The climate is changing. You hear about this every day. It’s a thought of concern, also – maybe even especially – for the Dutch people, who’ve been living with the dangers of the sea for as long as one can remember.
We’ve confined the waters with dykes. Sometimes successfully, sometimes the waters fought back.
In the years from 1920 until after World War II, there were several serious floodings in the Netherlands… Floodings that cost the lives of man and beast alike.
The former queen of the Netherlands, Wilhelmina, paid visits to the victimized areas, much to the surprise of the civilians.
Plans were made AND executed, to make sure similar disasters could not occur again.
So, apart from some several minor floodings that can still happen every time and again, the Dutch have successfully lived below the sea level for years.
My own memories of the changing climate are few.
Yes, I remember that when I was a child, we still had white Christmases, falling snow that remained long enough to make snow men, frozen lakes to skate on… but to all things it seems must come an end.
I think the last ‘real’ winter we’ve at in the Netherlands…. was nine to ten years ago. When my ex-husband still had to go out with the tugboats, to create a safe path through the ice for large cargo ships who didn’t have the capacity to do so on their own.
The sound of the caving and crashing ice was deafening!
I remember that for several times, the forming and breaking ice would crawl over land, on Urk it once even reached the light house!
It was an exciting but dangerous playfield for parents and their children. Oh my, I was in some real trouble when my mother discovered that I, in my zeal, had ventured off a little too far, completely oblivious to the dangers of the ever shifting ice.
Hot summers, cold winters, seem a thing of the past. Mild summers and mild winters took their places. Last year, the winter wasn’t even severe enough to kill remaining bugs and mosquitoes, creating a real nuisance early on early this year. People got sick massively because of all the remaining germs in the air. A simple cold virus evolved and took the lives of those most vulnerable.
Days and days of rain and clouds seem to drift by. In summer maybe two, three weeks of warm damp weather other then that it could be agreeable most of the time, but those days are soon forgotten when I look through my window right now.
The song: ‘Three little toddlers were sitting on a fence, on a beautiful warm day in September’ no longer applies. I can’t even remember the year in which September carried those agreeable warm days.
It’s cold. Fall is here and soon winter will come. I hope against hope… that this year I might celebrate a white Christmas again.
