, I fix a little lunch for my big girl. I feel spun, and spun again, landing repeatedly, unexpectedly, in the arms of another city.

It’s been six months since we moved back to the U.S. Six months into our 18 in Amsterdam, I felt home. I am learning now how attached I became, and how quickly, to Dutch life. Just this morning, Dan and I looked into each other’s eyes and saw tears. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry,” I said.

Louisa knows her grandparents already. Josie is outside playing with one of hers, having seen all four within the week. We know why we are here. But still our hearts clamor and yearn and won’t let us forget.

On the morning Louisa emerged from my body, robins sang outside the bedroom window. The sun came up and filled the house with a day of heavenly white light. It was April 8, and I remembered that date from somewhere. Yes—this was the date, two years ago, that with heavy hearts and a certain excitement, Dan, Josie, and I boarded the plane to move from Minneapolis to Amsterdam. Half a day later, we stood in our 400-year-old apartment, staring out the windows as a blaze of evening sun drenched the room. We watched the boats, the bikes, the laughing, gorgeous people at the wine bar below. We were dizzy from the flight, hungry, and thrilled. Too jet-lagged to leave the apartment, we knew the best we could do was to stand in the windows and watch from a safe distance as we waited for the vertigo to subside. I do the same now with baby, swaying her in the moonlight, feeling city sun.

Postcard from Seattle: Nest

2011-03-19T19:08:00.001+01:00

Today, spring is whispering. In our back yard, birds jockey for real estate: chickadees and robins and sparrows, swapping branches as they negotiate. You, here. Me, higher. No, too damp. Too droopy. Too visible. Perfect—mine! Soon, they’ll start picking up the clumps of cat hair we’ve scattered for them, adding soft down to their twig cups. Our resident hummingbird, a ruby-throat named Kinker, has been singing for a mate from the lilac next to our porch every day, “accountably,” as my sister says, since we moved in 12 weeks ago. Each day we hope for her arrival, so they may begin to build their nest together. Just over the back fence, a mother crow is already gargling with her hatchlings.

This week, with a heavy belly and a heavy heart, I have been feathering my own nest. Folding diapers and laundering newborn clothes, I stop to shed tears for friends in Minnesota who lost their 2-year-old son in one of life’s pointless, blameless accidents. How to explain to their oldest, only Josie’s age? How to greet their third baby, due in a few weeks? How on earth to continue?

I blink, and recall a spring day in Iowa, years before we became parents, when a mother sparrow pushed a lifeless body from her nest in the eaves of our garage. Despite the thud on the garage floor, which she must have hated, unable as she was to cover her tiny bird ears, she did what she had to do for her other two. And, I need to think now, for herself as well.

As I line the fridge shelves with energy food and organize the midwife’s homebirth supplies, as I pack a just-in-case hospital bag for me and an overnight bag for Josie, as my strong and willing husband does all the heavy lifting to get the last moving boxes unpacked, my mind flashes on the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of parents in Japan whose children may have been torn from their arms, swept from their homes. Those who, unlike our heart-shocked friends in Minnesota, don’t even have a tiny body to tenderly bury.

I had trouble sleeping this week, rattled as I was by all of the terrible news. But I think I was working on understanding the contradiction that defines our work as parents. Really, we have only one job: to protect our children. But the scary truth is that our job is impossible, since we have no control. The illusion of security—car seats, baby gates, hand-holding in the street—doesn’t really protect us. It only allows us a few precious days without fear.

How fragile these nests are, woven of grass and twigs and ribbon, all tacked loosely to blowing branches. When Josie was a baby, I would sing to her, rocking her fussy little self through hours that seemed endless. I cycled through all the lullabies I could think of, but I always found myself editing “Rock-a-Bye Baby.” I didn’t like the words. One night, as I sang them softly once again, trying to figure out what spooked me about them, I finally realized what the song was about: a bird’s nest.

Rock-a-bye, baby

In the treetop

When the wind blows

The cradle will rock

When the bough breaks

The cradle will fall

And down will come baby

Cradle and all…

And will we be there, that stormy moment, to make the catch? Life warns us not to be so sure, but we continue to believe yes. We hold our arms wide, baby bird.

Postcard from Walla Walla: Sweet Unknown

2011-02-24T02:34:00.000+01:00

Lately, when I wake up in the mornings and blink my eyes for the first few times, I see Amsterdam behind my lids. With each blink I see the canalside streets of central Amsterdam, where I used to bump along on the boxbike. Usually, the direction I’m looking indicates that I’m heading home. Sometimes I see buildings I never particularly noticed before—maybe a house along the Looiersgracht, a littler canal which I detoured along from time to time. Or I'll see bridge-crossings familiar from my old neighborhood. I hear the sounds of the city—maybe a coot’s tinny honk down in the murky water, maybe the ding of a bell or two, maybe the hum of tour boats motoring down the Prinsengracht. The air is fresh but busy with energy, since it’s always midafternoon—exactly accurate, nine hours ahead as I awaken in Seattle.

I don’t know why my old neighborhood is the wallpaper of my early-morning mind. It reminds me of the way I’ll see waves when I blink after spending a day staring at the surf from under a beach umbrella, or the way I’ll blink and see endless evergreens after a long hike in the mountains. But these days I do not see those mute-brick houses, or whiz past their ornate doors, or glance upward as I ride, comparing one crenellated gable to the next. I don’t smell spicy shoarma or hot baked volkoren bread along my routes, or hear the electronic clang of blue-and-white trams, or feel the vibration of a sushi-delivery moped buzzing past our windows. I don’t hear Harriet’s wings as they beat the breath from her fat body while she flies over our terrace, or the neighbor practicing her grand piano, or the slam of the basement door, three spiral flights down, announcing that Dan is home from work. I don’t feel on my face the morning’s cold wind as I lean out to wave goodbye to Dan and Josie, pedaling off to work and school, before I pull the French window tight again and grind my coffee in a machine much louder than the one I have now. No, none of it.

So why the familiar streetscapes flashing in my eyes each morning? I must be dreaming of Amsterdam, although I remember nothing from my sleep.

Often, on these same Seattle mornings as Josie and I head to the car on our way to school, I step out onto our porch, I'm blasted with two decades of memory. The air is full of cedar and slug slime and crow feathers and moss and drizzle and duff and sumach and winter’s matted, gasping green grass. A reel of my childhood spins, and I'll remember an unexpected thing. Perhaps running for the bus as a girl, bursting through the hedge, carrying with me for the day the smell of juniper on my sleeves.

It was that way this past weekend with friends in Walla Walla, too. Not just their voices, reminding us that we are home in the Pacific Northwest, but also the contrasting yellow-on-brown bubble-script of the rolling Palouse as we flew downstate. The newest chartreuse of spring wheat, and the snow-dusted ridge beyond town. The cutting wind I remember from four years of school in that town, where I met Dan and, for all my hard work, lived an entirely directionless life.

Since then, of course, my directions have been many. From every town of my past, there is a scent I could follow into memory. Eucalyptus breeze in Adelaide, papermill belch in Longview, sour cicada blood and wet hosta breath in Iowa spring.

But then, things new: These old houses we find ourselves coming home to, our dear Amy and Andrew in their Walla Walla farmhouse, us in our latest bungalow, oak-and-honey dwellings we never dared imagine for ourselves. And further, when we blow warmth into cold little hands and bury our noses in our children’s hair, we find the unwritten. A white, weightless, marshmallow whiff of years and years to come.

Postcard from St.-Martin: Uninhibited Island

2011-01-23T00:08:00.003+01:00

Bonnie! Dan whispered. Quick!

He was standing in the darkened living room of the airy little beach house that would be our home away from home for a week in St.-Martin. The sun had set, and we had yet to turn on all of our lights. Josie colored quietly at the table, tired from our travels. I was getting dinner ready in the kitchen, and scurried to the sliding-glass doors, which were wide-open to the swishing palm fronds and gentle wash of waves.

Dan stood still as a pointer, staring past our deck toward our neighbor’s house with the water beyond. I was about to step outside when Dan reached out and caught my arm, holding a finger to his lips. He guided me to a window and had me peek at the neighbors, four middle-aged-and-older French couples, as they gathered next door for an alfresco dinner party. It was a farewell for Yves, who owned the house we were renting and would be returning to Paris the next day, thrown by his friends, who owned the cabins tucked closely around ours.

I waited for a breeze to lift a few leaves, and then I caught sight: The group’s white-haired host busily grilling prawns with his bare bronze bum open to the breeze. Across his lower back was the tie for the greasy canvas apron he wore for frontside protection.

You were right, I whispered back to Dan, who had told me 10 minutes earlier, with impressive nonchalance, that our neighbor was barbecuing in the nude.

Of course, earlier that day we had arrived to greetings from the neighbors on the other side of our place, the man looking rather conservative in a cheek-covering Speedo, and his female partner wearing a bikini bottom with her long blond hair draped over her bare chest in a mermaidly fashion. Yes, we were getting used to this already.

I’ll admit to feeling a twinge of worry when first arrived to the sight of a blond woman sunbathing topless about six feet from our deck. What if this was all just too interesting for my husband? However, by sunset, after my winter-chilled muscles had a day to relax in the warmth and my feet had been massaged by a walk in the sand, my feelings changed. These wonderful French—their spirit of laissez-faire was catching.

It was lovely to know that we had no need to herd our little girl behind closed doors when switching from clothing to swimsuit, for example. I quickly gave up fretting about the fact that my bikini, which earned points only for leaving my expanding belly unrestricted, was too tight on top and too big on the bottom. Yet I marched right out of that house and across the sand among my sun-lizard neighbors anyway, striding to the pool to hang out with Dan and Josie. As my suit-bottom flopped, I could feel a breeze across one cheek. But for once in my life, I didn’t feel ogled or judged and therefore decided not to loop a finger under the edge of the suit to yank it straight, obsessively, as I had since I was a teenager. No one was looking anyway, and even if they were, they wouldn’t care. Therefore I also wouldn’t feel self-conscious, I realized, even if I hadn’t shaved in ages, even if my thighs were white as winter skies, even if I had a red toilet-seat ring marking the backs of my legs.

As the week went on, I watched Josie’s play with new interest: What could I re-learn from her? She rolled in the surf caring not a whit about sand in her suit. Later, with salt dried in her hair, chocolate on her chin, and not a stitch of clothing, she busily swept the beach in front of our house for half an hour. She reminded me that freedom was once a bodily concept, not only an intellectual one.

Could I trace the moments that had shaped my particular American modesty? I remembered my grandfather pushing me on a swing in his yard on a hot summer’s day when I was only three or four years old. I complained of the heat, and he suggested genuinely, “Well, you could take your shirt off.” I still remember thinking he was nuts. My chest was private, somehow, already, and I would rather suffer through the heat than reveal it. It would take me many, many years to realize that my feelings were not natural, but simply an outcome of the time and place in which I lived.

I remembered being a little older and going on a camping trip with my parents. As my dad pitched the tent, I looked across a field toward the seashore, entranced by the sight of a young family playing together. Two parents and their preschool-aged son with a head of golden curls ran after one another in a tight circle. I felt a mix of interest, shame, and confusion to see the mother’s bare breasts moving freely under her loose-fluttering tank top. It would be only a few years until I would forget how to run—or do anything physically active at all—without the security of a sports bra, lest anything shift or bounce or, heaven forbid, show.

I thought ahead to Amsterdam, where I learned to see cycling as a part of life, instead of compartmentalizing it as an exercise activity. That meant no spandex, no sports bras, and definitely no running shoes (how completely and wonderfully lost were my exercise togs in Amsterdam! Athletic kicks at the back of the closet, moisture-wicking performance gear smashed in drawer-bottoms.) I tasted the liberty I remembered from early childhood, which was a freedom of bodily movement in the world; the sense that I could get up and go, anytime, under my own power, exactly as I was. Learning to cycle in everyday clothes doesn’t sound all that radical, but at least now I think I would forgo shopping at Lulu Lemon in exchange for a good romp in the waves and sand and sun.

On our French-Caribbean trip, I enjoyed the convenience of changing out of a wet swimsuit into dry clothes right on the beach, without needing to hide myself away in a dark, damp changing-room. In fact, there were no changing-rooms. Indeed, shockingly, I cooked breakfast in my underwear, another trick I learned in Europe. Each evening as Dan and I sat outside in the moonlight, sounds of pleasure escaped the bedrooms of the cabins closest to ours. A broader lesson finally revealed itself: “Inhibited” doesn’t have to be synonymous with “adult.” And maybe being physically uninhibited is just the gateway to revelations of the heart, those tender risks of sharing which really do allow us to live more fully in the world, leading to greater acceptance and deeper social connections.

On one of our favorite nights of the trip, Dan and I were reading in bed just before midnight when we heard a beautiful sound which reminds us always of Europe: accordion music, loud, live, and nearby. It put a little smile on my face as I read, and I kept thinking I’d drift off despite the jaunty concert. But eventually Dan nudged me with a smile of his own and said, “Aren’t you going to go look?”

I popped out of bed and scurried through the house, back to our spying spot behind the greenery-screened window. I peeked next door, my little smile getting bigger to see our prawn-grilling neighbor now standing, playing the accordion, and singing for his friends. He showed great passion in his facial expressions, and great passion too in his wardrobe choice of only a leopard-print g-string to ward off the night’s breeze. His friends, mostly dressed rather normally, drank wine and sang along, breaking to chat and then sing along again. They seemed to think nothing of their friend’s costume, and everything of the night, the music, the food, and one another. It was a wonderful party, and even from behind our window, we enjoyed it very much as well.

Postcard from Seattle: Passing Pie

2011-01-08T01:05:00.002+01:00

Back in September, I was in the U.S. for a second book tour for my memoir, Carrier. In the Midwest, I stopped for a big, hearty brunch on the farm with Dan’s distant relatives, the Danes. To them, I surely looked busy with book promotion, networking, and socializing, but the truth is that I was much busier with another question: Did we want to move back to the U.S.? Sitting with Dan’s relatives, stuffed with eggs and sausage and fruit salad and sticky buns, I laughed when our host brought out two whole homemade pies. To my left, Uncle George served himself a slice of pumpkin, and I felt the soft, almost translucent skin of his fingers under my own as I supported the bottom of the pie pan, passing it over my plate to Uncle John, whose warm and much larger hands received the pie just as they had from countless relatives before. Despite the fact that these weren’t even my blood relations, tears sprang into my eyes as a question popped into my head: “Who will we pass pie with?”

One week later, fall had whirled me to Rome, on what would be a last sweet European getaway alone with Dan. On the first of our three nights away, we ate osso buco and gelato and walked through the cobbled, orange-glowing alleys of Trastevere. The clock was ticking; the Friday workday was near its end in Seattle, where Dan’s prospective new employer was waiting for word as to whether Dan would be taking the job they had offered. Whether we would be leaving Europe and exiting the dream, however temporary, that had come true for us in a time when a dream come true was absolutely too much to ask.

In that moment, two futures hung in the balance. In one, the next two years would see Dan keeping his job, which he loved and found rewarding, with our family settling deeper and more comfortably into Dutch culture: learning more of the language, forming stronger connections with new friends, traveling to our usual excess (our list was long, and we still had a few high priorities left), and yes, even having a baby in Holland. Josie had been accepted to the perfect public school directly across the canal from our house, and would begin Dutch kindergarten as soon as she turned four the following spring.

In the other future we could imagine, Dan would join a new airline in a position to make big changes. We would settle into a city that could never feel new to us, despite the decade we had spent away. Josie would attend Dutch Saturday school, but otherwise lose her momentum learning a foreign language. We would be forced to purchase, and regularly utilize, automobiles. We would have neighbors and a garden and our funny old fat cat again. We would share the same time zone and holidays and way of life as most of our friends and family. Thanksgiving was coming, and Christmas. And pie.

Back in our hotel room, I stood next to Dan as he hit “send” on the message that sealed our plans. It was dark—we hadn’t found all the light switches—and music poured through the open windows from the bar next door. We stood awash in the blue glow of the computer screen, silent. We would be moving in three weeks.

“Congratulations,” I said, trying to sound excited.

“Thanks,” he answered quietly. Despite the fact that we had made a decision, our ambivalence had not shifted.

The following week, I cycled through Vondelpark in the dark with my friend Gijs, both of us returning home from Parent Night at the school our daughters attended together. After teasing me about the hopelessness of bringing my boxbike to hilly Seattle, he became more serious. “What will you tell her?” he asked, referring to Josie. “Will you say, ‘We’re going home?’”

“No. Definitely not,” I said, surprised how emphatic I felt. “Seattle has never been her home. Amsterdam has shaped her more than Minneapolis had time to do. This is her home.” We curved along the darkened rose gardens as other bikes approached, friendly headlights bouncing. “I guess we’ll just say, ‘We’re going to live in a new city.’”

In fact, I had already said something along those lines to Josie as we pedaled home through the park in late summer, around the time of my book tour, as Dan and I still incubated our feelings about what we wanted our family's next step to be.

“Josie?” I asked. Late summer wind fluffed her hair as we rode, carrying strains of accordion music, the groan of a homemade didgeridoo, and far-off splashes from the wading pool. She looked around, taking everything in from her shotgun perch, waiting for me to continue. I hesitated, trying to choose my words carefully.

“What, Mommy?” she finally asked.

“When we’re all finished living in Amsterdam, what city would you like to live in?”

“Seattle,” she said without a pause. “We could live at Grandma and Papa’s house!”

“That would be fun!” I said.

“Mommy?” she asked, with a sound of growing excitement in her voice, “When are we gonna be done living in Amsterdam?”

I had been holding my breath, and let it out silently. Josie was ok with change. She liked novelty and movement. Not to mention simple, precious, priceless things, like the kindhearted parents of her parents.

Neither of us knew it at the time, but it would be just a couple of months until, among the throngs of trick-or-treaters on the main avenue in a particular Seattle neighborhood, a tiny jet-lagged ladybug would weave along the sidewalk, pumpkin basket swinging, exclaiming at the other children’s costumes and having her first experiences of being chatted-back-with in English by strangers her own age.

And soon after, there would be family gatherings around bright tables laden with food and traditions. There would be visits with great-grandparents. Plus time to throw rocks at the beach with Papa and play with Auntie Amanda’s humongous dog and watch Uncle Luke work on a puzzle and help Grandma decorate sugar cookies. And to see how Mommy smiles when her phone rings all the time, an old friend pops by after work, and Little Sister wiggles in her tummy after dinner.

We were talking, last night, about what’s to love in American culture compared to other ways of life. It’s a topic that has dead-ended for me lately in the same miserable corner of self-doubt every time: What were we thinking?

But stressed in the midst of unpacking into a new house and stuffing suitcases for a week’s vacation, I heard myself blurt out something new: “The culture isn't what we came for.”

At the table with me sat my patient, interested parents-in-law and a pig-tailed Josie. A hot meal waited for Dan, who would be home to take Josie to swimming lessons any minute. My dad had just left after a cheerful visit, having picked up two antique tables to refurbish for us. A text message dinged on my phone: a running joke with a friend, getting sillier. My sister was soon to drop by with a bathing suit for me to borrow, and I would send her home with the tiger lilies another friend had brought to an impromptu dinner party the night before.

“It’s this,” I said. “This is what we came for.”

Postcard from Seattle: Dag, Sinterklaas!

2010-12-08T20:39:00.007+01:00

Dear Sinterklaas,

We trust you’re now safely home in Europe after your whirlwind birthday tour of the world last weekend. Thank you for coming to Seattle to visit children with a Dutch connection … how surprised we were to see you, and to find that your helpers came along too!

