Big Fun in a Tiny Pueblo

Lumberjacks and Timberjanets

2012-01-24T20:56:00.000+01:00

The annual wood-chopping party took most of Saturday to happen, with most of the male population of Moratinos chopping, lopping, picking up, binding, sweeping, raking, shouting, and backhoe-wrangling. After everyone got cleaned up we reconvened in the Ayuntamiento Bar/classroom/meeting room for La Merienda, "refreshements:" Veal ribeyes, barbecued over the grapevine fire outside, superb Cerrato cheese, and quince jam, and the grapey new wine to try, as well as a lineup of hair-raising moonshine. It was manly food, slabs of hot meat eaten out of hand, cheese carved off the round with a shared knife, wine poured from a re-used plastic liter bottle into beer-logo bar glasses.

I write "we," even though the Plaza Tree-Trimming this year was overwhelmingly male. Right up to the end I was the only woman there. While the men rode backhoe buckets and rickety ladders into the treetops and weilded blades and roaring chainsaws on high, I stuck to the girly-girl tasks of chopping out dead wood with a sickle, pruning the rose-trees, and raking out a foot of fallen leaves in the little flower garden in the middle of the plaza. (The actual growing of flowers is up to more experienced ladies like Milagros and Flor, Leandra and Angeles. Me? I wait til winter. I deal with the dead. We all have our place in the Circle of Life that is our municipal flowerbed.)

The outcome of all this is a shockingly clean Plaza Mayor, where the tortured plane trees look like chickens planted head-down in buckled concrete. In summer they will make a leafy canopy over the plaza, but for now? Well. It is something very stark and Castilian. The other outcome is tons of wood trimmings, split up among the locals for use in their wood-burning furnaces and fireplaces.

This year the lads with the chainsaws also trimmed the decorative trees in our woodlot, a little triangle of unusable land right at the western entrance to Moratinos. The trees belong to the town, but the land belongs to us -- and so the wood on it is ours. (Or so I assume. It could be nobody else wants to bother with scrappy wood way over in el Barrio Arriba, our end of town.) The men helped us drag the biggest, thickest branches up into our back patio, but several trees´ worth of wood still lie on the ground down there. And this is how Patrick and I are occupying our days this week. We are lumber-jacking all that wood into fuel for next winter.

It is hard physical labor. The sun is supposed to shine all this week, however, and Paddy seemed keen to tackle the job.

Paddy wakes up early and walks the dogs a good four miles each morning, no matter the weather. He does his share of cleaning and cooking around the house, he eats healthfully and he gets plenty of sleep. He is not in bad condition, considering all the abuse heaped on his body over his almost-71 years. But this morning, dragging a tree trunk up to our back gate, he looked like a victim of Elder Abuse. He muttered something about an article this weekend in El Pais, the 10 Signs of Heart Attack. He has all of them, he said.

"Stop this then, you daft bastard," I said. "We´ll leave the wood. I bet Fran will be glad to take it. He loves collecting firewood."
"No way am I paying someone to bring us firewood in a truck, while we have all that perfectly good stuff just lying out there for free," Paddy panted. His eyes rolled up into his head.
"So then. You hatchet the twigs and limbs off the trunks and chop it up. There´s a brand-new blade on the chainsaw. I´ll do the hauling," I told him. I hiked down to the woodlot. The two little piles of branches the men left there Saturday had multiplied into the crudely-hacked remains of at least six trees. But I was valiant.

For many hours I lifted and hauled, lurched and swore. I left a trail of twigs behind me as I dragged branches up the steep incline onto the N120, made the sharp right onto the shoulder, and shlepped along the guardrail 100 meters or so to our back gate. Murphy Cat watched, scornful, from the horsetail trees. Fran, the neighbor who collects firewood, came by to offer advice and comfort. Paddy chopped and stacked.

It went on for hours. We still are not finished.

All day we ate leftovers cadged from the fridge, and a loaf of bread made overnight in the bread machine, spread with fabulously fresh peanut butter Philip hauled over in his baggage. We have some Cerrato cheese of our own, and some Cecina de Leon (the world´s finest dried beef). We have a bottle of past-its-due-date Vega Sauco Toro wine, watered-down. The fire dances bright in the stove, and Rostropovich on the stereo, making his cello cry over something Brahms.

The dogs and cat are curled into Cs and Os in their beds, and soon we will sign off on our own consciousnesses in our own comfy places. Wood and good chilly air, hard labor for future comfort, and an early sunset.

The novels are not finished, but the woodpile is growing.
We are not youthful, but we are fine.

New Bee in Marrakech

2012-01-18T21:16:00.001+01:00

Sundown from the roof terrace: Marrakech

I lay naked on wet concrete in a chamber of hot fog. The murk was broken only by a tiny skylight, way up on the half-arch ceiling. A thin beam of winter sun knifed through the mist and illuminated fleshy bodies lined up on the floor. This is the Hammam, the public bath for women at Sidi bin Slimane, a working-class neighborhood of Marrakech, Morocco. I wondered if we maybe should have booked ourselves a deluxe Hammam and Aromatherapy session at one of the tourist spas, but I´d left this particular detail to my son Philip to handle. He´d opted for "taking a chance, going native, and saving 60 bucks apiece."

I am a woman of the world, well-traveled, confident in strange places, and this pushed my boundaries. I have been to public baths before, old Jewish schvitzes, in New York City and Detroit and Baden-Baden. In Madrid I´d taken Philip before to the deluxe faux-Moorish Hammam, great pools of hot and cold water, mint tea in misty rooms, everyone modestly attired in swimsuits, speaking in languages we understood, following a carefully-timed routine.

This was another country. Here in Sidi Bin Slimane, big women whispered to one another in a strange language, trying not to stare at the winter-white carcass old Fatima was handling, over by the entryway -- the carcass was me, a stranger in their weekly ladies-only. There were no limpid pools or hydrotherapy showers or rose-petals. There was concrete, worn smooth by years of water. There were great pipes and faucets, and dozens of plastic buckets. Fatima folded me down to the floor before a lineup of buckets, and poured the tingling hot water from several over my head and shoulders, back and legs.

The old woman worked naked, wet and bulbous and black-skinned. She squeezed oily black soap from a plastic baggie and spread it across a mitt of scratchy cloth, which she rasped across every square inch of my skin. She moved my body and limbs up and aside as if I was a doll, across her lap and much too near to her rolls of skin and hair. Flecks of dark waxy stuff appeared on my surfaces -- I thought the scratchy mitt was shedding lint, or the soap was curdling in the heat. I saw a woman sitting near, peppered the same way, rubbing and rubbing, and I realized the spots were skin, peeled off and rolled-up the same way it did when I was six, in summertime, out on the curb scratching mosquito bites. Fatima was removing my outer layer.

I let myself relax there, face-down on the floor, my body stretched across the old woman´s knees. The only sound was the scrape and scratch of many hands moving, washing skin, exfoliating arms or ankles or the back of the person adjacent. The splash of many gallons striking cement, a groan of shock or release or pain, the feel of those waxy speckles vanishing into the liquid heat. Fatima´s powerful fingers found a knot in my neck. She leaned into it, rolled it under her knuckles, I and felt the ache and the air-miles, the language barrier and a chest-cold flow from my body and roll away across the concrete.

Finished, Fatima patted my knee and smiled the beatific smile of a midwife. I sat sprawled on the concrete for a little while, glowing white in the darkness, feeling myself the newest-born bee in this misty, humming hive beneath the street of the Medina. I am sure I have never been so clean, not since I was first born.

Phil in our courtyard

tourists

Morocco -- or Marrakech at least -- was delicious and awful. Philip and I stayed at a "Riad," a done-over old courtyard-style house in the old Medina. Riad Dar Zaman is owned by an Englishman with a House-And-Garden decorating style, and the servants, mint tea, babbling fountain, and roof terrace overlooking the neighborhood would usually be outside our price-range but for a very positive currency exchange rate. The city reminded me very much of my three years of childhood in Turkey, what with donkey-carts and caleche carriages, trundling vendors´ carts, a souk and spice markets, dancing monkeys and a spectacular chorus of muzzeins singing live from the city´s many minarets five times every day. The old part of the city is a living museum of architecture, with even the corner shops somehow adorned in plasterwork or tiles or lacquer. Children are treated with great affection. Mosques are well-attended, but you can get usually get a beer with your sandwich if you want one. I bought a splendid wool and over-embroidered carpet for a very fair price. (I brought one of the Riad boys with me to help with the haggling business. Philip now repeats to me, at suitable moments, "Madame! You bargain like a Berber!") (I know, they say that to all the tourists.)

I could not have stayed longer than about four days, however. I was shouted-at by men, until I began walking with a hand on Philip´s elbow. Many women go about fully covered, in veils all the way over the eyes. I kept wondering which of those phantoms might be my hammam-sisters. The tiny streets are overrun with venomously smoky motorbikes, a noise level approaching "jackhammer," and more hustlers and cons and come-ons than a Damon Runyon story.

It is a city, and cities are noisy and polluted. I am a villager. I like my quiet. I was glad to come home.
Philip went home, back to New Hampshire and law school.
Kim came back, and is moving into the little "guitar house" in Carrion de los Condes as the first Artist in Residence of 2012. She is already making movies. She made up a new lot of blog-headers for me!
The first full read of the Zaida novel got a rather glowing review. At least the second half of it did.
Rosie dog has a terrible cut on her behind, we know not from where. Six stitches, and the hood in the photo above to keep her from messing with the wound.
Paddy still has a cold/flu. It is becoming tiresome. He looks done-in.
And so goes the first half of January.

why dogs smile

2012-01-06T21:22:00.001+01:00

walking in the cold sundown

January drags long around here, maybe because it is so foggy so much of the time, and there are so few pilgrims to spark things up. The upside is, the fields stay green all through the winter, and sunsets are often remarkable. If I can survive January, I can usually make it to (mercifully short) February, too. So far I have managed it almost 50 times.

I am getting things done, however. I applied for a new Residencia card at the Foreigners Office in Palencia, and sailed right through the first part of the process. Kim is coming back. Fred´s been here and left again, and this time we created a non-profit association to administer the artist-in-residence summer program in Carrion de los Condes. I am Founding Vice President, even though I warned them my responsibilities should not go much farther than "Vice."

Philip is still here, too. We are leading a quiet life, walking, reading, writing, shopping, cooking. I fuss about him being bored, but he says I worry too much. He is fine. Next week we are off to Marrakech for a few days, and from there he heads home. I know it is the Way Of the World, but it still makes me sad, thinking of saying goodbye.

gentlemen of leisure

Yesterday a box arrived in the mail, from my sister Beth. A few years ago I told my family in America to stop sending me gifts at Christmas, as the expense and trouble were simply too much. But Beth loves gift-giving. Now that she cannot send things to me and Paddy, she instead sends gifts to our animals.
And so we have millet for Bob the Canary, huge Brontosaurus bones for Tim, Lulu, and Harry, a bagful of little rawhide knots for little Rosie, and a squeaky toy mouse for Murph.

At the bottom of the box was a package from my mother: a seat-cushion cover in a Peaceable Kingdom fabric. Where do moms find these things? And Beth, incorrigible, sent me a pad of memo paper in a fancy red leather box. She had to send something!

I took pictures to send to them, of happy critters enjoying their booty. Here they are, you can enjoy them too. Because there´s not so much more than this to tell you about. Not in January!

sorry, Blogger doesn´t like me messing about with photos...

A New Year Blessing

2011-12-31T23:30:00.000+01:00

Zamora province, Camino Levante. August 2011

For Those Who Have Far to Travel
An Epiphany Blessing

If you could see
the journey whole
you might never
undertake it;
might never dare
the first step
that propels you
from the place
you have known
toward the place
you know not.

Call it
one of the mercies
of the road:
that we see it
only by stages
as it opens
before us,
as it comes into
our keeping
step by
single step.

There is nothing
for it
but to go
and by our going
take the vows
the pilgrim takes:

to be faithful to
the next step;
to rely on more
than the map;
to heed the signposts
of intuition and dream;
to follow the star
that only you
will recognize;

to keep an open eye
for the wonders that
attend the path;
to press on
beyond distractions
beyond fatigue
beyond what would
tempt you
from the way.

There are vows
that only you
will know;
the secret promises
for your particular path
and the new ones
you will need to make
when the road
is revealed
by turns
you could not
have foreseen.

Keep them, break them,
make them again:
each promise becomes
part of the path;
each choice creates
the road
that will take you
to the place
where at last
you will kneel

to offer the gift
most needed—
the gift that only you
can give—
before turning to go
home by
another way.

Jan L. Richardson, The Painted Prayerbook

This from my friend Claire, who posted it from elsewhere. May 2012 bring us all blessings and revelations.

Holy Innocents

2011-12-28T21:00:00.000+01:00

Paddy, Miguel, Martina, and Petra, hospitaleros all

Christmas came with two roasted chickens, three otherwise-lonesome hospitaleros, (2 Germans and an Italian) two rosy pilgrims, (a Brazilian and a Dutch lady), a warm house and big appetites. We got through a pint of pickles and peppers, a kilo of stuffing, 2 pounds of Copper Penny carrots, a bowl of home-grown parsnips, a loaf of bread, tiramisu, half a stöllen, eight brownies and a half-liter of caramel ice cream. And a bottle of champagne. And five bottles of wine.


Holy Innocents on Calle Ontanon

We even got a Christmas tree put up, at the very last minute. It is outdoors, in Murphy´s window, all decked with jolly lights. We let the hens run loose in the yard, and split up a big ol´ cheap sausage among the dogs. A good time was had by all, and seeing as hospitaleros were part of the scene, everything was cleaned-up and put away before sundown.

I picked up Philip the next day, at the airport in Madrid. I will not burden you with the hair-raising ordeal of finding him there. All is well now. He is here with us at The Peaceable, a bigger, broader version of himself. He is my son, whom I have not seen in almost two years! He is a first-year student at Franklin Pierce/University of New Hampshire School of Law. He loves to talk. I am adjusting my sensors from "prevailing silence" to "chatterbox." I love him very much.

Paddy is prevailing silent. Jo, his first wife and mom to his three boys, is hospitalized down in Malaga, gravely ill with blood poisoning. His son Matt is there with her. Paddy is not sure what to do. He is not much good at sick-bed duty, or even keeping his other two sons apprised of events. He cooks us lovely spaghettis and omelettes, and cracks wise, and swears at horse races on the computer. I love him too. I just hope I never get very sick.

The other exciting news on this Day of Holy Innocents is I finally met Alicia! She is the first grandchild born to Julia and Paco, two of our good neighbors. She is a month old, very tiny and pink and doll-like, with very good lungs. Her mother is simply besotted with her, as you might expect. I look at them, and I look at Philip, who was about that size himself only 24 years ago. I marvel at what time does to people. And I rejoice in my heart, knowing Julia has a grandchild, and knowing I never have to face raising another infant of my own!

In the evening Raquel came by, bearing gifts: beautiful yellow apples from their huerta, two jars of jam, and a great quivering block of membrillo -- quince jelly. Milagros gave us a great block of membrillo last week, the same day Angel gave us a spectacular cabbage. We still are discussing what should be done with it. What shall we make with it all? Can it all be eaten?

So here we are with an abundance of food and wine, with friends enough to share our Christmas feast, with family come from far away to spend some time in silence. Here we are with generations of a town: Raquel and Modesto the patriarchs, little Alicia the future. And here we are with worries for one of our own, someone fragile and far, whom we could easily lose.

It is quiet and sunny, chilly and sleepy. The last couple of months have been tough, but 2011 was a very good and busy year for us, taken all together. I can´t ask for any more than that, can I?

Short Days. Long hours.

2011-12-20T19:56:00.000+01:00

We have been very ill for the past week. Even after a round of anti-biotics I am still unwell. This is getting very tiresome.
Paddy is gone to London to attend a friend´s funeral. I am here, but I am not alone.
Fred wafts in and out, bringing groceries, repairing the front gates and spoiling the dogs. With Paddy gone, the dogs are particularly needy. I take them for long walks in the mornings, probably over-long -- I am worn-out by 11 a.m. They stay near me, they run hard but do not let me out of their sight. I think they might be taking care of me.
This morning, over at the Grand Canyon near San Nicolas, I saw two beautiful foxes slipping over the broken ground and up the camino. Lulu and Harry saw them too, but they didn´t chase them. Maybe they, too, were awed by their fluid beauty.
Christmas is coming to Moratinos. The little plastic Bethlehem is all set up in the church entryway, with real moss and dried flowers for trees. It is silly and beautiful. Each Sunday the Magi are a little farther along the sandy pathway to the manger in the upper corner.
I do not know why, but there are two Baby Jesuses.
Over at the bodegas José and Esteban toil away in the concrete bunker that will sometime soon be a bar and restaurant. Fred stored some box-wine in our bodega, but this weekend discovered mice had chewed through the cardboard, eating the glue all along the edges. They pierced the foil bags inside, of course... and so we have a mess in the cave, and some rodents full of holiday cheer! Tasteful mice. They only chewed the boxes from France.
At Hostal Moratinos, Martina spends her mornings waiting for the scarce pilgrims to pass. She offers them German herbal teas, gingerbread, pumpkin soup. If no one shows up to take a room, she lowers the blinds at sundown and tucks herself away.
The nights are very dark and cold. The stars are hard and sharp in the sky, and Orion spins across the firmament as the hours pass.
At the Hospital San Bruno, the pilgrim albergue, Bruno and Miguel have an electric star in the front window. The place will be closed between Christmas and New Year´s Eve, when it seems everyone will be back in town. We will take up the slack, here at the Peaceable, in the days after Christmas, the very last days of the year.
Pilgrims are already running into trouble: daylight is so short, the distance between open albergues very long. A German man showed up last night just after midnight, banging on the back door, the emergency exit we rarely use. He was lost, exhausted, and very sorry. And lucky -- he chose the right house! I put him in the green bedroom. He ate a banana and three pears, then slept for 13 hours.
I am led to meditate these days. Perhaps because of the long nights, perhaps because there is so little else to do that is interesting. (Reading makes my head swim, and we don´t have a TV.) Meditation makes my senses sharper, makes me slow down and think and appreciate more. Music sounds better, I hear the crows and hawks shouting at one another in the fields. Twenty minutes a day makes a world of difference. It also is an agony for little Rosie, who must leave me alone the entire time!
She watches me, even when she is asleep. She follows me, wherever I go.
I am alone here, but I cannot be lonely.

