In the stars

In the stars

There was cake. A strawberry tart with a chocolate key. There were flowers and there was champagne. Because finally, finally the house on Weststraat was ours. We had been looking forward to it for at least four years, if not secretly our whole lives.

I was born on Jacob van Heemskerckstraat. On the last evening before my arrival, my mother, weary of her heavy, tired body, walked up and down the stairs of the dike ten times. Each time, she caught a brief glimpse of the sea and Texel, the stars above and the lights of the villages, and turned back for the clumsy steps down. It worked. That night, the contractions began. About 28 years later, I myself, pregnant with my first child, would move into the same neighborhood and hoist my pregnant body up the stairs as well. Not even to induce labor, but purely out of longing for the sea.

My husband grew up largely in Den Helder, although he lived on Gran Canaria for the first years of his life. An island child, who took his first steps in the sand of the playa, only to then walk effortlessly through the sand along the Helderse coast.

We were 17 and 22 when we kissed for the first time on the dike. It was a Saturday night, Koningstraat was full of life, but we had escaped the revelry to look at the stars and the lights on Texel. (And to kiss, of course, let me be honest.)

Not long after that, I was going to study in Utrecht. I got a room in a student complex that was practically on the border with De Bilt. It could hardly be any closer to the center of the Netherlands. I had dreamed of the big city; I couldn't deny that. And I wasn't lenient about Den Helder. Never again would I return to that grey dullness at the end of the world.

Reality was stubborn. I couldn't settle inland. No wind, no horizon, no sea air, never a place to cool off on a hot day. I swam in a pool there, for lack of anything better. The forest was beautiful, but my eyes constantly watered from the pollen. And everyone seemed to cycle terribly slowly. Only much later did I understand that my legs knew only one pedaling mode: strong. Without a headwind, you suddenly go much faster than the rest.

Even before I graduated, I moved in with him. The boy who was my boyfriend back then, later became my husband and the father of my children. A very small rental flat on the Kerkgracht, once again within crawling distance of the dike. We dreamed of a bigger house and imagined that perhaps one day we could buy a house that would be at least as close to the sea. But first came our first rental home, right behind the dike, where our first son was born, and then our first purchased home in the Indische buurt, where the second arrived. And now, with a child of 17 and one of almost 12, there is finally, finally the house on the Weststraat. With a view of the wharf as a constant reminder of this city's historical connection to the sea. But even better, when we look out of the upstairs windows to the left, with a view of the sea and Texel, and in the evening, the stars and the lights again. I walk out my front door, stroll straight to the first staircase I see, and stand at the top of the dike once more. Call me a romantic, but I think it was always written in the stars. In any case, they showed us the way home.