It was a dark and, above all, very foggy day. I was feeling a bit gloomy and down myself. I’d had a wonderful time with my (step)children on Texel and was back home alone. I gave myself a pep talk and decided to go for a nice walk through my favorite area anyway: the beautiful Ooijpolder. Once I arrived in the polder, I wondered how good my plan really was, because it was indeed very foggy. I couldn’t see very far and could make out very little. Visibility was at most 50 to 100 meters. I did hear some birds, especially the muffled sound of geese flying overhead, but I couldn’t see them. Every now and then I came across a cyclist, a few pedestrians, and the occasional slow-moving car, which would suddenly loom out of the fog. There was something mysterious about it!
On a deserted little dike, I felt the sun peeking through the fog a little behind me. Just then, a parked car came into view. A person was standing next to the car. As I got closer to the car, I saw that the person was a woman who was taking pictures of me. I felt a little self-conscious. The woman looked at me with a smile and said, “It was such a beautiful sight, seeing you emerge from the fog along with the sun.” She showed me the photos she’d taken, and I was speechless. She had captured that moment so beautifully. The photographer—her name was Chantal—told me she lived in the United States and was in the Netherlands for the holidays. We chatted for a while, and she promised to email me the photos.
About 10 days later, I received one of her stunning photos along with a friendly email. It wasn’t until then that I discovered that Chantal is Chantal Heijnen, a famous Dutch photographer who lives in New York. She takes beautiful photos of people in extraordinary places all over the world. I was already impressed by her work, but now I am even more so. She takes photos that are so much more than just a captured moment.
There’s always a story behind a captured image. Without Chantal realizing it, the photo she took of me means more to me than just that single snapshot of that moment. The photo tells my story. In recent years, I’ve been walking through the fog, searching for the right path to pick up the thread of my life again after my husband’s passing and the loss of my right eye. The fog has slowly lifted, the sun has broken through from time to time, and I’ve begun to see my path in life more clearly, both literally and figuratively. I started to realize that—even though I was alone and had only one eye left—I could pick up a large part of my old life again. I got used to the new situation, found the courage to drive again, was able to go back to work, and started doing fun things again with the lovely people around me.
It wasn’t just that day—I’ve been emerging from the fog over the past few years. It’s wonderful how Chantal captured this in a single photo. In my thank-you email, I told Chantal about this and asked her permission to include the photo in a column—one I could already feel bubbling up inside me. Chantal replied quickly: “Of course you can use the photo for the column, because it must have been meant to be that we ran into each other on that last day of 2019!” I couldn’t agree more—it was a special and, above all, inspiring encounter!
Anita Hol-Bubeck
