I was nine years old when my parents moved to the countryside. Moving from our modestly sized family house to a large farmhouse in the middle of nowhere was quite a big change, and from the first weeks of living there I remember most vividly the smell of grass and blossoming flowers, my fear of getting lost in that big house, running around throughs the fields, and my unshaking conviction that there was a vampire living in our chimney.
On an especially warm evening in June that year ( we had moved in a couple of weeks earlier) , my mother looked up from unpacking boxes and said: "let's go pick elderflowers, so we can make lemonade with it." I still remember her saying that because for me, it was the summum of countryside living: just picking some flowers to make lemonade! How cool was that? In my mind, lemonade came from the supermarket, and the fact that you could not only make it yourself, but make it from something that was simply growing on the side of the road amazed me.
So I threw on the most romantic, countryside dress that I could find, we picked up a basket, and went picking elderflowers, just down the road near our house. Even now, years later, the smell of elderflowers brings back those memories: picking flowers and making lemonade with it. So, when I saw that the elderberries near our new house were blossoming, I told Joost: let's go make some elderflower-lemonade!