At Oranjeschool on Saturday, Josie was so intent on offering a letter and coloring sheet to you that she approached you as you made your solemn entrance. We do appreciate your not ignoring her during your procession, graciously accepting her gift while the 80 other children of Oranjeschool sat in their places on the gym floor. You see, Josie has felt a strong connection with you over the past few weeks. Each evening, as you know, she has left you a letter in her wooden shoes, carefully rolled and taped, along with a carrot for your horse Amerigo. And each morning, she has foregone her usual first stop at Mommy and Daddy’s bedside, instead padding directly to her clogs to see what anticipatory little trinket or sweet you might have left her. How did you know that she would swoon to have her very own roll of Wilhelmina peppermints? And to think you left her a scattering of the very same Dutch licorice her violin teacher gave her after each lesson in Amsterdam! Your presence in her life, which became a precious ritual each day for two weeks, felt to our whole family like the first sure thing we knew we had to do together here, in the midst of feeling otherwise up-in-the-air as we consider how to fashion ourselves a life. You also gave us extra chances to hear and sing songs about you, and to read bedtime stories about you in Dutch. You became more than just a benevolent old Bishop who would eventually bring a sack of toys, but also a symbol of the nascent Dutch in us here in our new, still strange, Seattle days.

Josie may be only three and a half, but her attachments are heartfelt and real. Since our move only five weeks ago, I have seen a new expression on her tiny face: Lips pursed with the lower one protruding, eyes downcast, all joggled by tiny whimpering hiccups.

“I miss Amsterdam,” she’ll say. “When I hear sad music, it makes me miss my home. I miss my teachers Wendy and Victoria. I miss my friends Zadie and Amelie and Jemima. I want to go back there.”

We reassure her she’ll be returning to the Netherlands for a whole week’s visit as soon as she turns four.

“It’s taking too long to go back,” she says. “I want to go back now. I don’t want to be living here.”

Slowly, Sinterklaas, Josie’s world is expanding to include Seattle. Preschool, neighborhood bike rides, new jungle gyms and bakeries and toy shops, and a bounty of visits with her extended family. Making matters easier are her Dutch preschool and the Holland-America Club, both of which hosted parties over the weekend to welcome you. While there are things about your tradition that make me wince--characters unmentionable in polite American conversation--I admit I felt choked up watching you and your entourage disembarking your yacht on Lake Washington and proceeding down the dock toward a mob of waving Dutch-American families on Saturday afternoon. I thought back to a year earlier, when Dan and I had actually boycotted the festivities of your arrival in Amsterdam, to protect Josie from racial imagery that we found unacceptable. On Saturday, there on the sunny lawn next to the lake, Dan and I did exchange a few glances of disbelief that we had chosen to come. How had we shifted from last year's position to this? And would we do it again next year? In her decorated crown, Josie jumped and waved and laughed, singing Sinterklaas songs and finally bolting toward the foreign visitors. Despite ourselves, we were glad we had come.

The next evening, Sinterklaas, just like last year in Amsterdam, Josie jumped out of her skin with fright at the handful of pepernoten and candy sprayed through the door as she opened it on Sunday to your magical knock. But this year, she had a smile with that startle and carried no resentment as she hauled inside a burlap sack of gifts and tore into the wrappings. You got her the truck she yearned for, and somehow you knew she loves puzzles. It was a night of visitors, Dutch pea soup, sticky stollen, sweet-spicy speculaaskoekjes, and marzipan-stuffed amandelstaafje. Grandma recited an original poem, and all of us had cheeks flushed with the warmth of the kitchen and the glowing holiday lights and good company. After the last visitor said goodbye, Josie retreated to her room to pull on her pajamas.

Dan and I were still aglow, chatting in the kitchen, when I heard a familiar and sad little hiccupping sound.

“Josie? What’s the matter,” I asked, finding her sitting on her bedroom floor pushing her left leg into her PJ bottoms.

Her head dropped toward her lap.

“I miss Sinterklaas,” she said. “Is it all done? No more treats in the shoes and no more letters?”

“It’s all done for this year, Josie,” I said. “He needs to go back to Europe and rest for awhile. But he’ll be back next year,” I said, answering my own private question about how long our family would keep our new Dutch traditions. “But now it’s time for us to get ready for Christmas.”

Her little sniffs became a deep, said wail. Tears now streaming down her cheeks, she climbed into my arms, then into her daddy’s arms, and back again. We rocked and rocked, she cried and cried, and I heard all of the sadness she’s been feeling since leaving Amsterdam—a mourning for her home, her neighborhood, her school and friends and favorite snacks and her violin teacher and the busy canal and the chatter of pedestrians and the ding of bike bells and all of our well-known routes as we pedaled through the fresh air.

I looked at Dan, realizing in one crushing moment that just as our daughter had been struggling with the loss of her first dear childhood friendships, we had created another for her, only to have it end in another goodbye. I felt responsible for breaking her heart all over again.

I know love and leavetaking are a part of life, and it is probably never too early to learn these things. I know, too, that Dan and I are also grieving and we risk projecting our feelings onto Josie, who is without a doubt the most adaptable of the three of us. But in this time of rootlessness, all three of us keep grasping for things we know we can hold on to. So that is why, as we make new friends and find new bread and get used to pedaling uphill, we also promise that next year, Sinterklaas, from mid-November until your birthday on December 5, you will again hear us singing your name.

Postcard from All Over the Place: Adrift

2010-11-10T20:58:00.003+01:00

“Mommy, do you know what that was called when you were riding that bike?” Josie asked me from the back seat of our rental car a couple of days ago. City lights flashed by as we drove home from a playdate, hungry for dinner.

“No, what was that called?” I asked, unsure what she was getting at.

“That’s called ‘Leaving a little girl alone with no one to take care of her.’”

I gulped, heartsick.

Earlier that morning, I had taken a 1-block test ride on a Dutch-style bike I was considering buying. After picking up our rental car, I strapped Josie into her car seat (recently dug out of storage) and drove the two of us a single block only to stop, in a jet-lagged early-morning act of desperation, in front of a bike shop I had heard about before we moved to Seattle: the Dutch Bike Co. We had no plans, and the morning stretched before us, appearing interminable. It was only 8:30. We had been up for three hours. We needed to stay awake until bedtime. Julie, co-owner of the shop, kindly let us in. The espresso bar was open, at least for us. She sold Josie a muffin and brewed me a coffee. Josie and I sat on the floor and one by one played through the classic games Julie kept tucked away under the newspapers: Jenga, Ker Plunk!, and Face Off!

My eyes wandered, though. I saw all the familiar Amsterdam bikes, but I was looking for something in between—a lighter-weight bike I could still use to haul things (such as children), particularly up non-boxbikeable hills. Something to keep me living a healthy lifestyle in which I have an appetite, exercise, fresh air, and a butt not sore from too much sitting. Indeed, something to keep us in the cycling world while waiting for our boxbike, which won’t arrive for a couple of months and which is currently smack in the middle of the Atlantic headed for Trinidad and Tobago aboard the MV Libra Santa Catarina, a Liberian container ship.

Eventually, with Josie on to her second muffin and the sun properly high in the sky, I decided to take one of the bikes, a Minneapolis-made cruiser, for a spin. I situated Josie at a table with her snack, a copy of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and Julie by her side. Then I sped off, to return in 90 seconds.

Little did I know that while I carried with me for the rest of the day that moment’s free-wheeling exhilaration, Josie carried with her a sadness she couldn’t express until many hours later.

I’m afraid that’s where we are at the moment as we drift between worlds: quiet in that space between saying goodbye and understanding how it really feels.

Postcard from Amsterdam: Goodbye to Holland

2010-10-21T13:53:00.004+02:00

Somewhere in the middle of the last 18 months, our “new” life in Amsterdam became, simply, our life. Next week—much sooner than we expected—it will become our old life. On October 28, Dan, Josie, and I will carry one-way tickets as we board our last transatlantic flight on a Delta Air Lines widebody until who-knows-when. We’re headed to Seattle, where Dan will begin working for Alaska Airlines, Josie will start in a new school, and I’ll do my best to write my way through the reverse culture shock I know we’ll all feel.

I’m a sucker for this time of year in American culture—all the festivity and coziness—so it’s a perfect time to come back to the city where Dan and I both have family, friends, and our deepest roots. Still, since the summer day when this opportunity first presented itself, I’ve felt a nonstop mix of emotions. The first thing I did was check myself: Was I soaking up every flcker of detail from our wonderful life in Holland? Was I grabbing every chance to travel and talk with my neighbors and try new things? Was I taking enough pictures? Once I got into the mode of seizing every moment—a good mode to hang onto, to be sure—then I began asking myself what I wanted to take with me. I didn’t mean physical objects—enough moving in the past decade has all but rid me of sentimental attachments to things. I meant which life lessons would I bring home? Living in another culture—even a Western one not, at first glance, so very foreign to American life—has reshaped my attitudes about parenting, global citizenship, and simply living well in my human body. Not all of it could translate to an American city. But with a little work, plenty could. This question—What will I bring back?—is the big one I continue to work on every day.

For now, two simple lessons I’ve loved learning—and relearning—every day:

Less is More

A brief example: A tiny house equals less space to fill. Less space to fill means less time spent shopping and more money in the bank. A little house also equals small appliances. A small fridge equals less temptation to overpurchase and waste food, and more fresh food in small quantities every day. A smaller dishwasher meant we couldn’t conveniently wash our American-size dinner places, so salad plates become the new “big.” Smaller portions, of course, equal less flab and more energy. Best of all, a little house, where we never had to yell to find one another, created a sweet, everyday closeness for our family.

More is More, too.

Again, just a few examples: More pedaling, more walking, more fresh air, and more just-harvested, unprocessed food (even in restaurants) led to noticeably better health for our family. A very urban neighborhood with more neighbors and more boats and bikes and tourists to watch meant more social energy to shore me up, even from behind the windowpane on gray, cold days. A great variety of shops and services just steps from the door certainly meant more hustle and bustle and honking and garbage trucks, but also less time (zero, to be exact) in the car and more time to walk and talk and lick ice cream with Dan and Josie.

These are tiny illustrations that only begin to scratch the surface of the lessons I will continue to examine as we repatriate to America—a culture we also love, sometimes despite ourselves. Through our transition to Seattle and beyond, I plan to keep up The Blue Suitcase. You can watch me make an idiot of myself in the U.S., forgetting I can’t push my grocery cart the Dutch way (bumper baskets!), and getting flustered by overmuch friendly American customer service. At the same time, I expect to bring you some surprises with The Blue Suitcase in the near future. And there’s more news. As you readers of The Blue Suitcase already know, the past six seasons have presented me with an unusual true story with a beginning, middle, and end: our journey as an airline family shedding our American lifestyle, learning a new way of life (and all about ourselves in the process), then coming back to the U.S. to fit the puzzle pieces together. It’s too much for a blog, but just right for a new book. So as I get started on this project, will you please leave comments here about which parts of our story stand out in your memory?

Oh, and one more thing: I know I said I wasn’t too worried about which physical objects would come along to Seattle, but I want you to know one thing: There is a new boxbike. A means of transport so spunky and gorgeous, in my opinion, that it hardly qualifies as a physical object. Despite Seattle’s hills and the fact that this contraption is the heaviest rigging a girl could ever choose for her wings, my new blue boxbike is coming with me. You won’t be able to miss us—that’ll be me, Miss Sisyphus, trudging my jalopy up the hill, huffing and puffing and sweating under my raincoat and happier than I look as you drive by on your way home from work. Won’t you give us a wave?

Postcard from A Tranquil Moment: Catching Our Breath

2010-10-13T12:20:00.001+02:00

“What the HELL are you thinking?” my friend Kate asked.

Lying jet-lagged and groggy on her couch in Minneapolis, I had just confessed to her that I hadn’t updated The Blue Suitcase in over a month.

If there’s one thing Kate can’t bear to watch, it’s self-sabotage, particularly of one’s writing career.

I stammered a little, trying to explain.

See, I like to think of The Blue Suitcase as something different from a typical blog. As you’ve noticed, I strive to write entries that feel more like mini-essays and less like “posts.” But as it turns out, there are some rules even The Blue Suitcase can’t break. For example, I don’t get to slack off without at least letting you know what’s going on. So, from now on, if I’m going to take a break, I promise to at least announce that fact.

Kate was nice enough to listen as I tried to explain what had happened since my last entry.

Since the date of that post, I traveled to Northern Italy and Switzerland then back to Amsterdam. Hosted a merry crew of visitors. Left Amsterdam for St. Paul, Iowa City, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Walla Walla, then came back to Amsterdam just in time for a getaway to Rome before leaving Europe again for another four-day stint in the U.S. In the past month and a half, I’ve spent a grand total of 2 weeks at home.

But none of that was the real problem. If nothing else, it was all a glorious research period, adding richly to my pot of stories to share. Despite all those postcard-worthy stops, the real delay has been the fact that my mind is preoccupied with some tidbits of news that I haven’t been able to share.

As I finished explaining, Kate nodded briefly before cracking the whip. “Get on it,” she said.

Soon, very soon, I will. Thank you for being so patient!

Postcard from the Swiss Alps: Roughing It

2010-08-20T23:23:00.000+02:00

Picture us, eighteen months ago, packing up our house in Minneapolis. We were judicious, storing most of our belongings and choosing only a fraction to bring to Amsterdam. Dan and I did each bring some comfort items, though—for me, a wild surplus of table linens. For him, the precious camping gear: four-man tent, sleeping pads and sleeping bags, and a heap of camp kitchen accessories, all in two giant Rubbermaid bins. Plus a blue ice chest. We knew we would have no place to store two giant Rubbermaid bins or a blue ice chest. But we brought them, and they've migrated among our bedrooms since we moved to Amsterdam. At the moment...sorry, Josie. But most of her room is too low-ceilinged for humans anyway, so we figure the floor space isn't much missed.

Dan picked through the gear carefully, trying to anticipate what would be needed in a European campground. We left the Coleman stove behind, assuming fuel canisters here would be different. And soon we moved to the Low Countries, where Dan's eyes seemed ever to be searching for the mountains. Finally, he planned the summer holiday of his dreams. A week in the Swiss Alps, family camping in Brienz. We borrowed a camp stove and a small, collapsible table from a friend's parents. In a fateful move, we refused their offer of a camp-refrigerator, a strange invention unknown to us. In our snap judgment, we thought a camp refrigerator, which ran on gas and would have required its own tent for climate control, seemed a sure way to be laughed off the campground. After all, in comparison to Americans, Europeans are by and large minimalists, keeping simple, uncluttered spaces pared down to necessities. Or so we thought. Anyway, we turned down the open-air Frigidaire. We borrowed a car from another family of friends. We bought some food and put it in the ice chest. Then we drove to Switzerland, where supposedly there were mountains all around us. But all we saw was rain.

Still, with a can-do spirit, Dan set about making us a life at Camping Aaregg.

"Do you sell ice?" he asked at the campground store shortly after we arrived. Our English wasn't getting us far, and neither did French or Dutch. They spoke German here, and that was going to be about it. The shop attendant asked Dan to repeat himself.

"Ice."

Her face flashed with recognition then, and she walked him to the large, unmissable freezer cart full of ice cream treats.

"Ok, thanks," Dan said.

Later, at the grocery store: “Do you sell ice?”

“Ice,” the shelf stocker mused.

“Ice,” Dan repeated. “For our cooler. For camping. To keep food cold.”

“Ice?” the shelf stocker asked.

“Yes.”

“Here.” He walked Dan to the popsicles.

“No I mean ice,” Dan said.

A blank stare.

“Frozen water!” Dan said.

“Ah!”

“Do you have it?”

“No.”

As I piled perishables into our shopping cart, Dan and Josie kept trying to figure out how the Swiss (or anyone in Western Europe, for that matter) kept food cold while camping. As I finished up shopping, I found them negotiating with the guy behind the seafood counter, begging to buy some of the ice chips beneath the bulging-eyed fish. No luck.

On our way out, I asked one more store employee, who happened to speak English. “That’s not typical here,” she said when I described how my simple American family intended to preserve food in our blue ice chest.

“What is typical?” I asked.

“A camping fridge?” she shrugged. “But doesn’t your campground have a restaurant?”

In fact, it did—an expensive pizzeria. And an arcade, and a place to get your morning espresso. It had the fanciest campground bathrooms we had ever seen. Both the Men’s side and the Ladies’ side had colorful children’s sections with kid-sized toilets behind kid-sized stalls, with three different levels of kid-size sinks with kid-height mirrors and two kid-showers with animal spouts. For the ladies, there was a vanity counter with pretty white stools and personal hair dryers mounted next to warmly lit makeup mirrors. Warm showers, plenty of toilets, and, notably, heat.

But the bathroom was only the beginning of our introduction to Swiss camping. Each plot was about the size of our living room, covered corner-to-corner with what appeared to be … cottages. Some were tents large enough for a circus sideshow. Others were camp trailers which doubled in size when the tent-half popped out. These bungalows had strings of twinkly lights, garden ornaments, and TV satellite dishes (dads seemed to be out hooking them up every rainy morning). There were dog houses and front porches and side-kitchens and pop-up picnic tables and camp-wardrobes with shoe compartments and bathrobe hangers. There were inflatable easy chairs and potted plants and electrical rotisseries and yes, refrigerators. We arrived at our site to find the grass yellowed and muddy in a perfect cabin-with-porch shape from the previous occupant (who, like most here, clearly had weeks and weeks of vacation to burn cultivating a darling hearth away from home on a Swiss alpen lake. Clearly, the name of the game was not who could rough it the most, Dan commented. “It’s ‘Who can camp best?’”

Dan set to work, and soon our tiny tent filled in the porch section of the dead-grass-print. There wasn’t much to do with the rest of the smelly turf except park the car over it. We put up our little folding table, which I used as a food prep counter. And we ate our first meal sitting on a picnic blanket on the ground. For atmosphere, every so often, we had a view up a passing car’s tailpipe. There was no fire ring. No tree. Clearly not a critter on the continent. And privacy? Ha! Our neighbor’s caravan stretched tightly down the property line, and I brushed the side of their tent with my elbow whenever I needed to open the passenger side of our car. I hoped they couldn’t smell the spoiling food we brought with us, but I knew I could sure smell their warm tasty meals. And Josie was not above begging for their watermelon. I couldn’t blame her, when her friends slurped and smacked just three or four feet from our makeshift evening picnic of rice and vegetables.

We were the only English-speaking family at the campground, and certainly the only Americans. Needless to say, we made a spectacle of ourselves. It only took a day or two before we knew the people must be talking. Have you seen the Americans with their sad little tent? How do they even fit a TV in there? Did you hear the Americans asking for ice at the store? They must not have air conditioning in that tent, poor things. Did you see the Americans with their impoverished child? They have NO camp fridge and NO four-foot grill—how will she eat? Maybe we could slip her some bratwurst. Did you smell that “meal” the Americans made last night? ‘Burritos,’ I think they called it. Curiouser and curiouser. Hey, and call me crazy, but were they hanging out in the bathrooms just to keep warm?

Alas, the rain came down. The mountains hid, though we could almost feel them there behind the soggy, tentacled clouds. We did take some trains and some gondolas up over the vivid green slopes, to see what we could see. We did get some beautiful photos in our lucky sunbreaks. We did come to adore the clankle, clonkle of cowbells in the mountain meadows. We intended to hike more, to ride up to the very cold and snowy tippy-top of Europe (where, I suggested, maybe we could harvest some ice?). But we did what made sense in mostly miserable weather. At a low point, we even paid the extra five dollars a day have an electrical cable run to our tent. Though from a mere hovel, we did as the others: surfed the web, charged iPhones, and played Curious George for Josie as the rain pounded our thin roof. At least the cool weather meant our food rotted slower.

Yet while Dan and I felt woefully regressed from our previous camping prowess, Josie seemed to mature about a year in the span of a week. Only just three, she rode her scooter to the playground, ran around the campground with packs of kids, went to the toilets on her own, insisted she take care of her own toothbrushings, learned to take a shower, and, by the last day, demanded cash from her dad so she could run to the store and buy candy with the other kids.

