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.