When the cat's away...

I often wonder what goes on in my apartment whenever I leave it.

My name is Amy and I live in Amsterdam with an orange cat. Let’s call him Rusty, because he’s not really orange, he’s more the colour bikes turn when they’ve sat under too much rain. I’m sure he’s responsible for some of the mischief while I am away, like my dwindling collection of pens. On a given day I might reach out for a new purple fineliner to write down my grocery list, and discover it missing. Then, several months later on a Saturday morning I will finally pull the sofa out from the wall to vacuum underneath it and find it resting there among tendrils of dust, along with the matching blue fineliner, a black fountain pen I took from the NH hotel in Brussels last winter and the eraser that I’ve been looking for. Not to mention four soft toys, a plastic ball with a bell inside and a weird looking frog that, when squeezed, uncurls its long plastic tongue.

I ponder it all over a cup of mint tea. I was pretty sure I had a pumpkin on the countertop waiting to be hacked into pieces and made into soup. I know for a fact that I put the extra set of keys in the cupboard under the bookshelf, but when the catsitter comes by to pick them up and we search and search and find them hanging on the hook by the front door, I am stumped. Images of Fantasia swirl in my mind, silent immovable objects coming to life and dancing around the room once I have closed the door behind me. It must scare the hell out of Rusty; no wonder he chases pens under the sofa.

Midsummer

The rain is so thick you can see it. It is flooding my terrace and drowning my coriander. The birds are twittering, calling out to one another from their hiding spots deep within the trees. My cat snoozes within sight of the window occasionally opening an eye to measure the ebb and flow of the water falling from the sky. When it tapers, small bursts of whitish light brighten up the grey.

An hour later, the whitish light reveals pockets of blue and threatens to completely dry up the stones and chairs on my terrace. The mugginess has been washed away, the trees stand still with no wind to sway them. The birds continue to chatter and begin to dart around again. My cat yawns and pokes his nose through the cat door to step out on to the terrace and sniff out the moist cleanliness. I am tempted to take my book and my coffee outside instead of to the sofa.

Another hour later and the cat sits sunning himself in my preferred chair. The sky behind him is a Simpsons’ blue, and the sounds of construction have come out to compete with the birds and a soft rustle of leaves. Spiders and flies and mosquitoes emerge to join in the celebration of the sun’s return.

For the past two months it has been consistently sunny and warm and I have fallen victim to the false promise that it could remain so. Of course it will start to rain again. Of course it should. This is a northerly maritime climate, a climate that avoids extremes but believes instead in keeping things steady. Every day this week there have been periods of rain and periods of blue sky, some lasting longer than others. Nice and balanced. A two-month dry period is something I should have written home about instead of the return of the rain.

It is also midsummer night. The days are now lasting about seventeen hours here, plenty of time for us to stay awake and notice the sky playing with the sun and the rain. The Scandinavians will burn bonfires along their rocky beaches, and we will sip schnapps late into the light night, somewhere in the urban outdoors, I hope. And all for what? Perhaps only to appreciate the natural world’s still remarkable central role in our lives.

The Green Hat Box (3)

It should have been long forgotten only because of its relative insignificance in comparison to the other events of that day.

The memory is almost like a snapshot in my mind, a picture of a moment that didn’t seem important but for some reason I noticed. The memory is of mum pulling a postcard from her purse and glancing at it quickly, as if whatever message was written on the back of it she’d already read enough times to have it memorized. She scanned it as if reminding herself of a word in it that meant something, or reassuring herself of a sentiment that she didn’t want to forget. Then, almost as quickly as she pulled it out, she slipped it back into her purse. We were still in the back seat of the taxi, right after the green hat box had been rescued from its fall. After stashing the postcard back in her purse, her hand touched the new gash on the hat box on her lap, her fingers rubbing absently along the dent while her eyes searched for something outside the window.

If I hadn’t been watching her at that very moment, I would likely never have noticed.
Her eyes were worried. She had a habit of biting her lower lip when she fretted over anything, so I am sure that is what she did in those strange moments in the back of the taxi.

The postcard was from Slovenia. It was written boldly across the picture of a rocky green cliff, topped with a castle and cascading down into a clear mountain lake. I didn’t know who she knew who had been to Slovenia, and who would send her a postcard from there.

I puzzled about it while the taxi lumbered up the mountain, but then quickly forgot all about it. Children have many other things on their minds than the strange matters their parents get up to. I would probably have completely forgotten about it except for the fact that she kept that postcard for many years after wards. She had stashed it in the hat box in the top corner of her closet. I caught a glimpse of it years later, one day when she was rummaging around in her closet for something. I had been sitting on her bed, we were engaged in typical mother-teenage daughter talk, and when she pulled the hat box out of the closet and dumped it on the bed, the lid dislodged and I was able to catch sight of a few of the things she kept in it. The hat long gone, amongst the keepsakes was the postcard from Slovenia, sitting right on top. I recognized the picture right away, and was recalled immediately back to the taxi episode.