Signed, Sealed...

2011-12-10T23:31:00.000+01:00

Now that the manual work is done, I need to get down to the written test.

Which is another way of saying "Christmas cards." I try to keep track of all the friends and family and just random kind people who touch us in special ways each year, and at the end send them each a nice hand-written holiday card. This should not be difficult, seeing as we no longer clog our Decembers with evergreen trees, holly, or extravaganzas of cookie-baking, partying, or gift-giving. I string a line of Christmas lights around the living room or over one of the larger house plants. I bake stöllen or lebkuchen or something merry, and if we expect a crowd I will roast a fowl or some kind or other. This year I grew parsnips and brussels sprouts in the garden, just for the holidays, because Paddy likes them. (we shall see how they turn out!) But compared to the month-long lunacy so many people undergo, things are pretty simple and easy around here at Christmas. I like to think if a star appeared in the east, or a baby was born out in our barn one of these nights, we might not be too busy to notice.

Anyway, we looked over our diary and thought back over the nice things we enjoyed this year, and we made up a list of people to send cards to. I bought ten nice ones from the UNICEF display at the post office. Ten cards. It tends to focus things a bit. Who is on the list?

>Kathy, who sends us divine Mexican tortillas from California, at vast and foolish expense. Who flies to Spain to walk with me on unexplored trails. A great friend. A card for her, surely.
>And one for Tracy, who drove me and Kathy up to the mountains, and let me stay at her villa in Marbella, and is soon to open a pilgrim welcome place in Galicia.
>Denis, the French Scotsman who rescued Kathy and me from the hot griddle that was the last three kilometers of the Camino Vadiniense in late July. Sent by angels. A card is the least I can do.
>Miguel Angel, my Mexican-French psychoanalyst friend. I did not see him this year, but on a particulary tough day in the spring a courier delivered an elegantly wrapped tin. Inside were waxed papers, embossed with the name of a French pàtisserie: Pastries. Cookies. Sweetness. He was just thinking of us, he wrote on the little slip inside.
>Filipe, my Portuguese DNA scientist and bosom friend who whisks me off to the beach.
>Dael, the dour Scotsman who helped me move 16 tons of dirt onto the bodega roof in May. The man deserves much more than a card. He needs a medal of honour, that one.
>George, from Virginia. An academic, a gentleman, a scholar, a mystic. He introduced me to movie stars in February in Washington D.C. We go way back. I love him.
>Ivar, who lives in Santiago and always welcomes me to town with a big lunch and all the latest camino news.
>John and Stephen, more Scotsmen. They walked and talked with me across the baking plains of Valladolid and Zamora provinces, and who now are innovating a pilgrim welcome center in Santiago. Visionaries.
>Marion, and the other very English people in the Confraternity of St. James office in London, who edit and publish the guides I write. Infinite patience. Hard work. No pay. Except maybe a card now and then. Worker bees.
>Colin and Margaret, from Wales. They drive their camper van from home all the way to Rabanal in the summer, to volunteer at the monastery there. They stop here on the way, and have done ever since we lived in the summer kitchen. They bring us Marmite, cheddar cheese, Branston Pickle, and week-old copies of The Times and The Guardian, and great good cheer.
There are others. You get the idea.

What do all these fine people have in common, except acquaintance with me and The Peaceable?

I cannot find postal addresses for any of them.

In the Information Age, I am without their data. It is here somewhere, maybe tucked into a computer file, or scrawled in a notebook. I have found addresses for Kathy and George, but I know those are out-dated. And Kim. Where is Kim these days? The sangha in Colorado, the Hindu chant-fest in Puerto Rico, or in Key West? I could send out an email appeal to all of them, but that would spoil the little frisson of receiving an honest-to-God, hold-in-your-hand greeting, wouldn´t it?

So here I sit with beautiful little cards and lots of good will, but noplace to send it all.

I wish everyone could be blessed with such a problem. Lucky old me!

The Seamy Side of Santiago

2011-12-08T19:13:00.000+01:00

Along a two-lane highway we walked, our coat-pockets stuffed with slippery green litter bags, our hands in gloves, our hearts in the right place. It was me and Keith from Halifax, Yorkshire, preparing the Way of the Lord.

Me and Keith, an out-of-work statistician who got on a plane in London early this week and flew to Valladolid and took a train to Sahagun and walked to our house to join me on out here on the seamy side of the camino. He brought along a handy litter-grabber device, which made the job do-able from his six-foot height. There were two of us, one little van, rakes and shovels, and two sizes of bags.

In four days we did every inch of the way, from San Nicolas to Itero. Almost 70 kilometers. All of Palencia.

The Camino de Santiago is a UNESCO Cultural Itinerary, a Spanish national treasure, the Main Street of Europe, the Way of Stars and Stones. It is also a trash-dump for tourists, pilgrims, and local folk alike. In December, after the weeds die back, a year´s worth of litter lies exposed along the path. (With more than 150,000 pilgrims passing this year, that´s a lot of litter.)

And a lot of organizations want a piece of that action. They line up to plaster their logos on We Luv Camino signs all up and down the path, but none of them has arranged a comprensive trash-removal program. Municipalities and local clubs or confraternities supposedly keep an eye on the trail and pick up the clutter. But Spain now has no money. Cities and towns are too strapped to waste labor on outlying hiking trails, especially near county lines or municipal borders. It´s winter, and nobody wants to work outside. It´s "the holidays," when everyone is supposedly "spending time with family." The old folks are too stiff for all that bending and lifting. The young ones all live in the city.

Camino litter is a hot topic on some online pilgrim forums. Foreigners find it appalling. They shoot photos of the granola-bar wrappers, poop-and-toilet paper assemblages, and drifts of empty water bottles in the ditches. They post them on their blogs, they analyze what kinds and nationalities and age-groups of idiots would desecrate a holy path with sewage and garbage. Spanish school-groups and bicyclists come in for a kicking. Heads are shaken, "tut-tut" is said. There are cries of "someone ought to do something," and "It is not my mess and not my problem."

And after all the outrage, accusation, and bloviating, the hubcaps and toilet paper are still out there.

Advent started last week, the penitential season leading up to Christmas. A year ago I had a profound Advent. I wanted to continue with that. I wondered what kind of project I could do this year to mark the season. The Scripture verse at church gave me the answer: "Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. The valleys will be exalted, the mountains and hills made low, the crooked straight, the rough places plain... and the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord."

And so it came to me: Pilgrims walk the Way of St. James to find God. So I oughtta pick up the trash on the path. Prepare the Way of the Lord for them, so if the Holy Ghost whispers their name they will not be distracted by the half-mile of wrappers that once were a KitKat 6-pak. I had found a way to make boring old waste management into a righteous pursuit!

I posted on the website with all the trash-complainers -- I am out to clean up the Way, maybe all the way from Burgos to here. Anyone want to help? (I did not expect much response, but I took a chance. It would be much simpler logistically if there were two or three of us.)

Keith put his hand up right away. The Confraternity of St. James of South Africa left dozens of plastic litter bags with us when they did a "Spring Clean the Camino" campaign two years ago, and a kindly blog-reader from America donated money enough to cover our lunches.

The work is harder than it appears at first. We followed along the camino far as we could with the furgoneta-car, and walked the rest of the way. On the stretches between Revenga and Fromista and Boadilla and Itero we drove slowly, eyeing the ditches alongside, stopping and jumping out to snatch Coke cans or plastic bags as they appeared. We tried all different ways. At the notorious picnic area outside Carrion we just stopped and shoveled. At Villacazar de Sirga I dropped off Keith with a bundle of bags, and drove myself to Carrion de los Condes, and we each walked toward the center-point along the two-lane, picking up the bottles, cans, cigarette packs, styrofoam and hubcaps tossed away over the past months by pilgrims and bikers and drivers of the passing cars. The weather is perfect for this. We are still healthy and spry enough to do this work. We are tired when we finish, Paddy is feeding us very well, and we sleep very well these nights.

It´s the sleep of the righteous. We are righteous trash-pickers, I am not afraid to say it. Sinners saved by grace, grubby and tired but full of life. I´ve decided to make trash-picking into a regular spiritual practice.

I made a fine stöllen for St. Nicolas Day

...hosted by Daniel and Martina at the new Hostal Moratinos (she is German)

Long View from the Tiny Pueblo

2011-11-28T11:09:00.000+01:00

When all the fear, aches, ugliness, bad news, and impending disaster gets to be too much, I take my telescope out into the yard and look up at the stars and planets and moon. I still love the moon best. (Probably because it is easiest to find with my telescope!)

Here is the latest from NASA, shot over the last couple of months from the International Space Station. Sit down for a minute and take a breath and let it play.

It is not just pretty pictures. It is pure philosophy.

The sky is the best free show in the whole universe. It is calm and dark and huge and so far away, and so constant. Even though humans have mapped the stars and planets, given them names and measures and grades, the stars themselves remain value-free. They don´t care.

I get caught-up in fear, aches, ugliness, bad news and impending disasters, I do not look outside myself, even though we have a choice. I get so caught up in relationships, schedules, neighbors, communities, politics, I stop seeing other people as struggling creatures who are just like me, trying to fix what is broken, trying to change people and policies and things to make life more secure and happy, to make the pain and fear go away.

I am just a creature. I will not be here for long.
The planet does not care if I am liberal or conservative, Muslim or Christian or atheist. It does not care if the oceans are poisoned or the price of silver or Euros or coffee is going up, or if currency is collapsing.

It will keep turning, light and darkness, lightning and Northern Lights, with me or without me. With us, or without us.

Walking: Ordinary Time

2011-11-24T14:54:00.000+01:00

At 4 o´clock each afternoon, if no one is visiting and it´s not raining and if we feel like it, I put on my boots and choose a dog from the lineup. I leave the other three moaning behind the gate and take off down the street for Julia´s house. Julia pulls on a jacket and ties a scarf round her neck, and off we go on Paseo.

Julia´s house is a plain brick place on the axis of the village, where the highway bends down to touch Calle Ontanon. Hers was the first door to open to us when we came to Moratinos. We were

strangers then, and she and her husband Paco invited us in. They invited us to lunch on the biggest day of the Fiesta of Santo Tomas – on a day dedicated to family and the pueblo, they made room for two foreigners at their table. We dined on rabbit and endives, roast potatoes and baked apples, all of it raised right there.

After dinner we took their daughter Juli with us to see a tumbledown house down Calle Ontanon and round the last corner. The house was for sale. Young Juli spoke good English, and could translate. Julia Madre was keenly interested in what went down.

The house we saw that day is now The Peaceable. Julia was here from the very start, offering warnings and advice, exclaiming “Ay! Virgin santo!” whenever we let slip the price we paid for anything.

Julia and I have walked together, off and on, all the years since. Sometimes other people join us – Leandra did for a while, and Oliva (in their slippers!), Juli and Christie, Paco and sometimes Chus, their daughter-in-law. Our most constant companion is Julia´s brother Fran. Fran lives in his own world, but he likes a good airing. Walking with Fran is like walking a cat. He falls behind, or strides on ahead. He has his own dialog going, his own songs he sings.

But mostly it is just me and Julia. I set a stiff pace, and Julia moves right along on short legs. She is not a big woman. Her chestnut hair is kept shoulder-length, usually caught up in a pony-tail. She is quick and active, slim and bright, her tastes are simple and somewhat conservative.

She has a ready smile with a bit of glitter from a silver-capped cuspid. She loves to talk. She knows everyone in the towns around us, the owner of every field, sometimes what crops grow best on which tract. It was Julia who showed me the little hidden holy spring at Fuentes de San Martin, the abandoned village down the road. She can look at animal poo on the trail and tell if it´s left by a rabbit or a hare. In her pocket is a plastic bag and a sharp knife, so we cut mushrooms that grow along the road, take cuttings of wild thyme. We pluck red berries from a tree by the beehives. Nothing goes to waste. In my patio she pointed out the little flowers I thought were some kind of daisy. Those are manzanilla, she said – camomile. I give her cuttings of camomile and rosemary and Christmas cactus. She gives me starts and seeds for native flowers whose names I don´t know.

We walk far and fast for two middle-aged ladies. Sometimes we go for miles, out beyond Terradillos or over the Grand Canyon and up the road toward Escobar (their feast day was Wednesday. San Clemente.) We walk until we run out of sun. She does most of the talking, but that is fine by me. She has so much more to say.

One day in the Promised Land a stretch of the tractor-path was embedded with the soles of many shoes. I wondered out loud where they all came from, how they got out there so far from any habitation. She knew, so she told me.

Up til not so long ago there was no trash collection service. Everyone just threw their old broken things into the same pile out back with the manure and trash, scraps and slops. Once in a while the whole pile was hauled out and plowed into the fields. There´s lots of strange things out here, she said, but everything but rubber soles finally rots away back to earth.

Not everyone in Moratinos is fond of one another, and occasionally I get a whiff of interpersonal conflicts. Julia does not discuss those things. She is not a gossip. There are plenty of more interesting things to talk about besides the neighbors, she says. We talk about our children, how my children are together with the extended family for Thanksgiving -- how this makes me feel, being so far away. Julia waits, walking, while I struggle to string together the subjects, objects, verbs into a description of Thanksgiving Day in Western Pennsylvania, the roast turkey and pumpkin pies and my cousin Jo´s great house on Chestnut Ridge.

Julia is a keen traveler. Her daughter Celia lives in England, and Julia´s spent some time over there. She doesn´t always make it home for holidays. Julia can kinda sympathize. She thinks it´s a good idea for a whole country to take a holiday to be grateful for what it´s got.

And so I am grateful today, even without all the holiday trimmings and Aunt Esther. The sun is shining, and in an hour´s time I can head out again, this time with Rosie on the lead.

We´ll walk for our health, to take the air, to practice some Spanish, to see who´s planted their garlic already, whose dog had pups, how old Gregorio´s holding up after his operation. Fran will sing us songs about the flag, or “una Chica Yay-Yay,” or “the way you broke my heart,” and we will walk on plain old tractor-paths, through mud and dung, in Ordinary Time.

Gut-Check at the Convent

2011-11-14T22:47:00.001+01:00

It felt oddly under water, removed from the ordinary. Sounds were muffled, tempers cool. It was a long weekend, a meeting of the Acogida Cristiana en el Camino – a group of Christians who provide accommodation for travelers on the Camino de Santiago. Half of us were priests or nuns, so it was only natural to meet at the convent of the Benedictine Sisters in Leon, halfway down the camino. It is a place familiar to pilgrims who´ve passed through the city, as the sisters keep a big pilgrim shelter there.

Pilgrims sleep in the bare-bones albergue, then move on the next day. The fact they are staying in a nunnery barely registers. They don´t see many nuns unless they go to the evening prayers and pilgrim blessing in the chapel. Few do. They´re worn-down from a week´s walk on the plain old plains, and wine bars and pizzerias and a great stone cathedral somehow lure them away from the convent. A chilly chapel and 20 black-clad nuns can´t compete.

The sisters do not compete. They have their own world going on.

They´ve inhabited this slice of downtown since the 16^th century, and with only a few historic interruptions they have continued the same round of singing, prayers, and worship without cease. They run a school, make medieval-style banners and hangings, keep an orchard and the albergue and an adjacent minimalist-chic hostel. And they host retreats and small conferences.

It was a three-day meeting, and aside from a breezy walk to a nearby shrine and a cathedral tour we did not see much of the city around us. We were immersed. As guests of the house, the sisters´ round of psalms and prayers was integrated into our schedule of meetings. It would´ve been churlish to skip Compline for the sake of a glass of Toro and a tapa, as good as those may be in the bar-rich Barrio Humedo. We stuck together, and stuck to the schedule.

It was a Hospitalero Gut-Check. We discussed the meaning of hospitality in the Bible and Christian tradition. We poked around the philosophy and the role of hospitaleros: We are, Biblically, acting as deacons, missionaries, and sometimes evangelists. We looked at how a tradition of Christian hospitality grew up along the trail as more and more people took to traveling it. Who were those hospitaleros? How did earlier pilgrims view their hosts, and how did the hosts treat their pilgrims?

We looked at how the camino changed since the 1980´s, when the only albergues around were run by religious orders or confraternities or other church groups, on a donation basis. The only pilgrims around were academics or hardcore Catholic penitents. People along the road hosted pilgrims in their homes, as pilgrims were few in number, and usually trustworthy and helpful. The pilgrims, the hosts, and the towns around them all knew the score.

And then, in the 1990´s, the Camino de Santiago was “discovered.”

Over the past two decades an onslaught of hundreds of thousands of visitors swamped the primitive Christian accommodations system. Private albergues sprang up, hostels, hotels, restaurants, baggage services... the camino became a money-making proposition, and a magnet for people in search of cheap holidays. Hikers with no spiritual motivation took advantage of an infrastructure not designed to support them. Travelers, given a choice, prove unwilling to contribute much of anything. The priest in charge of the massive albergue in Ponferrada – a donativo place with space for 240 people – said the average pilgrim leaves 3 Euros in the box.

