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.