[Click here to read the previous article in the previous series: Italy.]

I was born in Ruurlo in 1959, in the same house where my father was born.  My grandfather was born on a farm in Steenderen, some 23 kilometers away.  He didn’t want to be a farmer and he decided to leave. 

He went to Ruurlo where he could get a job in the store of Jan van Langen.  Jan ran a drugstore close to the train station and my grandfather worked and lived in Jan’s house.  After a few years my grandfather bought a place in the centre of Ruurlo, right next to the Protestant church.  It was the former post office.  Here he started his own store and this is the place where my father, and later I, was born.  Through the years the place has been altered and changed but always in small portions.  This way it became the place it was when I came to the world.  It had a lot of corners and steps and little stairs that seemed useless, but in fact are traces of the alterations.  It had become this way organically; it was in no way designed.

The house had an old fashioned kitchen with built-in wooden chabots and it had a terrazzo (or granite) kitchen sink.  In the room behind the kitchen there was a big round washing kettle in which the bed sheets and all other white fabrics were cleaned using hot water.  The living room was on the street side and also had the typical light situation that I recognized so well in the places that I have been photographing.  Of course I was not aware of all this when I was young, but as soon as I entered the new house that my parents built on the place where the old one once stood, I knew.