Some people have to live without a partner, but not always without love. Some people fall in love often, also out of it. Some get married and some do not. Some have one marriage, others have more than one. (My mother and I each had two.) One can also love a certain place or a certain house very, very much and my mother truly loved her house. I was well aware that where she lived was high on her list of priorities. As a teenager, I vowed that I would be different, and live where my future husband would work. However, I had not counted on genetics. I was to inherit not her beauty, but a certain trait: to be able to really love a house, besides one’s children. My mother also loved her family and her hometown. My father wanted to remain in the United States after his stays at Cal-Tech in Pasadena and then in Princeton, New Jersey, but my mother convinced him to return to Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Much, much later, her second husband offered her a bigger residence in a far prettier location, but she refused to move. Her house, by the well-known Dutch Bazel and Lauweriks, had captivated her, and her garden was her joy. Having obtained a degree in Horticulture and Landscape Architecture before marrying, she had settled down on a corner
lot with her first-born and brought two more children into this world who all have a love for plants. She lived there for more than half a century until she died of a stroke after gardening.
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