I see my brother and sister perhaps a little more often than once a year, we meet this week in a roadside restaurant in Brabant. I think all three of us were very pleased with this unexpected compromise on location. The weather reports are already old-fashioned: cold air from Russia will blow over the country that day, a bit like the old days when we couldn’t go out without a hat in winter. My mother turned the parental home into a terrarium, a few degrees warmer every year, when she opened the front door steam came out.
Then no one except my parents was interested, now no one is reluctant. This is what’s left of all the shared memories: a few hours in a place we’ve all never been, although I think I once witnessed a pig farmer meeting that got out of hand in the same restaurant as a reporter.
I received a business gift that I can’t use: a brick oven for pizzas that can heat up to four hundred degrees. I asked my brother if it would help him, but his eyesight is so bad that it didn’t seem ideal to him. Moreover: he does eat pizzas, but they come warm in a box. My sister didn’t want the thing either, but her youngest daughter might.
If only my mother were still alive. She was happy with any electrical appliance. She had opened the package and exclaimed that she had always wanted a pizza oven
If only my mother were alive, she would be happy with any electrical appliance. She had an electric blanket and a kettle for the hot water bottle on her bedside table. She said: “When the power goes out they really bring me to my knees.”
You could give her such a gift without carefully informing her in advance. She had opened the package and exclaimed that she had always wanted a pizza oven and had undoubtedly used the thing for something it was not intended for: frying eggs, making sandwiches or burning waste paper. I will think of her when I walk into that roadside restaurant with that enormous box.
Furthermore, it will continue as it always does: by saying that we should see each other more often, then we will call a few more times to say that it was very cold, but that the weather has not been too bad and my daughters are enjoying the idea that they have family after all. Somewhere far away from the daily grind, the Van Roosmalens are buzzing.
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