Whatever we had accomplished on our “camping” trip, one thing was sure: While Dan and I tried not to feel silly working so hard to keep the family dry and fed when any sane person would get a hotel and call out for pizza, Josie made the most of every non-sopping second. When we finally pulled up stakes after seven nights of camping and hit the road for home, she wept in the back seat, her face twisted into a deep heartbreak I had never seen in her before. “I miss my friends! I miss my friends!”

That’s when I realized that despite our blunders, we’d done one thing right. We took our kid to camp, and brought her home changed.

Postcard from Amsterdam: Eulogy for a Boxbike

2010-08-06T11:48:00.000+02:00

The first time I held your handles, my feet hurt.

We were new arrivals in Amsterdam and had been walking everywhere, everywhere, every day, stroller-pushing and baby-carrying and grocery-toting. We needed wheels. And a box. And some style.

I strapped my 24-month-old onto your bench and, weaving like a drunk, stiffly jabbed your pedals along the canal in front of our house. Up and over a speed bump. Up and over another. Around one city block, right turns only. I was terrified, certain my child and I would die. Yet I felt something odd: a grin on my face, which was not my idea but yours. By the time I saved lives by leaping off the bike and parking it, I was laughing out loud. It was the most fun I’d had in years. And the thing is, Boxbike, that feeling never went away. Riding you was never a chore. You brought wind into my lungs and sun into my eyes and blood into my heart and a song into my voice almost every day for the 14 months you were a part of our family.

We got into some accidents, and you held fast. Once, out of road rage, a crazy-eyed driver wedged our bike against a curb, and your strong, sold box pressed deeper and deeper into the flesh of his fender as he tried to squeeze past us. I was so proud of the final indent—half an inch!—and not a mark on you, or me, or Josie.

Another time, pedaling down the Prinsengracht at full tilt, the car in front of us suddenly slammed on its brakes and reversed toward a parking spot, swinging its passenger side smack into us. Full speed to full stop. But again, safe girl and safe rider, although we were shaken. The car showed scrapes. You showed integrity.

But all of this time, you had a secret: a quiet suffering. Baggage from a time before we knew you. You had been a young boxbike, innocently perched on the street, when a trash collector’s grappling hook mistook you for rubbish, clamping onto you, lifting you up, then replacing you on the ground in pieces.

You had been rebuilt, but you never felt quite the same. As the months passed, your proud shape attained a slump. The front wheel rode at an angle to the frame. And finally, on Monday, July 19, 2010, the uneven pressure became too much for you. I was pedaling you alone toward the bike hospital, knowing something was not quite right. Sometimes I question whether I could have done more for you. What if I had transported you an hour sooner? Could you have been saved? Or at least spared the humiliation of perishing in the street?

You and I rattled down the Prinsengracht in an easterly direction, my worry turning to alarm when your handlebars, which had once brought me so much comfort, jumped and jerked in my hands. Cyclists whizzed past, and a red van bore down from behind. Suddenly I felt no link between the handlebars and the front wheel. You had a final convulsion, and the box slammed to the earth, scraping along like a jet with no landing gear. The front wheel skidded spokes-down on the brick, and I leaped off of you for the very last time.

Passing cyclists dinged their bells, annoyed at the catastrophe in their path. I flipped them off. The red van waited with remarkable patience while I took your autopsy photos. Then, with a heavy heart, I dragged your hulk off the road and laid you to rest beside the canal. I chained your pieces together—the equivalent, I think, of gently closing your eyes. And I walked away.

By evening, my feet hurt again, and I missed you so.

Postcard from Holland: On, Oranje!

2010-07-14T20:42:00.004+02:00

I planned to write just one post about Holland’s World Cup showing. I considered penning something just over two weeks ago, when Oranje played Slovakia while I made dinner and Josie colored in the living room. We don’t have a TV, but it didn’t matter—it was easy to keep tabs on the game (attempt... save… Goal!!!) simply from the varying sounds of the cheers erupting from open windows and streetside cafes everywhere in the city. Color commentary sounded in the air, a universal language. It didn’t matter if I was at the front of the house setting the table overlooking the canal, or at the back with the terrace door open. I knew Holland was in control of that game and winning. A happy pulse brightened the already-sunny city.

But the story just got better with Holland’s match against Brazil on the second day of July. It was a steaming hot and bright yellow Friday—a day to laze by the pool in the park with friends, sipping prosecco and keeping one eye apiece on the kids as they splashed through the wading water and clambered over the jungle gyms. We whiled away the afternoon in a happy, heat-induced delirium. Then, when it was no longer safe to postpone dinner, we parted ways. Josie and I pedaled through the city at five o’clock on what seemed sure to be the summer’s warmest day. But eerily, the streets were empty. No bikes, no bells. No tired-footed tourists. No boats on the canals, no cars on the thoroughfares. The tooting horns, the lively chatter of a summer’s midday in the city—all had gone silent and focused. We rose and dipped over a canal bridge, passing onto the cobbled streets near home, headed to our favorite pizza restaurant for dinner. As we whizzed along a row of cafes, it happened: we heard those first few sucked in squeals of anticipation, then the expressed roar of a million people. Holland had scored. The count was 1-1, with 30 minutes remaining.

Arriving at La Perla Pizza, we saw that the door was blocked by two stools, and the fire in the pizza oven had diminished to embers. Using a projector, the workers had turned the wall above the pizza oven into a screen for the game. This tiny hole in the wall (much like our own) had no room for a television, so the pizza makers and their friends stood outside the hot little restaurant, watching the game through their own window. Josie and I joined them, and despite Josie’s periodic inquiries as to when that man would make her pizza, no one entered the restaurant except to grab a beer from the case inside, on a pay-later or maybe-not-at-all basis.

While the grown-ups looked up, watching every flicker of the game, Josie stood on a bench and peered over my shoulder, taking in the expressions of the fans: wild anticipation, clapping, window-banging, gasps and shouts, curses, songs, back-turning, flails of disgust, hoots of disbelief, and the thrilling, flag-snapping gallop down the street, arm in arm with neighbors, when Holland scored again to bring the score to its final 2-1 over Brazil. Minutes later, to everyone’s disbelief, the game was won. I hoisted Josie in the air, reminding her to clap, and shouted, “We won! We won!”

“Hup Holland!” she quickly took to yelling. Then she’d look at me. “When are they gonna say ‘Hup Holland’ again?”

“Right about now,” I’d say, and they would.

We ate our pizza, then pedaled home through a wild, steamy, summer’s-eve city dripping in Oranje. Music thumped from the boats, every bike bell jangled, mopeds tooted and cars honked their way through town. Once I had Josie home and into the bathtub, I went to the front window in time to catch a boatful of celebrants leaping into the canal for a quick swim, paddling back to their sloop before the next cheering party boat passed. With each cheer that reached our windows, Josie shouted from the bath, “We winned!”

All that evening, the party went on—vuvuzelas snorgling, fireworks cracking, horns tooting, and bodies splashing for celebratory swims all through the city. The babysitter arrived and I put on my orange cowgirl boots and went out into the city on my bike, dinging my way along as Josie dreamed. As a soft breeze cut through the intoxicating heat, as I watched a dogged pair of fans repeatedly bridge-jumping into the Prinsengracht, and as a can-do spirit consumed the 16 million people of this little country, I knew that no matter what happened in the Cup, this day would go down in history.

Holland had reached the semi-final against Uruguay, which they won as expected. Despite our plan to stream the game live from the local news station, an exasperating 50-second lag meant we still relied on the shouts of the city to keep us up-to-the-minute. It was a late-evening game, and a Tuesday. The toots and honks were happy indeed after the win—we got into a call-and-response Hup Holland! cheer with our next-door neighbors, who were sticking their heads out the windows a few feet to the left of our own—but still, it was no steamy Friday victory against Brazil—and now as riot-control helicopters circled above, keeping an already restless city awake late into the night, we all looked toward the final.

Sunday, the day of the World Cup final against Spain, thousands flooded the streets decked in orange. Swathed in tangerine boas, caped in the red, white, and blue flag like Dutch superheroes, topped with wigs and headdresses of all sorts, they marched to Museumplein to take in the game with a pack of 150,000.

Not watching the game on an actual television was not an option this time, so with our monumentally over-tired three-year-old, we joined our landlords in their apartment for the game. Outside, the sun went down. The lampposts flickered on, casting an orange glow against the soft blue of a quiet summer night. The city held its breath. And held its breath. The 0-0 tie went into extra time. The more exhausted Josie got, the more she wiggled and cast about. She was no different than the rest of the city—the rest of the country—which never, in the end, had the chance to liberate that massive, pent-up cheer they all held inside. Dan’s point: a goal would have been enough—we just wanted to share in that release, to hear the wild roar—but there was no such chance. Our plucky city remained in stagnant silence after the final whistle and Spain’s 1-0 victory.

It seems the taut excitement has been leaking away this week, like a balloon pinched lightly shut as it slowly deflates. On Monday the team flew home in a KLM 747, accompanied by two fighter jets. Yesterday, they waved to the crowds from a canal boat during their ticker-tape welcome-home parade. Half a million people turned out to cheer—including Josie as she waved her flags from her perch on my shoulders. But millions more stayed at work and home, saying no thanks to “the loser’s parade.”

I know it wasn’t the perfect ending, but it meant so much. This whole country ran on spirit alone for two weeks straight. Yes, Spain won. But “we winned” still sounds right to me.

Postcard from London: Hello? Hi!

2010-07-01T17:01:00.002+02:00

“That’s disgusting,” Dan announced after his first sip of ale at the Prince Edward Pub in London. “The smell is hideous,” he announced after taking another sip. He reassured himself by finishing the whole glass, then declared, “I just drank a pint of swill.” So, we upped sticks and went for Lebanese food and red wine, our luck continuing as we missed England-Algeria, perhaps the lamest of the Cup’s many lame ties.

Still, despite warm beer, bad soccer, and a persistent rainy chill, our first visit to London was a salve. We were struck by a conspicuous up-with-things-American spirit. The smell of burgers here and there. A familiar architecture. Ambulance sirens that said reee-roooo instead of nee-naw. Friendly service. And lastly but mostly, The English fricking Language.

Let us discuss, momentarily, Modern English. They say an English-speaking American may yet need a British phrasebook, but coming from a neighborhood where most of my spoken-English exchanges are utilitarian, I hardly noticed any difference. I estimate that ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of standard (non-Cockney) British English is used identically to American English, with the notable exception of the despoiled exclamation “Brilliant!” I dropped a hash mark in my journal for every utterance of the word I heard, coming in at around 50 for the weekend, right down to a particularly enthusiastic pronouncement by an airport security agent when I cooperatively placed my belongings on the x-ray belt.

As our weekend getaway progressed with almost unsettling ease, I realized how accustomed I’ve become, in Holland, to communicating at a disadvantage. If I commence in Dutch, I know it will be microseconds before I’m identified as a non-native speaker. I expect one of two responses: a pitying switch to English, or ensnarement in a verbal paragraph I have no way of unraveling.

Throughout my London conversations, out of habit, I felt apologetic for not using the local language. I would find myself trying to remember how to say “please” and “thank you” in this foreign land. Yet no one seemed to chafe at my rudeness or marvel at my cluelessness. Instead, the courtesies kept coming. Attention, service, answers to questions. Stories. Jokes, even. There were nuances, layers of comprehension, bursts of laughter among strangers—us included. Feeling it was all too easy to be real, I kept waiting for the hard truth. Would menus arrive in an incomprehensible script? Would the currency be of rare seashells, impossible to correctly count out? Would the salt be too easily mistaken for sugar? Would the double-decker buses lack roofing? Would the people drive on the wrong side of the road? Would there be spots of earth where heads had rolled?

As much as we’ve come to adore daily life in our big village of Amsterdam, Dan and I felt like London was R&R from our expat experience. A cakewalk, I believe we called it. Which caused us to wonder: If we were Americans living in London, would it even count as living in a foreign country? I mean, I’m sorry. But there were cupcakes. Wide asphalt streets. Wasteful to-go cups of good old-fashioned filter coffee. Endless choices of ethnic food—even Mexican. And a gross oversupply of yesteryear’s flowery teacups, their teetering stacks reaching sweetly for the sky in the antiques market on Portobello Road, reminding me of grandmothers and folk tales and cottage gardens and Imperialism and proper manners and American heritage and everything pretty and painful along the way.

It was all quite brilliant, really.

Postcard from Languedoc: A Glance at France

2010-06-18T13:12:00.001+02:00

Though it is noncommittal, a glance is intended: a turn of the head, a pause mid-chew, a halt on the stairs. A glance is the middle child: Her heady older sister is the gaze, unmistakable. Her baby sister is the glimpse, toddling through the day, happening upon life only perchance. Situated between the two, the glance carries a soft suggestion of more: a whiff of possibility.

Our friends the Hemleys, whom we visited in their home-away-from-home in southern France, seemed to leap from activity to activity, without transitions. Despite being a family of four, with two young girls, they experienced no delay between reaching their vehicle and reversing, while we fumbled with seat belts and snacks and power windows. As we all poured through the front door after each day’s excursions, it was as if another Margie stood in the kitchen; by the time Dan, Josie, and I had removed our shoes, there she would be, mid-chop, dicing legumes Provençales and laying sausages to sizzle in an already-hot pan. It seemed the whole four days moved that way—skipping frames, a pre-edited set of snapshots.

No sooner than we had arrived in ancient Ceyras, a village colored linen-cream and clay orange and summer-leaf grean, I found myself not in the house at all, but with Dan and Robin tasting wine at the local grape cooperative, looking out on a descending gray sky as a snail streaked its way up the window. And then, click, we were all seven on the road to Saint-Guilhem-du-Desert, so medieval and charming as to make it one of the country’s official most-beautiful villages. There in the town plaza, in full raincoat-and-umbrella plumage, our three girls shinnied around the roots of the oldest plane tree in France. As the rain came down, we ascended a mountain trail, punctuating our journey with close-ups on slugs and bugs and wildflowers. Drenched through coats, officially chilly, but whip! There we sat, in a warm café, drinking sparkling water and fresh-grated hot chocolate, sharing plates of steaming frites.

On Saturday, the sun came out and we buzzed to the farmer’s market in Gignac, shopped ourselves a picnic of rotisserie chicken, saucissons and fromages and summer fruits: raspberries, apricots, peaches. Click, and we were at the coast, shin-high surf whishing against the sand as we spread our blankets and watched a patchwork of clouds form, then dissolve, overhead.

Blink, to Sète, a cold throatful of melon gelato, a whirl on the carousel, a stop for octopus pie. Zip, away from the city and inland through the sun-dapple of narrow, canopied country roads, crossing river bridges over fly-fishers and wading children. Suddenly found myself out wine-tasting again.

Each supple evening at the table, after the girls went to bed, we poured out as many words as we could share—travel stories, writing ideas, food origins, the raising of daughters—before night and wine put out our little flames.

Sunday, as we hiked through the dolomites at Mourèze, we stopped for a picnic which seemed to spring from the rocks. (The work, it seemed, of the apparent backup-Margie.) Over lunch, Dan taught Josie to hike; she worked her way out of the hills all by herself, climbing up and over and through the rocky passageways. Just when it was too hot to carry on, we stepped through the arching doorway of a shadowy hillside church, the chill of ancient stone lifting the trail’s dusty stickiness from our skin. And shortly, lemon sorbet and cold bubbly water in the village, as thunder vibrated on the horizon.

Whisk, to Celle, a ghost town at the edge of a man-made lake, whose vacant town square was now a lounge area for beachgoers. And more of those country roads: splashing the cars through stream crossings, glancing out over the red soil, the cattle, the wheat, finding our way back over the hills into wine country. There would be a pre-dinner river swim, alongside the local yellow Labrador who had busied himself for the twelve years of his life collecting cannonball-sized river rocks, only to get a massive one wedged in his jaw in our presence.

Monsieur! Votre chien! We cried out to his owner, who hesitated to lay aside his fishing pole and only waved his hand to reassure us until he came close and saw—Merde!—what was actually happening. He wrenched the dog’s jaw even wider to loose the stone, and there was a flare of humor and ease and familiarity that passed among us.

Villagers picked their way along the woodsy riverbank with buckets of the evening’s catch. The sun glimmered on our swimming hole. We wandered back to into town, crossing through the valley forest, up through the townspeople’s rambly fruiting gardens. We rinsed our river shoes in the sluice at the top of the hill, where greenery met village lane. We still had a day left: there would be a shopping spree at the olive cooperative, a scamper with the village children in the town plaza, a few last slides and seesaws at the playground, more sweet country drives. Also another winery, this one run by an aging Spanish-French couple still quite clearly in love.

Zoom, home to Amsterdam. Slides of Languedoc flashed in my mind as I tried to fall asleep after our return. I felt something tug, tug, tugging. I had seen and done more than we usually manage in a short visit to a new place. Our trip had been more than a glimpse, though not quite a gaze. If a glimpse says anything at all, we hear simply, “Oh!” A gaze, of course, murmurs bravely “Here we are then.” But the meaning of a glance, a sweet glance: “Perhaps there is more; perhaps we shall meet again.”

Postcard from Amsterdam: June

2010-06-10T13:27:00.002+02:00

There has been rain. Splashing down in buckets and buckets. Tuesday it dumped so hard that water dribbled over the windowsills and through the back door. As she sat on the couch watching Sesame Street, Josie called, “Mommy, come see what’s happening.” Water pattered onto the couch next to her leg as it leaked from the ceiling. The building owner ran up the stairs at the moment she received my text message (having been there only moments before, though I did not see her as she stealthily delivered a load of folded clothes to the kitchen table). This time, donning my raincoat, she clambered onto the roof and declared a rotten window sill. “I can fix it as soon as everything dries,” she said.

But dry it has not. Tuesday evening, after his bike ride home from work, my husband burst through the door triumphant: just a few rain spatters on his pants, though rain hammered the windows. “I made it! I beat that damn cloud!”

Yesterday it rained again hard. Water gushed into the kitchen through the window casings. Harriet’s nest, eggs and all, smithered and careened through the gutters. I heard a scraping, a cursing, a clattering in the basement. Heading down to rotate yet another laundry load, I stopped short: a swimming pool at the bottom of the steps. Together, the owner and I used dustpans to scoop the floodwater into buckets and trash cans. Between scoops and sloshes, we chatted about her decades-long rainwater drainage feud with both next-door neighbors. And the fun fact that every once in a long while, the city forgets to open the canal system in a deluge, providing every canal house in the city with a private underground spa.

“Then what happens? Who has to clean up the mess?”

“We’re ready for it,” she shrugged, glancing around at her film editing equipment, a lifetime’s collection of tools and antiques, racks of wine and gin, bins of old VHS tapes and gardening gloves and movie props. I noticed for the first time that anything touching the floor was waterproof—aside from my pile of dirty laundry, now sopped with brown rainwater.

When I returned upstairs, I stood magnetized to the window. When water comes down like that, I love the way the bikes are doused from the streets, the tourists are soaked off the sidewalks, the nonstop boat parade is flushed from the canal. Without traffic, there is no horizontal movement—only vertical lines as the rain falls down, pierced only by sudden umbrella blooms. I scan for odd movement: a drenched straggler with his coat blown loose, a soot-black coot paddling the canal, dragging trash toward her nest through the onslaught. Behind me, under a near-perfect roof, my mostly-dry little life.

Later, my fast-pedaling husband arrived home with shoulders slumped. He squelched into the bathroom to remove his shoes in the tub, pouring water out of them both. “The wettest I’ve ever been,” he said, peeling off his gear. It’s something he’s said before. It’s true every time.

Today, there are two puddles where Dan’s shoes sat overnight. After another morning shower, Amsterdammers are navigating a warm, wet, white fog. Pedaling through the thick greenery in Vondel Park, I smelled a campground in New Zealand, a cloud forest in Costa Rica, a spring cloudburst over Budapests’s steaming baths. Also a smidge of June cornfield, a touch of Northern Minnesota lakeshore. This week, it will rain much more before anything begins to dry, and rightly so. We’re ready for it.

