Author: Elisabeth

‘No one is as old as me’

The rose bush outside my window is top heavy with flowers. Full petalled cups that drop down as if they are too heavy for each stem to support.

 My head feels the same this morning, top heavy and ready to topple. Too full of thoughts to be able to tease them apart.

Ours is a winter sky today and winter skies remind me of Europe, that first time we visited when I was still a young woman, though then I thought myself quite the sophisticate.

 In 1980 when my aunt met me at Schipol airport in Amsterdam she told me later she had been fearful of who and what she might find.
‘But you were just a girl,’ she said, ‘just a young girl.’ And no longer did she feel intimidated.

Now, thirty five years later, my aunt is dead.

My aunt in Holland, the year I was born in Australia, when she herself was a young ‘girl’.

 My aunt who goes by my two middle names, Margaretha Maria, was a twin born half the weight of her twin brother. So sickly was she during her early life that her parents sent her off to live in Munster, where she was allegedly spoiled by her childless aunt and uncle, away from the rigours of life with her parents and six other siblings.

 This was a commonplace event in those days perhaps but one I suspect that had a profound effect on my aunt. Sent away for her physical health with little regard for her emotional state. She felt abandoned.

 My aunt was so unlike her sister, my supremely optimistic mother, who is six years older and very much the opposite.

At 92 years of age my mother wants to live forever.

 My mother believes the world is full of goodness and help is always there when she needs it. Before my father died he told her that although he had not provided well for her after his death, he was sure she would find someone else to take care of her. Not that he took much care of her other than to provide her with many children.

 My aunt on the other hand, did not trust that the world would provide. And on her death notice which recently arrived here in the mail, her children had included these words:
Ik voel me stokoud. Niemand is zo oud als ik. I feel I am so old. No one is as old as me.

 My mother protests. How could my aunt say such a thing? She was not sick. Old, yes, maybe, but not sick.

 Try as I might to explain to my mother that her younger sister had lost the will to live, my mother remains confused, even after she reads Tonny Van Tiggelen’s eulogy.

Tonny, who had been my aunt’s friend for nearly eighty years wrote the eulogy in the form of a letter to her dead friend.
 ‘You would get angry when I told you to eat, otherwise you would die. But you were not interested in living any more.’

 After my aunt’s husband had died in 1994, Tonny said, her friend lost her way. My aunt’s husband as he was dying had arranged for her to live in a new house in Castricum, custom built to suit her needs but for my aunt:
 ‘The house was too big. There was too much sun. You had to walk the stairs and look after the flowers in the garden and you did not like that at all. The next house was smaller but it was too cold with not enough sun. The view was good, but you did not like it any more.’

 Slowly my aunt had stopped eating, Tonny said, and she stopped sharing a glass of wine with her friend. She stopped going out to eat.

 Tonny remembered their friendship. How they walked as flower girls together, on religious occasions, dressed in white with veils; how they rode on their bikes during the war to a village, Boverkaspel, to get food, but had then to flee because someone shot dead a National Socialist in front of them.

Tonny remembered how one of my aunt’s mothers friends had given them brown beans and oliebollen (dough balls) to eat and all the way home they had to stop by the side of the road to relieve themselves. The food had been so rich.

 Tonny remembered the two years they had worked together in a crèche, again during the war, and how they licked the pots and pans clean.

 She remembered the red cabbage feast at my mother’s place with candlelight and in evening dress…and how my aunt had so often said that when she died she would she see what there was to see.

My mother is certain of what she will see after she dies and yet she is reluctant to go off to see it. My aunt on the other hand, who kept an open mind about what she would find, has gone off in search of it.

I miss her already.

A short history of eggs

A full carton of eggs sits alongside the stove.

Every Sunday my mother passes them around, one egg for each child, one for her and two for my father.

She cooks his first in the fry pan alongside a butter soaked slice of bread. Then the brothers each take it in turn to cook theirs. My older sister prefers to boil her egg, hard boiled, the egg yolk as yellow as the sun.

My mother scrambles the little ones’ eggs into a buttery spread at the bottom of a sauce pan.

I take my egg to the corner of the kitchen away from the others and crack it gently on the side of a tea cup. My older sister has taught me how to ease apart the shell with my thumb and finger, so that the inner skin holds like a hinge when I pull the shell back. I can then tip the yolk from one half of the egg shell to the other, letting the white slide into my tea cup.

All the while I keep a close eye on the yolk, not only for blemishes, those red blood blisters that might signify a fertilized egg gone wrong – one I will not eat – but also for ruptures. I must preserve the skin to keep the yolk and white from mixing. The yolk glistens and slips from one side of the shell to the other.

When all the white has slid away into the cup, I offer the yolk to one of my brothers to cook alongside his own. Sometimes the brothers fight over it.

Then I take a fork and a spoonful of sugar – two spoons depending on the size of the egg and amount of white I have collected – and begin to whisk.

It is a tricky business. I must tilt the cup to one side to get maximum egg white under the whisk without spilling any.

I do this for an hour or two. I do this till the kitchen is empty of breakfast eaters. I do this till well past the time when the eight o’clock, the nine o’clock, the ten o’clock Mass are over, by which time it is too late to eat.

I must fast for three hours before Mass and communion, otherwise I will be in sin.

Today, my youngest daughter tells me she is in trouble because of my eggs.
‘It’s your old eggs,’ she says. They’ve caused my allergies. Your old eggs make me the sickly one in the family.’

It is a joke perhaps, but if I am to take it seriously what is she saying? That I should have conceived her earlier, just as I should have begun to whisk my Sunday morning egg at six o’clock in the morning in order to eat it in time for the last Mass at eleven.

I did not plan to have this daughter so late in my life. At the time I called her an afterthought, almost by way of apology, but the Sunday egg became a tradition for me, however late I came to eat it.

Put off the best till last, my mother said. Always save the good stuff. Do all the hard and horrible jobs first and then you will have the greater pleasure of anticipation.

All those years ago when I came home hungry from Mass and went to collect my egg white from the fridge, it still sat in its cup like a fluffy white cloud, but the cloud no longer stuck to the sides. The cloud had come away and slid around the inside of the cup afloat on a trickle of liquid that had leaked its way out, like a rain puddle.

I think my mother is wrong. I think my daughter may be right. There is a point in taking in the best things first. If you wait too long they might spoil.

When I think of the warmth of a freshly laid egg in the cradle of my hand, the warmth of the egg that has just slipped out from its hen mother’s body onto the straw of the hen house, only to land in the cold outside air, I remember my daughter’s birth.

How she hung there upside down in the doctor’s hands, after a quick labour that had surprised us all. Her body slimy and purplish blue. In those first few moments, her first in the world, I wondered through the fog and haze of a painful labour, will she ever breathe?

And then came the cry, the loud scratching sound that is a newborn’s cry, and I could let myself think the unthinkable.

If she had left the best till last, if she had held off that first breath, then she would not be here today to complain about her mother’s old eggs.