dollville

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 15:46

Its wednesday afternoon - its a low white sky day. The solid white layer is starting to separte into clouds allowing for some direct sunlight.
I just got an email from a friend back home describing a massive midwestern storm causing the morning there where he is in Dollville, USA to be blackened by thunderclouds. Cool morning! What a great way to start a day! That is one consolation to a life played out in the midwest. Midwestern thunderstorms!!!!
The last great storm i recall was back in '97 when bart and i had the fortune of living in our friends old wooden american turn of the last century house...
i was making us a pot of tea and then this summer storm broke - the house had a wrap around front porch so we took our tea and sat out there and the storm was the wildest heavy storm i have been in since.
As a kid school trained us to go to the basement for tornado warnings except i always thought it funny because school didnt have a basement.
Back then when i was at my grandmothers when a storm came thru she always took her cigarettes and me outside and not to the basement. When she was alive she also lived in one of those turn of the century wooden american houses. Going to the porch for a storm that frightened me but then i came to admire her for it. Over her house used to be the biggest black walnut trees.
When a storm passed by she would drag me to the back porch to watch it smoke a cigarette and we'd sit in metal chairs...
The weather here is nothing like that. The houses here are nothing like those great old houses with front and back porches, under big trees with cellar doors outside the house. The wood floors of the porches painted gray while all the other wood was painted stark white. The windows were tall single glazed with a few large panes of glass. The kinda glass that was slightly wavy distorting the images seen looked thru them. Porches the size of a small room but big enough to actually use, not decorator attachments from tract housing suburbia. Its nostalgic of me i know but those were great houses not very big but big enough.
Here Belgian houses are made of brick and concrete. the weather is damp and the damp gets in the bricks so there is always this smell in the air. its not a bad smell its just a smell i have no past associations with. so its a smell that remains foreign to me reminds me a constant reminder of my not belonging here altho i live with it everyday.
These brick houses are like echo chambers and even the smallest noise within a room can be a bit loud or harsh. Back in those wooden house sounds are muted in a softer way but you can hear everything in those houses from any room!
We'd visit grandma twice a month. When we would leave she would stand in front of a window and watch us drive away. The windows were tall and verticle unlike the horizontle windows you see today. I can still see the dark green shade pulled half way down with her standing under it. Her with her breast cancer lump the size of an apple which she'd refuse to get surgery for.
My dad (WWII vet) told me that she told him to vote Democrat because that way when he'd die he'd have a dollar in his pocket with the Republicans that pocket would be picked clean. it is for that reason i vote like she and my dad.
That house of hers was sold in the late seventies not surprizingly after she succumbed to her cancer. The big trees torn down along with the back garage that was more like a barn. The white painted over in a sick yellow color. The back porch built in with small windows and tho that's how the house is now that is not how i remember the place at all.
I see the old windows, the old wood painted white. The old trees standing tall over the one and half storey frame house. When grandma stood in a window she would take up only one quarter of its size.
Thats how i see her now - standing thru that tall four paned sash window. Me looking out the back window of an old long sleek blue FORD station wagon.
Grandma trapped alone in her old age and her old house. Me trapped alone in the back seat of a "family" car just above the fuel tank which i could always hear sloshing around. Separated by endless roads, powerlines, store signs, street lights, past woodlands passing into farmland giving way to stripmalling and parkinglots. Trapped in the consumerism of the automotive retail age.
Not uncommon to these here southern low lands of northern europe the clouds have reattached to a permanent white layer filtering the afternoons sunlight into a white haze. Its a stark kinda bright light that reminds me where i am and how far away from a place that was once home, a place that is no longer there.