La Fontanita, where I have been living for years now, used to be our ramshackle summer home in the blue mountains of the Ardeche. The centuries-old stone farm had been updated to a bare minimum, allowing our stay during summer holidays. But certainly not more than...
Protection or prison? photo: Gyon van Dam We all do it; we have a bad experience, and put up a wall to protect us. And then, the wall stays and we forget that we put him there in the first place. We live with it, and it becomes a prison. Forgotten but still erect. And...
Francine van Dam's Newsletter Fall 2023Hello there!I hope this newsletter finds you well. I am doing fine, we have rains finally, so the mountain streams are filling up again. Autumn has arrived.In these two weeks of school-holidays , I'm enjoying my "Soletariedad"...
Cardiologist in padlock At the entrance of the Beatrix Park near to where we lived was this sign: As a small girl, I truly believed this sign was made for us personally…me and him. My father. Strikingly handsome, almost 2 meters, brown hair, blue eyes, and so well...
I remember the exact spot where I did get this thought: It was in some white portable toilets-unit, while visiting a pop concert in Amsterdam. I had fled the new family house in the east of the country and returned to my native town, alone and seventeen. I struggled...
One early winter evening in Amsterdam, I took a walk to go visit someone I was very much in love with. (I was almost fifty at that time). I left my apartment in the southern part of the city, to cross the famous Vondel park and reach his apartment in the western part....