Where We Will Be, What We Will Do, & When

Since we came here, every day we´ve written a little something of our day in our Dietario, a cool sort of Art-Moderne ledger. Someday, posterity may look at these ragged books and know what the weather was like here on May 2, 2007, or how much gasoil was still in our deposito Thanksgiving Day, or what we served for dinner July 2 (and to whom), and how much we paid for the kitchen tiles. Maybe someday we´ll make a "stranger in a strange land" kind of best-seller book out of it, and thus secure our old age.

Meantime, I have to make up a new Dietario every January 1. It is a healthy Review of what happened in the previous year, as I comb through the entries and glean things like birthdays, anniversaries, feast days, processions, and fiestas, and enter them into the new book again.

Not that I will remember to send anybody a birthday card, or actually feel like shlepping out to Pozos de Urama to celebrate the Santa Cruz come September 5! Noting things down does not create any kind of commitment. It only means I know I oughtta. It´s the guilt that counts.

This blog serves in many ways as a diary of our Peaceable evolution. I almost never look back over it, unless I need a photo. This time around, from here in the depths of my mid-winter indolence, I am looking forward, writing forward, thinking ahead into what might just happen this year. I am trying not to think it will all be a lot of hassle (this is an effect of the indolence) and trying not to schedule six months´ worth of Big Events on the exact same weekend in June, as I am wont to do.

Writing here in public about what is to come is risky, I know. It´s tempting Fate to overturn all my plans. But I love taking chances.

The new Dietario has penciled-in Visits from a Dutchman who´s writing a Camino Guide that tourism promoters dislike very much. (he tells which restaurants have rude waiters, or dirty bathrooms. He tells which pilgrim hostel had bedbug problems last year.)

My dietario has scheduled visits from a young guitarist from Chicago, and my old Pyrenees-cruising, crystal-gazing girlfriend Kathy, and a gang of merry South African litter-patrolling pilgrims who I´ve promised a barbecue. We may see George and Tom from William & Mary, and Tom from Ontario, and Federico the Guitar Guy, and the French guidebook writer with the wonderful name: Christian Champion!

It´s got my trips in there, too. In a couple of weeks Jeanne and I will meet in Madrid. In February I´m flying to Belgium to visit Filipe. In April I´m off to Miraz, a tiny village in deepest Galicia, to be hospitalera over Holy Week and my birthday, too. And in summer, if it can be afforded and arranged, I´d like to go to America and see my sisters and cousins and mom, and maybe even my children.

But by then, if other things in the Dietario go as planned, our vegetable garden will be overflowing with peas and beans and Brussels Sprouts. We´ll have a big freezer to put them in. Pilgrims will be bombing in and out, as The Peaceable is listed in this year´s UK Confraternity of St. James Pilgrim Guide. We will have a few fine guitarists playing concerts here in Moratinos, and in Sahagun, too... a taste of greater things to come in 2010.

We´ll train new hospitaleros, maybe online and maybe here at The Peaceable. We´ll get more chickens who are not brown. Paddy´s ankle will get better, and so will my Spanish. We will figure out a way to make it all pay.

Thus it is written. Thus it shall not necessarily be. But gimme those dice, I´m rollin´ em.