The Season's Bounty

Tuesday. A market is held in Stockel today. If I grab bus 316 to the Metro and then ride one stop to the end of the line, I’ll be in the thick of things. Stall after stall of fresh vegetables and ripe fruit manned by pink-cheeked women wearing aprons. The clothes vendors will be out as well, with bohemian skirts and gauzy blouses, t-shirts and children’s clothes. Cheap jewelry sits on tables covered with black velvet. Purses hang from awning supports. A man and woman in white sell freshly made Belgian waffles. Women line up to take home whole chickens cooked to glistening perfection on a rotisserie. The cheese man, stout and dark-haired, cuts wheels and blocks on command. The frite shack does brisk business, and a side street is lined with cut flowers and blooming plants.

A man selling brightly colored tablecloths begins to speak to me in Dutch when I stop to examine his goods. I look up at him and ask “Do you speak English?” He smiles and reveals missing teeth, and then launches into his sales spiel in accented English. He asks if I’m British, and with a bit of reservation, I tell him, no, I’m an American, but I live in Belgium now. He smiles so wide I think his ears are going to fall into his grin. He taps his chest and says, “I love America ! I love it!” He then enthusiastically describes his brother in America and how he goes to visit him in Ellie. “You know Ellie?” For a moment I’m lost, and then it hits me, he’s saying L.A . He has traveled up and down the California coast and visited Yosemite . He’s going back in October—he can hardly wait!

I wonder what California looks like to a Belgian. Glass, steel, wood, concrete and smog. This is a place where every building is made of brick, even the barns and the sidewalks and driveways. Belgians are in love with clay and stone, from their ceramic tile floors to their red tile roofs and the cobblestone driveways and byways. It is no wonder their buildings last hundreds of years. The burnished reds contrast with the always green grass and often gray skies. When we first arrived here, my 15-year-old cousin asked me if I had ever been to Beverly Hills . “All the houses there are white, no?” America shines bright with newness to people with thousands of years of recorded history under their feet.

Gardening is a national past time in Belgium, and the yards are bright with color—window boxes of geraniums, climbing vines trained to frame the garage doors, huge beds of fragrant lavender, begonias in bloom, and piles and piles of roses. Everything is hemmed in by meticulously trimmed hedges. From early spring through the fall, the gardens are never stagnant or neglected but vibrant and ever changing.

Every community and village has multiple parks and hiking trails. Go walking in America , and you’re most likely to see youngish women in white leather shoes and hoodies out on the roads walking with swinging arms and determination. Here walking is a way of life, not a daily discipline. No one dons special shoes or athletic gear to walk. Old and young, men and women, families—they all walk and wander through parks and paths, often accompanied by dogs. The best walking routes are littered with what the dogs leave behind—dodging these canine calling cards is part of life here.

There is a tree-lined lane that curves around wheat fields just outside my neighborhood. I love to walk there, occasionally stepping off into the wanderliing that run into the forests. Take the trail around and it comes to a small pond, the surface skimmed with an uninterrupted blanket of green that cloaks the area in magic and mystery. Towering trees and a weeping willow sweep its edges, and I’ve seen baby ducks emerge from a hidden area in the bank and cautiously part the plants as they explore the pond.

This summer I discovered blackberry bushes off the trail, and the kids and I visited often, staining and pricking our fingers as we tried to extricate the tender fruit from the brambles. We’d carry our pickings home, divide them into heavy ceramic bowls, dust them with sugar, and taste summer. Sweet and tart with hints of sunlight and dusk—a pleasure as old as time, connecting us to the earth and all those who have passed this way.

August 30, 2005