I'm singing in the...

Living in the wide open spaces of the countryside cuts you down to size.  You feel appropriately insignificant, mother nature in her extremes is writ large and subject to inexplicable whimsy.  Moving to the bricked-in spaces of the city creates this pulse-quickening sense of expansiveness, all those languages, accents, skin colors, eye shapes, extraordinary personal histories, the swerve of social history evident in heroic buildings, the ringing trams, clustered bicycles--and mmm, those bookstores.  All that potential and hectic activity give the impression that we, as individuals, really can blaze our own trails. It simply took tasting hummus heaped onto sesame-speckled bread rings from a local Turkish market to realize I've just plain missed certain things.

Summer, in the rain.

But first I had to get used to stoplights again. By this I mean the stoplights keeping me from places I just have to get to by a certain time.  Because being in a hurry is a near-obligatory sub-clause of city life, and everyone's in a hurry here because we're all late because half of the transportation infrastructure in Amsterdam is under construction.  I only wish I was exaggerating.

The convertible mini cooper, in the rain.

Maybe you can't take the city out of the girl, not even after three years in what came tantalizingly close to southern French heaven.  (Oh, don't make me think of that garden I had to leave behind.) Here, there's just a rain-sodden terrace (a real luxury, should the un ever choose to shine again).  But the heels rise, the pants (and everything else) are tighter, and the wildness is found not beneath the scrub oak but rather in tribal-looking makeup and in that jaunty, sharp-hipped confidence of the (young) Dutch. Who are neck-twistingly taller than me, I must add.

The traffic, in the rain.

Good grief there's a lot of energy that gets burned in a move, lots of things happening at the same time and going in different directions.  Health insurance, a smooth transition for the kids, a coatrack (for all the raingear and coats in August/September). My thoughts are as jumbled as my files. Meanwhile, my to-do list is longer than a Dutchman's leg--and growing.  So this is partly why I haven't had really special photos to show you.  But it's been raining here, too.  A lot.  More than usual.  The rain barely pauses, and then only to switch to Chicago-style gusts of wind, because a proper Dutch day has all four seasons. And then some.  And oh, dear, I'd forgotten how to dress for this ongoing climatogical change; me and my silly, filmy, country summer wear.  But it's coming back to me.  And so is my affection for this laid-back, at times grouchy (can you blame them with this weather?), always engaging city.