Our new home in the Netherlands sits in a mundane residential area full of young families like ours. The street name comes from made (‘meadow’), still referring to a field that once lay here and now survives only in the name (just how the name Shanghai refers to a river that no longer exists). And cycling through the villages around Hattem, I keep meeting names like it.
Nearby Epe, for centuries, was low-lying marshy ground fed by springs and streams, and its name holds the old word apa (‘water’). Wezep pairs that same apa with wiso (‘meadow’): roughly, the watercourse by the meadow. Wapenveld joins veld (‘field’) to wapel (‘marshy lowland’). And Heerde is usually connected to herdō (‘herd’) — referring to a livestock and farming region, and no coincidence, perhaps, that its coat of arms even today carries two sheep’s heads and an ox’s head.
Then there is Hattem. The last part of the name is heem, an old Dutch word meaning something close to dwelling, home. It works the way ‘家 jiā’ does in Chinese, where the same word refers both to the physical building you call home, as well as your family living inside it. In similar fashion, heem means Hattem to me — but it also means my dad’s music, and the books my mom read aloud to me. The trees I played under. The lakes and the paths through the forest, the smell of bark, the sound of leaves moving in the wind. To live here again is like bathing in a type of comfort of forgotten familiarity.
I don’t think this is nostalgia, or homesickness — as both those words refer to things you lost. I think this is the opposite; the strange sensation of being handed something you’d stopped wanting, and realizing it was exactly what you were after.
When I was young, I wanted to get away from here and go to a bigger city. First Zwolle, then Rotterdam, then Amsterdam. But it’s only through those stays that I learned about Hattem, as I had something to compare it to. There’s a smaller thing too. Away from home, “from Hattem” started to mean something, a detail that set me apart instead of it being the thing that everyone around me shared. Another part of it is just aging. People want different things at different times in their lives. We’ve moved back to the town I grew up in, and now I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, and I find myself drawn to these names, something I never once thought about before.
T.S. Eliot named this before I ever left, in Little Gidding:
“Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit”
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
I walk these roads again — virtually unchanged in twenty years, yet it’s me who has changed.
Next to the ditch behind our house, the deep green reeds bend in the wind, as they have done for millennia.
