It’s not the best time of year to let yourself go. Ageing winter leaves the ground muddy, people weary, prospects grey, and tempers short. Yet this is the moment that sanitation workers chose to go on strike. The strike lasted only five days, but by the fifth day mounds of trash had begun gathering by the garbage chutes.
Strikes in the Netherlands are very scripted. Dates are set, and the city government announces them. Advice is published on how to survive the inconvenience. The press pitches in with sidebars and commentary. Employers and school administrators make contingency plans. There’s nothing very wild about these cats.
It’s enough to make one question: did I ever really understand the point of a strike? Was it to cripple the employer? It seems to cripple everyone else more. Was it to stress the importance of the work that labourers do? It seems to put people in mind of what’s not being done. Is the point to make the public think that the workers deserve more money? It seems designed rather to put people in mind of budgets, of all the money being spent on allowances and adjustments required by the strike and on the subsequent clean-up.
After the strike was done, things only got worse. Of course, not all neighbourhoods could be cleaned the minute the strike ended. In fact, many areas went another five days without pickup, even though the city mobilized extra workers. Garbage bags piled up higher. Some bags broke, and trash drifted across the roads and squares. This is our city as winter limps into its final weeks.
Wednesday, February 22, 2023
Sunday, February 19, 2023
This package was taking too long! Little Ren and I had picked out a pretty, red dress for her online. She had seen something on TV, I’m guessing, and so, suddenly, she had determined that she had an urgent need for a long dress. And so we did it; we ordered something online for her. Every day afterward, she asked whether the dress had arrived.
She decided the time had come for action. She picked out some paper and pens. She sat on the floor and began drawing capital letters in bold marker colours. It took her twenty minutes, but she painstakingly produced a colourful letter to the postman. “Postman,” she wrote, “please give me my dress.” She even folded a sheet of paper to make an envelope. She put the whole package together and pushed it into the mail slot in our front door. Later, I discreetly removed it. “The mailman must have picked it up,” I told her.
It’s a season of longing. February teases us with thaws and breaks in the clouds. The winds pick up and make us restless. I hear birdsong in the morning. Night is in retreat. We cycle to school in daylight. There’s some sun in the windows when I cook dinner.
The weather is changeable as a pinwheel. You can follow the path of blue patches of sky among the clouds, even as a barely perceptible mist falls on your face. You can warm yourself in a patch of sunlight, even as a wall of dark clouds approaches from the west. There’s something enjoyable about the capriciousness of it, after weeks of consolidated weather fronts: raining for days, then clear and cold for days. Nothing expresses the longing for spring better than the protean, seaside weather of February, blustery and shedding its fleeting light showers on us, while the seagulls wheel and cry overhead.
The day is coming. The cherry blossoms will open, and Little Ren will take her first spring promenade in a long red dress. The postman will deliver.
Tuesday, February 07, 2023
Baby Josie takes too much enjoyment in correcting her little sister. Now Little Ren is crying because she wanted to believe that the thin layer of white on the ground was snow. She has an affection for snow: she identifies as a winter baby. Winter is her season. During the rest of the year, she looks forward to seeing snow. This year we have not been fortunate. Even now, during our second cold snap of the season, we aren’t seeing any precipitation. Only this lowering fog, and the white condensation on cars and road and grass. There’s no snow, but only frost.
It's a word Baby takes up, as we set out on bikes, to her little sister’s increasing agitation. “It’s just frost, Ren.” They’re at an age when taunting each other is entertaining. Entertaining, and hurtful. Ren is heart-broken. “It’s just like snow, isn’t it?” I say, trying to lift her spirits. It’s just ice from the sky. Ren isn’t buying it.
“Look at the sky,” I say. This is a game we play often, while we cycle to school. At this time of year, we often catch pretty sunrises. Today, the fog is too thick. But instead of casting colours into an open sky, the sun is playing tricks with the fog. To the right, over the river, the light glows in a kind of archway among the fog. I’m not sure how that happens – the sun rises to our left, – but it’s a lovely sight. Little Ren is quiet now, riding complacently in the child’s seat behind me, watching the morning unfold. The frost is forgotten.
Later, after dropping the girls at school, I’m crossing the Erasmusbrug just as the fog is breaking. The sun sends long rays through the remains of the low clouds, reflecting off the high pillar of the bridge, racing across the road, and striking the waters of the wide river below.