Postcard from the Puget Sound: Missing Things

2010-06-03T15:31:00.004+02:00

Last month, in my parents’ Redmond backyard, Josie and I spent a few mornings romping around the sports court. We played basketball, soccer, and pickleball. She rode her school-bus scooter and a flower trike. She chased me, I chased her, we both chased the dog. Our cat Scooter, who lives with my parents now, chased us. There was tickling and hiding, skipping in the grass, shoes damp with dew. As we took a breather one of those times, she turned to the blueberry bushes beside her, twice her height. Grandpa had told Josie that the blueberries weren’t ready yet—she’d have to come back for them later in the summer.

“They’re trying to grow blueberries,” she said, picking a white cup-shaped flower from the bush and handing it to me.

“Oh, a blossom,” I said.

“I love blossoms,” Josie answered. “That’s a sign of spring.”

“Yep,” I said.

“I want to come back on blueberry day,” she said to me.

I had to think. That would be in late July. Maybe, in early August when we have some vacation, we could return to the U.S. and there would still be berries.

“Is that all right?” she asked.

The spring sun drenched me with a feeling of endless possibility. I flooded with thankfulness for our flight benefits. We can plan a trip at the drop of a hat—I can say yes when Josie wants to see how the fruit ripens, how her grandma’s flowers are blooming, whether the garter snakes are out.

“Okay,” I said. “Yes, we can.”

A few days later, in the midst of a visit to Port Townsend to see Dan’s parents, I walked with Josie through Chetzemoka Park and down to the beach. She carried her bucket and shovel, getting to work right away in the sand, filling the pail, oomphing as she tested its weight, then dumping it and beginning again. As she played, I scrabbled around the beach trying to tempt her with treasures: a Dungeness carapace, sea kelp, barnacles on a rock, a hermit crab, snails stuck to the underside of a rock. She gave a few glances, but kept mostly to her digging. I bent and stooped over tidepools, searching for the token that would make her day at the beach unforgettable. I never heard a click or tumble as I lost something from the outside pocket of the backpack I wore.

The next morning, I prepared to drive four hours to Portland to continue my book tour. Josie would spend the night in Port Townsend with her grandparents.

“Has anyone seen my sunglasses?” I kept asking. I asked Josie so many times that eventually she confessed to a crime she did not commit.

“I think I tried 'em on,” she said. “To see how they look on my eyes.”

“Do you remember where you put them after that?”

“Maybe in a suitcase?”

I combed the suitcases. Still, no sunglasses. I gave up; I could squint my way to Portland. I drove off, waving to Josie and her grandparents as they began walking to the sunny beach for a picnic.

An hour later, as I plowed the car through a driving rainstorm, my phone rang. It was Josie and her grandma.

“Please describe your sunglasses,” Jean said.

“Black and white.”

“Mommy, we found your sunglasses!” Josie’s voice piped. “They stayed on the beach with the crabs!”

My sunglasses had tumbled through two tides and managed to remain just steps from the muddy tidepool where I had dropped them. The next day when I returned for Josie, I was amazed by the glasses: Not a barnacle scratch, not a shred of seaweed, not even much need to adjust the fit. As I wore them, Josie and I drove back to Redmond to see my parents again and play more in the backyard. She slept in the backseat, overspent and probably still jet-lagged. For me in that moment, reality set in. Our home is far from the Puget Sound these days. “When are we going back to my home in Amsterdam?” Josie had been asking me. The word I hadn't been hearing in the question, until that moment, was "my."

I try to keep this whole globe tucked under my arm, but it keeps spinning loose. Soon the blueberries in Redmond will ripen, and we will not be there. Scooter will frisk after the white wings of a cabbage moth, and we will not be there. My parents will sit in the gazebo and drink a glass of wine at sunset, and we will not be there.

We’ll probably be here in Amsterdam, pedaling through the park on a sunny day. I’ll be wearing my sunglasses, which give me hope: Across the tides, our missing things could just possibly stay where we left them.

Postcard from Amsterdam: Blueberry Birthday Muffins

2010-05-28T09:26:00.000+02:00

Just for fun today, since it's Josie's 3rd birthday, I invite you to read "On the Sunny Side," a Blue Suitcase postcard from one year ago. Looking back at this post, I'm comforted: the pendulum between my feelings of homesickness and adventure has slowed into a much gentler rhythm.

As I prepped to make blueberry birthday muffins yesterday, Dan asked: "Tradition?"

"Yep," I said, smiling, glad to be reminded that family rituals will take root—and hold—wherever we are.

Postcard from Minneapolis: News from Lake Harriet

2010-05-26T11:53:00.007+02:00

Sheepishly, I return to The Blue Suitcase. The three-week hiatus was not intended—I thought for sure I’d find time on my book tour to post here and there about our adventures in the U.S. But alas, we’ve just returned to Amsterdam, and now I’d like to take you on a look back through our trip.

Back in April, after days and days of warm-weather news from our former home city, I decided to plan ahead to make certain I would get my own glorious afternoon of Minnesota springtime. Sandwiched between interviews and a book signing at The Loft Literary Center, I set up a picnic in the park for our Minneapolis friends and neighbors. I pre-ordered pizzas. I made a shopping list. I received more than 40 RSVPs.

When we arrived in Minnesota, the first thing I noticed was the giant moose statue that Josie as a baby always wanted to “go see” at MSP. “Do you remember the moose?” I asked her? In a daze, she looked around. “No,” she said, staring right at it.

The next thing I noticed was just a reminder of how awful my former state-mates are at freeway merging; it seems like every time we drive out of the airport, we’re welcomed back to Minnesota by a screech, honk, and death-defying experience.

After all that, I noticed something else: it was damn freezing.

“Look Josie,” I said as we drove to our friends’ home. “It’s Adi’s house! Do you remember coming here? Do you remember Adi?”

She didn’t answer, snacking voraciously instead.

Inside the house, there was a flicker of recognition between the two nearly-threes, and soon they were dressing up together in high heels and flower crowns, as if the elapsed year since they’d played together had been no longer than a day.

The next day dawned, but barely. The sky was so packed with soggy clouds that nighttime seemed to stretch into afternoon. And the rain that bucketed down was no friendly spring shower. It was a frigid, drenching downpour, so chilly the forecast predicted it would turn to slush, perhaps even snow, by evening.

The evening of our picnic.

Shan, queen of good ideas, called to propose another location: Beard’s Plaisance, a park with a big picnic shelter. Kelly, Adi’s mom, set up the location change while I gave an interview downtown. Later, as I grocery shopped, I scrapped plans for lemonade and picked up two vats of hot chocolate from my favorite neighborhood coffee shop. And later that day, in boots and many layers, we showed up at the park toting paper plates and some festive potted daisies, on the off chance that someone else might bother to come to our picnic. The pizza man came skidding down the mud-streaked hillside toward the shelter, with three pies as big as hula-hoops. Who, we wondered as we looked out at the downpour, would even think of leaving the house today?

Everyone, it turned out.

“Josie, look! It’s Hazel! Do you remember Hazel? And Evan and Logan? And Rylie and RJ? And David and Leonie? And here comes Stella and Zoe! There’s little Clare and her sister Leah! Here comes Adi and her sister Emma too! Oh, Josie, there’s Alex and Grace! Do you remember Alex and Grace? And Kenyon!”

The kids, decked in rain gear (and some, including Josie, in full winter down), splashed and slipped and splatted until their fingers were stiff and red, their noses numb and runny. The three colossal pizzas disappeared. Despite rapid intake, the hot chocolate turned cold. People stayed until they couldn’t feel their toes, and finally bade us goodbye, each with warm hugs and kind words and sweet memories. All the while, something funny was happening for me: I didn’t feel the cold at all.

The next day, after my reading, a chilly wind and sprinkles persisted. We took Josie to our old neighborhood.

“Josie, do you remember where your house is?” She turned 180 degrees on the sidewalk, then rotated back again, confused.

“Where is it?” she asked.

Dan and I tried not to feel too crestfallen. We walked her to her front yard, one house down from where we’d parked, and tried to remind her. “Remember? We used to live here together, with our kitty Scooter? And you used to push your toys up and down this driveway? And your bedroom was inside? And we played in the basement all winter?”

She considered what I was saying, and seemed to recognize her beloved strip of concrete, the driveway, where she had pushed her stroller and scooted on her cars and rolled balls and watched tiny ants. But the memories didn’t seem to particularly move her. We walked across the street to Shan’s house to play, asking Josie if she recalled the toys at that household. She did—she knew right where they were kept—but didn’t make a fuss about it. As the kids played, Shan brought out one of Josie’s old scooters—one she would take up and down the driveway—and asked if Josie remembered. Without answering, but with a look of satisfaction, Josie commandeered the vehicle. But soon enough, she abandoned it for another toy.

As we chatted with Shan, the sky began to clear. At last, afternoon warmth finally began to pulse through the chill. And soon, Dan and Josie and I were buckled in the car again, driving to another dear friend’s house, crossing the city by feel along our favorite route. Through Linden Hills, we crested an incline. The hood of the car dipped down West 42^nd Street, and there was Lake Harriet, a glitter of blue with white sailboats tied to their buoys and rocking like metronomes for a lullaby. Josie drifted to sleep in the car seat as a butterscotch trolley crossed the street in front of us, passengers riding just for the fun of it with ice cream cones in hand. Dan and I both released held gasps. Our breath carried appreciation—how charming it was!—and longing for those countless sweet days we spent on this very lakeside. As sun finally blazed through the windshield, we drove the long way around the lake, watching for the sanctuary where herons fished, the dock where we scanned the water for perch and carp, the arcs we used to trace with our baby girl in her stroller. Along the perfectly familiar path, residents jogged and pedaled and dog-walked around big shining puddles. We rolled down the windows to let in the smell of wet spring leaves and lakewater. On the radio, Garrison Keillor began reciting the news from Lake Wobegon. The nostalgia was too much; there was nothing to say. Dan and I rode in silence with our eyes swimming as we remembered, remembered, remembered.

Postcard from Amsterdam: On the Pretend Side

2010-05-06T10:52:00.002+02:00

It was the evening of Queen’s Day. The sun as it set left blue and pink smears on the sky beyond the canal houses opposite ours. The air molecules hadn’t settled yet after Holland’s annual orange-smeared day of revelry. Though they weren’t clogging beneath the bridges anymore, plenty of party boats still passed, their booming techno so loud that the walls of Josie’s bedroom shook. We put her to bed in the back room with night sounds of the garden in her ears instead.

That day, we had sold Homemade American Chocolate Chip Cookies on the canalside, making a good deal of money since people drinking beer will pay almost anything for fresh chocolate chip cookies. As we smilingly traded baked goods for cash, (that’s us at lower right in the picture), Josie played nonstop on the sidewalk, imagining jungles out of chair legs, bird cages out of hats, a zoo parade out of chalk figures. It was loud and busy and messy and wild and hilarious and exhausting, so Dan asked Josie at one point, “Do you want to play outside or inside?”

“Pretend side,” she answered, carrying on.

He told me this story as we cleaned up the kitchen that night. A moment later he asked, “Can I say something I probably shouldn’t say? Something that might jinx us?”

“Sure!” I said, hoping for gossip.

“I haven’t seen a mouse in a long time.”

He was right—it had been months since a mouse, or any tiny sign of a mouse, had been spotted in our apartment.

“Every day, I think about saying that,” I sighed. “But I never do.”

We finished cleaning up and put on a movie—“The Men Who Stare at Goats”—about a real-life American military initiative to capture and deploy soldiers’ extrasensory mental powers.

Midway through the movie, when the characters were working on their ability to see into the future, we both heard a little click and skitter in the kitchen. And we both astutely ignored it. But then, two little shadows sprinted down the hall.

“EXPLETIVE!” Dan shouted, smacking his hands together and jumping off the couch. “Two of them!”

Vanquished, we shuffled into the kitchen. We cleaned, again. We set three live traps with some truly excellent peanut butter on some nice cheese crackers.

At this moment, we’re leaving the house to head back to the States for a few weeks of visiting, and my book tour as well.

Mice, listen up: nobody’s home. That means if you end up in a live trap, we can’t free you into the wilderness before you waste away. Risky business, don’t you think? May I recommend the kitchen of a local restaurant, perhaps? Or the Monday/Thursday garbage-day buffet?

I sort of feel like I’m talking and no mice are listening. It’s been five days, and we’ve begun to wonder where they’ve gone. Are they inside? Outside? Or perhaps, as I keep trying to convince myself, only on the pretend side?

Postcard from Holland: Angelic

2010-04-27T21:03:00.006+02:00

There’s something about this age—they’re sparkling, they’re angelic. They are simply, as my hair stylist says in her round Dutch accent, a-dooor-able. Josie is almost three, and when she gets together with her friends, the sweetness abounds. They titter and giggle, exploding from room to room as imagination takes over, no mommies allowed. They test, but ever so benignly. As a friend and I watched our girls through the kitchen window the other day, they chalked each other’s bellies, and squirted water into their mouths from the garden spray bottles. Sure, sometimes they'll ask for a snack or plead for one more of Easter’s leftover chocolate eggs, but when it comes to having a good time, they seem to need grown-ups less and less. Now, when we plan an outing, Josie will tend to ask: “Will there be friends?” As her parents, we don’t entirely count for that category anymore, which is bittersweet. But mostly sweet.

On Saturday night, Dan and I sat with friends in the living room as our two girls played in Josie’s room just above our heads, at the top of the spiral stairs. It had been a heaven-sent evening, plenty warm for a barbecue and eating outdoors. We only moved inside as the sun dropped low and the girls seemed more and more entrenched upstairs, doing whatever they were doing. The four of us adults watched the boats go by, window-shopping for our favorites.

“Can we take a bath together?” Josie yelled out.

“No, it’s almost time to say goodnight to our friends. Everybody has to go to bed.”

A long quiet period ensued.

Eventually, Josie’s friend appeared at the top of the stairs, taking a careful step downward. These are tight, winding steel stairs, more open than solid. We watched her footsteps, knowing that this was her first time descending forward rather than crawling backward. Her upper body came into view, along with her cargo: Josie’s chamber pot, which is kept in her room for only for urgent needs in the middle of the night. From four feet above our heads, Josie's friend tilted the pot, attempting to showcase its contents. Careful not to make any sudden movements, I rose from the couch and stepped forward with my arm outstretched.

“Why don’t I just go ahead and take that? Then we can—”

A misstep. A cascade. Mudfalls down the stairs. A splatter to the floor, a splash up my pants. A wretched rain over the little girl’s father as he reclined beneath the stairs. Two little girls, trying not to slip on the way down.

They got their bath.

An accounting: two pees and one poo, the bulk of which was late to be discovered. As I scrubbed the girls in the tub, they sang and tickled and laughed hysterically. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my husband go down the hallway with a mop in one hand and a little shovel in the other.

Despite her blossoming preference for “friends,” the morning after the potty incident, our family of three struck out on an adventure. We boarded a bus for the Keukenhof, Holland’s famous bulb garden in the tulip fields, for a day of running around amongst the blooms, plus a picnic. “Oh, I love picnics!” Josie said as we packed up. Then she looked up at each of us. “Are we going with Mommy and Daddy and Josie?”

“Of course!”

“Oh, I love families!”

We did run amongst the flowerbeds. We did play hide and seek behind the trees. We did watch the fountains and listen to calliope music and smell hyacinths and exclaim again and again at the thick paintbrush strokes of color, the melon-sized cups of the biggest tulip heads on earth. We ate our sandwiches while Josie ran and hid and burst out and jumped and gasped through intermittent tickle attacks. We ate fresh Holland strawberries and pure vanilla ice cream. Josie galloped until, near the end of the day, she stopped on the side of the path and collapsed like an exhausted retriever. “Carry me like a baby,” she said to Dan, who cradled her from then on out, her legs flopping lightly. We held her quietly as she slept on the bus ride home.

Back in our apartment, we flung open the windows as sun and warmth flooded in, ate melon and oven pizza and drank sparkling apricot juice. Party boats passed, their music and hoots of laughter filling our living room. The light shifted, revealing some spots we had missed the night before. I went, not for the last time, to grab cleaner and a rag. But even as I wiped sludge from the recliner, I couldn't wipe the smile off my face. Life is so good and so sweet and so darn simple sometimes.

Today, when we met up to play with Josie's bathmate, the girls approached one another to say hello. But instead of "hi," Josie said, "Remember when you spilled the poo?"

"Yeah," her friend said.

And off we went to the park.

Postcard from Amsterdam: Staying Put

2010-04-18T22:58:00.003+02:00

“I was hoping to come home early,” read the e-mail from Dan, “but this volcano erupted in Iceland and it is closing trans-Atlantic airspace.”

It wasn’t your average dog-ate-my-homework excuse. Josie and I started dinner without him, but by 6:30 he joined us.

“There’s absolutely nothing we can do,” he said, referring to his role as one of the people in charge of filling trans-Atlantic flights for the world’s largest airline.

The three of us sat at our little table in the front window of our apartment, watching the canal boats under a beautiful sunset—our only clue, aside from the absence of jet engine noise, that an unusual stillness had gained a hold on our lives.

At first, I counted my blessings and carried on. With our frequency of travel, I put our chances of having been stranded somewhere other than home at something like 30 percent. But we were in Amsterdam, the three of us together as we belong.

Maybe I should have expected it, but I’ve been surprised by the number of people I know who are separated from family members at the moment. Somehow, until now, I didn’t fully realize how common it is for so many people to be a country or a continent apart from their dearest ones. Millions, they say, are stranded. And now, I am asking Dan to go pick up bananas and any other tropical fruit still available at the market, before those supplies run out. I know it’s silly—we can live without tropical fruit. But I’m so used to my global access pass that I can’t fully understand what I’d risk by losing it. Or what I’ve sacrificed in order to hold it.

From our window, everything is normal—beautiful—and we have no pressing needs. I trust the volcano will die down, or governments and airlines will negotiate a new plan. But I do wonder, what if nothing changes? If Eyjafjallajokull spews for two years, as it did two centuries ago, and we find ourselves a steamship away from America, does this change where we are from, and where we belong?

In the midst of all these thoughts, one image keeps coming to mind. It is a faded photo in a picture frame at my mother’s house in Seattle: my great-great-grandmother, Anna, a wrinkled old woman draped in heavy cloth, standing in an Estonian potato field with her black ox. This week, I think I finally understand what I love about that photo: it shows an ancestor living on her own ethnic ground. Anna’s daughters, including my great-grandmother Julene, went to North America in the early 1900s and settled in Canada. Julene remained for most of her life in the Albertan wheat farming village of Barons, but her daughters—my grandmother Esta among them—scattered. Of all the girls, Esta went farthest, venturing to the U.S. and working as a nurse across points west, finally settling in Seattle. She remains there now: a Canadian expatriate, a full-blooded Estonian, and a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother of Americans, some of whom now live relatively close to Estonia.

I know that families have always been in motion, whether migrating as a clan or striking out in different directions. Home ground can only remain so as long as it yields food and protection. But I’ve noticed that today, in the age of countless international flights and endless ways to instantly communicate across the globe, we're quick to describe families as “scattered.” That word brings to mind a quick, casual, careless mess. My great-great-grandmother Anna knew, when she said goodbye to her daughters, that she was unlikely to see them again. I can’t imagine her discussing her girls’ lives in America with anything but solemnity—perhaps sorrow, probably respect, and always the recognition that their decisions to leave had been enormous and difficult.

Anna might not recognize her great-great-granddaughter—one of the scattered—who gets lulled into a false sense of security. If we don’t Skype today, we’ll Skype tomorrow. If I don’t see you this time, I’ll see you next time. If we don’t move back next year, then maybe the year after. It’s so easy to forget that even when everything and everyone moves faster, time passes just the same.

I don’t feel stuck, but I might be.