She put the lid back on the hat box quickly that day, so I didn’t get a chance to see much more of its contents.

“I wonder if it is still in the hat box now?” I said, after recounting the memory for Daisy, my sister.

“There’s only one way to find out,” Daisy answered, as she motioned the waiter for the bill.

The Green Hat Box (2)

I remember when she got it. I think I was nine and we were on a ski holiday in the Swiss Alps. It might seem a strange place to buy a green hatbox, but when she bought it, it housed a hat and I’m pretty sure that at that point, she was more interested in the hat than the box.

The hat was white with lace and frills and a wide brim to protect from the sun. I remember it because when she bought it she loved it and I absolutely didn’t. We were skiing in an area that had a town that also posed as a fancy shopping destination. All sorts of watches, clothes, sunglasses, outdoor apparel and sporting goods glittered behind street-length windowpanes. As a child, I gave no thought as to price and status afforded by buying articles from any of these shops, but I realize now that the hat she bought that came in its own hard green hat box, fitted especially for it’s protection, must have cost mum a little bit extra.

The day we bought it must have been too snowy to ski, and so we spent it in town instead. I remember a long day hauling ourselves in and out of shops and at the end of it we took the local taxi transport up the hill to our private chalet apartment. The taxis were skinny in order to fit the narrow and winding streets, and we could generally only fit our own bodies and maybe a small purse inside the seating area. All other baggage was thrown - or, in the case of mum’s new hat inside her hatbox, carefully placed - on the luggage rack on top of the taxi. There were no straps holding any of it in, which is why, I suppose, it fell off during our short but steep journey up the mountain.

The roads were slippery with ice, and curvy instead of straight up or down, weaving back and forth across the mountainside. Picturesque wooden chalets and apartment buildings dotted the hillside the whole way up. We made it a little over halfway up the hill when we hit an icy patch. The taxi slid, stopped, and then slid backwards ever so slightly before stopping firmly at a sideways angle. The driver muttered something in a language I didn’t understand, and then hopped out of the car. We watched, me with my nose stuck up against the cold, grungy window, all of us looking a bit worriedly after him as he ran off back down the street, leaving us sitting in the taxi. We sat there for about five minutes, which was just enough time for mum to consider getting out and walking the rest of the way up the hill with my sister and I and our shopping parcels, when we saw him running back up the twisty hill towards us, an old apple box in his hands. When he got closer, we saw that the apple box was filled with gravel, which he then strewed under the taxi. Once he’d covered the icy street with the gravel, spraying it under the tires, under the vehicle and all around it including the steep bit ahead of it, he tossed the apple box onto the passenger seat, gunned the motor and we felt the tires grab hold of the gravel and lurch suddenly forwards and upwards.

This sudden lurch is what tossed the hatbox off the top of the taxi. We heard it thud on the ice behind us, forcing the driver to once again mutter something we couldn’t understand, stop the vehicle and jump out of his seat. The expression on mum’s face as she watched him run down the hill behind the taxi to grab hold of the hatbox, which was slowly sliding down the hill, and then return to the taxi to fasten it more sturdily on top, was one close to what one might look like while watching a horrible scene on TV.

We made it back to our chalet in one piece, as did her hat, which she insisted on wearing inside for the remainder of the winter ski holiday despite its being a typically summer-looking hat. I don’t recall her wearing it much that following summer, nor any summer or indoor-winter holidays in the years after that. The hatbox did suffer a rip in its thick green fabric and a dent that bent inwards like an old lady’s puckered lips along the corner that hit the ground.

The whole time afterwards that I lived in that house, the injured corner protruded from the top of mum’s closet like a childhood scar, and I never gave it a second thought. Until now. Strangely, it is only now that I am thinking about it again from this safe adult distance that the thought of that scar also triggers another memory from that day. A memory that should have been long forgotten, erased as if on a floppy disk gone out of style, but nevertheless is still there.

The Green Hat Box (part 1)

“Its all in the green hat box in the closet,” she’d told me that day, “all the evidence we need.”

I knew the box. It had been stashed at the top corner of mum’s closet since pretty much as far back as I can remember. As if it were a permanent fixture in there, a dark green artifact hidden in the shadows, silent and ignored as time moved along. None of us could reach it nor ever really thought to try to. Just like the well-worn string of pearls that she wound around her neck every morning and then carefully laid to rest at night on its own special hook on her nightstand. Just a part of the paraphernalia that came with her. Something when pointed out we associated with her but never really noticed on its own.

But of course it made sense to me, later as I became more aware of how adults operate, that she would have had a use for that green hat box. That she surely wouldn’t have been so utterly simple as to actually keep a hat in it.

The problem now is, how to get to the closet? He’s kept us so firmly locked out of that house for so long now. I wouldn’t even know where to begin trying to get back in.