Pilgrims no longer come from a Christian background. Often, the volunteers running the albergues are not Christians either. (Hundreds of generous former pilgrims volunteer each year for two-week periods to keep the non-profit hostels running. You don´t have to be a Catholic or a Christian to be a fine hospitalero, so don´t misunderstand me.)

The point is: when a Christian pilgrimage loses its Christianity, it becomes just another hiking trail. Modern pilgrims who undertake this ancient pilgrim path as a spiritual discipline are finding themselves lost in a crowd of souvenir vendors, Coke machines, and wannabe Templar knights.

Still. The Camino de Santiago is bigger than people. It is a sacred trail that´s waxed and waned over centuries and sustained itself through wars and counter-Reformations, inquisitions and invasions. We are surely not the first Christians who´ve wondered if this pilgrimage has been bought and sold, pimped and publicized to death. We do not despair.

Because we are still here. Hospitaleros (and villagers along the Way) are the other half of the pilgrimage equation, the counter-balance to the waves of seekers and pilgrims. If we don´t give up on being a Christian presence here, the Camino will not lose the Christian character that makes it unique, and so deeply, mysteriously appealing.

And that is why we met, and why we spent three days politely taking turns, telling tales and explicating, organizing and singing.

I think the singing was the best part. In the meetings we sang bouncy new Camino songs with three Augustinian sisters from Carrion de los Condes. And in between meals and meetings we went to the chapel again, and sat in serenity as the sweet-voiced Benedictines chanted Psalms back and forth across the choir.

We chanted too, those of us who knew how, and most of us did. A church full of us. It was beautiful, sweet, soothing. After the hours of hard news and philosophy and hashing-out, delivered at breakneck speed in a clatter of regional Spanish accents, it was like cool water to just sing “Alleluia.”

And to be reminded

this is really not about us at all.

Postcard from Seville

2011-11-10T21:58:00.000+01:00

Many generations of tiles in the fountains of Sevilla Alcazar

Written from Sevilla, Nov. 1, evening:

In the lobby of Hotel Murillo I sit in a comfy chair and feel the cool air whisk through the sliding glass doors behind my back. I feel them before I hear them, the people passing inside, my fellow tourists, middle-class travelers from everywhere, chattering in Dutch and Danish, German and Spanish and broadest Michigan. In the beautiful twirly-carved mirror a girl stops and looks at her pretty brown shift. She pulls her hair back from her face, grasps it into a ponytail. She wears Keds with her dress. She glares at her nose. I want to tell her Yes, she is beautiful.

Seville cathedral, in non-revenue hours

Here with me in the lobby is a Portuguese or Brazilian girl, chattering with two-dimensional friends on the other end of her I-Pad. And another girl who looks very much like the others, in a wingback chair, speaking into a mobile in rapid-fire German about what she had for lunch. The programmed stereo overhead plays an over-arrangement of some vaguely familiar top-40 hit from Air Supply or Oasis. It is rendered unrecognizable. No one cares.

The doors whoosh open and the football game howls from the bar across the donkey-wide street outside : “Gooooooalgoalgoalgoalgoalgoalgoal! Bells peal overhead from the convent in the next street. Who knew the Carmelites were Real Betis fans?

Two suits of armor stand by. This music drips over them every night at this hour, but they stopped hearing it years ago. They do not understand a single word of us. They do not see more German beauties arrive, and another Portuguese in full makeup, her lips a perfect Deneuve. They all are so beautiful. No man is safe tonight in Barrio Santa Cruz! I take a photo for them with the silent armor. They shriek and squeal and grimace. Their lives are peaking just now, for all I know.

Patrick and I are on a short holiday in Seville. For two months I planned these five days. It is not easy for us to get away – a friend came from England to stay with our dogs and cat and chickens and canary while we were gone. I had to drive four hours to get her from the airport in Asturias, and I will have to repeat the journey when I get home. We have to make this count.

Seville is beautiful, but I am not enjoying it so much. My mind is not on where I am. So I came to the lobby, to exercise “being right here, right now.” Being present. Stopping all my stories from the past, and expectations of future days. Just to sit here, and be, and let Paddy have some time off from me too.

Paddy bought a new hat in Córdoba.

I don´t want to be in Barrio Santa Cruz in Sevilla, even if the whole rest of the world is SO here. I want to be at home in Castilla. I miss my animals, my kitchen, my corner of the sofa where I work. This morning, at the over-the-top 1929-world´s fair Plaza de Castilla, we looked at the little tiled stall that housed the display for Palencia, our rather backward province. Laid out in ceramic tiles on the floor was a map of the place. And over to the far left, right beneath a glob of chewing gum, was emblazoned for all of Spain to see and marvel at: MORATINOS. I took photos with my telephone, but I do not know how to upload those to Blogger. Otherwise, you all could marvel, too.

For the first time in many years, I am homesick.

In one of the most beautiful, metropolitan, soulful cities of Spain, I long for Moratinos, a nowhere town in Palencia, a forgotten, depopulated province in Old Castile.

Nobody goes there on purpose. There are no beautiful or historic buildings. Everyone here has planned and budgeted and looked-forward to this moment. They are so ready and so dressed and so beautiful. I wonder what their dreams are for this place, what they envision happening out there in the narrow streets this moonlit night. But I do not wonder long.

They can live their dreams. It is time I lived mine. I have walked miles today, and I will walk more tomorrow. Time to summon the lift, and interrupt Paddy´s solitude, and tuck myself in.

It´s a pisser, being a hermit/pilgrim on holiday.

Because holidays are so full of expectations, the very thing a good pilgrim is supposed to foreswear.

A truly happy Patrick

A Star is Born (Again)

2011-11-06T22:12:00.001+01:00

From the upstairs bathroom the pilgrim roared for the second time this evening. Flu, maybe, or bad food. He is not the first vomitous traveler to share that awful serenade with the household. The toilet flushed, and a few moments later he shimmered down the stairs and into the living room where I sat.

"Rebekah," he said, pale-faced. "Do you believe in God?"

Not exactly what I expected to hear just then. But hey. "Yeah, I do," I told him. "You guys been talking up there?"

He smiled a little. I gave him a big glass of water. I told him to sit down, but he didn´t want to.

"Something is happening to me today. Something amazing," he said. "I´ve been walking for so long, and had such pain, and today I was walking alone so I just shouted and raged, like a madman. I am just so ready to give up. I tell myself if I get to this house and nobody is home, then that´s it, it´s a sign that my Camino is over. I am on the plane tomorrow and going home. But here I am. I feel like I am home."

"You´re welcome," I told him. "This is what we do here. You came to a good place." (His arrival was a reminder to me that my troubles could be a lot worse, and that pilgrims are the priority here.)

"I wonder if God sent me here. I was so glad to find you home, because I don´t really want to go back home yet. I was up there lying in the bed, hearing the rain, and I just gave up anyway. I just told God, "I give up. You take this. I can´t handle my life any more." And then I got up and want to the bathroom and threw up like I never threw up before. And now I feel like, wow. Like something amazing is happening. I don´t have the flu. I am not sick, really. I think I just got rid of all the, well, shmutz I´ve been carrying in my mind forever."

It was a Billy Graham moment. Anyone raised in Evangelical Land will recognize it.

"Wow," I told him. "Do you believe in God? In the Christian God, in Jesus?"

"I do now," he said.

"Well, then. What you just did means, in Christian terms, you are a new creation. You just made a brand new start, spiritually. Your past is gone. You are born again."

"It feels like maybe you are right," he said. "I´m Protestant. I heard about this before, but it didn´t really make sense..." We sat for a minute.

"What about the vomiting part?" he asked.

"That is unique," I told him. "I never heard of projectile conversion before. It might be your body just mirroring the cleanup that´s going on in your spirit. But vomiting -- I think that´s maybe supposed to happen when your demons are exorcised. And that´s one service we don´t usually provide."

"So I got a two-for-one bargain," he said, smiling. He smiled in all sincerity.

We had a cup of tea. He then went off to sleep some more.

Moratinos isn´t any more spiritual than any other place, but wonderful things happen here.

We keep a mop and a bucket handy.

(This pilgrim is a pop star in Germany, a real character. I would post his photo but I do not want to violate his privacy, and New Creations are sometimes fragile. Besides, I still have not found the cable for my camera.)

Scrubbed

2011-11-06T14:15:00.000+01:00

Cordoba was a mind-blow. The mosque there was so beautiful it made me weep. Sevilla was a let-down. I did not cope well with the noise and crowds.

When time came to go home, we were ready. We´d had enough of the 24-hour racket and hoopla and shakedown prices. The longer I live, the less I enjoy large cities. We hermits like our own silent spaces and routines, and once we get settled in somewhere we tend to keep things pretty much the same.

But it was not to be.

The Sister of Mercy we left in charge of animal care turned out to be a brutally efficient housekeeper. We returned on a rainy afternoon to find The Peaceable spotlessly clean, the corners swept and mopped, the carpets beaten and even blankets washed. I was duly grateful. And then she unveiled her piece de resistance: the Salon!

The Salon has single beds for three, the best mattresses in the house. It has a long wall of shelves, where we store stuff we don´t know what to do with. Out-of-date cameras and cables, decades worth of film negatives, (remember disc cameras?) family photos, tax records, diaries, and New Yorker magazines are all hidden out of sight in colorful file-boxes. Or they were, up til now.

Now the mishmash is unboxed, stacked on one of the beds. The shelves are full of books, books moved from another shelf, which was moved from the corner along with the cedar chest, which is now in the middle of the room. The corners are spiderweb-free, and our fiction collection is filed according to genre. The box of books for free giveaway is gone, its contents duly filed. Three baskets of notes and references for three ongoing writing projects are now emptied, their contents neatly stacked and filed into God knows what box. Even my bag of vocabulary objects for the English class -- cans of beans and peas, toy animals, seed packets and small tools -- was broken up and put away.

We´ve been back for days, but the Miscellaneous crouches on the bed like a gang of toads. It must be dealt-with. Decisions on what should be thrown away, what should be kept -- who is this familiar person in this photo? Will we ever use this camera again? Should I list it on EBay? What about these trail notes from the Ruta Vadiniense? What about this old printer/CD player/cassette recorder? Is there a place to recycle these things? What happens if pilgrims show up and we need to use this bed?

And that´s just the salon. The kitchen cabinets are now filed. And the upstairs linen supply.

...And our bedroom.

Dear God in heaven, she cleaned our bedroom.

I am not sure when this place has been so clean, certainly not since Shimmering Kim left us. Somehow I feel I have been scrubbed-down too. With a steel-bristle brush.

Maybe it´s the weather -- suddenly it is cold out there, and windy and wet.
Maybe it´s hormones, or the lack of daylight now that the clocks have shifted back.
Maybe it´s my sudden inability to write coherantly, right when I wanted to be hard at work on the new book. (I cannot find the notebook with the outline in it!)
Maybe it is Paddy´s fault -- he feels the same way I do, and we can´t afford to turn on each other.
I am very low.
But my house is clean as hell.

Mr. Clean and the Sisters of Mercy

2011-10-29T00:07:00.000+02:00

The whole world is occupying and protesting and saying ugly things about each other.

Here at the Peaceable, though, (almost) all is Peace Love and Understanding. Paddy and I are off in the morning for Córdoba, and from there to Sevilla -- two "can´t miss" Spanish tourist attractions that I have never seen. I made some kind of whining sound late last month after we had a long pilgrim occupation and cabin fever set in, and what I said then was true: we need a break. We want to get away somewhere together for a change. And so Leena called up and asked, in her perky way, "When shall I come? And how long shall I stay?"

Today I drove all the way up to the Aeropuerto de Asturias to get her. It was a beautiful drive, and I only got lost twice. Leena took a week off work and came all the way there from London Stanstead, just to walk dogs in a backwoods Spanish town so me and Pad could get away for a few days.

Sorta like Anita, the Busted Pilgrim. I wrote about her last week. She still is here, and will travel with us tomorrow as far as Madrid. Her arm is still in plaster, but her face is much more Anita-like now. It took a few days, but the last three or four she´s taken apart our sitting room, utility room, and old summer kitchen. She sorted out the pots and drawers of screws and drill-bits and fly-strips and eye-drops and outdated anti-depressant pills. She swept away the dust-bunnies and dog-hair muskrats and filth-beavers that have lurked for months (or years!) behind and atop and around the furniture and fitments. She sorted out the books, knick-knacks, Virgins of Guadelupe, the very pictures on the walls. It was horrifying and fascinating, like a train wreck. Having strangers see how truly nasty my house is. Knowing pilgrims sleep in those beds, with that much stuff underneath... Euuugh.

The two of them met only hours ago. At dinner Anita told about the things she´s achieved in the last few days. Lena cast her bright eyes round the room. Some kind of spark ignited between them. The spark of shared passion, shared compassion -- they tell me they are sorry I am so allergic to dust, that I cannot do this work myself. The truth is, they are obsessive-compulsive cleaners and organizers, and they´ve hit on a mother-lode of benign neglect that´s within their power to put to rights.

They are OCD, and Patrick and I are, well... lazy. Patrick has bad eyesight, and supposedly cannot see the dirt. I know the dirt is there, and I can medicate myself beyond my allergies and do the work. I just do not choose to do it. Any more often than, say, every two years or so. And only one room at a time.

Upshot is: We have tickets to ride to Cordoba tomorrow on the 10:08 a.m. train. It now is 11:34 p.m. I am in the living room with the dogs and cat, relaxing, blogging. Leena and Anita and Mister Clean are in the salon, apparently moving furniture and wiping surfaces.
Leena says "You want to sweep that?"
"Is this pilgrim stuff, or do you think these mittens belong to Paddy?" Anita says.
"That I´m going to empty, and put these in there. That´s too pretty to hide back there."
"If we move this to the back room, maybe the pilgrims won´t walk out wearing Reb´s jacket any more."
"Isn´t this fun?"
"Are we being neurotic?"
"This isn´t OCD. I´ve seen OCD. We´re doing this for fun, not because we have to."

No. They don´t have to. People buzzing around cleaning is a sure way to drive Patrick to his bed, or to the pub. I feel just slightly guilty, having these guys laboring over my place and things. But not too guilty. It´s true, that kind of cleaning makes me miserable for days. They are doing a true Work of Mercy -- payback perhaps for some of the other mercy that was worked in the salon over the years.

I didn´t ask them to do this. They are having a good time, God bless them both. They recognized one another right away, declared themselves sisters, and set to work. Leena and Anita, the Sisters of Mercy.
I am grateful for the blessings that rain down on me.
A burst of lemon freshness rolls out the door and down the hall.It´s a long journey tomorrow. I am going to bed.

Dustbowl

2011-10-23T01:37:00.000+02:00

An important week in a quiet sort of way.

For an entire week I have very slowly wrestled with the climactic scene in the novel I am writing. I have written this story three times now, and this part was most important and very challenging. I took it slowly. I was painstaking.

I was unusually busy besides. On Monday a phone call came from a tiny town on the Camino de Madrid. Anita, an American pilgrim, wasn´t going to make it to Sahagún as planned. Something had happened. Could we come and get her?

We did. She was waiting at the pilgrim albergue at Santervás del Campos, a medieval adobe town right out of a spaghetti western. Her face was a mess – one eye swollen shut, her lip split and cheeks bloody, one arm was crooked across her chest, like she just did three rounds with Bruno Sammartino. But she smiled. “Can you take me home with you?” she drawled.

She is a cargo pilot from Tennessee. She´d walked the whole way north from Segovia without incident. Tuesday was supposed to be the last day of this particular trail, but she was walking heads-up, surveying the roofs and cornices and soffit and fascia as she strode down the main street of Fontehoyuelo. Downhill from the fuente, the concrete heaves up a little, enough for both feet to catch. She crashed face-first, with 8 kilos of backpack pushing from behind.

Tuesday she spent with me in the health center in Villada and the hospital in Palencia. She was examined by a family doctor and an emergency doctor and a trauma osteopathic doctor, X-rayed twice and then plastered from wrist to shoulder – the crooked arm was broken at the elbow. The evil Socialist doctors did not give us a bill.

Anita cannot carry her backpack now, and she has noplace to go. So she is here.

Yesterday a Scottish hospitalero stopped here on the way to Castrojeriz, a town east of here, where she is helping to close the pilgrim hostel for the winter. She took Anita away with her, for what looks like the weekend. It is good to have a break after a few days, even from nice people.

Moratinos is a dustbowl. It has not rained for months and the dust is getting unbearable.

Austin, a pilgrim from Canada, started walking the Camino Vadiniense on Sunday, and phoned or emailed his progress as he “beta-tested” the new guide I wrote a month or so ago. On Wednesday we three drove up to meet him in Cistierna. He had not seen another pilgrim or spoken English for a week. He talked and talked, and we looked at his maps and pictures and ate sea bass and drank vermouth. He is liking the trail, but it is apparently kicking his butt, as it kicked mine in July.

It was beautiful in the mountains. The night sky was spangled with stars. I started thinking of other stories I want to write, when Zaida´s tale is told.

On Thursday Florian, a handsome German pilgrim, arrived with Einstein, his equally handsome dog. We let them both stay inside the house, and Harry was very jealous – Harry isn´t allowed inside, as he is a hound dog. (Einstein was a Münster, a smart sort of spaniel.) Florian and Anita are both pilots. They talked and talked about helicopters and airplanes, while Patrick made good things for dinner.

Before he left Friday morning Florian helped us move the big houseplants inside. The nights are getting frosty. Now the sitting room is full of greenery again. Soon we will start up the woodstove!

