Raphael Kadushin
Northern Holland

My favorite place is fitting: It’s where I first realized what a sense of place was all about. This was in northern Holland, where we lived for a while when I was a child.

On our monthly drive south to Amsterdam we would pass through the watery province of Friesland, where the clouds were so dense they drooped all the way down to the flattened-out pastures. From my window, in the back of the car, I could see the silhouettes of church steeples, bell gables, windmills, and fat sheep. Mostly, though, I saw bicyclist after bicyclist, all pedaling furiously along the top of banked dikes as the North Sea glowed behind them, so that they looked like they were riding on water.

When I returned to Friesland as an adult and accidentally bumped my rental car along a dike’s bike path, I finally saw what the Frisians see: green fields on one side and on the other deep blue waves, all lapping furiously and waiting to inundate a whole fragile world.

Raphael Kadushin is a travel writer and book editor.