Sint-Katelijne-Waver

I was just beginning to like sixth grade in June of 1997 when we moved back to Belgium. We had already lived there for a little over a year. That was our interregnum between Poland and America. My parents intended to make this return permanent. My father went over first. My mother and sisters and I packed our small fortune into a container that sailed the Atlantic on the U.S.S. Claudia and arrived in Antwerp several weeks after we did. That summer, we lived in a house on the outskirts of Sint-Katelijne-Waver. The town and I shared a saint, but my sister and I were truly heathens. I led the girls in song across the field that held our house, so that the neighbors stirred. We also disturbed the geese, the hens and the hogs. We marched with curtain poles for staffs, collected crabapples in our skirts, and hung bouquets of flowers on the fence in memory of TWA Flight 800, which had crashed the previous summer off Long Island. Our mother called them weeds. She chased after us with a broom because we tramped sand and dirt into the house. Sometimes she forbade us to leave, so we climbed out through the windows. (We knew no keys.) When it rained she sent us to pull down the laundry. When she went to market with my father, we rehearsed for a concert we wanted to stage. The costumes were old bedsheets and were held together by binder clips. When our parents returned home, we showered their car with the very flowers my mother deemed weeds. We also built teepees out of those same bedsheets, and took our Flemish lessons out there. Everything was a celebration. When we heard our cousins would visit from Poland, we begged a neighbor to mow the grass in our field, which we called our garden. The grass was rather like hay. After he mowed it, we toiled with rakes for three days, piling the stuff at the far end, near the TWA memorial, and called it Mount Hay-est. We glistened with our own sap. We connived to go into the centre of town and sit by the roundabout, waiting for our cousins' van, so we could give them the proper welcome. But they got lost, and came by another way. We could not summon their imagination as far as curtain poles and binder clips were concerned, so we settled for three days of fierce Frisbee, likely barefoot. We went to sleep with hay in our hair and down our shirts. The mosquitoes were rich that summer, swarming in hordes under the pines, and our wallpaper was covered with the slap of our father's slipper, our mother's dish towel. The summer was not permanent, after all. When we returned to the States, I could not sleep for the whir of cars in the street. The roof was too close; we had not been able to stuff expanse into the container.