Today, Saturday, was best of all.

A big shipment of wine arrived, mostly Ribero del Duero. Delicious. The English lesson went well. Today they learned to say “No way!”

Still no rain.

The new two-star Hostal Moratinos, the Spanish/German enterprise on the edge of town, is now open for business. We went there in the evening. I had a Warsteiner Dunkel, a delicious dark German beer in a huge tall glass. Paddy showed the proprietors how to make a gin-and-tonic. It is a clean, sharp, well-lighted place in a really prime location for catching pilgrim traffic. I wish them well.

And on the way from there, in the dusk, José and Estevinas showed us how things are progressing at the new bodega-cave bar-restaurant. It should be elegant, I said. Slow but sure. Like learning verbs.

“No way,” José told me, grinning.

“No way José,” Patrick quipped. (I am not sure they got it.)

And further up Calle Ontanon we met Edu, coming home from his garden with a bucketload of freshly-pulled onions. They are gorgeous and fragrant, bristling with green tops. He gave me three. They weigh at least a kilo.

Back at home the dogs gave us their usual hysterical welcome, their tails tracing figure-eights in the half light. We settled in. Paddy watched a horse race from Keeneland. We picked the first- and second-place finishers.

At 9:30 p.m. I finished writing the book.

At midnight the lights flickered off, then came on again. The dogs looked up from their dozing. I lost internet access, so I shut down the computer for a while and picked up the daily diary. I heard voices outside. A man talking. The neighbors, I thought, staying up late.

But then the voice changed, and someone started singing. A folk song, a “niña bonita.” It was, I realized, the boom-box, the portable CD player out in the patio. The power surge had triggered it to “play,” and the flemenquista Carmen Linares was doing a midnight concert for the entire Barrio Arriba de Moratinos.

I stepped outside to restore peace. I did not turn on the lights.

I looked up to my friends the stars – the Big Dipper dumping upside-down over the barn, the W of Cassiopea atop the chimney, the Earth warm and powdery underfoot. The night was like velvet, and the singer´s voice rich as toffee. The patio was an adobe bowl, filling up. Eduardo´s onions on the table, the last of the basil leafing-out on the well-head, and the birds fluttering in the spruce overhead. I switched off the music, but my heart kept singing.

The patio was full of darkness and joy.

New Life in the Old Pueblo

2011-10-16T23:10:00.002+02:00

Leticia, Manolo, and The Star of the Show

They are Flor and Angeles, Hilario and Feliciano, Segundino and Angel and Manolo. The sisters are small and slender and fond of flashy fashions.

The brothers are short and portly, with spectacular smiles.

They share the same cheekbones and chins. They are fair enough to pass for Irish, but they´re Castilian to the bone.

Seven sisters and brothers, they grew up in Moratinos and still work together on their parents´ homestead. This weekend they gathered into the corner house on the plaza mayor with all their children, spouses, aunts, and uncles – 29 people altogether.

This is not unusual out here in the pueblo. Big families were the norm, right up to the 1980s.

It is not unusual that Igor, one of the sons of this family, a couple of years ago married Leticia, a daughter of the family who lives on sunny weekends in the house next door to ours. And this afternoon the vast assortment of friends and relations on both sides, and both ends of town, donned their Sunday clothes and descended on the church for the baptism of Asier, the much-anticipated firstborn great-grandchild.

The church was mopped and dusted and decked with flowers. The bell rang, and Angel and Pin set off sky rockets. The 90-something great-grandparents – a bisabuela and a bisabuelo who now live in care-homes far away – gloried in their front-row seats, their faces radiant to see their old village and neighbors again.

The parents stood at the font, a 700-year-old stone cup that´s tucked under the stairs, and offered up their offspring to a Christian life. The baby was duly sprinkled with holy water, and shed not a tear.

Igor and Leticia were baptised at this font. Their mothers were, too, and Leticia´s mother´s father, and who knows how much farther back. Baptisms didn´t used to be so special.

This is the first baptism here for a good six years, Leandra told me.

At the turn of the 20^th century, 120 people lived in Moratinos. The young men and maidens grew up together and married one another at this altar, then baptized their children at this font. They knelt here to receive their first communions, and turned up for Sunday Mass and rosary prayers if they were one of the respectable families. And when they died, their families gathered into the church to mourn. The church is still the heart of Moratinos, but these special events are landmarks, remarkably rare.

And so it was, back 20 generations or more, a thousand years. And so it continues, just not nearly so often. Not when the population stands at 21 souls, all of them over age 40.

We spilled out of the church into an Indian summer afternoon. Manolo and Flor and Angel threw out handfuls of candy, and old and young scrambled like gulls to snatch up the goodies. The families stood on the church steps and smiled for the cameras.

The sun was brilliant, the smiles luminous.

From there on the steps of the church you could almost hear Moratinos´ heartbeat.

proud family

more of everybody


the whole crowd, except photographers

The Key to Everything!

2011-10-09T23:46:00.001+02:00

convento de las clarisas, Astudillo

This is going to sound "woo-woo," but what the hell.

I watch the news, and most of it is bad. Soon our money will be worthless, the plans we made to keep us in comfort for the next few years are not so stable and sensible after all. What can I do? How can I get ready? How can I change a system so evil and so entrenched?

I felt scared for a little while. I looked at the wall of negativity on the Web, and I sat down with it to think. I decided to look round the other side of it, at what else could happen. I looked for a glimmer of light.

On the other side of this mess is something simple and beautiful.

I pray for it. I think so much of the answer to the fear and suffering around us, the suffering that is and may be to come, is for everyone to calm down, shut up, and do something Good.

Doing Good doesn´t have to cost anything. It is therapeutic, calming and cleansing. It has tons of historic precedent. You don´t need lessons or workshops or seminars to learn to do it. You don´t even need to believe in anything or anybody. It is as natural as breathing. It is something humans just do, whether or not they call it "prayer" or "works of mercy" or "charity work" or "volunteering" or "standing up for what´s right."

My friend Claire made me think a couple of days ago, when she quoted author Brian Taylor, an Episcopalian Rector:

"Do you feel God most directly when you sing the blues? Then sing the blues and call it prayer. Do you blurt out things that everyone seems to be thinking but no one is saying? Blurt one, and call it the prompting of the Spirit. Do you love to cook and eat? Hold parties and consider it Holy Communion."

So he expanded on the "prayer" thing a bit. My point is, many of the things we do naturally are, with a simple re-phrase, doing Right. Doing Good. People have stuck labels on all these things and assigned them to lists and Virtues and Gifts of the Spirit, Sacraments, etc. etc., as if they were church property.

Nope. If God is as big as the church people say (s)he is, no one can co-opt goodness. It is from God. It is natural and human and therapeutic. It is not Democrat or Republican, Labour or Tory, liberal or conservative. You know what it is, because you are good.

Unless you are a sociopath, you know what is right, and you know what needs to be achieved in your house or yard or street or neighborhood. Shut off the goddam TV and/or computer and go do it.

For all our sakes. For God´s sake.

It will put your mind at ease. It will correct wrong, clean up the mess, solve a few problems. Just imagine if everybody stopped snarling, snarking, fighting, and worrying, and just did something good. Every day. Not waiting for the government to do something, not worrying about someone else taking advantage. Just doing it because it needs to be done, and our hands are free, and the needs are clear.

Even if the über-rich win and we all must live under a bridge, if we all are in the habit of doing Good we will make the bridge into a community, where good people do good for one another, without having to make a buck out of it, without having to score points at someone else´s expense. Maybe when we are all collectively screwed out of all our "belongings" we can dump our over-hyped, alienating "Individualism" and learn to take care of each another.

Jesus talked about that. Jesus the homeless brown-skinned revolutionary, the woo-woo Jew. (If I am just a silly dreamer, I am in very good company.)

We cannot stop a financial armageddon. But we can stop being afraid, and go out and be kind to our neighbors. This is the only answer I can find.

Hound Dog in the Promised Land

2011-09-30T23:53:00.002+02:00

Paddy, Promised Land

If you have been round here for long, you know about the Grand Canyon, Labyrinth, Tumberon, Hare Field, Medieval Lane, and Happy Valley -- names we´ve given to the trackless landscapes around us. You will not find them on any maps, but these names enable us to find one another while dog-walki, bush-whacking and star-gazing, or better describe to one another where we spotted the owl or the avutarda.

So... what´s the Promised Land look like in September, when the fields are cut and there´s been no rain for many weeks? Here you go. Shot today, while the camera battery stuttered out its last moments of power. I will do better next time, I promise.

soybeans sprouting near the bodega hill

Delighted

2011-09-28T16:04:00.000+02:00

Things delight, if you let them.

Here are several things that delight me lately.

My grandad Albert Scott celebrated his 94^th birthday Saturday. He is sharp and smart and funny, and now he has a girlfriend! Her name is Betty. She is a sweet young thing of 80-something.

This morning I picked a bucketful of sweet yellow apples from the trees in our back yard. I thought to make pies with them, but realized I still have sliced-up apples from last year in the freezer. I pulled those out to use them up, and discovered frozen sliced-up cherries, too. And cascabellas, the little cherry-ball fruit thingies that grow on the tree out front. So in the oven now is an apple pie and a cherry-cascabella pie.

I don´t know who will help us eat them, or even if they will be very good after all this time in the freezer. But we´ve seen a spate of very fine pilgrims lately. Hungry ones. And I bet these pies are going to be fabulous.

Lately the fruit and veg are beyond compare. In the past two weeks I have made the finest Red Gazpacho Andaluz AND the finest Sopa Ajo Blanco of my entire life. And some killer zuchinni bread and veggie quiche as well. It´s the vegetables, people. September is the moment for fresh vegetables and fruit, and I love to eat!

I delight in Literacy. Over the last couple of weeks I re-wrote Zaida, a novel I wrote last year about a Moorish princess who lived nine kilometers away and a thousand years ago in Sahagun. The book is now being read critically by three trusted people. And of course I now am discovering a great trove of historic information on that time and place that will have to be rubbed into the story somehow! I am delighted to say I feel no fear or resistence to re-writing the whole thing again if I have to -- I may need to make Zaida into a tough cookie instead of the innocent hard-done-by. This is a wonderful and simple story, but I am not so attached to my work that I cannot chop out chunks of it to make it even better.

Reading deeply of historic texts has always been a favorite pastime. Now I can do it with an end in sight. It makes me want to go and visit Córdoba and Sevilla (where Zaida grew up). Just about every tourist who comes to Spain goes to see Sevilla and Córdoba, but until now I have managed to miss them both. (FYI: Leprosy did not exist in western Europe until the 12^th century, when the crusaders brought it home with them from the Middle East.)

I am delighted that Leena, a friend from England, may be coming in a few weeks to stay with the dogs, so Paddy and I can go together to see the splendid Moorish cities down south. We almost never travel anywhere together, so it is a treat when it happens.

Meantime, the camino has offered up some wonderful characters. We hosted a kilt-wearing Shaman massage therapist, a high-church Episcopal priest from Fort Worth (he updated me on goings-on in my beloved US denomination and did a bit of healing as well); Another night brought a chipper Dutch-English couple who run hotels in Costa Rica. (The man is a jolly prophet of our oncoming collective economic doom). We also had a beautiful Irish girl who explained how hashish is made, using freezer bags and tea strainers and a rolling-pin.

We bought three new tires for the car in a week´s time, and now the front end is making a not-encouraging sound when I turn the wheel hard. So far we´ve been able to address the problems as they rise... including the fused light-switch in the salon. When things go, they all go at once.

The English lessons are swimming along. It delights me to hear Flor and Estevinas saying aloud, “The doves are timid,” “I have no money,” and “José is drunk.” Some of them are doing very well indeed, even though I still do not know what I am doing. The hours of 5:30 to 7 p.m. Saturdays goes by faster than any other hour-and-a-half of the whole week.

Our critters are healthy, we are getting over colds, and we put the last couple of pilgs on a train for Oviedo just before lunchtime. Now I will have a nap.

We are doing delightfully.

The Year´s Hard Crown

2011-09-15T22:32:00.000+02:00

Internet is back. I am taking all the credit, even though I am not sure which of the several "fixes" I tried was the one that worked. It is all very mystical and mysterious. Maybe a saint dunnit. Thank you, whomever or whatever. Living takes on an odd cast when you know the communication links are down.

The sky is full of herds of birds, lots flying south, a few heading north! This afternoon we saw eight gray geese fly across the fields near St. Martin de la Fuente. The sky is becoming silent now. In the morning, out on the Promised Land, nothing can be heard but crows. I saw a snake out there the other day, black and gray, running away.

It is manure-spreading season. The familiar perfume hangs in the air. The flies are bad.

At the bodegas work continues on the new underground restaurant, with a forest of floor-jacks and elaborate cement-injection machines blasting away on the roof. Someday, something awesome is going to be there. Around the other side of the hill the Segundino family is rebuilding a collapsed bodega, connecting it inside with their current cave. Beautiful arches of bricks, all of it going to be buried at the end. We are keeping busy too, taking care of business: furnace maintenance, new front tires on the car ("Fear As Tony," the tire man recommended: Great for farm vehicles. Tough as nails. American. Then I saw the brand printed on the side of the tire: Firestone! Aha!) All we need now is a window and door out back, for Paddy´s painting studio.The next ordeal.

It all would be rather boring and anodyne if I was not working a good four hours each day on Zaida, the novel I wrote last November. I am doing an overhaul, a re-write, smoothing out all the repetitions and stupidness that slips into a document that size. It is productive, it is creative, and it is funner than just about anything else I do. Half my day is spent in Sahagun, but a thousand years ago.

The work is only apropos, seeing as Autumn is on its way.
Next to the downstairs toilet we keep a copy of "The Unquiet Grave," a series of epigrams by that cheery old elf Cyril Connolly. In there this morning I found this:

The creative moment of the writer comes with the autumn. The winter is the time for reading, revision, preparation of the soil; the spring for thawing back to life; the summer is for the open air, for satiating the body with health and action, but from October to Christmas is for the release of mental energy, the hard crown of the year.

Hear, hear, Cyril. I could not agree more! And now that I have the re-write half finished, other projects are flowing in -- Mitch is going to Bolivia at the end of the month, and will be writing madly after that to have his book in shape for a November deadline. I agreed to do that re-write, too -- no doubt chapter by chapter, as the draft is finished. Should be fun. I might actually make some money, too!

And then there´s the Vadiniense guide, and an article or two about the route for a couple of pilgrim magazines. Kim sent me a huge zip file of blog entries and photos... I haven´t had the nerve to open it yet.

It is very good to be booked-up. Things like blogs, housework, friends and birthday cards are neglected, but I don´t feel too guilty. I am doing what I do best, what I love most.

Limited Contact

2011-09-11T14:24:00.001+02:00

The internet connection in our house has gone south again. I write this from Bruno´s place. I will get back into better touch when Civilization returns to The Peaceable.(everything else seems to be breaking down, too. Tis the season!)

Meantime, I am doing the re-write on Zaida, the novel I wrote last November. Without the internet distractions the work is progressing apace. Also, the English lessons here in Moratinos recommenced yesterday evening... I thought I might get five or six takers, now that the summer rush is over. But TWELVE people showed up, and stayed for a full hour and a half! What fun!

But seeing as I need to move on out of here before another purchase is required, here is my offering for the week. An offering, really, from Kim. She lived with us for a good while in the last couple of years. She is a gifted woman, and a filmmaker. Here is her summary of her Year On The Road, part of which was spent with us in Moratinos. I could never have put it better than she does -- our house, and the Camino de Santiago, and Finisterre at the end. Put it on full screen and pour a glass of Tempranillo and just enjoy:

reflections from the end of the land from soulful road on Vimeo.

Thank you, Kimster, for being a part of our story.

What I Ate on my Summer Vacation

2011-08-31T22:56:00.001+02:00

A week ago I was stretched out on a lounge chair under a cocoa-fiber umbrella, dozing in the heat of a Portuguese beach. The hiss and roar of the Atlantic muffled the children´s shouts and the tak-tak of the paddleball players, and the calls of the boliña vendors -- "Boliñas! SUCH boliñas I got!"

In the Algarve part of Portugal, beach food is not hotdogs or sno-kones. It´s boliñas, berliners -- big cream-filled doughnuts! I can´t imagine anything I´d like less after a hard day of sun-bathing, but apparently at Praia Altura there are people making their living that way. I did not yield to the temptation.


Filipe and Lobster Cataplana

I think it was the only culinary offering I turned down in my entire stay there. Filipe, like many Portuguese, is a superb cook, and Altura is home to a small local market with excellent fish stalls, vintners, and truck-garden vendors ... So. Imagine what we ate and drank each day and night, out on the rear terrace -- cataplana cookers loaded with sea creatures, veg, and green wine. And when I trimmed the lemon tree, we made a fragrant barbecue from the sticks, and roasted lamb chops and red peppers and marinated octopus over the coals. It was days of wonderful excess, with some of the finest company in the world. And best of all, a week ago tonight, I looked into the night sky to find Cassiopeia, and instead saw a shifting, silent V of pink flamingos.

Breathtaking.

