But over week-ends it was like a beehive over there, as they were clearing and planting, and doing things around the house, and that house needed a lot of tlc! As they had been clearing a piece of land for a veggie garden during the holidays, it wasn't long before their seedlings had grown into looking very good and healthy indeed.One morning Nina and self decided to go to the small gardening shop in Uniondale, where one could get a few things for the flower garden, mainly roses, as Uniondale is well known for it's beautiful roses.Fortunately Haarlem, as cold as it was during the winter, had also a good rose climate.
We were all nicely scrubbed up, hair combed and lippy on, ready to go, when a guy selling grass brooms came in to see if we would buy, and I did, as this brooms made by the locals are indeed good for sweeping outside, and for giving the carpets a quick clean if one is too lazy to take out the vacuum cleaner.
I had a good look to find the strongest made one, and happily put my hand in my bag to get my purse out, but it was definitely not my purse that I felt, but a kind of cold, and dry and rough thing that wriggled as I touched him! I am not a screamer, I hyperventilate easy, but scream, no! But that Day I showed Haarlem that I had a voice ten times as powerful as that of the drunk women who shouted such obscenities at each other in the middle of the night on their way home after a good time at a shebeen! And Nina, who got the fright of her life, not knowing why her reasonably calm mother in law was screaming, joined in, and we put up a very decent show indeed. Andreas then joined, and the man selling the brooms must have thought it was the tokkelossie, and he gave a shriek and legged it down the road, with the broom I wanted to buy!
After some good and wholesome using of the old lungs, we stopped, and I went to retrieve my bag that I had thrown a good five meters, and with Nina and Andreas standing on the other side of the fence, I put on my long waterboots and then very gingerly turned the bag upside down!
I waited with baited breathe for the monster to climb out, but what did climb out was not a monster, but one huge, very ugly, and very upset frog, who would easily have qualified for the Olympics, as he got himself into a longjump position, and before I could do anything, he jumped up to the door and disappeared into the house! Was indeed glad that I didn't have a bigger audience, as Self felt a teeny bit silly, but as Nina screamed just about as loudly as myself, she couldn't tell the story as it was without implecating herself!
I will explain about the Tokkelossie. According to black folklore the Tokkelossie is a very small man who come in the night to kill people, for no reason anybody ever found out. But as he was so small, they put their beds on bricks to make it higher so that the little man could not get to them. When I was small I always wondered why the workers on the farm all had their beds on two rows of bricks, but when I asked my little black friends, they just shrieked and told me not to ask about it, as the Tokkelossie will get cross and come and kill them in the night!
Anyway, after I made us a cuppa so we could calm down, we set off. It was a glorious day, and the countryside looked so pretty dressed up in green and red and yellow! As the fruit season was now over, the trees had begun to take on their Autumn colours, and specially the peach farm up the road looked like a touched-up picture with it's red, orange and yellow colours!
I bought a few plants, and also a vine that I wanted to plant at my front door so it will rank along the wall and frame my front door. Always wanted a vine, and hoped that Haarlem would not prove too cold. Also a few flowering shrubs for my front garden where I had started the rockery!
That night the thought of what could have happened if the broom man didn't come, and I touched the bally frog in the bank, as that was where we were first going, kept me awake till the early hours of the morning!
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