Postcard from Belgium: On the Square

2010-04-11T20:10:00.007+02:00

Josie made it all the way to the restaurant with no pants on. We had just arrived in the adorable Belgian village of Veurne for an Easter weekend getaway. After settling in at our B&B and washing up our child from her requisite bout of motion sickness, we came to an impasse: Dan and I felt that Josie should be fully clothed as we ventured out for dinner. She strongly disagreed.

Our temporary compromise was that she would have to at least carry her pants, and don them the moment her legs got cold. Or when we got to the restaurant. Whichever came first.

We knew she was stubborn (and quite warm blooded), but I did not expect her to go more than a few paces down the wet stone sidewalk before demanding pants. But she said nothing of the sort as she capered on, dignified as ever. Heading toward the town square, we rounded a corner and walked through an alley lined with daffodil gardens. There, a boy of about five passed a soccer ball with his dad. The ball scuffed over the brick as the child scurried and kicked, scurried and kicked.

“Look! He’s playing soccer ball!” Josie said at the top of her lungs. I had hoped we could slip quietly past.

“Dan,” I said quietly, “I don’t want her to be laughed at. I don’t want her to feel ashamed.”

But at that point, we had no choice but to stroll on. When the boy spotted Josie, he only ran to his dad’s legs and waited there, watching quietly as we passed. I was relieved until Josie stopped and announced,“I want to take his picture.”

I stood a few paces ahead, hoping my lead would urge her along. But she turned her back on me, lifted an imaginary camera to her eyes, trained it on the boy and his dad, then cocked her bare hips to the right and leaned left around an imaginary corner to get the shot.

“There,” she said, smiling, tucking the camera back into her pocket.

Soon, the winding roadway opened into the village square. Josie broke into a run, legs like shiitake stems beneath her puffy parka. Dan and I felt the same exhilaration: Open space, sun breaking through the clouds after a windshield-wiper day, a splashing fountain, and a charming cobbled square nearly all to ourselves. We were hungry, too, and glad to be just a few strides from the restaurant.

We stopped at the fountain, still imploring Josie to put on her pants. She refused, swiping her fingers through the cold water as it ran down black stone.

Finally, we invoked an age-old rule: no pants, no service. Dan and I entered the tiny restaurant and sat in the window just next to the door, telling Josie she could come inside as soon as her pants were on.

Through the window, we watched as our daughter sat with her back against the entrance, wrestling her shoes off, pulling on the pants, and finally pushing open the heavy door to hop up beside us and eat those famous Belgian fries.

I was surprised by how nervous I felt on Josie’s behalf as we walked through town with her bright little legs flashing. There was nothing to worry about, really. It wasn’t exactly no-pants weather, but she wasn’t going to get hurt. At least, not physically. She’s reaching the age when she notices other people’s meanness, and therefore risks getting her feelings hurt. Sometimes, I fear that the day I see her dignity crumpled, all of my own hope will die.

I listen closely to Josie as she talks about her schoolmates.

“A boy kept trying to trick me,” she said one day this week as we pedaled home. (She uses “trick” to mean “tease.”)

“I told him, ‘That’s not a fun game!’” she continued, “and he said ‘It is a fun game!’ and I said ‘isn’t’ and he said ‘is.’ Isn’t-is-isn’t-is-isn’t-is!”

“And so you had an argument,” I said.

“Yeah, and when he do that to me, that make my heart go out!” She demonstrated by taking a closed fist to her chest, then thrusting her arm outward. “My heart just go away!”

I tried not to cry as we pedaled through the park, which was bursting with flowers and sprinting dogs and high spirits. How did my daughter, still only two years old, know how to describe hurt feelings so viscerally?

I felt myself simultaneously crestfallen about life’s meanness and also resigned to it. Insults happen, after all. No one can, or should, prepare for humiliation.

Josie has so much self-confidence, I silently reassured myself. I just had no idea she would need it so young.

I've been missing that hidden-from-scrutiny feeling of young childhood. My book is coming out. My copies arrived, orders are shipping, and I’m preparing for reviews. I’ve given a few interviews and have more coming up. I just launched my author web site, with precious pictures of my family. Soon, readers will start to post their opinions of Carrier—my own true, personal story—on Amazon and anywhere, for all the world to read. And they won’t all be nice. Life just doesn’t work that way. As much as I want Carrier to be read by a large audience, I'd be lying if I said I haven't worried about exposure. It’s one of those times for bad dreams about showing up naked in public. I wish, in those dreams, that I could skip along unruffled, the way Josie did in Veurne.

I thought about these things as we pedaled through the park in silence for a while. Birds chirped, kids played, accordion music floated past.

“Oh!” Josie suddenly exclaimed, grabbing at the air then clutching her chest. “My heart! It came back!”

May it always.

Postcard from Egypt: Delicate Monster

2010-04-01T17:15:00.014+02:00

My friend Colleen, an amazing writer and intrepid solo traveler, is currently living in Cairo for a month as she researches a chapter for a book she’s writing about Americans living abroad. On our first night in Cairo three weeks ago, Dan and I met Colleen for dinner at a nice restaurant in Zamalek. On the menu, among other specialties, was stuffed pigeon—an Egyptian national dish.

“No thanks,” I grinned, turning to less daunting delicacies. I barely even eat fish, and even milk and mushrooms can weird me out.

Since our return to Amsterdam, I’ve been watching Colleen’s photo-a-day blog from Egypt, snippets of her intense experiences there. A few entries ago, this quote from an American she interviewed caught me by the throat and hasn’t let go:

“'i always define people by whether or not they like cairo,’ an expat named patrick told me. 'maybe it’s the romance in a person’s soul,' he went on. 'you have to see beyond the dirt.'”

As you might have guessed from my last post, I have been struggling with the fact that I did not have an unbelievably good time on our trip to Cairo and Luxor. In fact, by the middle of the second day, I began longing for our flight home. And despite my hopes, I did not return home deeply changed, or particularly inspired, or especially high on life.

It wasn’t the dirt. I have seen dirt. In some Asian cities (and heck, European and American ones too), I have strode through garbage and sewage and swill, with my heart still bobbing like a bright pink balloon.

I suppose it could have been the air. The sky over Cairo was an ominous color—the blue-brown of a scary Midwest thunderstorm, except edgeless—it covered the sky completely, with no fluffy cumulus crown or clear skies to the west. In our photos of the pyramids, the sky looks like rain—but it was only pollution. As we rode with a guide alongside the Nile one day, Dan commented that there didn’t seem to be much in the way of Egyptian wildlife. Perhaps so, although we didn’t have time to visit the Red Sea coast to investigate further. What I did see, though, was a lack of birds, especially in the city. Surely they had fled, like Dr. Seuss’ Swomee-Swans from the Onceler’s smogged-up skies. Where, especially, were the pigeons, normally omnipresent in a city of easy pickings? The few pigeons we did see were sick: missing eyes, crippled feet. Feathers blackened and greasy.

Before we arrived in Cairo, I was finishing a cold. I had a small cough that was almost gone. But with my first breaths of Cairo’s air—cigarette smoke, dust, exhaust, miscellaneous toxins—my cough roared back, worse than before. Each day, walking through gray-cloud traffic, padding along dusty sidewalks, boxed in smoky train cars, I coughed harder and more uncontrollably, feeling a rasping raw place in my lungs that I feared would bleed. I coughed until taxi drivers shrunk away from me. I coughed until our guide made me promise it wasn’t swine flu. I coughed until I vomited. The scarves I wore around my neck for modesty’s sake soon became masks I would use to filter the air, even under the bedcovers at night. I used them as handkerchiefs to muffle a cough too convulsive to block with hands alone. My abdominal muscles ached and my ribs burned. In our pictures, my eyes are red from the strain.

The Cairo smog made me happy only for the damage it couldn’t do: We had left Josie in Amsterdam with her grandparents. I was not pregnant, so I was the only one in my body absorbing the city’s venom. And even if I were thinking of becoming pregnant, I commented to Dan, I would wait a month or two for my body to detoxify.

Do I have an unromantic soul? Do I lack zest? Passion? Curiosity? Is my gaze unforgiving? I’ve been putting these questions to myself ever since I read Patrick’s quote on Colleen’s blog. One thing I have realized is that for some travelers, or even expats living abroad, it is possible to “see the sights” without fretting about the other aspects of place: culture, people, environment, language, history as it manifests in the contemporary: why certain things are stocked on grocery store shelves, what to say when answering the telephone, and how (or whether) garbage is collected. I have long since lost the ability to go sight-seeing without getting lost in the sensory overload of human faces and local fashions and radio stations and body movements and roasting smells and family shapes and foreign languages and unsavory winds. I feel dishonest if I try to peer over the crowds instead of through them.

The one thing I know, in a place as new and different as Cairo, is that I know nothing. And I obsess, trying to learn as fast and as much as I can. I am frustrated, almost defeated, by the fact that there isn’t time to quench my curiosity as better questions overtake the small answers I find. I know I must look beyond dirt. The difficult part is understanding what I see there.

I wanted to like Cairo. I wanted to love Cairo, the way I cherished the first places I ever traveled abroad, the way I swooned for Egypt when I studied it in elementary school and later in college. I wanted to be able to talk like Colleen’s friend Patrick might: Cairo, oh! I hardly know where to begin! The bread and bodies, the perfume, the colors, the current. It was terrible and overwhelming and powerful and seductive and I can’t wait to go back.

Alas, no.

Yet there I was on the last night of our trip with dark circles under my eyes, aching muscles, and ragged lungs at a fast-food restaurant called Farahat. Dan and I renamed it KFP—the P for pigeon instead of chicken.

Something about our short trip had changed me after all. I spread my napkin hungrily, knife in one hand and fork in the other. Dan ordered his bird stuffed, and I wanted mine grilled. I ate first with my fork and knife, then with my fingers and teeth, stripping the tiny bones, cracking capellini-thin ribs as I chewed.

I knew the birds we ate were farmed: once-pretty creatures with white or pink or copper feathers and bright eyes. They had not, of course, been plucked from the city streets. But some part of me pretended they were the same vile, dogged creatures we had seen limping along the sidewalks. Something in me had shifted—as if I had been standing in hot desert sand and, instead of turning to an oasis, decided to head for the sun. Come here, you delicate monster. Let me devour you back.

Postcard from Egypt: Getting There

2010-03-23T11:55:00.008+01:00

Picture me, if you will, in the orange-carpeted sixth-grade foyer at Norman Rockwell Elementary. I am seated at an Apple II E computer, hunting and pecking my way through my country report. I had chosen Egypt, and, knowing I couldn’t cover the whole country in a few pages, I narrowed it down to a single area: THE MUMMIES OF EGYPT. I had read everything in the library’s encyclopedias on this topic, and now summed up the mummification process for my own readers. I still remember the part that interested me the most: the removal of the organs, their individual preservation and storage in canopic jars. And of all the organs, nothing interested me more than the mummy’s brain, which was removed through the nostril using a bent tool like a crochet hook.

It was almost too awesome for words, so I illustrated my Egypt report using fine colored pencils.

Mummies, for me, were never zombies returning from the dead, moaning as they lurched down the street trailing strips of linen. They were just very, very, very old human bodies, ritually preserved in a way no modern scientist has been able to replicate. Their ancientness gripped me, and their grossness was just the icing on the cake.

With the spiritual yearning some reserve for church retreats, I wanted to travel to Egypt. There among the pyramids angled like the sun’s rays, I would find a holiday home for my heart, which sometimes felt to me as ancient and sealed as a pharoah’s tomb.

In junior high, I discovered a spiritual bookstore in town where, one summer day before classes resumed, I found a necklace of tiny ceramic beads. None was larger than a grain of couscous, and each had a slightly different shade of sand. The beads smelled of primordial perfume, musky and full. I asked the shopkeeper about them, and she explained that the beads hailed from antiquity and had come from inside a real Egyptian tomb. When I tried them on, I felt what my family called the Holy Spirit pressing inside my throat, telling me that the beads were powerful. And reminding me that when the beads came out of the fire, the Holy Spirit hadn’t even been invented yet.

I bought the necklace for twelve dollars, and I wore it frequently to school. Perhaps like the crucifixes around my friends’ necks, the beads gave me a feeling of protection: the reminder that there was something greater, wiser, more mysterious, and even more terrifying than the shrill adolescent hive of Redmond Junior High.

If you had told me then that you were whisking me to Egypt for five days and two dozen mummies and three great pyramids and six ancient tombs and several sky-high temples, plus a Sphinx and a camel ride and a felucca sail on the Nile, it is possible I might have gotten myself to the airport in a single held breath.

But something odd happened to me last week when it was time to leave for Cairo. After Dan and I said goodbye to Josie and her grandparents, I boarded our flight with the strange feeling I had missed my spiritual window for visiting Egypt. Twenty years after my sixth-grade report, I secretly I feared that too much knowledge in my head had replaced the wonder in my young heart.

On the plane, Dan was giddy. “Bonnie,” he nudged me, “we are going to see the pyramids.”

“Have you always wanted to see them?” I asked.

He stopped to think. “Yeah,” he finally said. “But I’ve always assumed I never would.”

That surprised me. I always felt sure I would see the pyramids. It was my earliest travel wish, and my life had opened into travel opportunities galore. Of course I would go to Egypt.

But my antique necklace with its earthy scent had long since broken and scattered. I knew my camel ride at the pyramids would be for a token photo. I had heard of the Pizza Hut and honking traffic a few hundred feet from the Sphinx’s broken nose. I feared sickness from the pollution I would breathe. I knew there were almost no vestiges of ancient Egyptian traditions in the culture of modern Muslim Egypt. I would see the very poor sleeping on the streets and the very rich whisking through the doors of fancy hotels. I would spend far more time thinking about a barefoot three-year-old girl in the filth of Cairo than I would spend thinking about the boy king Tut. I knew I would feel frustrated: while cheap geegaws from China would hang brightly displayed for me, almost everything important would be hidden from my understanding.

As we flew over Europe toward Africa, I admitted to myself that my childhood fantasies had been overwritten by real-world expectations. I began to wonder if I would be able to find inspiration in Egypt.

In the photo is me, searching.

Postcard from Austria: White Noise

2010-03-11T12:13:00.006+01:00

When I look at this photo, the room around me falls quiet. I hear the hum of the gondola cables above, the swish of ski pants as Josie shifts in my lap, the skitter of flakes against the window as we ride to the top of Alpbach to take in the view before our last ski down. As beginners, we made ski-scrapes and pole-clacks and oofs into the soundtrack of our descent. But they were tiny noises, instantly absorbed by the mountain air.

It was a quiet trip to the Tyrolean Alps. There was the tinkle of bells as Moritz the draft horse pulled the five of us—Dan and me and Josie, along with Dan’s parents—up a mountainside to a dark-beamed 400-year-old farmhouse for dinner. Josie and I did clank the cowbells displayed in the hall. And kids did shriek, a menagerie of under-threes galloping around the dining room. But with a snowfall outside, cows softly shuffling beneath the floor, and a forestful of the dead—foxes, badgers, birds—preserved along the walls, silence was stronger.

There was the squeak and splash of our bodies in the waterslide at the pool as flakes cascaded just beyond the windows. The bleep of the checkout as we bought groceries. The thumps as Josie opened and closed the series of doors that made each bedroom in our apartment a silent sanctuary.

Sure, we had the smelly rumble of the ski bus, the spinning of trapped car tires on the white streets, and hoots from sledding teens at night.

But in the tiny village of Alpbach, we walked home from our dinners with a little girl safely shepherding her “baby” and her “sister” and her “girl” home through the streets, all the while licking a snowball and singing softly. Constellations blazed from a black sky that looked nothing like the tent-roof over the city. Instead, the blackness of heaven was clear and empty, far outdistancing the stars.

Everything around us—the mountains, the sky, the river valleys—was enormous and indomitable and quiet. Impossibly different from the city of hurrying bicyclists and sharp-elbowed shoppers and accelerating taxis and squabbling gulls and whining trash trucks and messy street sweepers and speedy deliveries where I sit now, only briefly, before racing off to my own chores of the day. There will be the snaps of toiletry lids, the snick of my quart-size zip-lock closing, the shuffles and zips of packing. Dan and I depart tonight for Cairo, with more seat-belt clicks and jet-engine roars and bongs of safety lights. I hardly know what to expect in Egypt, but I feel certain that music and traffic and Arabic, plus whispers of the mystic and the cryptic and the cosmic, will add to the sweet discord of this: our good life. Soundless mountain air will seem like life on another star.

Postcard from Amsterdam: What You Don't See

2010-03-04T22:55:00.001+01:00

After I snapped this scene from our window last week, I realized that most of it is invisible.

Right in front of Dan and Josie, who are tossing stale bread crusts to the canal birds on a frigid morning, there’s a canoe floating low against the canal wall, full of a winter’s worth of slime-green water and garbage. It’s our landlord’s placeholder for her grachtenboot, which she took out of the water for the winter and will soon bring back. Also in front of Dan and Josie, at the bottom of the Prinsengracht, are bikes (plus furniture, Christmas trees, cracked up dinghies, and other city detritus). Once a month or so, we watch a barge with a grappling hook come by and scoop clawfuls of blackened cycle frames from the murk.

Straight across is Bloom, a pretty little shop where Josie sweetly, carefully touched a display doll soon after we moved here, receiving her first of many undeserved scoldings from shopkeepers here.

There’s also the Proeverij, where each table is lit at night with a tall taper. The candle glow seems to reach our living room each evening, filling us with a sense of warmth and connection.

The houseboat on the left is owned by a thin, pale woman with black hair. Sometimes in the evening, I’ll watch her clean her dinner dishes, brush her teeth at the kitchen sink, and go out. Last summer, as I wrote the final chapters of my book at our table in the front windows, I would look up from my typing to see her scrubbing the deck or polishing the black bumpers or fluffing the pillows on the outdoor love seat after a heavy rain. She never worked for very long. Max 15 minutes at a time. Then she would stand up, stretch, and reappear with coffee to sit in the sun.

You can clearly see the houseboat next to hers, dark and ruddy like coal and clay. Once a month or so, this quiet, dark hideaway becomes the source of blaring classical music. It always feels like a reminder shouted from the man who lives inside, I am still here! One evening last summer, I sat in my usual place with the French windows thrown open, a glass of wine in hand. I happened to see the man crawl through his bathroom window to lie on his back in the little dinghy you can see in the picture. He rested there, staring up at the sky, as the sunset faded through pink to purple to electric blue. The stars came out. Then he crawled back inside, skinny in his jeans and alone.

In the alley across from Josie and Dan is a primary school, where a river of boxbikes and parents hand-in-hand with their kids flows each morning at 8. Not knowing how long we’ll live here, I wonder if this might be Josie’s school one day.

The white moped in the foreground is hypersensitive. If the hem of your coat even creates a breeze as you gather up your things, its alarm wails. It might be only 30 seconds, but it feels like 90 as you stand there with your mittens pressed over your daughter’s ears.

You can’t see the swan paddling near. Or my daughter’s terrific arm. Or my husband’s perfect aim as he lands a crust on the small of the swan’s back, beneath the canopy of its lofted wings. (The neck twisted, snaked beneath the wings, and the crust disappeared.) You can’t see the pack of Kleenex in Josie’s pocket, which she has learned to use instead of her sleeve. Invisible is the wire coat hanger consistently missed by the trash pickup, on the ground behind the rear wheel of the boxbike. Inside the boxbike, under the cover, is a green towel frozen stiff, which swabs the seat and handlebars many times a week. I’m glad you can’t see the collection of crumbs—raisins, rice-cake flakes—which accumulate in the bottom of the box as Josie snacks her way home from school.

You can’t see me, standing in the window as I do each morning when Dan pedals off with Josie toward school. Me in my glasses and pajamas and a stuffed Elmo clutched to my chest, our waving done, watching as the substance of my life spins out of sight.

Birds of Amsterdam: Rose-Ringed Parakeets

2010-02-26T10:32:00.010+01:00

There’s a photo of the three of us poking our heads from the window of our canal house, smiling down toward the street. My mom framed it at Christmas, alongside other pictures to remind us of our past homes: college in Walla Walla, the bungalow in Iowa City, Josie’s babyhood home in Minneapolis.

