Saga of the BIG WHITE BOX

This is the story of The Big White Box.

Back in the Illinois hotel room, I was faced with choices--what would fit in a suitcase and a box, and what would have to stay behind. The Florida house was emptied, the hotel room had been nearly emptied, too, but when you're thinking of all the Stuff you've accumulated over 50 years, what is left in a hotel room doesn't look like much to you. But it looks like a hell of a lot to KLM and other airlines.

So when I learn that KLM will allow two checked pieces, I run out to buy two boxes, the 18" x 18" x 18" brown box that I hoped would hold everything, and a white 24" x 18" x 18" if not. The sum of sides must not exceed 62", so that was the limit. Sure enough, I have to unpack the small box and pack the larger white one. This is noon, and my flight leaves at 5 pm.

I seal the box and at the last moment write the Netherlands hotel address and phone number on it, and my last name on every surface. I'm all packed but running late. You've read earlier about my messy transit through O'Hare airport, and the Big White Box followed me every step; it disappears into Security, and I disappear into the departure area. The next morning at Schiphol airport it fails to show. When the nice Dutch lady at Baggage Service asks me how big it is and I tell her with my hands, she gasps. In best Netherlands form, she wags a finger at me, hands me an official receipt for my trouble, and tells me it will be all right.

It was bloody well not all right...

• They phone Saturday night that it will arrive Sunday morning.
• They phone Sunday morning that the Bighh Vite Bucks will arrive Sunday afternoon.
• They phone Sunday afternoon that Meneer'ssh Very Bighh Vite Bucks weighs 44 kilos and so will require delivery on a special truck, Monday morning. Or I can come to the airport Monday morning and they will pay me 20 euros. I have no car yet--it's Sunday, after all--so the round trip will cost me 120 euros taxi fare or 40 euros taxi fare plus 10 euros train fare plus three hours' time. I signal to the hotel desk: No Thanks.
• They phone Monday morning that it will, without fail, zeker appear Tuesday morning, and sure enough the desk points to the monster, and I get on my knees and hug it.
• Maybe that would have gone better if I had hugged it in Chicago.

As I load it into my new rental car Tuesday morning, and my new landlady appears in the parking lot. We drive to the apartment, she opens the front door, and I nearly faint. Oh my God, I think to myself, if I try to live here for a year I will DIE. Here is the entry procedure:

1. I unlock front door, enter, lock door behind me (extra points if carrying groceries, etc).
2. Climb first then second circular flight of stairs.
3. Unlock glass door to the outside, step through, lock door behind me (extra points if carrying).
4. Walk 15 meters across other apartment's flat roof. I am not making this up. (Extra points if raining.)
5. Unlock third door, step through, lock door behind me (third lock) (extra points etc).
6. No, we're not finished yet.
7. Doff shoes. Pick up stuff, mount steep steps absent any handrail, two turns past toilet. Dump stuff. Home again.

To go out, reverse process. No wonder the Dutch get home and stay home. Thuis blijven, they say.

Now, about the toilet. It is the size of a Corsican jail cell, if cleaner. Did I mention that the toilet and bathroom (actually, shower room) are separate. No, not just separate...on separate floors. You see, our climb into the stratosphere is in fact not done yet: it is a two-story apartment!!! To wash clothes or self requires another climb up steep stairs through the middle of the living room. In fact, I think I know how this apartment was designed slapped together. The other five apartments in the building got first dibs on space, and mine is tinkertoyed together from whatever space was left over. That has to be it.

After the day's work I come through the first of my new Trinity of Locked Doors, and in a crouch, there on the floor and eager to put an end my days in a spectacular, Icarian spill down the stairs lurks...the Big White Box--horrible, reptilian, relentlessly evil.
 

But already this place is home, and it sure isn't Florida out there. Anyway...a little WD-40 in the rusty locks, and after a few trips carrying up contents of the Big White Box up--piecewise, safely, in a successful bid to outwit it--and I hardly even notice the stairs any more. (How such a flat country can be so obsessed with steep stairs I haven't figured out yet.)
 

I remember my very first thought when I looked about the apartment with just the first of my things in it: So this is where my novel gets finished. I will sit at the desk and look down Achtermeulenweg and edit its 111000 words. This seems possible, even inevitable. A very good omen.

The rainy evening I spend unpacking enough things to remain clothed this week. Even the stuffed animals made it OK from: being lifted kicking and screaming (not really) for the last time from my writing desk in Florida, then riding in the car over the snow-covered mountain roads and across the Midwest, suffering with me in the claustrophobic Illinois hotel room where for all I know they decided we would live, then all of a sudden trucks and movers and boxes AGAIN, then a clandestine ride across big, big water. Well. When I grow utterly bored with unpacking (ten minutes) I walk in the mist to old Bussum and a nice dinner, and I walk home. Home. Sometime this week I'll have to figure out the grocery store. But not today. Who knows what the future will bring in this land of bicycles, but for now this is home. This is home. This is home.