WINDOWSILL
[another passage from my fictionalized memoir House without Doors, told in the voice of the twelve-year-old Mira]
The palm tree in front of my window always makes me think of the sea. When it is dark and I am lying in bed, I listen to the wind rustling through its branches and pretend I am standing on the beach, feeling the sea breeze brush against my face, and I look out at the gentle waves of the South Coast rolling in, doing their little somersaults before they are drawn back into the open sea.
All the windows in this old house have wooden shutters that you can open to let the cooling breeze of the trade winds blow through all the rooms. There is no glass on these windows. You do not need any glass in the tropics to keep out the cold, like they do in Holland. The modern houses in the suburb of Mahaai do have glass windows and sometimes you cannot even open them. That is to keep the cold air of the air conditioning in.
The windowsills in my room are high, not like those in the living room that are more like benches you can sit on, and so I have to jump to get up. The grownups do not have to worry about us falling out of the window, because each of the upstairs windows has a special frame with wooden bars that reaches about half-way up so that my brother and I can stand on the windowsill without fear. I can stand for hours on the windowsill in my room right by the tall coconut tree that is waving in the wind. But in the modern houses in Mahaai, the windows are built flat on the walls. Without windowsills. Without a place to dream.
(...) I love to stand on my windowsill when it is raining. It is almost like being outdoors in the rain, yet I do not get wet. I breathe in the pure, fresh smells of the downpour washing away the dust outside, until the grownups come rushing upstairs to close the window, so that I will not catch a cold. Then the house becomes dark and gray and all I want to do is to cuddle up in bed under the covers with a good adventure book.
At those times it feels like winter in Holland, where at four in the afternoon it will already be getting dark. Our teachers in school tell us that the Dutch kids have to wake up in the morning when the sun is not yet up and go to school while it is still dark and gloomy. Imagine what it must have been like, in those dark, frightening days of the war, with sirens clanging and the Germans knocking on every closed door, looking for Jews.
And so, I feel lucky I was born on our sunny little island in the tropics, where there are no wars, and nothing terrible ever happens.
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