As I admired the collage, I noticed that she hadn’t included pictures of my childhood home or Dan’s—the houses where our parents still live. I wondered why. Maybe she was trying to assuage my periodic homesickness, reminding me that home is where I came from, but also where I find myself.

Yesterday, pedaling home with Josie, I stopped to snap some photos of the parakeets in the Vondelpark. I’ve been noticing them more than usual. I’m not the first foreigner to identify with the bright green birds, so exotic, so glaringly out of place. On a recently installed statue near city hall, the sculptor included reliefs of rose-ringed parakeets on Spinoza's robes, a nod to the immigrant city of the 1600s where the philosopher advocated tolerance and freedom of expression.

With the camera blocking my face as I aimed up into the trees, I heard Josie say to a passerby, “That’s a cute dog!” A middle-aged Dutch woman with bright eyes and stylish hair and a few brown teeth stopped with her fluffy white terrier.

What did you say? she asked in Dutch, soon switching to English.

I asked her how to say “What a cute dog” in Dutch. After a short lesson (her translation was simply, “great dog!”), we continued chatting. She explained that the parakeets had only lived in Amsterdam for a decade or two, possibly due to a mating pair released from captivity.

“The people who freed them thought they never would survive the winter.”

But rose-ringed parakeets hail from the foothills of the Himalayas, and although our friend said she comes across a few green birds frozen to death each winter, the population can handle cool weather.

I asked if most Amsterdammers thought the non-native birds were a problem.

“Some people think it’s annoying,” she said. “They’re noisy. They’re bigger than the native birds and scare some of the little ones away. But they are also kind of nice. Those beautiful colors.”

Above us, a flock flapped and squawked, spreading their green-blue pinions like fingers against the sky.

“Still, they don’t really belong here, do they?” I asked. “Like us.”

Her eyes widened. “But I think it is just the same with animals and with people. Either they adapt, or they stay homesick forever and always want to leave.”

I feel both ways at once. At two or three years, our time in Holland is temporary. But failing to adapt to life here would seem a terrible mistake, a priceless opportunity lost.

“Look!” the woman said. “There’s one, on the tree! I’ve never seen this!” As we stared, the bird turned her bright green face side to side, making sure the coast was clear, then, through a hole no larger than a billiard ball, she stuffed herself completely inside the tree trunk. Her longest tailfeather, thin as a pencil and silhouetted against a white winter sky, was the last thing to disappear.

I walked toward the tree, my camera trained on the hole, ready to snap her photo as she came back out.

But she did not come out.

And she did not come out.

Josie asked to be unbuckled from the boxbike. She found two sticks and a rock to play with. I rested my arms, tired from propping the camera.

People pedaled by. Some walked. A few tourists. Many dog walkers. When another small hond passed, prompting a yap-fest with the white terrier, our friend explained that her dog was in heat and she had to get going. We waved.

Josie practiced safe street-crossing, waiting until the bike path was clear to come running to me, then crossing back to the woodsy dirt trail where the boxbike stood.

More minutes passed. Our cold toes went numb inside our boots, and our fingers began to feel stiff. We wondered if we had missed the bird’s exit. Holding hands, we walked to the base of the tree and listened very carefully. Through the cackles of crows and magpies, over the shrieks of swooping parakeets, barely above the scramble of playing dogs, we heard tiny dirt thuds, little chip-chips, as the mama bird prepared her nest. Now and then, a few crumbs of dirt and wood tumbled from the opening of the cavity.

“She’s making room in there,” I said to Josie.

“Why?”

“For her eggs. She’s going to lay some little eggs in there, and then they’ll hatch into baby birds.”

“Why?”

“That’s what happens in springtime.”

“Why?”

“Josie, look!”

A little green face peeped out.

Josie stared. I fired the camera.

The parakeet twisted her head every possible way, sizing us up with each eye. She wasn’t, I was certain, worrying about how she had come to reside in the Vondelpark, or where to build her nest next year. She simply watched us, eye to eye, curious and unafraid.

Postcard from Minneapolis: Patina

2010-02-19T11:38:00.010+01:00

This morning I saw the news: A raging fire devoured a row of shops and restaurants in our old neighborhood in Minneapolis yesterday. One of the shops was Patina, a purveyor of glittering wonders and clever trinkets and handmade delights—toys and kitchen gadgets and clever books and handbags and decor and every unnecessary little whimsical thing I seem to desire.

For five years, I knew Patina only through its windows.

When we moved to Minneapolis from Iowa City in 2005, I was in the middle of writing my memoir, Carrier. As I got to know my neighborhood, I swooned for the spunky restaurants and sweet boutiques, luscious fresh food markets and a dream selection of coffee shops. Patina was one of the last, beautiful stores I laid eyes on. But before I stepped inside, I made myself a challenge.

You will not enter this shop until you have a book deal, signed and sealed. Once you have a publisher for Carrier, then you get to go inside and have a $100 shopping spree.

I stuck to it. For four years. And then we moved away. I left the Twin Cities without ever browsing Patina. I never even let myself look at their website.

Only two months after we moved to Amsterdam, the news came: Counterpoint would publish Carrier in spring 2010. The next weekend, in Ireland, I bought myself a celebratory sweater. (In a pinch, Merino will do.)

But then, last month, I swooped into Minneapolis for a day on my return to Amsterdam after the holidays. I stayed with Kelly, a mama Josie and I used to see as often as the sun. She had a surprise for me. She drove me through a frigid snowfall, first to my favorite bakery, Butter, and then on toward 50^th & Bryant.

“You never had a chance to go to Patina, did you?” she asked, smiling.

Before we went inside, she snapped my photo in front of the store. I did it, I remembered to think as I smiled. Inside, I found some earrings for myself. Some toys for Josie, some gifts for friends, a shiny red kitchen timer, a magnifying glass just because. Little things. What really mattered, of course, was being there with my friend. There she was, toting a feverish baby, trying to shield me from her rush to return to the toddler and babysitter at home, suggesting possible adorable things for my shopping basket. Shuttling me around the city, she had put her life's momentum on pause for me. Me, the gal who now only flashes into town and glimmers just as quickly away.

This morning, reading news of the fire on the Star Tribune, I saw the same corner of the store where Kelly took my picture. Above Patina's pretty lettering roared a crown of orange flames. I read of bright little trinkets washing down the gutters in a river of fire-hose foam.

Next week, my book will go to the printers. Late next month, the printers will start shipping copies to bookstores everywhere. In April, people who have ordered the book will start to receive their copies. By May, it will be widely available, and I will be back in Minneapolis with Dan and Josie to celebrate Carrier’s release before heading to other parts of the country on my book tour.

Patina will be gone from our neighborhood (though perhaps on its way back). For a few days, we’ll reenter the circle of our dear Minnesota friends—purveyors of glittering wonders and clever delights and every necessary little whimsical thing I seem to desire.

Postcard from Portugal: Swallows

2010-02-12T16:12:00.004+01:00

On our last morning in Lisbon, we stumbled across a beautiful shop called A Vida Portuguesa. I was waiting for a pair of glasses to be made for me at a nearby shop, so everything was blurry. While Dan and Josie investigated a toy display, I stumbled around like a mole, trying to read about these cultural products through my lack of Portuguese and the fog of poor vision. I could tell I was somewhere special—dark, oiled wood floors, rich music, handmade colorful items adorning the shelves. We had only a short time before we needed to pick up my glasses and bolt to the airport. I moved through the shop in a happy daze, whisking a few things into my shopping basket. A crock of sea salt. A tiny bottle of port. Wall stickers: simple black swallows, 14 to a flock.

Everywhere in the store perched ceramic swallows—a Portuguese folk symbol for the coming of spring, the homing of family, the dawn of a good day.

Despite their thousand-mile migrations, swallows return, year after year, to nest at home, in the place where they were born. Swallows are monogamous. Male swallows do more to help raise their babies than do males of any other perching species. Swallow chicks hatch naked, with only a few tufts of down and both parents nearby.

When I was unable to hold Josie just after her birth, her father did so. She lay sleeping and warm in his arms as he revealed to me her tufts of spare hair, soon to disappear. Even without my glasses, I could see dark fuzz on the tops of her ears, a soft shadow down her spine. We flocked together.

I’m hanging our swallows today, on the wall at the top of the bedroom stairs. This weekend for Valentine's Day, Dan and I will pour out the tiny bottle of port, a swallow apiece and plenty.

Postcard from Portugal: What He Forgot

2010-02-05T12:38:00.004+01:00

On our flight to Lisbon, I forgot to give Josie her usual motion-sickness remedy, a little tablet that dissolves under her tongue. During the flight, I forgot that it’s best not to offer too many stomach-sloshers, like juice. After we landed, I forgot that she might be queasy and plied her with a mango smoothie. I forgot that soft green melon can make an otherwise fine person feel urpy. In the taxi to the apartment we rented for the weekend, I forgot to keep Josie sitting up in my lap, eyes up and forward. I forgot to crack my window. I forgot what it means when she sits quietly in the back seat, keeping to herself, trying to soothe herself by rolling the skin of her neck between two fingers. I forgot that this would not be the time to offer another bite of melon.

Everything came to me then. Literally. Also it went down Josie’s brown sweater with a bow, which she had been so proud to wear. (“Isn’t it pretty?” she’d asked her dad when the three of us met at the airport.)

“My sweater,” she wept. And gagged again.

“Do you want me to stop?” asked the driver.

“Yes, please,” I said, scrambling for the cup-shaped lid from the plastic melon container, flipping it to catch the contents of another heave.

We pulled to the side of a busy intersection. I had forgotten to keep our kid-stuff bag in the cab with us. So the wipes and the clean clothes and the comfort of water and rice cakes were all buried in the trunk.

“It’s ok, it’s ok,” the driver insisted as I apologized about his car. “I have kids. I have two. Age three and four.” As I stripped my daughter in the back seat he laughed, and momentarily blocked my vision with a picture glowing from his iPhone: his kids in matador outfits. “They’re devils,” he said.

Once everything was tidied up, we settled in for the rest of our ride. I forgot that there was an uncovered container of soft green melon in my new purse until the pieces and their juice were spread among my things.

In bed that night, I forgot to help Josie sleep on an incline. “I’m gonna be sick again,” she wailed, though the idea of throwing up into a toilet was such an affront that she kept her rice cakes down. Like an amnesic, I had given her yet more smoothie to drink, and there was a sour soup bothering her belly until late, late into the night.

In the morning, the sunlight was bright, there was a hint of cold in the wind, and I had to tell Josie I had forgotten to pack her baseball cap.

“Next time you’ll remember to bring it,” she reassured me. And continued to remind me throughout the weekend of my omission.

In Lisbon, we rode Tram 28 up the hill toward the Castela de Sao Jorge. In the little garden at the church of Santa Luzia, I forgot that Josie had asked me to stop taking her picture. I got a shot of her stamping her foot.

I had forgotten that the Portuguese, like the Italians and the Greeks, dine late. Past-Josie’s-bedtime late. I didn’t realize that when I promised Josie she would hear beautiful fado music in Lisbon, there would be no such opportunity. Hard to believe I could forget that romance happens late, after little kids are asleep.

As the weekend went on, although I remembered to play “what’s that shape?” with every bite of rice cake, and to feed and clothe and read to my child, and to get a few snapshots with all three of us, and how delicious tastes dark-chocolate gelato, I would go on to forget to take our toddler to the potty as we traveled home. Last pit stop: apartment in Lisbon. Accident: Right at touchdown, seat 18E, dark blue circle on the fabric.

“It stings,” she said. I could remember that feeling from a long time ago.

The day before, we had taken a day trip from Lisbon to Sintra, to see the Moorish Castle and the Palace of Pena. At the Palace, Josie and I looked up at the massive sculpture of Triton staring creepily down.

“What he forgot?” she asked me.

“What, Josie?”

“What he forgot?”

“What did he forget?”

“Yeah, what he forgot, Mommy?”

Finally I caught on. “Pants?”

“That’s RIGHT! He forgot PANTS! Aaaand underpants. Aaaand a shirt. Aaaand an undershirt.”

This coming from the three-foot-tall person who that morning insisted that all she needed to wear for a day of sightseeing was a fuzzy pink monkey backpack, strapped on like a g-string. (Try it yourself. Be creative. You’ll see.)

I wondered if Josie could see that Triton had fins instead of feet.

“Josie, did he forget shoes and socks, too?”

“YES!”

“But look! He doesn’t have feet! He has fins like a fish!”

“I love fish,” she said. “Big ones and small ones as well.”

(As well? A credit to her British schoolteachers.)

“But Josie, isn’t that funny how he’s part man and part fish? He doesn’t even need shoes and socks because he doesn’t have feet.”

“Girls have feet,” she said.

“Yes, humans have feet. Men and women have feet, and children have feet.”

“And princesses have feet,” she said.

“Yes, princesses definitely have feet,” I said, wondering where she heard about princesses.

As we marched down the hill, I kept thinking about Triton. Son of Poseidon, his mother’s herald, going around all sea-colored and barnacle-encrusted as he carried a mighty trident and controlled the swells and blasted a conch so scary it sent giants scurrying. He rescued the Argonauts and ruled Libya for awhile and fathered Pallas and maybe Scylla and adopted Athena too.

No slouch, right? But he totally forgot his pants.

Nobody’s perfect I guess.

Postcard from Amsterdam: Time Change

2010-01-27T11:57:00.007+01:00

One year ago today, I lived in Minnesota, where my world was covered in a cold crust of white. Where my bread steamed as I carried it out of the bakery, pushing the stroller over the ice-chunk sidewalk. Where black-capped chickadees and scarlet cardinals and the year’s first robins convened in our plum tree, bickering over the past summer’s shreds of dried fruit. I watched them hopping through the leafless branches, signs of life against a black-and-white landscape, as I talked to my sister on the phone across only two time zones.

One year ago today, I kissed my 20-month-old and, leaving her with her grandparents, flew with Dan to Amsterdam. It would be the first of two visits to the foreign city that would become our home. I had been to Amsterdam once before, briefly as we passed through. Now it was time to get the lay of the land, a real whiff of life here. As we flew, I tried not to look at my watch, not to do the math, not to calculate the exact time at home. I needed to keep my anchor up.

It’s such a different exercise to go through a foreign city outside of the regular tourist mindset, I wrote in my journal. Instead, I am thinking about where I would like to buy groceries, or what sorts of shops or parks I'd like to have in the neighborhood. Where do I find moms with strollers? What kind of kid-carrier should I have on my bike? And especially, What will Josie think of life here?

In the darkness of early morning as the taxi drove us through the quiet city, I quickly realized that Amsterdam exists on a child-friendly scale. The shop windows and the apartment windows along the sidewalks reached nearly to the ground. Even a toddler could window-shop and kitchen-peek along with her parents.

I also realized, with a sense of comfort, that the narrow brick houses and classic stone stoops might convince Josie that she had moved to one of her favorite places in the world: Sesame Street.

Dan had to report to his new office for work, so I had the rare experience of being alone in a new city with time on my hands. (Actual house-hunting would wait until our next visit a few weeks later.) I made my way to the Van Gogh museum, where a single painting stuck in my mind: Crab on Its Back. It struck me because unlike Van Gogh’s other renderings of inanimate things such as flowers or a pair of leather clogs, this was not just a still life. It was a life, stilled.

In the year since I first saw Amsterdam through expatriate eyes, I have adjusted to a nine-hour time difference for my daily phone call with my sister. I stand in the window and watch seagulls and coots and swans puffing their feathers to keep warm on the wintry canal.

I have found my groceries. And my bank and our doctor and Josie’s park and even the children’s theater. I have found other moms with strollers. I have learned to shimmy our boxbike through the hairsbreadth between steel amsterdammertjes and delivery trucks. My bread is never quite like the dense honey loaves I miss, but we’ve found the best appeltaart on earth, and I can order eight slices of bacon from the butcher all in Dutch. Josie still watches Sesame Street, but does not confuse it with her new city, about which she offered recently as we pedaled over a bridge: “Amsterdam is so beautiful. Isn’t it fun here?” And later when we got our groceries up the stairs, “Whew! I’m so glad to be home with you.”

In the year since I kissed Josie and flew across the ocean to start searching for home, my grandmother has died. I missed her funeral. Last month, I returned to Rocky Bay on the Puget Sound to discover how her home feels without her. (I heard her laughing from the kitchen.) On the beach, I showed Josie how to look for clams and turn over rocks to find baby crabs.

Nine time zones away this week, Josie and I took a nature walk in the Vondel Park, turning over rocks and digging around tree roots, both of us surprised to find seashells everywhere in the soil.

“Now how did those get there?” I asked Josie.

“I don’t really know,” she said. “Maybe somebody threw ’em there.”

“Maybe!”

Later we checked our theory with Dan.

“Or, remember,” he said, “Wasn’t this whole place under the sea a long time ago?”

Surely he’s right. It’s hard to picture, but we keep trying.

Postcard from a Passenger: Bon Voyage

2010-01-19T12:17:00.011+01:00

Earlier this month, I overheard a conversation as I wrangled my backpack from the overhead bin just after my flight from San Francisco landed in Minneapolis. I had been visiting friends in the Bay Area, and I was headed back to Amsterdam to join up with my family.

The two suits from seats 1A and 1B, one near-retired and the other much younger, began chatting about their business travels.

“I’m on my way to Cape Town,” the younger man said. “I’m always going from San Fran to Minneapolis to Amsterdam to Cape Town and back.” He sighed.

The older man nodded. “I used to travel all the time. West Coast to Europe. West Coast to Asia. I went everywhere.”

The young man shrugged into his overcoat, shaking his head. The older man continued: “People always think it’s glamorous. But it’s a pain in the butt.”

As for me, the non-rev, I had spent my own first-class flight—one of the last Northwest-operated flights I would ever fly—sitting next to a three-and-half-million-miler, the owner of a textile business in Minneapolis. More like the characters in the new movie “Up in the Air,” she seemed pleased with the miles she had racked up. But after listening to the men in the front row, I wondered if perhaps this CEO was proud of her elite status less like a celebrity with exclusive club access and more like a captain with hard-earned stripes.

“Do you know how many that is?” she had asked me.

I laughed. “When I was a kid, I thought one million was too high for a human to count out loud in a lifetime. I never even considered the possibility of flying a number like that.”

But after we disembarked the plane, the sentiment from the businessmen stuck with me. People think it’s glamorous. But it’s a pain in the butt.

There I was, a gabillion-miler of sorts myself, except that most of my miles had been “earned” free of charge and just for fun, thanks to Dan’s position as an airline employee. In the five years since Dan started with Northwest—which will officially and finally morph into Delta Air Lines this year—we have traversed the globe in World Business Class, eating lots of fancy little delicacies and watching quite a few free movies in the same super-recliners those businessmen are sick of. We’ve stepped into dozens of eye-popping new worlds. Though she won’t remember all of it, we have shown our young daughter the Grand Canyon, Maui sands, Lake Louise, the Bismarck Zoo, Adriatic shores, Irish paddocks, and countless other destinations. We’re planning a visit to Lisbon in less than two weeks—and we cooked up the idea just a couple of days ago. After that: France, Spain, and a long-awaited trip to Africa. And surely a few more surprises along the way, as our whims go.

It IS glamorous! I kept thinking as I walked toward baggage claim. It is so insanely, disgustingly, ridiculously glamorous!

I started thinking about the birdmen who, for centuries, tried to figure out how to fly. For thousands of years, people strapped wings, or cloaks, or paddles, or sails to their bodies and leaped from church towers or castle walls or la Tour Eiffel or high cliffs, all part of a desperate and deadly search for the secret of winged flight.

Then at last, a century ago, in little pockets around the world—especially France, Britain, and America—people knew they were close. Flight attempts reached a fever pitch, and on December 17, 1903, on the cold dunes of North Carolina, the Wright brothers clocked the first sustained, controlled, powered human flight.