I drove the car this time. It gave me the flexibility to pay a visit to Tracy, a camino friend, author, and hypnosis therapist who lives on the Spanish coast. We met up in the mountains, hiked a beautiful green arroyo in Grazalema, ate local trout in the dark, and drove a massively long and twisty mountain road down to Ronda and into the great coastal Babylon of Marbella. Tracy lives in a palatial villa there, in a palatial gated enclave surrounded by golf courses, swimming pools, and spas. She has a beautiful balcony garden, a massive collection of books that I want to read, two superb cats, and a soft rabbit. But Tracy would much rather live in a stone house in rainy, gray Galicia, taking care of pilgrims. (how bizarre!)

sundown over Andalusian mountains, north of Ronda

It was very very hot there. I did not stay very long. I drove on east to Torremolinos, where part of Patrick´s family lives. It was hotter still there, humid, crowded. We ate Indian curry, talked about the past and the future, real estate, funeral arrangements. The heat drove us north, back into the mountains, where we spent an afternoon in a cool reservoir lake, playing with Sam the adorable and sassy step-grandson. I learned that Matt, Paddy´s second son, lived up there in his 20th summer. In a cave. (Matt made a great video of the event, which I hope to post here:

back in my own house!

I headed home on Monday morning. It was a long, long journey, punctuated at the end with a minor accident: a rock flew off the back of a passing truck and into my windshield. The safety glass held up, but I was sprayed with tiny shards, and an impact the size of a baseball was right there above where I needed to see out! Insurance paid for the new windshield. I got home just fine (in spite of my Garmin Nüvi 225W SatNav, which was worse than useless). I was very glad to arrive, because...

After two weeks away, Murphy Cat came home! He is missing one of his toes, but it does not seem to bother him much. He is as demanding and luxuriant as ever. I was so happy to see him, and the rest of the howling horde, I almost cried.

I wondered, stretching myself out on my own bed in my own room in my own house, what could have possessed me to ever leave this place.

Pueblo de Poesía

2011-08-20T22:51:00.000+02:00

Flor stood up at the podium where the Gospel is usually proclaimed. She laid her papers straight, cleared her throat, and launched into her reading full-speed.

The words flew from her mouth and over our heads. They winged out the church door and circled the tower. She read fast, and with well-rehearsed gestures and stresses in her voice.

What she read this evening, before her relatives and neighbors, was a poem she wrote herself, a poem about a nest of storks. She proclaimed it with pride as well as some nervousness. It was a very good poem, and it earned her a noisy round of applause.

And after her came Toni, her sister-in-law, with her poem about the dignity of Spanish womanhood. A striking young cousin emerged from the sacristy halfway through, decked in a red dotted Flamenco dress, fluttering a lacy fan – a living illustration.

José was up next. His poem was a free verse, a song of sad longing, of nights spent in a silent town wondering if this was what he will always do. He read with dignity of things many men would never speak of aloud.

Then came Sara, whose lively youth burbled out in a quick, sweet ode to something pretty.

The heavy artillery rolled out last. Modesto, the 80-something resident historian and poet, writes and recites poems for at all of Moratinos´great events. Tonight he shared no less than four Tributes in Rhyming Couplets, ranging in subjects from A Mother´s Love to The Useful Pig.

His sons sat smiling in the front row. At the end of the pork poem came a flurry of hands motioning in Modesto´s direction, fingers making slicing motions against necks, chopping motions against wrists. Modesto smiled pityingly at them and gathered up his sheaf of rhymes.

It was Moratinos´ First Poetry Reading, part of the annual Fiesta weekend. It lasted only 20 minutes, but it played to a packed house of appreciative listeners. All of the poems were written by the people who read them. And none of them was bad. Not at all.

We live, after all, in rural Castile, a place with a long history of poets and poetry. They teach it in school, and students that show promise are further fostered with lessons on how to read in public.

We have a pool of talent in our midst, apparently untapped. Until now. Here we have a housewife watching a leggy bird and her brood, seeing how the two of them, woman and stork, do the same sorts of chores each day.

Here´s a lonely farmer. A teenager blossoming, aware of her blossoming. A Spanish woman, a carpenter´s wife, celebrating herself and her sisters and her nation. And a patriarch, holding forth the way respectable old men in little rural towns are wont to do.

There were no prizes, because that would require judges, and judgements. At the end everyone filed out and patted one another on the back and bought each other beers at the bar. We stayed just a little while, watching the big card-playing tournament (the prizes there are hams and pork loins, cheeses and bottles of wine) then headed back toward home and dinner.

Up the street beyond the albergue, Julia sat chatting on the curb with Oliva and Justi and one of their grown-up daughters. Julia´s still mourning, she is taking a pass on all but the Mass for this year´s fiesta – but she still loves a good visit. I sat down and told them what they´d missed. And Oliva was inspired.

When she was small, she said, every Sunday in May she´d stand up before the Virgin statue and recite elaborate poems of praise. “Offerings,” she called them, taught to the children at school and at home. And now, 60 years later, Oliva still has them filed comfortably in her vast memory.

“O holy mother mine,

O flower of Judah, O star of the Sea,

When I am sad, I always call to thee,

And you are there to comfort me,” she reeled off.

“You dry the tears of every child

A mother to all who call to you,

Eternal mother, robed in majestic blue

O hear our songs of gratitude...”

She knows three long Offerings like these, and Julia joined in for one about a Mystic Rose. Their voices made a sing-song as Pilar´s troupe of pretty grandchildren toddled and wheeled past, on their way to the plaza to play boules. Justi stood by, watching the recital. He smiled as Oliva spoke, his craggy brown face full of tenderness.

We have always had plenty of poetry here, what with storks on the roof, and crickets singing in the fields, and thunder grumbling off to the west.

And we have poets here, too, listening and writing that poetry into words. And ladies perched on the curb, pulling forth poems they first recited when their voices were young and clear and sweet.

Imagine, a little town full of poets, offering it up. Because we all are here, and because we all want to hear.

Demolition

2011-08-18T23:56:00.000+02:00

Calle Ontanon, just before the stars begin to fall

Dust and heat and electricity are settled on our little town. The sun smites us by day, and at night the stars are falling like crazy. People are moody – cheerful and chipper one day, low and blue the next. Me too.

Here is the big news of the week: the house on the way into town finally came down yesterday. It once was the finest house in Moratinos, we are told, but years of abandonment and neglect saw it falling further earthward every day. It was a dangerous eyesore, and a beautiful, broken old glory – if you were a pilgrim within the last two years or so you might remember how tempting was that sagging-open front door. You could just see inside the kitchen, where a pot still stood on the ancient iron stove. It invited exploring, even as it threatened sudden traumatic crushing injury.

The demolition guys worked two days over there, playing to an appreciative crowd.

There are lots of people in Moratinos just now. It is August, and all the Summer People are back, their houses unlocked and windows thown open, the dust shaken from their rugs out into the already-dusty plaza. Children loop up and down the streets on bikes and scooters, more children every day. A hundred swallows trace the same loops in the air above their little heads.

We pick the figs and plums and courgettes, chop and blanch and bag and freeze them all. We write, or at least I write – I have finished the Vadiniense guide, but have not gotten ´round to sending it off to London for editing. We´ve had guests, from Wales and from Astorga, but we still have not got around to putting the house back together after their visits. We are sun-struck, lazy.

And leery. Much as I like a party, bad things have happened here the last couple of fiestas. A pilgrim fell and broke his foot on our front stairs. Our dog went missing. Last year a traveler lost her life on the road outside town.

Now Murphy is gone missing. Three days now, and no yowls from the back yard.

Peter, the archguitarist, is playing the fiesta Mass on Saturday. I had other, more elaborate liturgical plans laid out, but they suddenly came to naught. (I think I am the only one who´s noticed!)

Juli was here for the last fiesta, cuddling the new babies, hanging out on the church steps, making sure everyone had second helpings of chorizo and bread and wine. (I miss her keenly, she was such a part of my last five summers, and what a gift she would be to the English class!).

During last year´s party Una dog hid from the fireworks in the downstairs shower. Nabi spent the fiesta barking from the safety of the barn.

They all are gone now.

The fiesta will have the place heaving all weekend. We will play cards under the trees, and dance after sundown, go two times to Mass and march the saint around the town. There´s a poetry recital planned, and some folk dancers, and The Big Feast. And on Monday everyone will pack up and vanish for another year.

I will lose half my students at the English lessons. And maybe the English lessons, too, will end when the plowing starts up again.


Big fun learning English

Because we are part of a big rhythm here. Things sprout and flower and fruit, and then they die away and vanish for a while. Houses are built and lived-in and loved until the people move away or die or forget, and then they slowly crumble. Friends, like pilgrims, come into our lives and go out again, sometimes way too soon. We have to let them go.

It is only natural. It´s living.

Two Angels & a Trinity

2011-08-07T01:17:00.001+02:00

Kathy charms the youth of Cistierna´s industrial wasteland

I spent the whole last week writing the new Vadiniense guide, and now I am sick of it.
Not the trail. The guide. The writing about the trail. This is hard work!

the Roman road near Cremenes

BOILED DOWN: From where I left off in the last blog post, that trail loses altitude steadily for two more days, passing over a huge dam and along ten unforgettable cliffside kilometers of often-pristine Roman road. It continues into coal country, where I was reminded of my youthful wanderings over similar mountains of mine-tailings. (In Armstrong County Pennsylvania, however, the mines are called "Rosebud" or "Tintown" or "Lenora Lee." Here in Spain we passed the mouth of one called "Imponderable"!) I enjoyed poking round the skeleton of a massive and abandoned mine complex on the riverbank. All the heavy metals in the world could not crush the joy of a little herd of semi-wild horses that whinnied and grazed among the ruins.
The following two days were green fields full of storks, an 11th century convent still home to chanting nuns, a haunted monastery on a hilltop, cliff-dwellings carved into hillsides by hermit monks... and miles of broiling black asphalt. I am writing all about it. I will give you all the link when and if it sees the light of day.

Meantime, I am involved in a bit of folly. It started at the Vermut last Sunday after Mass. Somehow we got to talking about how many more people are around here in August, and how quiet it is in the fields, seeing as the harvest is in and the big plowing hasn´t started yet. And we started talking about languages, and the English words "harvest" and "plowing" and "seeding," and somehow it morphed into a Project.

So, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings at 8 p.m., an assortment of Moratinenses gathered in the ayuntamiento to Learn English.

Before I moved to Spain I took a certification course in teaching English as a foreign language, so I ought to know what I am doing. But I do not. With each lesson I am confronted by my own vast ignorance of grammar and usage. And that´s just the Spanish part! I need a curriculum to follow, something very basic and engaging and just-for-fun. Because that is what this is, really. Fun. We are having fun in there, at least most of us are... and each meeting brought more participants to the table. Angel, the teenage son of Segundino the Carpenter, is a keen student at school -- he has a decent English vocabulary and he keeps my Spanish spelling in order. Paddy offers commentary and clarity, most of the time. Milagros and Angeles, Eduardo and José, Antonio and Toni all take copious notes and ask all kinds of questions and keep things light and bouncy. The time flies by.

And this evening, when I took the trash to the tip, I heard a voice call out from across the huertas. Maybe it was Edu, or maybe Angel or Segun -- "Got eebening, Rebekah!" it called out from the gloaming. I smiled.
But I digress.
There are a couple of things I want to add here that will not go into the Vadiniense guide. Taking a page from the camino blog of my friend Johnnie Walker, I will tell you about an angel we met out there. And the angel who finally rescued us.

Trini de Carbajal

Sunday July 24 was a scorcher, and Kathy and I walked down a narrow blacktop road that connects the six villages between Cistierna and Gradefes. It was shady, and water babbled in the irrigation channels alongside us. Heavy horses, raised for meat, snorted at us from under the trees. Someone had told us that halfway down the trail, in a town called Carbajal, there´s a bar. And as the day went on, and the temperature rose, we spoke more often of that bar, that beer... (Kathy is, wisely, a proponent of a cold brews on hot days.) And finally, just when our water bottles were running short and lukewarm, we rolled into town. A lady came out into the street and waved and smiled.
We greeted her, asked her if there is indeed a bar there, or someplace to buy a beer.
And she said yes, maybe, but it is full of MEN. It would be better for everyone if we came inside her porch and sat down and let her give us beer. And so we did.
We sat in her cool patio and sipped, and met her husband. We heard about the crops, the neighbor´s fistula, the Virgin Peregrina statue in the local church, and how to feed jasmine vines. We had cheese and olives. Refreshed, our bottles refilled, we went to leave.
"Pray for me," she said. "My name is Trini. Trinidad." Trinity. Cool.
She asked us to pray, and so we did.

Monday 25 July was hotter still, and there were no trees to shade us on our way. The pavement-walking was taking its toll -- my right pinky toe had a terrific blister that would not heal. We decided to take the bus to Mansilla de las Mulas, another to Leon, and the train back home. We could come back in the car and cover this last 25 kilometers that way... there are some cool old monasteries we didn´t want to miss.

BUT... July 25 is the Feast Day of St. James, a national holiday.
No buses. No jolly builders or coffee salesmen making their rounds, picking up hitch-hiking foreigners. I recalled a similar situation not long ago, out on the plains of Toro. I was stuck. I was gonna have to transcend my toe and get on with it. And so we strapped on our packs and walked. It was pretty and pastoral and breezy, but slow. Heat radiated off the blacktop.

I phoned Paddy with the news. It only made him frustrated. He cannot drive. We´d hoped to see each other that evening, and neither of us could do anything to save the situation.

Kathy and I arrived at the monumentally simple monastery of San Miguel de Escalada. It was closed, of course. The Belgian tourists there were not interested in giving a ride to two scruffy backpackers. (I still think I could´ve talked them into it if I hadn´t been sectioning an orange as I spoke. I sliced open my thumb. I oozed charm, but the simultaneous blood-flow kinda killed my appeal.) The Belgians unearthed a bandage and staunched the blood and got the hell outta there. We were left alone on the hilltop with the road spooling out across the plain below.

"Damn," Kathy said. "It´s angel time, Santiago. Show us what you got."

hermitage with great reception

"I will leave you my stick, as a token of our good will," I said.

I walked this camino (and the last one too) using a walking stick abandoned at the Peaceable by Dennis the Scottish Frenchman, a pilgrim/motorcyclist who turns up periodically at our house. It was not a great sacrifice, seeing as one of my hands was rendered un-wieldable. I thanked Dennis again for the use of the stick, and we walked off southward again into the afternoon.

We found a bar and ate a massive tortilla. The place filled up with people, but none was driving south.
We walked some more, past the hermit caves on the cliffs above, with mobile phone towers topping them off. It felt like hours. The toe burned. I felt light-headed. A song played over and over in my head: the Beach Boys, "Barbara Ann." Madness. From somewhere along the road behind me I could hear Kathy making mad noises, too. Krishna Dass, I think. Crazy.

And then I heard another kind of music. My mobile phone was ringing. It was Paddy. He was in the car, on his way to collect us. No! he said, he was not driving. Dennis was. Out of the blue, just moments before, Dennis the French Scotsman had pulled up to our house. Where were we, anyway?

I whooped and hollered out in the field, and scared a cloud of doves into the bright sky. Me and Kathy collapsed under the first tree in the next town we got to, and in a flash our Rescue Rangers came. Our angels. They scraped us up and took us home, our butts well and truly kicked.
We wanted to do the Ruta Vadiniense. And it ended up doing us.

Pilgrim´s Friend

mountaineers

2011-07-28T23:58:00.001+02:00

from the window at Fuente De

An angel dropped us off in the mountains, and another one picked up our worn-out carcasses out on the plains a week later.
We started our hike at a clifftop monastery, and ended it -- spiritually at least -- at a severe little Cistercian sanctuary with 20 sisters singing psalms.

In between was seven days of breathtaking, knockout, spectacular scenes -- glacial cirques, thousand-foot walls of rock, gangs of Scouts camped out in meadows, salamanders, eagles, storks, owls, cows and calves, goats and kids, even a baby donkey. (Baby donkeys may be the most cute things on this planet.)

I walked the Camino Vadiniense with Kathy, my best camino mate. She traveled here from San Francisco to do this hike. She walks at the same speed I do, she knows a million stories and can identify all kinds of plants, and she knows how to pray. She has a disturbing ability to look chic and fashionable, even halfway down a mountain with a high wind blowing. But I forgive her for that.

It was cold up there, and lonesome. These mountains are prime tourist territory, and Spain is supposed to be on vacation about now. The "Crisis" is cutting deep up north, deep enough that the national bus company is only sending out one bus every three days from Leon to Potes. Tracy, an expat author and lover of arcane Spain, lives down in Andalucia, but was passing this way in her car. She gave Kathy and I a ride up to the mountains, saving us about seven hours on a combination of trains and buses. With Tracy we scanned facsimiles of bizarre apocolyptic manuscripts written in the neighborhood about a thousand years ago, and put on display in downtown Potes. We wandered the twee town, saw the nice (and empty) pilgrim albergue, and touched with our own fingers the True Cross relic so deeply revered at the Monastery of Santo Toribio de Liebana, up on the nearest mountain.

We left Tracy up there, and hiked 20 kilometers up the Deva river to Fuente De -- home to a cable-car that hauls the hardy another 500 or so meters up to the very top of the peaks and the trail-heads that scatter outward from there. It´s the edge of the Picos de Europa national park, a huge patch of skyscraper peaks that march in ranks right up to the Cantabrian Sea. We were, apparently, the only guests in our Fuente De hotel. The tour buses looked empty. The queues at the cable-car station just were not there. We were too tired to care very much, and the next day promised even more high-altitude wanderings.


the reservoir at Riaño

The maps tell us the mountain path we followed is only about 11 kilometers long, but it took us five hours to reach the Pandetrava Pass from Fuente De. We walked in glory, with eagles hovering overhead and long, green views down valleys and upward to the blue heaven. (The weather was very kind -- it was apparently pouring rain on the Leon side of the massif.) We ate a soft white cheese we bought in Camaleño, drank water from the springs along the route, cooled our toes in the watersheds and stock-watering tanks. The ten additional kilometers to Portilla de la Reina were gently downhill, following a babbling river past sheep herds and massive mastiff dogs. We were beat, and the paved surface was not kind to our feet. This is a stupendous camino, but it follows narrow valleys -- once you leave the mountain trail, there´s often noplace to walk but along the quiet country road. Which is covered in asphalt.

