How soon is now?

Navigating life in the Netherlands, embracing no schedule, and finding joy in the small things.

Apologies for leaving you all reading flash fiction for a few days, but William and I both took a turn being down with a cold which has been a rather annoying upset to our otherwise utterly idyllic one-room apartment life (HA!). Thankfully, I was having fun writing little stories instead of feeling badly that I’m across the world and laid out on the couch (see below the fold if you’re interested).

Today, we visited Den Haag to tour an apartment and the agent mentioned something about being away for the weekend and I genuinely wondered how far away that might be. A quick check of my phone and I understood why he brought it up.

Before we left the US and after the haze of that bleary period before the year’s end, I remember first losing track of what day it was. Whether or not it was a weekday or weekend barely mattered to two unemployed people who were packing up their home. It only became an issue when we wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t open.

When I first traveled abroad in high school, I was in the middle of a French math class with my host sister when I found myself unable to keep my eyes open. It was unlike anything my sixteen year old self had ever encountered. I couldn’t make this analogy at the time since the devices weren’t yet ubiquitous, but the feeling must be exactly what your iPhone feels like when you hold down the power button until everything goes blank.

Let’s not count how many years later, but I know now that it was good Lady Jetlag sneaking up on me. At the time, I was young enough that I had no concept of the change, let alone its impacts on my physical body. All I could think was that I was in goddamn France and there was far too much to see in such a short trip! For posterity’s sake, I tried my best…and I still can’t believe that I brought home more than two dozen rolls of film.

That’s right everyone, I was sixteen BEFORE digital cameras when you still had to ration the number of pictures you took and pay someone to transfer each of them onto a piece of paper…and hope they were in focus since it would be weeks from taking to holding the photo…

Since we landed here in the Netherlands (golly) three weeks ago, I haven’t had a job to wake up for and have had one occasion to set an alarm. Thankfully, our feline companions’ hunger pangs serve to mark the passing of the hours rather effectively. As far as the clocks go, we’re watching the time back home to know if it’s okay to try to contact someone or bang our heads against the wall calling a number promising “customer service.”

After five calls to Delta and two to American Express, I have gotten the refund for our return tickets.

I have been struggling against the idea of how a day is “meant” to be allocated, telling myself that I “should” have breakfast between 8 and 11, after which I am “supposed” to have lunch. My overly manufactured sense of time tells me that it is improper to eat when I am hungry, instead I should fill my plate at the appropriate times.

A few days ago, I had a ham sandwich with spreadable Gouda at 10:30 AM and nothing terrible happened. Well, too much cheese has slowed the proverbial works…but it is SPREADABLE GOUDA and I am only human!

I have handfuls of chocolate sprinkles (as common here as beans on toast might be in the UK) whenever I feel like it, and my body is still unsure about adopting a circadian rhythm based on the local day and night. Yesterday, I caught myself thinking, “Oh, it’s 3 PM, I can’t have a sandwich now.” I thought I might “ruin my dinner” or that I should save my eating until the “appointed time” because it’s utter lunacy to have a sandwich in the middle of the afternoon simply because you want one, right?

This is all happening inside the same mind that decided to have paprika flavored potato chips for breakfast for two days in a row…

In January of 1914, my great-grandmother married a man she had met three times and left everything and everyone she knew behind to join her new husband in Wyoming where they would homestead and farm bees. Having grown up in a tight-knit, intellectually-forward family, this was the first time she would be truly separated from them. She spent the next few years learning how to live in a strange place and recording everything in the typed letters she would send back to the family in Indiana.

Sound familiar?

In 1986, my great aunt Cecilia collated and published these letters. The book is now out of print, but, of course, there’s been a copy on my mother’s shelf for as long as I can remember (which isn’t much before 1986 if I’m being honest). Shortly before William and I left Minnesota, my mother presented me with her copy because it seemed like the best time to crawl inside the head of an ancestor who did something very similar to what I’ve done 111 years later.