(Dear Readers: I intend to keep posting installments for as long as my imagination takes me with The Green Hat Box. One a week might be optimistic in the face of real life, so I won't make any time promises. I would love to hear from you in the in between times - both congratulatory and critical. :) )

This is what Tunis looked like through my camera lens a week ago:

Watching the news today, I am shown images of Berlusconi going to court; a plane crash in Poland; Lebanon's government falling apart; Sudan on the brink of a breakup; an eruption of Mount Etna in Italy; terrible flooding in both Australia and Brazil; and intense rioting in Tunisia. All big news, but it was this last news story that captured most of my attention, considering the content of my last post.

When we were standing on the streets of Tunis a little over a week ago, we were oblivious to the level of anger around us. But it seems that the expression “got out in the nick of time” might be the most appropriate way to follow up on my Tunisia travel post. When we arrived back in Amsterdam we were a bit surprised to turn on the news and hear about a protest turning violent in a smaller inland Tunisian city that had likely happened while we were in the air flying home. I’ve watched it escalate in the news since then, taking interest mostly because of the narrow escape it seems we made. Today the riots are at their worst, and I read in the Dutch news that 145 Dutch tourists are being prematurely sent home from their vacations.

Glad we weren’t sent home from our vacation.

The problems being reported from there include widespread unemployment, particularly among the young graduates, high costs, and stifling online bans. I sit here on my comfortable sofa watching live images of people in Tunis throwing rocks amidst the sound of gunfire. And I still have Tunisian sand in my shoes. Of course I am glad that it was quiet and safe while I was there. But it is a baffling illustration of the unpredictability of travelling in a place where I know very little about. Quite a lot can be bubbling under the surface, apparently.

What is happening is terrible. But I look at it this way - the Tunisians are standing up for what they want, demanding change, and it might be a bit ugly for a while. It isn’t the first time in history something like this has happened. And we were there, right when it all began, a part of history.

Tunis in the news today:


http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/spotlight/tunisia/

Tunisia

We went to Tunisia for the week that 2010 became 2011. It is a small country in comparison to its North African neighbours, Algeria and Libya. It is where the Sahara starts and where there’s also a long, lush coastline along the Mediterranean Sea. We rented a car and drove as much through the country as we could with the time we had, and we ended up visiting varieties of rocks.

I wanted to write “old rocks” there, but really, all rocks are old. It’s the arrangement of them that can be interesting: ruins from ambitious human societies long dead or the natural scattering of them as a result of the Earth’s shifts and movements.

The Romans had a heyday in Tunisia in the wake of the Phoenicians. I won’t bother telling you about Carthage and its monumental sacking by the Romans– you can google that story yourself. As modern visitors we spent some time walking amongst some of the lingering old ruins and photographing them in low, late-day sun. The ruins in Tunisia were often better preserved and similarly impressive as the remains that are heavily visited in Greece and Italy and scattered around Europe. El Jem had a grand rival coliseum, and in Sbeitla we were the only visitors in a huge Roman forum. All were impressive, carefully arranged piles of old rocks.

There are mountains and water in the desert. The sandy brown countryside contains oases of palm trees in low lands at the foot of mountains or crevices in the flatter desert where water would naturally flow. Because water evaporates immediately in this desert atmosphere, we encountered enormous blocks of gypsum and salt deposits. We even drove across an immense inland salt lake, named Chott El Jerid, and it shimmered like fresh fallen snow with salt that covered the dried-up sand. Every tourist stop accosted us with piles of desert flowers for sale.

Our rental car was a little, white, dented Fiat Punto, so 4X4ing in the Sahara wasn't an option. When we reached the beginning of the Sahara, we parked the car and jumped into the sand. Our few minutes in the desert ensured that later we were packing a substantial heap of the sand back to the hotel with us in each shoe. The Saharan sand is incredibly soft and fine. As I held it in my hands I wished that it wasn’t so cold overnight in the middle of winter because I’d have loved to sleep one night in the open desert.

This seemed like a perfectly peaceful image until the moment when we decided to stalk desert wildlife hidden during daylight hours under rocks. We wanted to find a scorpion, and after turning over about 25 mini-boulders, encountering beetles and caterpillars almost as long as my mobile phone, we were rewarded with a beautiful specimen of the north African desert scorpion. It was green and scary-looking and apparently nocturnal. It paraded around in for us with his front pincers reaching forward ready to grab and its tail perfectly poised in the air. It was thrilling to find him, and now I understood better why people who do sleep in the desert often do so in a hammock!



When we got home we were, of course, curious to google our little scorpion to see what kind it was. It turns out that it’s one of the most frightening kinds. In fact, it is known as the “Deathstalker” and according to Wikipedia it is “regarded as a highly dangerous species because its venom is a powerful cocktail of neurotoxins” which causes significant pain and illness if one gets stung. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathstalker)


And finally, if you haven’t yet been there yourself and you want to know what Tunisia looks like, watch the introductory scenes from Star Wars Episode IV (the “first” film from 1977). Luke’s home on the planet Tatooine was set in southern Tunisia, and was named after a nearby town, Tataouine.