The locals

We slept in a private albergue in Portilla, a tiny town nestled in the folds of three mountains. The roof above us was new, and snapped and groaned all night. "It took those timbers a hundred years to grow. Now it will take them a hundred years to die," the owner said. I heard no other noise.


a water fountain/ancient tombstone

We walked a narrow gorge, then a tractor path along a stream with a thriving marijuana plantation on one bank. We dined like queens at a truck-stop in Boca de Huergano, and followed alongside the haunted reservoir of the Embalse de Riaño, a great blue mountain lake made when the Esla was dammed in 1990. (It´s along here we found the tombstones and rock carvings left by the Vadiniense, a pre-Roman tribe that lived here before the Romans showed up, and gave their name to the trail.) The dam project drowned nine little towns in the river valley. Their church bells hang in a little memorial park in the new concrete-and-plaster town of Riaño. When the wind blows, the bells sing and wail.

These are just the first three days of the hike. I am now writing a guide to the path for the CSJ in London, and I need to get back to that... so hang on for more travelogue soon. Here are some photos from then, and maybe even one of Kathy´s videos!

Potatoes, and Being

2011-07-18T00:51:00.001+02:00

I have not been a full-time journalist for several years now, but I still carry a notebook, and I still write down things I see and hear that are interesting. Most of them never go anywhere, but they make for interesting reading when I find them rolled-up and stuck inside old shoes out in the barn. I sometimes wonder where I was when I wrote that. And what was I thinking?
Here is a bit of grafitto I saw on a wall and copied-down:

"Quiero hacer contigo
lo que hace la primavera
con los cerezas."

That translates to:
"I want to do with you
the thing that Spring does
with the cherry trees."

I looked it up. Pablo Neruda wrote that, and it is beautiful. I wonder where is that wall?

And here is a description I found, apparently I wrote this whilst hospitalera-ing someplace.

His name is Alberto, he is Italian with 71 years and a pot belly with his trousers pulled way up over it, all held together with suspenders. He is exhausted, red in the face, unshaven. He has lost the arm off one side of his eyeglasses. One of his boots is split. He is a small man carrying a huge 20-kilo backpack. He says this trail is too hard for him. He needs an optician and a shoe repair shop, a coffee and maybe a shot of something stronger. He needs to make up his mind today, whether to keep going or to get on the bus for home. I am making him coffee. It is about all I can offer him. Poor old guy. What the hell is he doing out here?

I observed the famous Goya portrait of King Carlos III dressed as a hunter, which makes the king look like a dope. The king looks a lot like my dad did, when he was acting silly. Somehow I doubt they were related. Goobers are goobers, no matter when or where they show up in history.

I wrote about how much I would like to have a vegetable garden, and a canary. Now I have both. The hailstorm destroyed a good bit of the garden, and this week we dug out the potatoes. They are small, beautiful, and delicious. There are not very many of them, but Paddy is over the moon. He boils them, and puts some mint leaves (also from our garden) in with them, and they are More Than Tatties. This week we ate courgettes, cabbage, and a few French beans, all grown out back. A dream come true, delicious and nutritious.

I look at these old notes, and I see how seriously I took things, not so long ago. How caught-up I was in the lives around me, how significant were the plans for next week or next year. I was still realizing dreams, I was laying foundations and learning how to navigate and occupy a new life. So much was still so strange and terrifying.

Now we are moved-in and settled-down. We still are laying foundations, but now they are for patios and studios and garden-beds, not for entire houses. We know where to go for the best lunch, sharp knives, fresh fruit, fast trains. The people whose doings were so fascinating and intimate to ours have all given up on this place and moved back to civilization.

The Camino doesn´t stop here so much any more. I rarely volunteer as a hospitalera, unless helping out at Bruno´s or hosting people here counts toward the total. The travelers who stay with us these days are students and neo-retirees, nice, deodorized middle-class people of a particular, self-selecting, safe type. I like them, but I kinda miss the hippies and drifters and fire-worshipping stone-masons, the shrieking Spanglish-speaking Swiss ladies and the bony Germans who think they are Jesus.

I have become safe now, too (if not deodorized). I no longer feel like a valiant pioneer. I no longer imagine the things I do are important. I am getting over doing. I am shifting slowly into being.

I am disappearing into the landscape. Which is a good thing, as this landscape is as beautiful as anyplace I have ever seen, or been.

I don´t mind vanishing, long as I can still get out and hike a trail and write a guide for it, and see it published. Long as my neighbors still manage to smile when they see me, and I can pay my bills when they come due, and long as there´s still dog food and chicken-scratch in the bins. Long as my friends and family still love me, and come to visit now and then.

Long as I am able to notice enough to take notes. And maybe even
hago contigo
lo que hace el verano
con las patatas.

Can´t Be Easy

2011-07-11T14:13:00.001+02:00

Beautiful weather for walking. Had three fine pilgrims from Oregon stay here last night, a teacher and two students, part of a group that´s on the Road. They were enjoyable company, but they made me feel quite old and out of touch.

This morning Patrick and I began the monumental task of moving his painting things out of the little kitchen and out to his new studio in the back yard. It is one of the domino-theory frustrations here -- in order to do Job A, you must first do Job B. But to do Job B, everything already in the corner of Space J must be moved to Space K. It is much like one of those sliding-square puzzles. I hate puzzles.

But the back yard was a shambles, and something had to be done, so me and Paddy girded our loins and set to it. We moved a big length of fence alongside the chicken coop, only slightly damaging the existing fence. We shifted a large pile of boards from one side of the woodpile to another -- they all were right-angles and Zs and Ts, spiked and studded with pointy nails and screws and bits of string. I dismantled this year´s garden irrigation hose system, seeing as the builders had pretty well demolished it anyway. I started a pile of things to go to the trash, another to go to the gardening shed, another to go to the tool storage. I was getting into the rhythm of it, accustomed as I am to feeling spiders run up my arms and bits of adobe dribble off the beams and into my hair. And then I asked Paddy to help me move a great sheet of corrugated iron from the middle of the yard into the woodshed. We couldn´t find a second pair of gloves, so I gave Paddy half of my pair. Of course you know what happened next.

No stitches, but a pretty tightly-bound bandage round the middle finger and across the palm of my right hand. So that is my excuse for not blogging more. It hurts when I type, and I don´t want to keep breaking it open.

None of this would be remarkable, except for one factor: We expected a volunteer a week ago who was to stay right through the end of summer, helping out with these heavy chores. (We´ve been saving them up for a while now, and they´re hitting critical mass.) The guy has not called or written, nor has he answered my emails. I guess he isn´t coming. People do that a lot these days, and not just builders.

The piles are still out there.
The wheelbarrow needs to be wheeled to the bin. Paddy goes light-headed when stoop-and-lift are required. It will be a while before my right hand picks up anything heavier than a Coke bottle.
I hope it doesn´t rain anytime soon.
I hope the volunteer shows up.
I hope the cuts close up before next week. I want to go Camino-ing again!

Harvest Lost

2011-07-04T21:43:00.000+02:00

It hadn´t rained in a month, but nobody here was complaining. The fields had gone brown to match the khaki ground. The drains started stinking of dirt. Squadrons of flies arrived, outside and in. And sometime last week the farmers received a signal that we cannot hear, and the harvest began.

Paco, a little man, climbed into the cab of his John Deere combine and disappeared behind the controls. From dawn to 1 a.m. he was out there in the fields with a herd of similar city-sized machines, lumbering through the rows of wheat, rye, alfalfa, oats, soy. On each family´s era, their ancient threshing-floor, the wheat began to heap. The new-cut fields were corrugated with lines of straw, or chockablock with bales and rolls of green or gold, drying there in the hot sun until the men came back to truck and tuck them away.

It happens fast, the harvest. Once the flurry finishes, the farmers go off to the beach for a holiday, or visit their mums in Madrid. Or cook up a fine fiesta for mid-August. The fields stand brown and dry until the next planting goes in, starting in September.

Even at harvest time, most of our farmers take Sunday mornings off, even if only to not interrupt the Mass with their roaring, clanking machines. After church this Sunday, out on the steps outside, Pilar asked me how we´re doing. "We are OK, but for the asthma, the allergies. Even Paddy is coughing," I said. "It´s the dust, the chaff off the fields. We could use a bit of rain, no?"

Her eyes widened. "Mujer, no! The harvest isn´t finished. Rain now? No. No. Later on. Once the barn is full and the door is closed."

Faux pas. Cut grain and straw need to lie and dry for a little while before they can be baled up and stored away. Wet weather during the harvest means rot and mold, a ruined crop. That´s why it´s so important to "make hay while the sun shines."

And seven hours later, a season´s worth of wind and stacked-up cumulonimbus rolled in from the northeast and smashed headlong into Moratinos. It took only about a half-hour, but the sideways wind, monsoon-force rain, and repeated doses of horizontally-driven hail blasted the heads off the grain still standing in the fields. Beans and grapes, tomatoes and marigolds were shredded, torn away, flattened where they stood. Carefully tended garden rows were plastered with the leaves ripped from the fruit trees.

Our patio flooded. Flowerpots floated free. The power went out. The herb garden was battered flat -- the patio filled with the fragrance of basil, cilantro, thyme, and wet earth. The rain kept coming. Murphy came howling in through the window, disgusted and muddy.

The sun did not go down for another hour or so, but nobody went outside.
We waited until morning to go down the street. Maybe, like us, the other families were busy indoors, sweeping and mopping up the back rooms and kitchens where the wind had driven water into every little crack and fault. They were reaching shoulder-deep into the drain at the bottom of the patio, into the brown, hail-chilled water, to open the clogged grate and let the backed-up water run away.

Maybe they were asking God why the rain came now, when the fruit was just forming on the trees and vines, and so much of the feed-crop was still in the field.

I walked the town this morning in the usual white light of July, to see what the storm had done. The hail had a sand-blast effect on northward-facing walls. The white paint Justi put on his house last week is spalled and bubbled on one side. The front of the Alamo, rendered five years ago by professional adobe artists, is transformed -- fine gravel lies all along the pavement out front, gravel that yesterday was part of the street-side edifice. Now all that remains of the protective render is straw and mud, clinging to the adobe bricks beneath. The straws stick out now. From down the street, when the sun hits it, the abandoned little house looks furry.

The hail beat the windows of the little adobe house for sale on Calle Ontanon. One of the window-sills is slipping. Another good storm and its right angles will slip into curves and slide down the face of the wall. (I wish I could buy it and preserve its rustic beauty, but I just don´t have the wherewithal.)

It was rain that did the most damage, tons of water suddenly dumped onto clay so dry it´s turned to dust. The tons of dirt we hauled up to the bodega roof in May unclenched and flowed, leaving swaths of asphalt exposed. Streams flowed beneath the door of each windward bodega, soaking the walls and doors and floors. Another piece of roof collapsed into the derelict house on the way into town. The crack in its face is a bit wider, the lean a bit more severe. Out at the abandoned Fabrica de Luz along the N120, the center part of the house fell down. And out in the fields the dogs found rabbits and mice and a lizard drowned in the ditches.

The streets are littered with stones and dirt, leaves and branches.
The men were out today with their tractors, finding out how bad it is, saving what they could.
It´s bad, Feliciano said. The grapes are ruined. A lot of the grain is ruined. The garden? The acre of potatoes planted with such great expectation?
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled his twinkly smile. "It´s the weather. What can you do?"

These monumental storms happen every three or four years. They are part of the rhythm around here. This very blog opened with a monumental storm, if you go back to the very start you will see it there.

I asked for rain, and got a minor disaster.
I gotta watch what I say.

Mysterious Ways

2011-06-27T14:27:00.002+02:00

The mystery began on Saturday, a hot market-day morning in Sahagun. I´d parked up by the pilgrim albergue, and so was toiling back up the hill on Calle Constitucion with my shopping-bag full of vegetables and dog-bones from from the butcher. At the top of the rise, across from the Irish pub, the leafy shade of Asturcon Bakery beckoned to me. The little terrace was full of happy pilgrims downing apple tarts. And the lady in charge turned from one of the tables and called out to me: "Rebekah! Stop a minute!"

Like many people in Sahagun, I know the lady by sight. Even so, after five years of buying buns and tarts and goodies at her takeout counter, I still do not know her name. But she knew mine. I put down by bag under the plane tree.

"Did you see Maria Jesus yet?" she asked. "She has something for you, a bottle. A pilgrim was here, must be a week ago, a pilgrim who needed to get it to you, a pilgrim who said he stayed at Moratinos, and said you were very nice, so we knew right away who he meant. He left it here for a while. And yesterday Maria Jesus took it, to bring it to you."

I thanked her for the nice words, and assured her I had not seen Maria Jesus lately, nor taken delivery of any bottles. I bought an apple tart, retreived my bag, and headed home.

"What pilgrim would buy us wine?" I thought. Some pilgrims leave our place swearing never to drink again. Most know we are fond of a dram. We had a big run of pilgrims in June. Perhaps one of them forgot to leave a donation in the box, and only realized it after he´d been on the road for an hour. (I´ve done that myself.) This was a way to get something to us, a thoughtful way to ease his conscience. Maybe. But the donation box was appropriately flush. I could think of no likely suspects.

"Maria Jesus," I thought -- the woman who´d taken the bottle from the bakery. The only Maria Jesus I could recall is better known as "Chus." She is Julia´s daughter-in-law, soon to be mother to Julia´s first grandchild, a fun, talkative woman we see only on occasional weekends. Chus lives in Santander, her hometown is San Justo de la Vega, near Astorga. She is not likely to hang out in bakeries in Sahagun.

There had to be another Maria Jesus around. Someone local. Whoever it was, she had a bottle with my name on it. She´d had it for a day already, and this was Corpus Christi, a holiday weekend, when the families all get together out here on the campo. Wherever the pilgrim´s bottle was, it was unlikely to survive the weekend unmolested, I thought. I let it go. But I felt a prickle of expectation, too.

And late this morning a knock was heard at our door. Under her straw hat smiled the garden lady, another woman I have seen and greeted for many seasons now -- she and her taciturn husband used to run the Escaleras grocery in Sahagun, but retired a couple of years ago to their little house in San Nicolas, the village next to ours. This year, the lady took over the hot, heavy summer brush-cutting and weeding job for both San Nicolas and Moratinos -- a post in the past held by a strapping young man with a hot little Opel. In the spring I interrupted her spading the flower beds and asked her if she needed help. She waved me away, saying she loves this kind of work.

I did not know her name was Maria Jesus. And here she was on the doorstep, with a gift-wrapped bottle in her hands and a big smile. "Don´t thank me," she said. "There´s a note here, stapled on. It will explain, I think."

We thanked her anyway, and took the note out of the folds of the worse-for-wear gift-wrap. It is written with a pencil on paper from a spiral-bound notebook. It says:

"Hello Rebecca and Paddy, it is 17 June 2011 in Sahagun, I am a peregrino from Luxembourg and you don´t know me from Eve, but we have a common acquaintance. An Irishman by the name of John Murphy. He was on his way from the Meditarenean cost and endevored to go to Finisterre and meet Father Atlantic. Unfortunately some problems at home forced him to interrupt his camino. A pitty because we had a similar sense of humor and I got along with him. John must have really appreciated your hospitality, because as we parted he gave me money to buy a good bottle of wine for you. As I was unable to stop at your place in Moratinos myself, I left it to the good hands of this the owner of cafe-bakery Asturcon in Sahagun.

The ways of the camino are mysterious, as you are well aware.
All the best, Marc."

Mystery solved. John Murphy is a perennial pilgrim. He´s stayed with us twice now, is never any trouble, is always almost too grateful. Our cat is named for him.

So, thanks to John Murphy, Marc from Luxembourg, the Asturcon lady, Maria Jesus, and Santiago, we now are possessed of a fine bottle of 2007 Bordon Crianza, a Rioja fit to grace any table. I think we should wait for the next pilgrim to open it. A Texan is expected tomorrow.

Matter of fact, I think his name is John.

Out With the Lads

2011-06-23T01:53:00.001+02:00

Stephen and John, Road Warriors

Long time no blog. You Faithful Readers are being pushed aside. Sorry about that.
I sometimes wonder if the blog has passed its sell-by date. What do you think?

After a week of hearty Australian company I finally made a break for it. I abandoned Paddy to the
tender mercies of our Antipodian friends, and I lit out for Palacio de Godas, a rusty, dusty hamlet near Arevalo, in the heart of Valladolid province. There, with two fine Scottish pilgrims called John and Stephen, I started walking northwest on the Camino Levante.

Those two started in Valencia, where the Levante begins. They´d already been at it for three weeks when I showed up, trail-hardened veterans. They had asked me to join them for a few days, and promised to go easy on me, seeing as I am a friend of theirs. It was getting lonesome out there, I guess. Or they needed a bit of comic relief. Or a good reason to get up earlier, cover fewer kilometers in a longer time, and drink more cold, fizzy liquids. (I am good at motivating all these things, I admit.)

And so we walked. The country is rough, rolling farmland, with lots of scrub and rocks, wheat and sometimes vineyard. It is the Spain of Delibes and Cervantes -- severe. Big wide skies, black eagles, tiny towns huddled in hollows. It is not so different from our beloved Tierra de Campos, really... but it feels more harsh there somehow. (Their wine is better. But they probably need it more.)

