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A place can integrate itself into your life without you being openly cognizant of it. This week I was sorting through the dozens of travel guides I’ve bought through the years, including a large stack of my mother’s given to me after her death almost a dozen years ago. Among her collection was one I had never noticed – a guide to Holland called “Voici la Hollande,” Here is Holland. Why she bought a Dutch guide in French I will never know, but inside it was the receipt dated April 29, 1960, for 4.50 guilders (about $3.00) when she and my dad were in the Netherlands with my three older sisters the year before I was born. Also inside was a postcard showing a painting by Hendrik Averkamp called A Winter Scene. My mom’s guides are replete with receipts, museum passes and other bits of nostalgia which reflect her travels so well documented by date that a chronology of her lifetime of wanderings could easily be constructed.

This is a habit I picked up without realizing my mother did it – tucking momentos from a trip into the guide I was using that would show the dates I was there. My guides are also stuffed with similar time markers, including the first Dutch guide I ever purchased, a now dog-eared Michelin within which I discovered a fax of a 1997 business itinerary that was my first of many chocolate buying trips to Amsterdam. On the back of the fax are my hand-written notes of observations from that June trip, scribbles that are more than enough to spark memories that otherwise would never have been brought to consciousness again: pretty girls riding bikes to work, evening walks watching college students gawk at the red light women, a business lunch on the water discussing the impact of the Dutch East India Company on the world of chocolate. Other memories from that trip have never left me, particularly one great meal on the Damrak at a restaurant I look up on every trip to Holland, including my most recent trip there a year ago.

Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Anne Frank – Holland is a unique country whose personality is concentrated in the city of Amsterdam. My parents took my three sisters and another three offspring (including me) back to Holland in 1970, and the three youngest yet again in 1978. I remember my mom buying pottery from Delft and tulip bulbs to be shipped home and planted at the house in South Bend, Indiana. I returned many times to that city of canals during a collegiate year in 1981 for activities that shall remain undisclosed.

Amsterdam was the locale of the first family trip with our kids in 2001, a trip of windmills, water locks, art and history that, I hope, instilled the love of other cultures in my children that my parents gave to me. I’ve been so fortunate to be able to travel since my youth, and I now call several other countries places where I might still live someday, primarily Italy and France. Today, though, with two travel guides in hand spanning decades of memories, Holland fixes itself as a place of treasured memories woven into the fabric of our family history.