This text is handwritten on the front facade of the library in Someren. (Material Stainless polished steel)

As an 18-year-old I left Someren. I lived in Breda and then I moved to Amsterdam where I live now.

Someren is my native village. What I especially remember is playing outside. With the neighborhood kids on bikes -that bike was important, the vehicle to freedom- to the sand drifts on the Strabrechtse hei. Butter sandwiches and lemonade with them and rolling down the sand hills for hours at a time. I lived in the village street. My father had a house built there. The first house on the street and over the years more were added. The library actually the book bus came every fortnight on a little square. You could pick a maximum of three books. Usually I left with more and at some point I had read everything of my age group. Eye-candy allowed me to browse in the row above my category, a treat every time. After a few years, a wooden shack arrived. A private library for the village. I could now just walk in every week and even twice a week. In the meantime I had grown so old that in Lent I built a little candy jar and at Easter I sold the contents and with my saved dimes.

Now I could buy my own books because a bookstore (1958) had come to Someren. The owner was Mien van Moosdijk. Slowly I moved from the library to the bookstore. I could sit there for hours, doubting which book I would choose. Mien had a lot of patience. It felt like a sacred place. Mien saw me. Mien made my life color. I still have the most important books I bought then from my saved rolls of candy. Whenever I visited my parents, I would invariably visit the bookstore and chat with Mien and buy a book. Eventually the bookstore was no longer rewarding. According to Mien van Moosdijk, Someren was a music – village not a reading – village.

Not fun was my elementary school days. I was not “good enough” to play with classmates whose father had a high position in the village like the director of the Farmers’ Loan Bank or the alderman, for example. And my desires lay there. My father (born in Someren Late 1923) and mother (born in Lierop 1926) were hardworking people. The director of the farm loan bank and the alderman were people from outside Someren who brought a different world with them. And my curiosity about outside Someren was great.

And now to the text on the library.

As an 18-year-old, I fled the village.

In 2012 I was asked to develop an art piece for public space in Someren. Eventually I was able to return to my hometown in the form of a work of art, and in the place I loved most.

The sentence:” it is written- it is said ”, refers to my feelings in my youth. The books I read gave me a place for my feelings and gave me courage not to adapt too much.

Eventually I created the book Traveling Companions. An ode to books that were important to me until I was 50.

Leo Vroman wrote a poem for me

In which he expressed my feelings;

LITTLE ETERNITY

Between my end and my beginning

There lies my little eternity.

There I live comfortably inside

Out there, time does not exist.

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