If you are a map person, you can trace our route:
Day 1, Arevalo to Ataquines.
Day 2: Ataquines to Medina del Campo. (there we attended a beautiful sung Mass at a parish fiesta);
Day 3: Medina to Rueda (oops! followed arrows for another camino in town! Who knew the Camino Sureste came through there? But Rueda is noted for its lovely white table wine. No complaints here, except 14 extra kilometers makes a real difference when the temperatures are hitting 36C in the afternoon...) Late afternoon we staggered into Sieta Iglesias de Trabancos, a town straight out of a spaghetti western. We stayed at the Castillian concrete version of the Bates Motel. Room decor featured lawn furniture from the San Miguel brewery, and bathroom ventilation inspired by industrial feedlots. But out in the gloaming, under the mimosas, we sipped our Fantas and found redemption. Crickets sang. A church bell rang across the drying wheat fields, and the trucks moaned out on the autopista. Inside the nicotine linoleum bar a boom-box yippy-i-ohed ranchero songs. It called the good men of Siete Iglesias up to the junction for a hand of Brisca and a shot of booze.

Day 4: We agreed to rise very early the next day, for the long haul into Toro. Not many places to stop, and a heat wave on its way. The morning was beautiful, the scenery rugged and lonely. We got a little lost, then found again... added another 2 kilometers to the 30+ on the schedule. By the time we hit 17 kilometers, the asphalt was bubbly in the streets of the last-stop village. We huddled in the shade of the local bar, and I told the guys I was calling a cab. I would take their backpacks with me ahead to Toro, check into the hotel there and ease my already-aching head.

John and Stephen did not cavil, especially when I mentioned a Gin and Tonic prize they´d set aside for the big Toro welcome. They started re-arranging their packs, to ensure they´d have water enough for the rest of the trip. But alas -- it was Blood-Draw Day at the local health center, and all three taxis listed were engaged, right up through 5 p.m. Damn. I was in for it.

It was a beautiful walk, most of the way. It tracked along the great Rio Duero, where cornfields were irrigated with elaborate earthworks and canals. We came round a bend in the road into an apparantly-abandoned village and surprised a little man standing naked in his front garden, showering under a jolly yellow watering-can. He shrieked and ran inside, and we kept right on going, pretending we´d seen nothing. And as we passed he reappeared outside the gate, wrapped in a towel, dripping onto the dirt road. "Where are you from?" he sang out. "Where did you start?" His eyes were full of fun. He told us the path split there, and the right-hand branch went through a bird sanctuary, right along the river. And lo, it turned out to be breathtakingly beautiful, scented with piñon trees, fluttering with white ibis, with water, water flowing all ´round. But it did not last.

Once the trees thinned out, and the river took a bend away from us, we were back out in the sun in a blasted landscape of gravel quarries and scrub oak, skinny dogs tied to tractor-tires, warm water, and no breeze, no shade. For many miles Toro could be seen, standing brave atop a bluff across the river. Cruel, it was. A mileage sign on the distant highway said "Toro 6." I thought I might cry. Then I told myself I might be hallucinating by now. My head pounded, my stomach was nauseated. I told Santiago he better get on the case, because I have treated plenty of pilgs myself for heat exhaustion. I know what that looks like. And I knew I was there.

I felt terrible and a little scared, but I was still, fundamentally, happy to be there. I was with people I love in a land I love, doing something I believe in, pushing my limits... maybe a bit too hard. I was not really there to walk that camino, much as I enjoy a good hike. I was there to hang out with my friends. And when your friends are long-distance hikers, you sign up for this.

The last three kilometers into Toro are a showcase of Roman foundations and pavements, and finally a spectacular Roman bridge across the deep Duero valley. I wish I´d enjoyed it more. I promised myself I will go back someday. And the last, 17-percent grade haul up that bluff onto the ramparts? It was a picture of two men very patiently waiting while a Woman Of a Certain Age reeled from one patch of shade to the next, all the way up, making cooling sounds, whispering softly of gin-and-tonics, ice pops, showers...

the Roman bridge and road into Toro

And soon we were at the splendid 3-star hotel that dear Stephen had booked ahead -- lolling in bathtubs, sipping refreshing beverages, napping in crisp sheets. Soon I was back to my vibrant and scintillating self again, albeit a little burnt on the edges. I managed to take a walk round the old town, and had a quick little tasting of the new 2010 jovenes. (Toro is my favorite wine town in all of Spain, you know!)

And so, scrubbed and re-hydrated, we dined on the terrace, with a breathtaking view of the day´s achievement. We agreed it was a very fine few days on the trail, with all manner of topics discussed, problems solved, and plots hatched, even. We ching-chinged our glasses of Cañus Verus Crianza. And we called it a day.

Big Fun in Squidgy Mud

2011-06-12T21:53:00.002+02:00


Gordon & his boys

thoroughly modern Miraz

The busy season is upon us, and it may have peaked this week. I did an overnighter to Galicia, where I visited friendly, feisty South African hospitalero Gordon Bell at Casa Banderas, and attended the bishop´s blessing of the newly reconstructed pilgrim hostel at Miraz, a Confraternity of St. James (London) project on the Camino del Norte. I picked up lots of wonderful Galician and Bierzo wine for the bodega, and a fresh cow-milk soft cheese from Arzua, and cherries from the orchards in Cacabelos.

We then spent two fun, raucous days hosting 13 people from the architecture program at University of Michigan. (the Arzua cheese and the cherries and 14 liters of Bierzo Mencia vanished without a trace!) We made earth plaster and cob mortar, and the students rendered one wall of the bodega in the spiky goo that all our houses are made of. Big educational fun in squidgy mud. I would have taken pictures, but I was too muddy to handle cameras. So much of architecture education is conceptual, philosphical, aesthetical. I felt good, showing them how "vernacular architecture" lives and dies before our eyes. And it was good getting them down in the mud, where all buildings really begin... some of them really dug it.

I made the year´s first gazpacho! YUM!

Paddy and I also oversaw the ongoing patio and studio projects out back, and looked at a house that´s for sale in San Nicolas. (no, we didn´t buy it.) We got some sobering results of our bi-annual health checkups, and good news from Laurie, a friend who is now in the heart of Galicia, beta-testing the updated Camino Invierno guide. (It works! Now if the CSJ people would only post it on the website, other people could benefit this summer.)

I started a rewrite on eight chapters of a novel sent over by Mitch, a Pulitzer-winner bud who used to go grafitti-painting with me, back in the day. I love doing re-write. It is a dying craft. I am doing a chapter per evening, after everyone else is gone to bed.

Over the weekend we rested. We are tired, but still able to smile at one another. The house is a bit messy, but everyone is fine and relatively healthy. And tomorrow, we pick up pilgrims at the train station, for a hospitalero training session on Tuesday.

Aside from all that, the Camino is calling my name. Once the calendar clears out, I may have to join some friend or other out there on the road. Just for a few days. Just to keep my head straight.

Added later: Yes, I now realize I repeated myself up there at the start with the Miraz stuff... I think it´s because I uploaded the photos of the whole week at once. And because I forgot, OK? Didn´t I say it´s the Busy Season, and that I have lost my mind a little?

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Soul-Biographies----AMO-LA-VIDA--new-film.html?soid=1101043267358&aid=KQjmnFMbsy4

2011-06-08T02:19:00.000+02:00

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Soul-Biographies----AMO-LA-VIDA--new-film.html?soid=1101043267358&aid=KQjmnFMbsy4

Gratitudinous

2011-06-08T02:18:00.000+02:00


Harry, Paddy, Poppies

June is busy. Lots of pilgrims, and lots of plans. I did an overnighter out west in Galicia, with South African gonna-be hospitalero Gordon and his two nice boys, and then to Miraz, a pilgrim refuge on the Camino del Norte that Paddy and I had a hand in for a while. I met the new bishop of Lugo, and re-met with a publisher who continues to make noises at me, and a gang of lovely English Camino-heads who make little corners of the world go around, and the local salt-of-the-earth barmaid at the center of the universe. What an abundance!

Best thing of all was the long drives there and back, through beautiful, beloved places, in my own company. And stopping, poco a poco, at wineries along the way. (Past caminos introduced me to the delights of Valdeorras, Ribeiro, Albariño, Bierzo, and Ribera Sacra wines, so I came back with beautiful young vino from all different little nooks and crannies of northwestern Spain -- as well as a few "drink it NOW" boxes of plonk from Galician and Bierzo co-operative wineries -- Spain´s best-kept secret.)

We shall see what time and dark and stillness does for their constitutions. If we can leave them alone for long.

I returned to a house full of lovely South African ladies, welcomed and duly blandished by Patrick. And thereafter blandished with a surprisingly dry young Bierzo white Mencia, I found this, which I think sums up a lot of what I love about particular people of Spain:

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Soul-Biographies----AMO-LA-VIDA--new-film.html?soid=1101043267358&aid=KQjmnFMbsy4

(I cannot figure out how to make this work smoothly. I will link to it in the next blog. So much for "intuitive posting... I think someone makes this difficult, so someone can make a buck. Sad old world.)

And the photo which opens this post, taken last Sunday on our morning dog-walk. Nothing could be finer than poppies and galgos, a loving spouse, and a community Mass after. Except maybe a vermut, and a hike, and friends who know how to converse.

Life is beautiful, if you let it be. If you just open your eyes and take a good look. It is in there.

Little Runaway

2011-05-30T01:08:00.000+02:00

cloister ceiling at San Zoilo, Carrion de los Condes

We talk about running away, Paddy and me. We want to go to Venice, or Turkey, or maybe even Japan.
But we have four dogs and ten chickens, a cat and a canary, and a house where people like to find us this time of year.
We cannot run away, not without somebody going hungry or lonely.
And so we wait for a day when no one is supposed to come, a sunny day usually, when nothing else is going on. And we get in the car and run away to somewhere not too far.
People say The Peaceable is "in the middle of nowhere."
But we always jump in and tell them no. The Peaceable is "in the middle of everywhere."
The region is peppered with historic sites, tiny private museums of farm implements and folk costumes and historic or architectural ephemera, Roman remains, mouldering convents, converted mosques, hermit caves... It´s a delicious mix, if you like this sort of thing.
Which we do, very much.
And Saturday, we ran away for just a few hours, and touched on no less than three wonders.

St. Martin family homestead

We drove our little car east on the N120, the two-lane that goes past our back gate. It took us past Terradillos and Ledigos and hordes of hiking pilgrims, past the little Roman villa in the cornfield, and on to Cervatos de la Cueza, a place almost nobody goes anymore.

Cervatos Boy Made Good

And there, tucked along the road, three hundred-some years ago, was raised a great family of Spanish soldiers by the name of San Martin. The greatest of these generals and colonels was Don Juan San Martin, one of the founders of the Republic of Argentina. Argentina since, in thanks for Cervatos´ part in its glorious beginning, rebuilt the local church (in a jolly Argentine style), erected a statue of Don Juan in the plaza, and preserved as a museum the little half-timber adobe farmhouse where the military brood was raised.
The little town is plastered with plaques and commemorations. We asked about seeing inside the house, but the guy who keeps the keys was not in the plaza nor the bar up the street.

Cervatos´ Argentine church

So we will go back some other day. It looks like a very cool little house. I wanna see inside.
But if was too hot to wait around the Plaza, so we carried on east to Carrion de los Condes. In English, "carrion" means "dead animal carcass." In Spanish, it is the name of a river and a town and a ruling family made infamous in the medieval Spanish classic "El Cid."

the church at San Zoilo monastery

Carrion de los Condes is a Camino town full of historic treasures and convents as well as tractor dealers and very good hardware stores. Saturday we stopped first at the Royal Monastery of San Zoilo, a Benedictine foundation that grew like crazy for a while, and then seems to have suddenly hit the wall. The part that is not now a deluxe hotel is a dusty old church with a great pipe organ and some grand tombs, a fabulous library, and a cloister with breathtaking ceilings. Oh, and a couple of huge Arab tapestries, in almost perfect condition, that are a good thousand years old. It is on the camino out of town, so most pilgrims just hoof right past the front gate in the morning.
Thousands of lives were lived inside those walls. Five times a day for hundreds of years that church rang with songs and music and worship. On Saturday, with the sun crashing through its high windows, it felt as empty as an airplane hangar. It is awesome in its size and age and forgottenness.

gargoyle

Over the bridge and uptown we walked. We stopped in a junk shop and I coveted old French clocks, the tick-tock pendulum kind, whirring away in a barn alongside a zinc bathtub and a new Audi. (Antique shops are surprisingly rare in Spain. People here never get rid of anything.) Up the main street we stopped at the old Church of Santiago, now roofed-over with iron and done-up as the parochial art museum.
It is a little treasure house, full of the very kind of thing you´d imagine finding in a pirate´s wooden chest: silver crowns, golden crosses, and rosaries made of coral, gilded statues, heavy keys, robes crisply crimped and embroidered with metallic threads by a hundred nuns in the far-off Phillippines.

Carrion parish museum

It all is nicely displayed, and there´s not too much of it. I wish I´d brought my sisters there.
From the church we walked past the Plaza Mayor to the Bar España, a crossroads where the Camino flows into town, and the bus to Leon stops and picks up the pilgrims who can´t take any more Meseta. It´s got prime people-watching tables set out on the pavement, and one of the biggest and finest gin-and-tonics on the trail. We had us one of those. And we took pictures of pilgrims taking pictures of one another.
From there we went to the Rincon de Hamburguesas, and ordered cheeseburgers and patatas bravas, and watched the crash-and-burn report from the Formula 1 races on the TV overhead. The food was wonderfully fatty -- a rarity in a place where all the beef is really veal. Paddy said it was vile, and that he loved it.

And then we hiked back over the river and through the woods to our car, and back to home we went. The dogs hardly had time to miss us. (we took them later to a little lake we discovered recently... my attempt at video is (hopefully) above.

Por Fin

2011-05-25T22:48:00.000+02:00

The Old Teacher House, demolished this week to make room for the new bodega restaurant.

May, a month of non-stop company. People I love, people I like, people I kinda tolerate. The Visitor Book tells the tale.
People with whom I have an instant rapport: Denise, a pilgrim from New Zealand. She rubbed my neck and shoulders after a very long day. It is usually me who does this for other people. When it happens to me, it is something truly special. And when I need it as deeply as I did that day, well. It is divine.
Generous People: Dael the Scot. A retired traffic cop is not the person I would usually pick out for ongoing companionship, but Dael came here at his own expense and spent three weeks working his tail off, for nothing, right alongside me. He did not complain, or say no, nor even punch out a drunk who criticized his kilt. He worked so hard and so efficiently he worked himself right out of a job. He was supposed to stay through the end of May, but finished up everything a week early. So now he is off walking the Camino Ingles (even though he finds the name of it repugnant). He will go back home to Hibernia once the great Icelandic ash cloud passes... or so I assume. A simple and generous man, who puts his back into work he believes in.
People who are part of our lives: Dennis, another Scotsman and habitual pilg, lives in France but stops by here now and then -- he came to Moratinos this time straight from the Nation´s Capitol, on the Camino de Madrid. (all roads lead to Moratinos!) He is a former steelworker and high-school teacher, educated and opinionated. Paddy enjoys the intellectual company... and someone who can match him wineglass for wineglass. I trained him to be a hospitalero last year, and this morning he is off to France to volunteer at a small pilgrim gite in LePuy -- ash cloud permitting.
John rolled up, too, an English pilgrim who stayed with us last year. He is tall and bony and very funny, and handy. He and Dael installed a much-needed new light fixture in our kitchen before church on Sunday, thus saving us a good 50 Euro that would otherwise go to an electrician. It works just fine. But John emailed from Mansilla de las Mulas, two days after he took to the trail again: While looking at the ceiling in the last albergue I am minded to strongly suggest that you get the next Peregrino with DIY skills to tighten the hook on which your kitchen lights hang --wood breathes and with changes in humidity the screw hook may loosen," he wrote.

Me and Dennis fixed it this morning. John, you can rest easy now.

Tourists: We´ve also hosted pilgrims sent our way by Daniel, the entrepreneur hospitalero who is opening the two-star Hostal Moratinos here in town someday very soon. (He hosts people in Carrion de los Condes, a long day´s walk to the east.) He sends his hikers on to us lately, at least he does until he opens his own place out on the opposite end of town. Some of them are great -- including NZ Denise above. These travelers are an economic class above the usual run of pilgrims. They stay at hotels, hostels, casas rurales. They don´t mind spending money, unless they can find a great deal.
We are a great deal, or at least we were for one German man this week. He is an executive for a luxury auto company. His feet were a mess. We patched him up and fed and watered him, put him in a good bed, reserved him a room in a four-star in Leon (he speaks no Spanish), and I took him along when I drove there. For all this he gave us his hearty thanks, and 50 Euros. (the taxi fare there alone would be 100 Euro, and he knew that.) I had business in Leon anyway, so it was not a complete loss. But I decided to give up on driving pilgs there unless it´s an emergency. It is always somehow a losing proposition.
And then there are Divine Providence people. They take up the slack. I think of the two sweet Irish ladies who stayed last night in the Salon. They scrubbed their own laundry, they stripped their beds, they even washed up the dishes after dinner. Just hearing them talk was like soft music. This morning at dawn they gave us hearty thanks, too -- and a donativo that more than paid the tab for the executive German skinflint.
(After they left it took a while to find where they´d put the sheets. They turned up in the clothes hamper in the bathroom. Imagine using a hamper for its intended purpose!)

