At a separation of three decades and an ocean, I have an idyllic view of my childhood in the Netherlands. "Idyll" is derived from the Greek eidyllion, "little picture"; therefore it was fitting that my first glimpse of Holland, when I returned for the first time earlier this year, was framed by an aircraft's porthole. First I saw the dunes, and then, this being a morning in April, I saw the bulb fields in flower, each one a green plane striped very brightly by oblongs of tulips and hyacinths and, more subtly, by the lines of sandy earth running between the flowerbeds. My eyes accepted this world-famous spectacle as news. I had somehow forgotten about the geometric and chromatic extremism of the Dutch countryside, whose red and purple and yellow and pink and white rectangles are subdivisions of the larger polygons outlined by the famous canals and ditches. I gawked at all of it: I had become a tourist in the nearest thing I have to a homeland.
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