In a blink, airlines launched. Northwest Airways opened for business in 1926, and would continue service for more than 80 years until its operations became part of Delta. In the 1920s, passengers wearing their Sunday best boarded Northwest’s “metalplane” under the gaze of a pilot uniformed in a sleek leather flying helmet and goggles, just for the glory of it, since the cockpit was totally enclosed. During the Depression, Santa flew Northwest from the North Pole to deliver toys to needy kids in the upper Midwest. In the 1950s, an organist entertained Stratocruiser passengers between Minneapolis and New York City. The airline wanted its “red tail” livery to mean glamour, and it seemed to do just that. At a Montana air show in 1955, five thousand people lined up for a chance to simply file through the fuselage of a Northwest airliner.

A pain in the butt?

Maybe, I thought, it's just another privilege of our place in human history to take air travel for granted—even to consider it a first-class hassle. I had to admit that if the two suits in First Class that day had family, friends, pets, a garden, a hobby, a home, even just a fast car, then the ease of air travel in a world economy only gave their employers license to keep them physically separate from their happiness. I reminded myself that most of my travels are by choice, and taken together with the ones I love. Nothing scares me more than flying separately from Dan and Josie, which I must do from time to time.

But then we land. And I come home.

Postcard from 2009: Reflection

2009-12-31T05:37:00.006+01:00

It was New Year’s Eve, 1996. I was eighteen years old, and Dan was 21. For the holidays, we were home in Seattle from college in Walla Walla. I had somehow arranged a New Year’s Eve party to take place in the Seattle fraternity house of a high school friend. I had spent the afternoon at my parents’ house pasting together a six-foot sandwich, then plastic-wrapping it onto a two-by-four for transport to the party. That night, for perhaps the only time aside from my wedding eight years later, my high school and college friends mingled. I was proud to show off my boyfriend to my Redmond buddies, and vice-versa. I was new to drinking, and kept cautiously sober. My girlfriends jumped into the swimming pool in their underwear. The sandwich disappeared, slice by slice. I danced with old friends and joshed with new ones, but mostly I stood near Dan, feeling the comfort I still receive from his presence. Near midnight, we all went up onto the roof for a countdown. Cheers, clinking bottles, a warm kiss. Then Dan said, “Let’s see, 1996. I met a pretty girl. We sat next to each other in astronomy class. Later we kissed. Then I took you to Port Townsend to meet my parents.” He went on. The things we said to one another in the snow. How he felt when he jogged across campus late at night, from my dorm to his house. The road trip we hoped to take to Eastern Oregon in January.

I listened, my own prattle silenced. This was my man of few words, giving me a picture-perfect reel of the first months of our relationship. Because I crave the way his perspective streamlines my own scattershot memories, each New Year’s Eve I still ask him: “Tell me what we did this year.” I try not to say too much and just to listen. There is something of a lullaby to his story—a sense that even on a warming planet of desert firefights and hungry bellies and terror attempts, it’s safe to sleep. Because there’s also chocolate and children’s choirs and cherry blossoms, and tomorrow will be a new day.

After this year’s countdown, I will ask him again. Perhaps, about 2009, he will remind me that we opened the year still uncertain whether we would be moving from Minnesota to Europe. We began yet another home remodel. We had a snowstorm. He taught Josie to throw, hard. I was hard at work on a proposal for a book about childbirth, which I was not, as it turned out, ready to write. We escaped the cold to visit our expectant friends in L.A. The details of our move became final: Amsterdam in April. We entered the intense logistics of moving abroad: What to pack? What to ship? What to store? What to ditch? What to do with the house? With the cars? With the cat? With the friendships left dangling? And how to explain it all to a two-year-old? We planned intricately. We worked very, very hard. We took a trip to Seattle to say extra farewells, and Josie played with her grandparents. We took our last walk to Lake Harriet, then flew to Holland and set up house. We bought bikes and learned a little Dutch. We saw a bit of the countryside. We drank wine at our table overlooking the Prinsengracht—a simple canal, designed to keep us safe from the sea, with no natural current and no clear direction. We visited Ireland, and Turkey, and Croatia and Germany. We came back “home” to Washington State: Redmond, Seattle, Port Townsend. There were weddings in Portland and Mexico. We enjoyed a steady stream of visitors. I worked on my book, Carrier, for a final dogged year. At work, Dan's job doubled in significance as Northwest joined Delta, bringing KLM and Air France into the same fold. Along a row of American expat homes in Amsterdam, we took Josie trick-or-treating in a monkey costume imported from Target. We celebrated our first Sinterklaas avond, then flew to Seattle once again.

Or, Dan will raise a dozen more important things I forgot.

I wonder what he’ll say when I ask him to tell me what he thinks we should do in 2010. Maybe he’ll talk about the events surrounding my book’s upcoming release. He’ll probably suggest that we take a family trip to Africa. I’d be surprised if he didn’t propose a camping excursion in the Alps.

For certain in 2010, as long as Amsterdam remains home, we will continue to indulge in our daily—okay, half-hourly—appreciative glances out the window at the quintessential Dutch city scene of brick and bikes and boats. Sometimes I’m tempted to describe the canal as “flowing past” our apartment, but the truth is that the water flows nowhere (except for weekly flushings, engineered for sanitation). Looking left or right—south or north—from our windows, it’s not possible to say whether I’m looking “up” or “down” the canal. And although a photo of the Prinsengracht shot from our apartment on a snowy morning makes a pretty illustration, the canal is actually an imperfect metaphor for a retrospective. It’s not really possible to glance upriver to remind yourself of the past, or downriver into the promise of the future. What you see is what you get: the reflection in front of you.

Each night when Dan takes Josie to bed, he reads her a story or two. She then surrenders, droopy-eyed, to a toothbrushing. Finally, she puts her head on the pillow as he turns out the light. Then, from a dark bedside, she pipes to her father, “Tell me what we did today.”

Though I strain to hear him reflect, his tones are too low. And though I try to catch his words as he suggests ideas for tomorrow, his whispers fade on the stairs. All I can do is sit with my tea feeling the nearness of my family as I watch the water below, trying to be still exactly where I am.

Postcard from Nuremberg, Germany: Beautiful Fountain

2009-12-16T16:02:00.007+01:00

The legendary fountain was a side note. When we went to the Christkindlemarkt in Nuremberg last weekend with our very good-natured German friends, “turn the wishing ring” was not on my list of things to do. Things to do included the following: Eat grilled sausages. Drink gluhwein. Catch up with Carolin and Holger. Listen to Christmas music. Show Josie all the pretty things. Feed her copious sweets.

Finding a current, we swept along with the masses through what may be the busiest Christmas market in Europe. Above us, on the edges of the hauptmarkt, towered the Frauenkirche, which had been rebuilt painstakingly, stone by original stone, after World War II. A choir sang of St. Nick, hope, and climate change. Snowflakes stuck to our knit hats and scarves. Warm mugs of mulled cider warmed our fingers. Josie licked the frosting off a gingerbread Santa.

Caught up in the crowd, we soon found ourselves facing the Schöne Brunnen, an ornate, 60-foot, 600-year-old golden spire rising from the ground. One after another, tourists popped from the crowd to reach an arm up the wrought iron fence at the base of the spire. Pulling off a mitten, they would take two fingers and grasp a brass ring intertwined in the fence. Most gave the ring three turns. Someone near me said something about the ring bringing good luck. With Josie in my arms, I went up to get my ration.

When we returned to Amsterdam, I was curious about the wishing ring. Had I turned it correctly? And what would my reward be?

I began reading legends, which seemed to lead only to other legends. The fountain itself had been built to top the Frauenkirche, but when the time came to move the steeple, decked with 40 masterfully-carved limestone figures, the townspeople demanded that it stay where they could admire it. It would be called a fountain. And the ring itself? One legend said that an ironwork apprentice, wishing to prove himself to his master, installed the apparently seamless ring overnight. Another legend said the apprentice crafted the ring as a symbol of his love for a nobleman’s daughter. Some legends said that turning the ring would bring luck. Others said you would have a wish granted. Then I read that turning the ring a full 360 degrees would bring a baby to a hopeful young wife. I gulped—later, perhaps, but not now!—then remembered with relief that I hadn’t rotated the ring a full 360 degrees. Still, I was glad I had placed my fingers on this ancient craftspiece…until I read it was actually just a brass ring installed a mere century ago, shiny and easy for tourists to see. The original ring, supposedly, was blackened and old, hiding elsewhere in the fence lattice. And speaking of original, this was not the original fountain. The crumbled artifacts of the original are now housed in a museum, I learned. The fountain had been rebuilt in 1912, and restored again after the damage of World War II.

One of the things I love about Europe is the rich history, the medieval, the ancient. I love seeing an original just-about-anything, perhaps for the implication that permanence is possible. But quite often, I find that even “originals” aren’t original in the sense that I hope. They have been shined up, brushed off, freshly painted, carefully epoxied, with most parts replaced.

A few days ago, our friend Jess was playing with Josie in the living room while I fixed coffee in the kitchen. I heard Josie ask, “What’s that?”

Jess called to me, “Should I tell her?”

“What is it?”

“The tattoo on my ankle,” she said.

“Sure,” I answered, laughing. “You can practice for whatever you want to tell your own kids someday.”

“This is Mommy’s mistake,” she jokingly rehearsed.

“But do you really feel that way?” I asked her as I filled our mugs.

“Well, the only thing is, sometimes I regret putting anything permanent on my body.”

That has always been my rationale for not getting a tattoo. (Also, the only thing I’ve ever come up with to truly represent me would be my name, and a “Bonnie” tattoo would be a little redundant.) But on the other hand, hearing Jess talk about putting something permanent on her body reminded me how very impermanent the body is. Recent science suggests that the average age of the body’s tissues is seven to ten years. That means that you and I are walking around in bodies much younger than our birth dates. Many of the body’s cells live even briefer lives. The surface of the skin is replaced every few weeks. Tastebuds, every ten days. White blood cells, overnight. Bone and brain cells seem to have the most longevity—perhaps decades—but they change over, too. So, even when the human body is not stretching itself into an adult form—the work Josie’s body does every day—the original is never exactly original. When I look at the very ends of my long hair, soon to be trimmed, I don’t have to go back very far to remember what I was doing when those hairs first sprouted: I was asking Dan to take my picture next to our Christmas tree as I stood sideways, showing the small bump of our baby girl growing in my belly.

Of course, this impermanence is why we save a lock of baby hair. This is why my mother has my baby teeth in her jewelry box. This is why the smell of my husband’s skin comforts me so: it is the same smell, familiar and soft, even if very little flesh remains from the day I met him.

Jess’s tattoo could be a little anchor of something original and permanent in a sea of constant change. I realized that maybe it doesn’t matter whether the brass ring in the Schöne Brunnen is one century old or six. Maybe it doesn’t matter if the fence around the fountain is the precise fence that the apprentice originally tinkered with. Perhaps it is unimportant whether the fountain was meant as a church spire, or whether water ever had anything to do with it. And possibly, it doesn’t matter if the fountain is a 600-year-old original, or a replica built a century ago, or even a 60-year-old restoration. The pieces are holding a place—in roughly the right shape—of something that would otherwise too soon have disappeared.

Postcard from Amsterdam: Dear Sinterklaas

2009-12-04T23:59:00.002+01:00

Dear Sinterklaas,

Happy Birthday! We know you have been watching from the rooftops recently, keeping a close eye on the children of Holland. (Hopefully, you don’t bother with adults’ behavior. From way up there, can you tell I haven’t vacuumed?)

Thank you for the special goodies you’ve been dropping in Josie’s red rain boot this week. The first time she put a carrot in the boot before bed, she said, “Sinterklaas’ horse going to be so surprised!”

The next few times, she didn’t say that.

Still, each morning, she has been surprised by the books and trinkets and crunchy pepernoten in her boot. All that remained today was for her to write her wish list, and leave it with the carrot.

This afternoon, as we pedaled through the Vondel Park in the bakfiets, she wore a festive paper hat in the spirit of your celebration.

“Josie,” I said, “did you know that tomorrow, Sinterklaas is going to come and bring a big bag of presents?”

“What’s he going to bring?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think he’s going to bring?”

“Candy,” she said. “And maybe… maybe….”

“Maybe a train?” I asked.

“Yeah. A train.” Then she got excited. “AND SOMETHING TO PUSH IT ON!”

“Do you mean a track?”

“Yeah, a track!” Though she pronounced it like “crack.”

“We’re going to have to write Sinterklaas a note and leave it in your boot tonight.”

“Yeah! We gotta tell him to bring a crack!”

But by evening, Josie was too spent to engage in the epistolary arts. As Dan carried her to bed, I promised her I would leave a letter for you.

I want to tell you about a moment earlier this week. In the midst of all these days of wet and rain, the sun came out. Josie’s Grandma Rough met us at the skating rink on Leidseplein after our errands, where Josie tried out her new skates. Her favorite thing to do was to be pulled around the rink by the arms, gliding without effort. My lower back hurt after fifteen minutes of that, so I stood up and stretched. The sun blazed in my eyes, and I had a memory.

At this very time of year in 2005, Dan and I took a long-weekend trip across the Atlantic. We had been living in Minnesota—with Dan working for Northwest Airlines—for just about six months. We were getting into the swing of non-reving. He asked where I wanted to go for a pre-Christmas trip.

“Bruges?” I asked.

“Sounds good,” he said. We had visited this tiny medieval town in Belgium once before at holiday time, and I had been enchanted.

A few weeks later, we flew from Minneapolis to Amsterdam, then hopped on a train to head south. We were slow-blinking sloths as we rocked down the tracks, lulled nearly to sleep with our heads tipped together. Outside, it was cloudy and chilly. The passing landscape was dullish, but I knew soon enough my wonder would awaken.

We stopped in Antwerp to change trains, but just as we started heading for the next platform, we both stopped and looked at each other. There was a foggy-breath bustle in the station, which had big wide doors beckoning us into the heart of the city. We had been in Europe for a few hours now, having left the Netherlands and entered Belgium without yet taking a breath of outside air. Deciding to proceed to Bruges later in the day, we left our bags at the station and struck out, wanting that feeling of feet-on-the-ground. We strolled past diamond outlets around the station. On a busy shopping street, I bought my sister a Christmas present. Then we aimed for the town square. It was time to sit, for coffee and a snack.

On the Grote Markt, a skating rink had been set up. Dan and I settled in at a bruin café on the edge of the square to watch a group of schoolchildren skating. The day was still gray, the air cold and thinly foggy. The kids laughed and chased each other. Some shouted, others ran off for snacks. All around them, ancient buildings held fast, towers of spindly grace and sour-smelling stone. From the café window, the square seemed to be cast in black and white, except for the orange flames licking from barrels spaced around the rink to provide warmth.

Imagine growing up like this, I thought.

Four years later, my daughter would grab my hands, begging me to pull her around the ice again. Soon we would head home, hang up her skates, fix hot chocolate, and listen for you, Sinterklaas, tooting down the canal in your pakjesboot, reminding all the children to keep it together for just a few days until you deliver the mother lode on the 5th.

Really, what more could we ask for?

Postcard of Thanksgiving: Lost for Words

2009-11-27T10:03:00.009+01:00

I’ve been frozen. All week, in my head, I’ve been working and reworking a blog post for Thanksgiving. What am I thankful for? My list kept spilling and gushing and unfurling and looping in my head, a catalogue of every teeny tiny aspect of my life, which I love and love and love. This week, certainly, I’ve been grateful for the big things: family, fortune, health, and the icing on the cake this year: a view from the dinner table of a historic, charming, buzzing city that allows us to feel, for the most part, at home.

But what could I write that wasn't already obvious? At a loss, I decided to try to think of something that I’m not grateful for. I’m not at all grateful that my beautiful Grandma Myrt passed away this year—but each morning as I pour my coffee and feel my lips quiver just the way hers did as she anticipated the burn of the first sip, I only feel thankful. Thankful for every moment I spent with her, thankful for the chance to love someone so much that I miss her with a sweet sting, and thankful for each small part of me that came from her.

Little joys kept leaping at me. One day this week, when I picked Josie up from school, I handed her a banana to eat in the bakfiets on the way home. I’m thankful for our bakfiets, I thought. Then I remembered a summer day in Minneapolis, many months earlier, when I spotted a little girl eating a banana in the back seat of the car as her mama drove past. I had been walking down the sidewalk carrying my baby girl, who seemed to want to do everything independently before her arms and legs and fingers were quite ready. I yearned for the day when she could sit and eat a banana, dealing with the peel all by herself. It seemed as big a deal as graduating from high school, as big a deal as anything a person could accomplish. I’m thankful for this banana, I thought as I pedaled off. Josie chewed peacefully, content for the moment with her abilities.

At home, we were greeted by her grandparents, who took over for awhile. I slipped upstairs with my computer, thinking, I’m grateful for Josie’s four healthy grandparents. I’m grateful for time to myself. I’m grateful that I could choose to skip this time to myself, and walk right downstairs and join everyone. I’m grateful for stairs. I’m grateful I can walk. I’m grateful… and on and on it has gone.

I did stay upstairs for awhile, though, puttering on my computer, peeking at something exciting I had recently discovered online: my book, Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA, had just become available for pre-order on Amazon and Borders (and by request from any local independent bookseller). It was yet another thing to be thankful for, amazed by, speechless about. Carrier is a memoir about navigating into family. Given the risk I run of passing a genetic disorder to our children, Dan and I had to make a series of thorny choices as we started our family, listening to science, history, our hearts, and each other. (There's more about the book here.) Though I may never be perfectly comfortable with the risks inherent in sharing our story, I realized something as I thought about the book’s upcoming release: I am grateful for words. Even though I sometimes feel lost for words, I know I would be truly lost but for them. Even when I don’t know exactly what to say, or how to say it. I am grateful, I realized, for the chance to explain.

And I felt especially thankful for the possibility that my story could matter to someone else.

I stared at the book’s cover online for a few more minutes, filled with a mix of hope and gratitude. Then, I clomped down our perfectly good stairs on my perfectly good legs and, without a word, scooped up my perfectly good girl.

Postcard from Tulum: Souvenir

2009-11-17T19:44:00.010+01:00

The pattern is always the same. In the lead-up to a kid-free getaway with my husband, I thirst for the break. I crave the long, trouble-free plane ride, wherever it may lead. I consider with quiet joy the fact that even half a globe’s worth of jet lag is easier to handle than a week’s pileup of sleep-disturbed nights.

Then it comes time to pack my suitcase. I kiss my daughter goodnight, knowing I will see her only briefly in the morning. I sleep fitfully. What if something happens? What if our little getaway becomes a disaster?

This time, we were headed for Tulum, Mexico, for a dear friend’s wedding. In the days before our departure, I fantasized about sipping margaritas on the beach, eating real chips and salsa, staying up late by the fire with old friends. But the night before leaving, right on cue, my imagination took its dark turn.

As a girl, when I heard my baby brother cry out from his room at night, I thought pirates were stealing him. When I fell in love with the man who became my husband, my stomach lurched to picture him in a devastating wreck. In my head, I’ve attended every funeral I fear. Now, as a wife and mother, I’m doubly inventive when it comes to possible disasters, and fierce in rejecting those imaginative impulses before they become full stories in my mind. The hardest time to keep them at bay, though, is in the middle of the night, just before my family separates. What if Josie never sees us again? All for what?

In the morning, before going out the door, I grabbed a sticky-pad of lined yellow paper and scribbled a fast letter to Josie—words I had composed in my head while lying awake the night before. I signed it and laid it in my sock drawer. If something were to happen, someone would surely find it.

