Progress

We lived on the edge of the village, the last house before the farm land started. Across the road from us there was a spot of land with two horses, one brown, one black. The black one only had one eye.

To the right of us, some barren land. Our street, Fransepad, lead up to the gates of the fields called 'De Meent' (officially a word that means communal pasture area). Ffarmers would drive their cattle through the street daily and we had a simple wooden fence to close off our driveway. Sometimes we would forget to close it, and cows, or sometimes horses, would end up eating flowers from the upturned earthenware sewage pipe that served as a flower pot in our garden at the back of our house.

My dad and I would go for walks along the Meent. Up Meentzoom road, past the edge of houses, into the woods, along the cemetary. We'd go in and look at the graves where, five years on, I would be burying my mother. We walked in the light, a dad and his daughter and if I was tired, he'd carry me home.

Somewhere near the end of our walk, just before going back into the village via Bergweg road, there was a spot obscured by overhanging trees. We'd stop there for a while. There was a little hill you could rest on. Which we did. My dad would smoke a cigarette, and I'd just sit, probably babbling away the way a toddler would.

It was "our" spot, and we referred to it as that. I don't think we ever brought my mother there, it was between myself and my father. As safe place we shared.

I moved away from Blaricum when I was 12 and though I've been back to the village, and back to the cemetary once or twice, I've never done that full walk again. I don't know whether our spot's still there, or whether it's been erased from the map like the life we had.

Sometimes I walk around Amsterdam looking for a spot like that.