Home, Sweet Home

Liege – Guillemins

Thalys.

A very fast train takes me from Schiphol Airport Station across a country, flat.

To a country, flat.

Graffiti on bridges, long rows of greenhouses, red brick buildings, the exoticism of commuters, earthy language of potato eaters. It is the sound of papa’s Flemish workers stopping at our house, on their way to the steel factory, dropping off potatoes or strawberries grown on their farms back home, North of our French speaking, coal and steel Wallonia.

Slagheaps.. built by women in an earlier time..

My first mountains..

Wind towers along a river, a green blur now. This train moves fast. Soon I’ll be in Brussels, chasing a connection to Liege, and reunion with papa, my sister and her family, friends and cousins, and that other language, that sort of French, fire in the voice, ample gestures. To non speakers, fishmongers yelling at each other.

To us… that maternal tongue so warm and cosy, down to earth and earthy too… Belgians of the North, Belgians of the South. Same same.

Cloitre, Eglise Saint Denis.

Belgium. The national soil that rooted me in common sense, the world in miniature as I look out of the train window, little houses, little trees, little valleys. And everywhere, the stone lace of cathedrals bell towers, reaching for the sky.