As she expected, I am seeing just how many of the instincts and ideals have been passed along the line of genetics from my great-grandmother, to my grandfather, and through my mother to me. I’ve not gotten too far as there’s always something drawing my magpie mind in a different direction, but my mother wanted me to have this little piece of our history on hand and I am very glad.

“One thing that seems so strange here is that there is nothing here by which to regulate your clock. If your clock doesn't keep exact time you never know it till you go some place. There are no whistles or bells that we can hear. The train goes by, but that is hardly accurate enough to time a clock by. We think now we are half an hour fast…. As soon as we get correct time again we shall have to keep all our pieces going for a while until we find out what is what.” —January 13th, 1914

It seems across the years between us that my great-grandmother and I shared the same feeling of being a bit lost as to when exactly “now” is in our new lives, especially according to the clock.

I like to think she would also laugh at the clock in our apartment, perpetually stuck at a minute to ten…and labeled with a Dutch language learning sticker.

In my previous life in the United States, I worked remotely which meant I routinely did the mental math for four different time zones to schedule meetings, to say nothing of the insanity that Arizona doesn’t observe daylight savings time or accounting for when I had teams in India.

For as certain as the core four US timezones feel, they were implemented in 1883. That’s AFTER the Civil War. As modern humans, we “know” that time is split into zones across the globe; however, it’s still a structure that we invented. Yes, from the beginning of everything, creatures have marked the passage of days and nights, but the idea that it’s 2:30 in Chicago when it’s 3:30 in Cleveland is not a natural law or anything.

“To send a letter takes four days from you to us. That is, it gets here to the house by rural delivery the fourth day from the day you mail it in Bloomington…. Now in case you should need to reach us in a hurry, a telegram sent to Powell to get there before twelve o’clock would reach us the same afternoon at about three o’clock or thereabouts. A night letter sent from Bloomington ought to reach us the next afternoon.” —January 13th, 1914

Had my great-grandmother been writing only 35 years earlier, none of that math would have worked since there was no rhyme or reason to how time was marked in Powell, WY as opposed to Bloomington, IN. Up until 1883, what time it was in a place was a LOCAL decision. You could arrive in Chicago, on a train from Cleveland, and—much like visiting Australia—it might be earlier than it had been when you left.

And here I think I’m confused by thumbing my nose at traditional mealtimes…

Tangent: timezones were implemented in the US after a Congressional pressure campaign by the railways. From their perspective, it was madness to try to maintain a schedule. Now, I’m not lambasting their lobbying because I do see the reasoning; however, I feel compelled to note that it was a commercial enterprise, not citizens, that successfully enacted federal change…how utterly American.

Up until three weeks ago, the longest I’d spent outside of the US was a few months and I’d always “gone back home.” I remember having the hard hits of jet lag when I studied in Moscow and in my time in Italy, but both of those were still “trips” and had a return ticket, meaning I suffered through adjustments in order to keep learning and exploring, my body somehow understanding that this was temporary. There was always a time at which I would return to my regularly scheduled programming.

This time, we’re not headed back soon, nor are we sure to have anything that holds us to a “normal” schedule in the near-term. William’s business will be his to manage and while I am looking, I’m not in any rush to rejoin the “rat race” and live according to a “regular schedule.”

On one hand, it’s strange to slow down and even stop after the two months of non-stop action and stress that saw us making all the preparations for the leap but, on the other, it’s SO refreshing to not give a shit about whether it’s an appropriate time for a stroopwafel (the answer is always yes, by the way). It’s refreshing to NOT have my days dictated by a structure that only serves to make me anxious in the ways I’m not adhering to it.

At first I found it odd that the only clock in our rental shows a minute to ten perpetually, but now I kind of like it. If you want to know what time the rest of the world thinks it is, you have to look elsewhere instead of just going with the feeling of what sounds like it should come next.

For now, I’m thinking about a bit of that Gouda on literally anything…

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Letters from Honeyhill: A Woman’s View of Homesteading 1914-1931, by Cecilia Hennel Hendricks; edited by Cecilia Hendricks Wahl. Published by Bristlecone Books, 1986. Read more about her here.

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