Storks in Holland
When my daughter was in 1st grade our homeschool curriculum included the book The Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong, a Dutch-born American. It tells the story of a group of school children in Holland who are concerned that storks migrating from Africa no longer build nests in their village, and they set out to discover why. They learn that the pitch of the village roofs are too steep for the storks to build their nests, so they must find a spare wagon wheel they can set up on the roof to provide a flat surface.
Flash forward four years, and my family is stopping the night in the Netherlands on our way to visit friends in Paris. We spend a beautiful day in the village of Geithoorn, and as we drive around the area and enjoy a boat ride through the waterways of the village, I notice these tall tripods standing in many of the front yards.
This caused all the synapses in my brain to go off as I started putting together information from a long-forgotten read-aloud. I realized the book wasn’t just a nice story for children but that it reflected a broader cultural history of how the Dutch looked forward to the coming of the storks each spring, how they represented good luck (and even brought babies!). At the time I read the book I had no idea I’d ever have the chance to visit Holland, but reading it tripled my enjoyment of that day, and I derived so much pleasure seeing the storks and the their babies in the nest and the welcome the Dutch still gave to them as seen by the intentionality of having wheel-shaped tripods near their houses. Now I always think back to this experience when I think of the power of stories to connect us to their settings, especially when we have the opportunity to travel and see the landscapes for ourselves.
