Double rooted

The former title was: ‘A stranger at home’, but that sounds so negative. So let me start on a positive note:

Wind arriving. Leaves falling. Cold attaching to the brick structures and attacking the body, however much I am being reshaped, cold is not part of the picture. But let’s get over with it: practicing cold showers and the prospect of touring somewhere in winter is easy when the sun shines. We are doing things different compared to ‘normal’, self sustainability means also working on staying healty.

The earth is tired and depleted and yellowish. Burned. The hottest month of August since the temperature count started in Hungary. The well with which we water the garden is still giving, although with bursts. Bursts, like the earth flees jumping to me when I pass cabbages, Brussels sprouts and kale. Things I didn’t like most of my life. Sugar which I always loved is gone. Conventional bread too.

Summer means bleak, light colored fields. Here, in between, faded green patched with small concentrated villages modest in outlook. My joy when I flew above this land I now live was overwhelming. Not because of the foam parties in Budapest or the beer bars, never for the Hungarian cuisine that stopped existing but for the calm and great possibilities of natural living. For the predictability of the never changing frame I look at in the mornings. The set up of trees, swaying or still, only ever gaining in height. At times succumbing, returning to the soil.

Geo dressed in shorts in late September, the continental climate so much more pleasant than the Dutch temperate climate.

A deep rumble of tractors. High pitched shrieks of air-jets, not unlike Indian Bollywood singers, the latter soothing. Later on the deer that rut, their voices accented by the natural acoustic of a forest. An ever ongoing of cicadas. No doubt the nothingness, at times the boredom and the absence of coming to a desired standstill in a world that drives madly makes a hiccup startling.

Once a year bigger garbage is collected by the trash hauler. Days in advance people, especially Roma drive by to find useable material. We found a load of treasures too: 6 pieces of hand made wooden furniture that I will upholster. I find it unthinkable to throw out such valuables.

Going back to the Netherlands means a full immersion into a working society, something I can miss out on but mostly not. I understand people talking, even if I don’t want to. Early mornings sitting outside when I need quietness but there hardly is. Sitting open air in the Netherlands is still feeling imprisoned, eyes bouncing against walls. Benefits are embraced and I buy whatever I can’t get a hold on in Hungary. Doing so without the postal service means being among a multitude of people, which feels too much. Entering the square around the cathedral I feel I am thrown back into the middle ages. Where I am, unwillingly, on a stage to perform, where oddities are showed off. People are dressed in a huge variety of apparel and sizes that I feel overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. I have to flee the scene. At once. By doing so I pass a young obese woman who has to rest, already tired before entering the shopping part. She rubbing her knees and looks exhausted, like me but for different reasons.

Okra soup with fufu, the Nigerian inspired dish I came to love when I cycled through. Plastic wrapping not very sustainable I wanted to keep to the original.

The Netherlands have me sleep quietly alright, with unfamiliar sounds, nights that are fully illuminated at the other side of the black-out curtain. A full moon now is street lanterns. A Middle Eastern shop a cacophony of immigrants, or economical refugees not to be found in Hungary. A few odd Dutch and me smiling, lingering, soaking it all up for I so appreciate people speaking a language I understand. Finally finding sumac. Shukran. Goedenmiddag. Dank je wel. Salam alaikum. The mind taking a flying carpet: to be in continental Hungary is where I was led. It could have been Germany or Spain, Pakistan or Paraguay, it would have brought me more manioc.

Chipa as I enjoyed them in Paraguay are now part of my diet and I can’t get enough of them: not very nutricional correct but filling for hours on end and that is nice when you want to work the soil for a few hours straight.

Bees land on my plate. The onset of insects is never ceasing, now shieldbugs hitchhike into the rooms. Also called stinkbugs because of their smell: similar to cilantro, the seed I sow most and the herb I eat every day. Frogs jump gracefully, though I would call it rather lack of preciseness, into the pond when I come too close. The sun is ever present and I dread the moment it won’t. Walking past overhanging topinambur, through mushy pears and past split wood. Nowhere as comfortable as home. Coffees with ghee. Wool from the delivery man I can’t speak to. A cat at ease, leaving gallbladders from her hunts on the patio, hot sunshine drying them into hollow hulls.

The Netherlands makes me normal with a funny embroidered ribbon around my neck (or rather above it). The postal delivery man from the Maghreb moves with such ease he is obviously more integrated than his receiving end (but maybe not more than his grandma was what I feel in Hungary). Being long enough in the Netherlands dots you with confidence and often apparent awareness, or arrogance.

Small as Catpaw is this little zipper pouch called, hand dyed with carob pods from the forest.

Therefore, I recognize the gate that brings me back to Hungary without having seen the board information. I now know how the look of less confidence looks like. Little do I know that the flight is arranged such that I sit in front of young Dutch giggling fellows eating stink nuts with fumes of beer harrowing over me. They’re preparing for the bars. Skinnier, timid and anguished looking versus arrogant, firm, half undressed or in trying, missing the fashionable mark, becoming clownish. Summer prevails, especially mine. My garden is left to it’s own devices in the height of August, where school youth must go on holiday now, or not. By the masses, people fly out and drive over congested highways to countries so hot they desire shade.

