Utrecht

Flora goes to school an hour or so away by train, in Utrecht. There was only one day out of the several I spent with her on which she had to attend classes, and I asked if she wouldn't mind if I followed her, exploring the city while she studied English and Italian Renaissance literature. She was delighted by the idea. We took an early train, and she drew me a map.

Utrecht is a medieval town, also built around canals. The city is so old, however, that new street was built upon old street, new house built atop ruin, so often that the canals now lay at the bottom of long sets of stairs descending along stone walls, a full floor of a house at least below street level. Sometimes the basements of the homes and businesses have windows or doors or courtyards opening up onto the water.

There is a great Christian Viking stone in Utrecht, and the church was once blown in two by a great wind. A storm arose long ago, and one wing of the cathedral was destroyed by it completely and never rebuilt. As a result, the church proper and the tower, called the Dom Tower, short for Christendom, are separated by a courtyard. The flagstones under which people were buried in the church are still there, part of the pavement out of doors.

It is a university town, and all of the school buildings are public spaces. Flora encouraged me to explore them, and I found some lovely things, including a stained glass ceiling. There is also an Art Deco post office and more than one apothecary's garden.

Castricum, the Netherlands

Some of my last days in the Netherlands I spent not in Amsterdam, but in a nearby town among the dunes called Castricum. I'd gone there to stay with a friend of various wonderful people I'd met in that city. I knew that her name was Flora, that she worked with herbs to great practical effect, and that she was a midwife, and that was all I needed in order to want to seek her out. I met her at the Noordermarkt on Saturday, which is one of the two weekly organic markets in the city. Amongst stalls of mushrooms and fresh juices, pleasingly piled fruits and tempting antiques I found her, standing near the sheep skins: a small creature, tanned, with a chip on her front tooth. She smiled and laughed kindly when I stumbled, not having known until that moment that the Dutch kiss one another on the cheeks three times, not two. The market was closing down, so Flora and I and many of the people who worked the stalls at the market went out to an organic vegetarian restaurant on a canal, the name of which meant "The Bowler Hat" in Dutch. We sipped soup and coffee verkeert, and, as very few of us there had grown up speaking the same language as anyone else, we all spoke to one another in English. One of them was leaving within the week to return to a monastery in India. The British expatriate was rude and loud and completely fantastic; we sat next to one another and conspired together, laughing at all the same jokes. There was a pair of beautiful Russian twins whom I admired from across the table; Flora whispered to me, "We call them our Russian princesses." And when the sun had gone down and the lights had come on I followed Flora home, to a beautiful place with purple walls in some places, Victorian wallpaper in others, and wallpaper made of sheet music in some of the smaller places. There were dented brass instruments hanging on the walls, puppets on the shelves, Moroccan carpets everywhere. The space glowed.

She took me for walks in the forest, to the beach, on the dunes. We cooked locally grown vegetarian food together and had picnics. She showed me the plants and told me their names and what they were good for. We ate seabuckthorn berries, apples borrowed from the trees of farmers, wild raspberries, and young hawthorn berries. We climbed trees. We drank fresh mint tea. We climbed the wall built by the Germans during the war in fear of an attempt by the British to claim the Netherlands as a land base and port. It was a good deal easier to scale than the barbed wire fence I clambered through a bit later. We saw horses and birds.