A love that ticks

EDGEWATER – Maria (Riet) and Pier (Piet) Van der Mey are living proof that time, place, and different continents don’t get in the way of two people in love. More than 50 years after they first met, they live happily together in their Edgewater home after a lifetime shared and the blessings of a son, twin daughters, and grandchildren.

Though both grew up in Holland, they say they would never have met in their native land; their hometowns were simply too far apart.
It took living in Australia to bring the two together. Piet emigrated there in 1956 because Holland’s post-World War II economy offered few employment opportunities.

“Life in Australia was simply better at that time,” Piet explained.

Unique timepieces abound at the Van der Mey home. Piet (left) has had a longtime interest in working on clocks and runs his own clock repair business. (Glynn Wade I Sun Day Photo)

With ample mechanical and electrical skills, Piet found work with Sydney aviation and also on the massive Sydney Harbour Bridge — the world’s tallest steel arch bridge originally built in 1932 to carry rail, automobile, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic.

He worked on the bridge for several weeks and was able to photograph its progress. It remains an architectural masterpiece as revered as the iconic Sydney Opera House.

Along with a group of 28 other young adults from Holland, Riet traveled to Australia aboard ship to find out how the Dutch immigrants liked living in that country and report back to people in Holland.

Within a few days of her arrival, and with the help of the Dutch embassy, the young teacher was employed first as a nanny and then as an elementary teacher in a Sydney public school.

Groups of Hollander immigrants working in Sydney at the time enjoyed socializing together. One fateful evening, Riet came to a party at the house where Piet lived. He describes the moment when he first saw her:

“She rang the doorbell, I opened the door, and there she was!”

While it may have been love at first sight (or soon thereafter), the path to their happy marriage took longer. Riet returned to her family in Holland to teach school, and Piet moved to the United States, where he had relatives in the Chicago area. The young couple stayed in touch through correspondence.
Like the famous Holland tulips of which Riet is quite fond, love was still blooming. Piet, in courtly fashion, wrote to Riet’s father asking for her hand in marriage. A year or so later, Riet traveled to New York via the ship New Amsterdam and to Chicago by train to visit Piet. They were wed the following year and have made their home in the Chicago area ever since.

Piet worked for S&C Electronics and General Motors, and Riet worked as a school librarian. Piet has always enjoyed working on clocks, especially cuckoo and grandfather clocks, and he sometimes creates his own replacement mechanisms. Del Webb residents in both Sun City and Edgewater havebenefited from those talents, and he enjoys a clock repair business that keeps him busy in both communities as well as his former community of Lombard.

Riet is a reading volunteer at Elgin’s Otter Creek and St. Charles’s Norton Creek schools and enjoys Edgewater’s Paint Drops and Chapter One Book Club, and Piet plays chess. The couple like to travel and return to Holland for annual family reunions.

Since clocks of all kinds abound in the Van der Mey household, the comparison of their longtime love with time is an easy one to make.
With quality materials, care, and reverence, a relationship – like a fine timepiece – can last a lifetime.

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