On such very hot summer days people from Hungarian villages gather in the evenings and sit on benches facing the road. Us driving past are looked upon as outsiders, so it feels. As different. On our patch I don’t feel the Hungarian world, we are our own. A magnificent feeling, as if traveling without the ever changing beauty, however much longed to often times, instead a stagnant one, equally longed for. When I do meet people, scarcely, it are hunters, slowing down in their vehicles to have a closer, longer look at me. They seem not to be sure what to make of it. So I smile and wave, a trailer trotting behind me from a night in the woods. Camping between hunting towers, shots being fired. Hoping I am out of range, wondering why exactly it was I wanted to sleep here?

In summer more than in winter being in the Netherlands is also being home. Time management exist here and I am fully in: I talk more in 3 weeks than I do in 3 years in Hungary. Strolling through town is marvelous because people greet, come over, embrace and talk. The doctor, in my dad’s eyes, who isn’t a doctor but a total and skinny stranger, talks: ‘Do I look like a doctor? Look at me, I don’t appear as the prime example of health, do I?’, gesturing at his sigaret. My father’s friends, also sitting on the bench facing the road and thus life, they talk endlessly about pigeon racing and other long past days. They also look away from the old folks home, hoping never to end up in a money eating institution, instead returning to the soil before.

Pouch India has tiny rounds cut out from CD’s attached to sturdy hemp cotton, inspired on old-fashioned Afghan wallets.

Having kept the position from long-term traveling means recognizing like-minded people, something that gets more challenging when aging. I love to see single, separate, creative, self-thinking people. They stand out. They look unsame. I hardly know where they are. Except for the few I meet back home. Fire in the eyes. Determination. Possibilities. A new day with new chances. I don’t see it, except the rebelliousness in pre-pubertal Roma girls. I don’t search as I depend on the power of like minded attraction. The precious few I meet are of an opposition where the only resemblance is living in the same country (exceptions aside). It is the same with cycling through Hungary or the Netherlands; it just doesn’t deliver, the trouble is outliving the bliss.

Pouch Leah & Judah tells a story about our first two lost cats, something so common in the Hungarian forested areas.

So, when the airplane touches ground I notice tears in my eyes, collecting like water in an absorbing spongy. The plains, dried up meadows and bare fields around Ferenc Liszt airport give way to low mountain ranges in the distance, colors bleak and the sky so warm it has become laden. Yet, a lot more pleasant and cool than the suffocating Dutch smothering that brings headache. Unlike the feeling I have come to borne inside, unexpectedly. The feeling of coming home. The broad Danube river, which doesn’t spark me the least bit, I view now as a route towards adventurous places. Seen from an airplane window perspective, places far off appear touchable. I feel Bosnia beckoning and being led out of the Netherlands feels instantly good as I notice that I have grown roots in Hungary.

Pouch Llama is a fancy one, inspired on a llama its adornments, hand dyed with mulberry from the forest.

Coming home I meet with a garden exploded, seconds before a doe, a mother deer with her two fawns, tiny babies almost the size of big hares, graze in the darkness at our home, jumping clumsily legs splashing funny directions back into the woods. My own manicured piece of land is amazing yet a little painful to see: the work I invested now being invisible. Arms of tomato grow wild and break under their weight, soy beans dried out, peppers outgrown by hideous weed bushes, okra’s uneaten and pumpkins disorderly seeking new routes. Above this all lays a quietness that is not of this world.

The goodness of the people I met in the Netherlands was enabled by a common language and the establishments of relationships, bringing more than a fulfilled mind, things like connection and goosebumps, amber and alternative cook books. Being a traveler has that same effect but living in a foreign country impossible to integrate does not. Our patch gives full integration vibes but as soon as I am out it ceases. Walking through immigration at Ferensz Liszt airport in summer overwhelms me with a feeling I had the first times in India: on to the big grand unknown. The atmosphere is similar, perhaps because of the few Sikhs, the multitude of tourists and the warmth. Even after some years this feeling is still in place, perhaps because feeling all at once at home and in a country where I can connect only on the level as a traveler.

Drawstring pouch Paraguay Chaco is made entirely by hand when cycling came to a halt at a Mennonite farm in deep Paraguay.

A brick home cool in summer and bone cold in winter, where days merge into another season and the scene at the back is changed by only moonlight and a collapsing tree. The scene in the front unchangeable. So it makes me as curious as our cat who watches through the window when, for once, a person walks by. It is Geo who walks in the rain. When it doesn’t rain, which was most of the summer, I am out. Because, though I might not feel integrated, I am outside as the old-fashioned rural style Hungarian life dictates. And having an outside, I think it is a poverty to not have your own supply of fresh vegetables and fruits, roots and herbs. I feel an own garden is better than all the shops at your door step. My stay at the Netherlands was tainted by the loss of what I live in Hungary. I see both worlds through glasses, none of them encased with true colors. Will the traveler ever leave the one who choose to be so?

I hope not.

Pouch Malaga is dyed with flowers from the garden: tagetes erecta & calendula officinalis.

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