We kissed Josie goodbye, thanked her grandparents, and left. To board a plane and enter the forbidding thin air. To walk through the airport in Cancun where officials scanned passengers for signs of epidemic flu. To ride two hours in the dark to Tulum, where Hurricane Ida thrashed just offshore. To spend our first night in a room where bats swooped and chattered. To swim in a jungle cenote, its small-pond surface jittering under torrential rain, as friends on the dock half-joked about alligators. To snorkel in a cold, dark cave. To watch wind tearing palms. To sop up the water gushing through the windows, doors, and ceilings of our room. To wonder when the electricity would be back. To body-surf under black skies.

On the last full day of our trip, Ida hurled northward and away. Dan and I found our seats on the beach, which smoldered bronze under a prodigal sun. We sniffled through a wedding between two people whose particular disasters were anything but imagined, yet whose bond created a perfect whole.

It was the most I had ever missed Josie. Which is to say, more than I thought I possibly could. Perhaps it was the nostalgia. When she was nine months old, the three of us escaped Minnesota’s spiteful February and visited Tulum for the first time. We rented a hut on the beach with an outhouse and mosquito nets. On our first night, after Josie went to sleep, Dan and I stepped out into the white sand, awash in blue under a full moon. Sipping beers, we held hands, kept an ear on our hut, and talked over the wave-wash. With each breath, we purged the cold, dry hustle of home, and took in the slow syrup of an easy pace. On that trip, skies were sunny, but the wind blew so hard that the water looked like blades. Anyplace but the beach was insect-thick. I still remember the sight of a black mosquito, spider-legged, on our daughter’s plump white cheek. After that, we never left our patch of shore. We watched iguanas drag their tails through the sand, leaving a dividing line between their footprints. We ate lobster, served Josie her first juice (watermelon), and swung together after each meal in a rainbow hammock. We helped Josie practice sitting up, balancing her on a big coconut for a quick photo. At mealtimes, eating whatever Mayan dish had been prepared, we handed Josie her new favorite toy: a coconut seed, nearly round, bright green, fitting perfectly in her fist, safe for gumming, fun to roll. We took it back to Minnesota, where it eventually rolled under her bed, dried up, and turned gray. I found it when moving day came, just as I now find a letter to Josie each time I dig deep in my sock drawer.

Last week, I wanted to bring her a souvenir from Mexico. I looked in a handicrafts stand in the middle of the jungle. I scoured the beach for a perfect shell. I considered waiting to peruse the airport shops. But, on the night of the wedding, I realized that the answer was obvious.

In Amsterdam, I pulled a green coconut seed from my bag. Handing it to her, I watched her face carefully. “Do you remember this?” I asked her. “From when you were a baby?”

But what I really meant was, I remember you.

Postcard from 28,000 Feet

2009-11-06T16:35:00.001+01:00

They are giving us Internet on our plane today.

Airlines are formed, reformed, broken apart, discontinued, and merged. Leg room contracts, then again. Snacks come and go and come back. Smoking sections at last became extinct.

And now, goodbye, goodbye to another era in airline travel: the Great Disconnectedness. That time when I so often have managed to accomplish those things that don’t happen in a wired world: reading a book. Skimming US Weekly. Writing long journal entries. Movie-watching. Eating without multitasking. Inventing toddler games from raw materials: seatbelt-latches and window-shades.

Today, instead of hand-writing a letter or organizing my address book, I post from the stratosphere. We are above most weather, somewhere between Atlanta and Cancun, with light turbulence joggling our MD88, nonstop metallic rush of air blasting my ears. It is hard to imagine more of a no-place. We are in space, and there is nothing here.

But yet, here in our crosshair of compass degrees, are we: 155 souls, including two tired residents of the Netherlands, listening to the pilot announce the weather at the beach. Still chewing our Sun Chips and cookies. Trying not to look as the lady in the red business suit loses her lunch in the lav directly to our left. Unable to read our books, with eyes too wobbly to focus after 10 hours en route across the Atlantic, two more in the Atlanta airport, two more on this last puddle-jump, with just two more to go in a shuttle once we land, to see our friends and celebrate a wedding near Tulum. For three days. Before we turn around and fly again, nowhere and everywhere.

Postcard for Halloween: RIP, Filippe

2009-10-30T12:30:00.004+01:00

Huismuis, Filippe A.

Filippe A. Huismuis, age unknown, of a certain canalhouse on the Prinsengracht, Amsterdam, died earlier this week.

He was first sighted in late August 2009, and met his end in an unfortunate accident in the early morning hours of October 25, 2009.

Mr. Huismuis was distinguished among mice by his fatness, his ability to fool people into thinking he was gone for good, and his fluffy-charcoal-gray cuteness, undeniable despite light scarring over the brow. His kinked tail betokened his bravery. A veteran scavenger, he steered clear of boxed poison, Frisbees, soccer balls, and amateurish traps. His eyesight was remarkably poor, which put him in awkward situations from time to time, such as the afternoon when the lady of the house, carrying a hot pot from the stove, “kicked something and heard it hit the cupboard” but saw nothing when she searched the floor.

Those who knew Mr. Huismuis either loved or hated him. Jopie, the black-and-white cat who came to visit for a few days prior to his death, loved him. The adults of the household he frequented disdained him very much. Josie, the girl who first saw him only after the building owner had caught him in a cage, cooed, “Don’t worry Filippe, you’ll be okay, we’re gonna help you with your tail. Go to sleep awhile. You need to rest.” The building owner loved Mr. Huismuis so much, even before meeting him, that she opted for a live trap instead of deadly methods, and, in a kindhearted plan, intended to turn a city mouse into a country mouse.

In a sad turn of events, however, Mr. Huismuis never saw his country home. Intending to drive him deep into the polderlands the next morning, the building owner nestled him in a shoebox and placed him outside for the night. There, starving after many days of crumb-stinginess by the humans he depended on, stung by the insult of having his tail caught in a trapdoor leaving him unable reach the peanut-butter cracker that lured him, exhausted from his undignified confinement, stunned by multiple camera flashes, and terrorized by loud voices and human handling, Mr. Huismuis died peacefully of old age.

Mr. Huismuis is survived by dozens of ex-wives, over a million children, and his most recent girlfriend, Pinda, who is still on the lam.

He was preceded in death many, many, many times over, but still not enough, judging by the Rentokil free-estimates van, which has been zipping up and down the canal in recent weeks.

A celebration of his life will not be held.

Interment took place on garbage day.

In lieu of charitable donations, lavish gifts may be sent directly to the human family who suffered his presence.

Please sign the guest book.

Postcard from Croatia: Lingering

2009-10-17T13:14:00.006+02:00

On our last day in Croatia, I sat outside Pile Gate in Dubrovnik, waiting on the drawbridge with our suitcases. Dan had hiked up the hill with Josie on his back to collect our car, and would soon be back to pick me up. I had been mopey that morning, and even shed a few tears.

“I didn’t get to go to the pharmacy museum,” I had said to Dan earlier, trying to explain my mood. He looked at me, dumbfounded. I was the one, after all, who had spent our entire last morning in Dubrovnik showering, packing, and generally dilly-dallying, not even coming close to leaving our hotel room.

“I’m just sad we’re leaving,” I said, clarifying, both for him and for myself. I do not, as it turns out, much care about pharmacy museums.

Sitting just outside the city walls with our luggage, watching fresh tourists entering the Old Town for the first time, I took a deep breath and grasped my last few moments. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a spiral strand of my hair catch the morning sun as it floated from my head into the air. It stuck to the gray pant leg of a twenty-something man, who wrapped his arm around his girlfriend’s shoulder and carried a tiny bit of me back inside the city walls. In my funk, I thought that would make a magical detail for my writing. But I soon realized I was being over-sentimental. I was not some young scholar leaving the city where she studied and left her heart. I was just a tourist who had spent two nights. I wasn’t, actually, bereft to be leaving Dubrovnik. I had certainly had my moments with the city, and found many glittering things to admire. There was one moment, as we descended the stairs back to the streets after a gorgeous morning spent circumnavigating the city atop its ancient walls, when I felt a pang: What if I never climbed those stairs again? Had I lingered long enough?

But the truth was that I was just sorry that our vacation—our family vacation—was ending. For us, family vacation differs from our many other trips and travels. On a family vacation, we stay in place longer. On a family vacation, there is almost no itinerary—at least not with set times. Therefore, on a family vacation, there are fewer moments of frustration. If Josie wants to wait another hour to get dressed, so be it. We have all day. And the day after.

After leaving Split, we had spent three days at the beach in Orebic, then another three days swimming and hiking in Mljet National Park, before ending our ten-day trip in Dubrovnik.

There were things that made our trip uniquely Croatian: Pomegranates, mandarins, walnuts, olives, and grapes, all ripe and ready at the same time. A particular bony, buttery type of sea bream. Slavic affricates echoing through Roman ruins. Serious dance music piped onto the upper deck of Jadrolinija car ferries. Grk wine, Karlovacko pivo, peach juice always on hand for kids. Traditional costumes and song-filled wedding marches on the Stradun in Dubrovnik. Basketball courts, slick and new, bent to fit against crumbling fortress walls. A morning swim alone, it seemed, in the Mediterranean, syrup-smooth and clear.

But in other ways, our vacation could have taken place anywhere. Anywhere, Josie could have watched and watched as a cat toyed with a grasshopper. Anywhere, Dan and I could have stayed up late eating chocolate and watching movies, knowing that only another slow, easy morning awaited.

We could have been anywhere for all the times the two of us stood arm-to-arm, heads cocked, smiling at our daughter as she chased pigeons, or answered her imaginary phone, or “read’ the map, or demanded another bite of fish “from the tail!”, or danced to street music, or fired a bouncy ball around the hotel room, or tackled a creaky playground, or played with her tiny horses in the sand.

We didn’t have to be on St. Mary’s Island for Josie to take off on a lizard-hunt, hiking straight to the top of the hill, demanding, “What lizards eat, Mommy?” (I answered “Bugs!”, wondering what she’ll ask when she turns three, and whether I’ll know any of the answers.) Indeed, we didn’t need to be in Croatia to eat ice cream every day. And it didn’t have to be the Peljesac peninsula for me to sit in an open-air restaurant, watching Dan and Josie throwing rocks into the sea, and seeing our daughter spotting a moonrise with a first-timer’s squeals.

But those were the things I loved the most about our trip to Croatia. As we drove to the airport, Dan glanced over and caught me teary-eyed again. But I wasn’t just sad. I was more thankful than I had felt in a long time. The surprise for me was finding, when we returned to Amsterdam and I saw the canals reflecting the evening’s first twinkly lamplight, that I still felt that way.

Postcard from Split, Croatia: More than Sightseeing

2009-10-13T12:21:00.004+02:00

On our first morning in Croatia, Dan, Josie and I wandered through the white marble streets of Diocletian’s palace, a glorious compound 1,700 years old and humming with life. We saw shops and restaurants, laundry lines and baby carriages, walking tours and flashbulbs. We heard the murmurs of admiring tourists, flooding from their cruise ships, as a Dalmatian men’s chorus filled the air and strains of accordion music wound through the streets not too far beyond. As we strolled down a narrow stone passageway, I turned my head to stare through a little square window into the dark, cozy interior of a tiny restaurant—and I knocked my little girl to the ground.

It was a first for me. In her 28 months of life, she has learned to trust that she can crawl, or sit, or wobble, or teeter, or toddle, or stride, or run, or jump in my presence, safe from wayward knee-strikes and tripping feet.

When I bumped into her, she toppled against a wooden bench, then fell to the ground. She wasn’t much hurt, physically, but her loud cries echoed against the white limestone walls, letting the world know how betrayed she felt.

My hugs and kisses did no good, and she reached for her dad. We wandered on as he carried her, knowing her cries would simmer down eventually. It was Sunday morning, and I stopped to snap a photo as a nun arranged a candle on the outside windowsill of a hidden chapel. It was the sort of picture I have produced many times in my travels: a snapshot of daily life, an image extracted from a story I do not know—and do not, very often, have the courage to enter.

I’d be lying if I said we never worried that having a child would mean limiting our travels. In many ways, it has. Perhaps without a 2-year-old, we would have been taking a walking tour that day in Split, or exploring the caverns of Diocletian’s palace, learning the history of even the wells discovered beneath the palace, which are centuries older yet than the emperor’s massive retirement spa. Instead, we shuck museums and cathedrals and tours, following our daughter’s tiny footsteps to other points of interest: the hiding places of kittens, the sources of music, bakery cases against which to plaster face and hands, and so much more. One of the biggest things I notice about our travels with a 2-year-old is how the focus on our experiences zooms, tightens, lingers. We may miss the palace history, but we discover where children live inside, and hear their mothers talking to them through open kitchen windows. We watch fishermen repairing their nets, and peer into the baskets of fresh-picked grapes as they are carried through the streets. We see fish flopping in buckets, hear the scratchy sounds of onboard radios before skiffs motor out to sea. We discover the orientation of a culture toward children: in the beginning, each back-tickle and head-scratch from an old man sent Josie bashfully running to hide against our legs. By the end of our trip, unexpected cheek-pinches and shoulder-taps from passing strangers were as normal to her as fish for dinner, blackened on the grill, eyes and tail and all.

My first photo of the nun was boring, even though she turned and smiled for me. Or at least, I thought she was smiling for me. She walked straight to Josie, who was still wailing from her fall, and made it her mission to cheer our child. All in Croatian but in tones plain to any parent, first she tried a voice of reason, then sweet pleading, then teasing, tickles, laughter. A song, a rhyme, deep sympathy. Although Josie still sulked, her attention had been caught. What would this white-robed friend do next? Finally, the nun held up one finger: an idea. She disappeared through a doorway in the stone. As we waited, I prepared Josie with some suggestions. Perhaps she would bring a book, or a postcard, or maybe even a string of beads. But the nun knew much better. She returned with two cream-filled cookies, which Josie wrapped joyously into her hands.

My photos looked suddenly better. They no longer appeared apart from the action, as a set piece. They were part of a narrative I actually knew—the story that a little one brings.

Postcard from Waterland: Going to See

2009-10-02T11:44:00.004+02:00

In some of my more jaded moments, I wonder why I should bother to go see new places. I think to myself, “I’ve traveled enough—I get it. Each place looks different on the surface, but deep down, it’s all just human beings dealing with human problems. Finding food and preparing it. Trying to sleep at night. Trying to work by day. Behind it all, love and loss, birth and death. Each person silently praying that if disaster comes, their family will be spared. It’s the same story, everywhere.”

Years ago, when I liked to write fiction, I spent lots of time imagining the lives behind the walls of the places I visited. But now, I feel raw enough just considering my own place in it all. I am one among billions, wishing for a long life, a minimum of sorrow, a lasting love, a safe journey for my child.

Sometimes, “safe” seems like the only thing that matters. Why should we leave, when we could stay right here behind our own windows, I’ll ask myself. But then, I am drawn out into the world. Last week, my mom came to visit us here in Amsterdam. The last time she was in Amsterdam—and Europe—was October 1975. My husband was a month old. I had not even been imagined. She had run out of money and was waiting on standby to fly home to Seattle, to see her sweetheart, my father, who would soon marry her. She was tired of roaming and found a little hotel called Dannenbroek, number 19 J. W. Brouwersstraat. The innkeeper, Mr. Benschaap, brought my tired, young mother a glass of lemonade when she reached her room. So lonely she was, so tired and so grateful, that she wrote him a song, and a letter, and a poem.

With Josie in the stroller, we took a walk to find the place that had once been her refuge. It was now an apartment building. She posed for a photo by the door, not really recognizing it the way she expected to. But she seemed content to have come full circle. She was no longer alone, no longer just starting out, no longer worried about how to get home or who would greet her at the airport. She had family here, and there, a home at either end.

She wanted to see the countryside, so Dan rented a car and we all ventured out into a region north of Amsterdam called Waterland, to see three old, small towns. Edam was medieval and quaint, making Amsterdam seem over-tall and girthy. Volendam had views of the sea and hot frites on the promenade. Marken, a ferry ride across the water from Volendam, was an old fishing village revived. Each place was different, and each had a side for tourists and a side for inhabitants. There were souvenir shops and photo ops, but also chicken coops and kids’ plastic yard toys.

Standing on the wharf in Marken, I asked myself if traveling too much takes away the wonder. Real people lived here, just like anywhere else.

A wind was picking up. Our ferry was nearing the dock. The light shifted. I saw my favorite slanting, white-gold rays of autumn, and I let go my questions and stood right where I was, glad. My feet rested on a patch of earth where I had never stood before, and might never stand again, unless I was very, very lucky. I remembered why I was there: just to see. Visiting one more place is like reading one more book, or tasting one more cheese, or listening to one more song, or sipping one more wine, or smelling one more rose, or holding one more hand. It is not critical. But it is the best we can do.

Postcard from Haarlem: Look Closer

2009-09-29T11:21:00.010+02:00

A few mornings ago, Josie woke up when it was still dark. She clicked on her bedside lamp and got out of bed, fuzzy-headed and pink-cheeked. “I had a nice nap,” she said. “It’s time to get up?”

I kissed her good morning and hurried downstairs to the bathroom. A few minutes later, from the bottom of the stairs, I heard her whimpering in her room. Her words were so soft and high-pitched that I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I climbed the stairs and found her standing in her room, pointing at the wall two feet away.

“That’s a scary guy,” she said.

It was her shadow, wild-headed, troll-height, darkly alive.

Fright—from deep in the psyche, more than a baby’s startles and fear of abandonment, has found its way into her world. A babysitter found Shrek in our DVD collection—something I figured we’d wait at least another four years to try—and played it until Josie asked her to turn it off. “That one was too scary,” Josie told me later.

Even when I censor carefully, I can misjudge. Yesterday, Josie called me to her side and asked for help turning off Super Why, a reading show from public television. “That’s too scary,” she said of the tantrum-prone giant featured in that episode.

She hears things I don’t hear: my phone ringing, knocks at our door, Dan’s footsteps in the stairwell, and apparitions I don’t see, or hear, or feel, and therefore cannot explain. Sometimes, from around a corner in the house—or the library, or the store, or someone else’s house—my girl will come careening, sliding in her socks, crashing into my legs to bury her face in my thigh. “That scared me. There’s something scary.”

Always. My own ghosts are not so much spirits lurking, these days, but ideas that fill me with fear. What if my parents grow old? What if we live abroad too long, and lose our friends, and my siblings find a new big sister, and my cat gets diabetes and dies? What if one of these airplanes crashes? What if I tell too many secrets? What if I fail my family? What if I miss my chance to teach my daughter, to tend to my husband, to say the things I should say?

“What’s this? Mommy, lookit! What’s this?” Josie keeps asking about the Alien-type creature—with two bony, rot-brown offspring hatching from its sides—lunging from posters on the toddler-height electrical boxes throughout our neighborhood in Amsterdam.

‘That’s a scary guy,” I tell her each day. We might talk about its “babies”. We might talk about the choice to look away from something that scares us. I forget, though, to tell her that another choice is to look closer. That is what she reminds me.

Last week, with her grandma—my mother, visiting us in Amsterdam after 34 years away from Europe—we took a day trip to the small medieval town of Haarlem, near Amsterdam. Despite the very real risk that my two-year-old would sing the ABC’s at the top of her lungs in the echoing caverns of the Grote Kerk, I decided we should all go inside and see the stained glass, giant organ, and countless relics of the great St. Bavo’s. After a few rounds of the alphabet song—there were signs everywhere, see, and wherever she sees signs, she sees letters, and wherever she sees letters she sings out the song—I tried distracting her by showing her “the animals.” These were actually a series of hideous grotesques—deformed humans, gnarled ghouls, slack-jawed beasts.

“That one’s too scary,” she said, looking away from a figure like Death, with desiccated genitals and a wailing face. She turned toward a hound-like figure—no longer a dog, not quite a bear—standing over its kill, with the heads of two offspring as protuberances from its flanks. I expected her to recoil again. But she took it in, then stepped toward it. She put her hand on one of the pups and said, “Oh, you’re sad? It’s okay. You don’t need to cry. Need your mommy? Here’s your mommy. See? She’s right here.”