Here I am in Bodegraven, Netherlands. What am I doing here? I’ve debated about re-hashing the past four years or so since I last wrote here, but I think I’ll just let things fall out of my head as they will.
Tonight, I will try to sleep in a very old house in a very hot, upstairs room. I am tempted to just lay my spine along that metal strip on the floor (in the photo) because it is very cool. It was 35° today; 27° now, but warmer still inside.
Fortunately, during the day my part of the office had working air-conditioning—some colleagues were less fortunate. When I stepped outside I was slammed in the face by a very tropical heat. I suffered through the start-stop traffic, windows down (which made zero difference for the inescapable heat that scorched its way across my path. And then sauntered my way through a calmer traffic (one-laner) in a south-easterly fashion until I arrived at the oldest house in the Netherlands. (I’m sure it’s not the oldest.)
Ella lives here. She is 77 and doing quite well on her own. In a giant house that she rents out rooms to all sorts of people, through AirBnB. She hates spiders. Makes a great ardtjes?? cake* (no idea what it’s called). Her husband passed away five years ago and he was a bee keeper and liked gardening. Ella doesn’t have as much of a green thumb. She’s lived here for 50 years. She has 10 children and….23 grandchildren! She spoke no English…fair enough…forced me to pull out my Swiss-army-knife of Dutch tools (in my head) and we learned a bit about each other.
She said I should sit outside with her on the back deck overlooking her not-too-bad-of-a-yard-for-someone-who-doesn’t-have-a-green-thumb garden. She brought me a slice of that cake she made…soooo good. Didn’t want more cake (birthday cake at work**), but I also didn’t want to explain why and make her sad after she brought me a piece. It was more the size of half a bread slice, than a big, fat cake slice. So it was doable.
She asked if I was a Christian. I wasn’t surprised after earlier being given her Dutch Reformist newspaper to gander through while I ate my salad that I brought from home. She was very pleasant up until that question. Should I have lied? Said I was what I wasn’t? Her eyes scoffed me when I said I wasn’t. Oops. Then, she was still ‘niiice’, but if I was in a cartoon I’d have released steam from my collar in an uh-oh-sheesh sort of way. And that was that.
Mostly, he liked the hi
biscus. He climbed right on in there and came to life within seconds.
tied to the tail of a dragon 
