“For sale: Electric sewing machine, hardly used, price: €25.”
This is the translation of the Dutch text on this little index card
(pardon the fuzzy picture; I would have made a horrible spy) that has been on
the bulletin board at my local supermarket for quite a while now. Sometimes I go over to the board just to look at
it, surreptitiously, pretending I’m also looking at the other cards offering
bicycles, kids’ toys, clothes or a variety of other things people no longer
want or need. Or services they are offering, such as cleaning, odd jobs, or housepainting.
But all I’m really interested in is this little red card. Apart from the
fact that the Dutch is incorrectly spelled (electrice being the phonetic
way of writing the correct word, electrisch), I have to wonder what the story is behind this
card, who the person is who put it there, hopeful that he or she would quickly
find a buyer.
I fantasize about it being an elderly woman, a member of the generation that
not only experienced World War II as young children or teenagers, but survived
it. A generation of women (if it was a woman) who never finished secondary or
high school, many of whom didn’t even get all the way through primary school. After
all, school wasn’t considered as important as staying home and helping their
mothers take care of the other 6, 7, 8 or even more younger siblings. Some of
them even had to go to work at a young age to help the family make ends meet,
particularly if the father and/or brothers were off at the front, or prisoners
in a work camp in Germany.
In the 1940s but more commonly in the 1950s, most girls went to huishoudschool or “domestic science
school”, where they learned how to, you guessed it, be housewives. Their
brothers went on to learn a trade or profession (so presumably, they could be good husbands). Those who had made it home safely
from the battlefields, that is.
Maybe it had belonged to a woman who could no longer see well enough to sew, or whose hands were
failing her. Whose daughter or granddaughter had no interest in such an old-fashioned
hobby.
Perhaps the person who wrote the card was not even necessarily part of
the “war generation”. It might, in fact, have been pinned there by a man, a
widower who is slowly, sadly packing up his wife’s things, removing any
reminders of her, particularly those that may be worth something, easy to sell
for cash. After all, young families and students fresh out of college (the jobs
available for them these days are fewer and farther between) are not the only
ones feeling the effects of the economic crisis here. Many of the elderly have
had to suffer major cuts in their already meager pensions, or the full
retirement benefits they are still fortunate enough to receive don’t go as far
as they used to to cover the ever-rising cost of living these days.
Or maybe I’m romanticizing it. Maybe it’s just a foreigner like me who
hasn’t mastered written Dutch yet. Or a native speaker who can’t spell, or who
just doesn’t care about these things. Or someone else entirely.
Still, I can’t help but wonder.