We have a couple of other people about the place now: Albaniles. Giorgio and Achtzehn (or something like that) are Bulgarian immigrant builders, and I gotta say this... They leave their Spanish counterparts in the dust when it comes to price, quality, communication skills, and work ethic. By 9 a.m. each of the last two days they´ve been up on the garage roof, hammering and cementing and installing. And when a big thunderstorm rolled through this evening, the garage was, for the first time in several years, leak-free. They will repair the winter-damaged main roof, too, and they install a new paved patio out back, with a drainage channel. (Dael advised me these are jobs too big for me and my volunteer legions. My aching joints thank him.)
I have another volunteer coming in July to help with heavy things. I wonder if there will be any heavy things left for him to do! Meantime, Moratinos is heaving with heavy equipment, builders, pilgrims, and important-looking men with clipboards. Progress is here. I am not always sure I like it, but some people say we started it.
These enterprises are locuras, José told me -- foolishness, wild dreams. José and his brother Esteban, farmers and fertilizer dealers, are dreamers. They are building a bar and restaurant in a cave in a town that had no services at all a few months ago... and will have three bar-restaurants when theirs is finished.
"You wake up one morning with notion," José told me. "Like you guys, leaving everything and moving to Moratinos. For some people, a locura works."
May God bless José´s locura the same way he´s blessed ours. (Maybe they should name the place "La Cueva de Locuras?")
Today we took Dennis and an injured Norwegian lady and four backpacks to Sahagun. When we came back to The Peaceable, nobody was here but me and Patrick.
Nobody is scheduled to arrive before next Tuesday.
Nobody except the builders, who like to leave us alone, and the dogs, who give as good as they get.
I love pilgrims, and family, and visitors, and friends, and I really like volunteers.
And after a non-stop month of all these blessings, I am ever so happy to just sit here with Tim, Rosie, and Murphy, listening to another storm blowing in.

Ticks

2011-05-20T00:38:00.000+02:00

Ticks are bad this year. It is spring, and our dogs have ticks. I have sprayed them, collared them, brushed them, and washed them, and still the big creatures have little creatures attached. I remove the bugs whenever I find them. I carefully kill each one. I am no longer squeamish about ticks. They are part of life here, like tractor noise and dust and smelly pilgrim boots.

In the last few days, when I sat down on my end of the sofa to write, twice I have found a little black tick walking across the skin on the back of my neck. I carefully killed each one. I try not to be squeamish about them. But when they are walking on ME, (even though the vet assures me the local ticks don´t bite humans, and they are very seasonal), I get squeamish. Where do they come from? Are they living in the sofa, in my clothing? Are they living on me? Will people see, and know? Will they wonder if they will get ticks, too, from visiting here? Are we unclean, unsanitary, nasty, bad people?

Today we cleaned the living room, removed the rugs, vacuumed out the sofa and chairs, washed the floors and cushions dog beds. No bugs anywhere.

It was only after dinner, after everyone else went to bed, I found the second little critter.

We have three German pilgrims staying with us tonight. They are nice men, smart, educated, professional. I wonder if, as we discussed over Rueda Verdejo the ages-old merger of Daimler and Chrysler, if they might have seen a shiny black bug walk casually over my collar-bones and into the collar of my shirt. I wonder what they might have thought, whilst puzzling out my conjugations of verstehen, if their beds are infested. But they went willingly enough to sleep there in the salon, so I think I am safe. For now. I am not infested. I am clean, and healthy, and decent enough, and my house is as scrubbed as it will ever be.

I looked at the bug. It made me think.

It is a tiny creature with a shiny black coat and many legs. It is subtle and quiet, its movements almost indetectable. It does only what it is designed to do. It is unaware and unaffected by its repugnant rep among humans. It gets on with its business.

I thought of the greyhounds, and Rosie, and Perla, the neighbor´s little grey-black dog. Perla looks like a charcoal drawing of a dog, she is all cute scruff and fur and yap. Rosie is about the same size as Perla, and she likes to bark at the gate of Perla´s house when we pass by, just to make trouble.

And this morning, trouble happened. Perla was loose. Paddy was coming home from the morning hike with all four of our dogs. Tim ran up to the little pup to say hello, wagging his stumpy tail. Rosie ran after, yapping. Lulu the greyhound, seeing all that small-dog leaping, went hysterical on the end of her lead, slipped her specially-designed greyhound collar, and leapt full-speed down the street and instantly pinned the pup. Harry promptly followed. The poor little dog was overwhelmed. Paddy fell down.

Thank God somehow the petrified Perla was extracted from the fray before any real damage was done.
A badly shaken Paddy reappeared in the house soon after, with our four sheepish dogs in tow. The greyhounds were shut inside the barn, disgraced. Rosie hid herself away. Only Tim, the Besty Dog, was allowed in the house. It was a long, sad morning. Paddy finally went over to Perla´s house, to make sure everything was OK. Pilar, Perla´s owner, seemed bemused by the whole affair.
Spaniards are amazingly matter-of-fact about dog behavior. "Dogs are animals," they say with a shrug.

Lulu was born and raised to hunt and kill hares. She is not an intelligent dog, but she is a skilled hunter. And any animal, cat or dog, rabbit or mouse, that moves quickly along the ground and squeals when she bites it is fair game to her. It is her nature. Like a tick, she can´t help but do what she is meant for.

It is up to We the People to ensure she does her thing far from where she can kill pets or livestock. (She and Nabi killed one of Julia´s hens last year.) As dogs go, Lulu is a problem child. We love her very much, but we have to do something about her behavior.

We need to get real with ourselves.
Maybe four dogs is just too much. Maybe we need to get rid of Lulu, a neurotic at best, and a sociopath at worst. Perhaps we ought to start keeping Tim and Rosie outdoors, so they can´t bring vermin and dirt inside. And Murphy Cat, whose white fur is ingrained in the cushion of his favorite chair. I have asthma. This can´t be good for me.

If we did not have so many animals, we could live in a smaller place that did not require so much backbreaking, expensive, ongoing maintenance. Seeing as the pilgrim traffic is pretty much cared-for now by Bruno, we don´t need so much extra space. It wouldn´t be so much housework for me. We wouldn´t need to bring in people like Thomas and Kim and Dael to help us maintain the place.

Without extra people around, we wouldn´t need a vegetable garden, or so many hens. We wouldn´t be troubled by out-of-the-blue Germans, or beautiful word-of-mouth Kiwi massage-goddesses, or the niggling need to design a new sello stamp for pilgrim credentials. We could read books all day, and grow orchids, and write our memoirs.

We wouldn´t be allergic, or dusty, or overwhelmed in summer. We would not spend so much money.

And we wouldn´t be The Peaceable Kingdom any more.

Like ticks, and greyhounds, we have to be what we are.

Progress

2011-05-13T22:32:00.000+02:00

"In Castile, the landscape is in the sky." -- Delibes

The sisters swept back to America on Friday, and Dael the Scotsman swept in. Their visits overlapped by a day, so Beth and Mart got photos of a Kilted Scot, to add to everything else they saw In Spain.

It was a long way back from Madrid, alone in the car. I ran into a ferocious hailstorm -- part of a string of terrible weather that damaged crops and sowed mayhem all over the meseta that afternoon. I could see the storm approach for miles, then I could hear it -- the hail popped like corn up the autopista, then crashed onto the car like a million jawbreakers. (I was safely parked under a bridge, having learned my lessons in tornado country for several years.) Happily, nothing was hurt here in Moratinos. We seem to live a charmed life these days.

I hung Bob the Canary´s cage outside on the wellhead on sunny Tuesday morning, after giving it a cleaning. Bob sang out to his friends, the sparrows up in the spruce tree. And then, right in front of me and Paddy, Bob hopped to the still-open door of the cage and flew away to join them!

He sang up there for a while, dazzling them all. I started to cry. And then he flew back down onto the wellhead, looking for his home. I ran over to the well to nab him.

For the next hour and a half he led me on a chase -- all over the patio, over the wall into the driveway, under the Jesus Car, and deep into the rosemary hedge. He worked with his camouflage (Bob is a grey canary), and gave me the slip in the high grass next to Pilar´s field of rye.

Paddy brought me a chair, and sunglasses, and his hat. I sat out there and waited. I cried. I went in and got the sickle and cut the little lawn next to the driveway, and called on the Patron Saints of Lost Things, and Animals, and the Peaceable. And I called to Bob. And soon after I finished hacking at the high grass, I saw something moving up there, just next to the path... Bob. I grabbed him from above, popped him into his cage in the patio, and slid shut the door. He sang his little heart out through the rest of the afternoon, none the worse for wear.

I took a good nap. Crying wears me out.

The crops are amazing. Heads are fully formed on the standing grain -- the wind combs it with its fingers, the spaces alongside are filling with poppies and cornflowers and daisies. All these things are not supposed to happen til June, at least far as I remember. Nobody is complaining.

The potato plants growing out back of our house are huge. The artichoke plants are huge. The lettuces and spinach and parsley will soon overrun everything else out there. (We are eating salads with every meal!) Out in the field beyond Segundino´s carpentry shop, his brother Manolo planted a great swath in... potatoes. Why potatoes? "There´s a hotel opening on one end of town, and an albergue on the other, and a restaurant going into the bodegas," he said. Potatoes. Of course! His potatoes are well up now, dots of dark green, planted in neat rows. He is a practical man.

Tim loves hangin at Bruno´s

Tonight, over at Hostal San Bruno, 25 people sat down to dinner. The place is packed to the rafters with pilgrims, as well as people stopping by to sample the Italian cuisine. Bruno is still smiling, but a bit raveled round the edges. He brought on some help. Georgieu, the Bulgarian builder who helped him finish the building project, and his wife Maria, are cooking and waiting tables. Their little boy Lorenzo adds a wonderful spark of youth to the place. They want to live in Moratinos, Georgieu says. There is no place to rent here, welcome as they might be.

Not yet, anyway. There are so many works going on in town, something might just open up.

three abandoned bodegas went

Over at the bodegas, the Esteban/Milagros family bought up several of the abandoned and collapsed wine caves, and just yesterday started digging into their ambitious bodega restaurant plan. Soon the tumbledown Teacher House will go, as well as a couple of other condemned buildings in town. A new roof is going onto another tiny house, so the restaurant staff will have a place to live.

On our side of the mountain, the bodega roof project is finally happening. Dael, the hard-working Scot, hacked away the grass, and the two of us hauled great rolls of cut-to-size asphalt-aluminum roof sheeting up there. We lapped the edges, threw some clods of dirt on top, and ran for cover when another storm rolled in. So far it is still up there where we left it. That was the easy part... Now we have to haul a couple of tons of dirt up there, to cover over the roofing material.

Dael the Scot, atop our bodega

We took today off. I spent most of today in bed, laid low by a gastric bug that´s put Paddy out of commission, too. I am feeling better now. By tomorrow I will be in shape for dirt-slinging. Dael did not take a break: While Paddy and I lolled in our beds of affliction, Dael weed-whacked the front and back and sides of the house, watered the garden, and finished sculpturally stacking the 5 tons of firewood out back. (Dael is supposed to go home in a couple of weeks, but I am not sure he will be allowed.)

And Dael is only the first in a string of pilgrims who visited here before, and are now returning to stay and work with, and for, The Peaceable. I keep thanking him. He keeps telling me "nae, tis nowt lassie, innit?" Dael is a retired policeman from Fife. He smokes a wee pipe, and has quite the brogue going on. (Sometimes understanding him is a bit like talking to Georgieu the builder, whose Spanish is really Italian with a Bulgarian accent.)

Anyone who´s done the pilgrimage knows how the Holy Spirit Gift of Tongues operates out here. Somehow, just about everyone manages to communicate.

Canary-song, earth-movers, hammer-blows, tractors, and a dozen different languages. It is not language. It is music.

It´s Tuesday, This Must be Burgos

2011-05-05T18:40:00.000+02:00

Wow, what a week it was!

Two sisters who´d never seen Spain before. Ten days, and an entire country to show them. So here is what we did and where we went:

Day 1: Met Beth and Mart at Madrid airport. We drove to Moratinos from there, stopping for a little while in Lerma, a cool little town south of Burgos with the country´s fastest-growing convent of cloistered nuns. Beth and Mart both still, miraculously, wide awake, and snapping photos of everything in sight.

Day 2: Local. Villa Olmeda, a Roman villa; lunch with Paddy at Pili´s Casa de Comidas, a working-man´s café in Villada (Martea never ate rabbit before!); then to Villacreces, a jolly little abandoned ghost town. Fascinating place, and not another tourist in sight. Then to Grajal de Campos, home to our local castle and down-at-the-heels Renaissance palace; and into the Plaza Mayor in Sahagún for a vermouth in the Plaza Mayor.

Day 3: Road Trip! Drove north into the mountains, stopping first at Cueva de Castillo, a complex of limestone caves that are dotted with 4,000 years´ worth of Paleolithic artwork – some of it dating back 21,000 years! (I can´t believe I have lived here this long and never went to see the abundance of cave-painting sites so nearby... and these ones are the real thing, still there on the walls where they´ve always been. Beautiful paintings. And no one knows why they are there.) We continued north to the big cave-painting complex and museum at Altamira, where Spain´s best examples are securely sealed-off from humanity – but we still oohed and aahed over an exact copy of the biggest and most spectacular cavern. Very worthwhile. Downright inspiring, really.

Being good tourists, we drove to Santillana del Mar, a painfully charming little town nearby, to walk the historic streets and see the historic church and cloister – which apparently has some link to Camino churches in Fromista, Jaca, and Leon, judging from the Cistercian architectural details. It dawned on me that Santillana is dead on the Camino del Norte! Duh!

And so we soldiered onward and west to Comillas, a seaside town with a drop-dead collection of Art Moderne and Deco buildings, including one fascinating “Capricchio” by Antoni Gaudi – he of the freaky Barcelona Parque Güell and Sagrada Familia fame. We walked on the beach, we ate a great mountain of shellfish, we visited a steampunk graveyard...

Day 4: We hung out at the Gaudi place, we splashed in the Cantabrian Sea, we headed south through the high mountains to Potes and on to Santo Toribio de Liebana, an important and very ancient monastic shrine were a big slab of The True Cross is kept. It started raining. I did not get a good vibe from the place, perhaps because I could understand the fulminations of the rabid preacher in charge. The gift shop was a trip, though: I bought a shot glass there that comes with a vision! (add clear liquids and Santo Toribio appears on the bottom). Long drive home, spectacular scenery.

Day 5: Stormy and wet. We stayed home and rested, seeing as it was Sunday. At the vermut after Mass Leandra brought some superb homemade croquetas and pork cracklings. Beth and Mart were in heaven!
Day 6: The sun reappeared, and we drove west along the Camino to Pedredo, the tiny village where Malin and David live – just west of Astorga. We walked over meadows and streams all dotted with wildflowers, heard cuckoos calling, saw a set of petroglyphs carved into a rock face – discovered only three years ago! We ate a “parillada,” a feast of lamb, veal, and pork perfectly grilled. We drove up to Rabanal del Camino and visited Pat the Hospitalera. We hit the heights of the Camino at the Cruz de Ferro, the Iron Cross where people leave behind mementos. And then we said goodbye to Malin and David, and headed for Astorga. There was a fiesta going on, with Maragato folk dancers as well as a few local break-dancers. A great many photos were taken... and then we checked into what I thought was a Casa Rural (a nice B&B inn) but that turned out to be an Earl´s house, done over into a tiny hotel: La Casa Tepa. Wow. Simply Wow.

Day 7: We slept quite late. Drove to Leon, saw the Gothic cathedral and the Romanesque splendor of San Isidoro cloister. We also shopped for souvenirs. Apparently Beth is bringing “something thoughtful” home to each of her relatives and most of her son´s schoolmates.

Day 8: (today) We went to Burgos. We saw the wondrous cathedral, and ate shrimps on the colorful and asymmetric plaza. We intended to see the royal monastery of Las Huelgas, but I pooped out. We came home instead, and spent some times over at Bruno´s place with a gaggle of English and Irish and Australian pilgrims that Paddy met earlier in the day.

Tomorrow we rest, and pack up the bags. On Friday I will take them to Madrid and their airplane home.

It´s been quite non-stop. We are beat. They have seen such a tiny slice of this great, big country. I am amazed at how much I have never seen of Spain, myself. What a gift it is, to have such a lineup of beautiful places and great food and lovely people to share with my family!

And I am amazed at my sisters. We are funny, articulate, and capable women who have made very different choices in the past, and who live very different lives now. Still, we share so much more than genetics... so many crusty old jokes and songs and memories, and so many values and world-views, still. After all these years.

We have spent many hours together this week, but we haven´t had any of those Hollywood heart-to-hearts. We haven´t had to. We still speak the same language. Our parents set us on a strong base, and we three still stand strong thereon.

In my long pursuit of my personal dreams, I have neglected my family. But only because I assumed they will always be there for me, even if they are far away.

I have taken them for granted.
I have forgotten, up til now, that they are getting older. The weight, the aches and pains, the medicine we need to make it through the day... I guess I thought it was only me who was changing, that they would always be the clear-skinned teen beauties my mind sees when I hear their names.

I had forgotten, I guess, how fiercely and deeply and truly I love them.

Auctioning Easter

2011-04-25T00:11:00.000+02:00

Enough about me. Time to get back to Moratinos, and Sahagún, the nearest good-sized town, where a very wet Holy Week just wound up.

In America, where I come from, Easter is an odd sort of Spring festival, wherein some of us get chocolate rabbits and colored eggs in baskets full of fake hay. Others of us dress up in new clothes and go to church (how dreadfully I look back over that Easter when I taught Sunday School at College Hill Presbyterian Church... I handled the fourth-graders, seven of them, dressed in fabulous finery and tripped-out on marshmallow chicks and chocolate to the point of nausea, vomiting, and uncontrolled screeching.) Still other Americans do Passover instead. Or nothing special.

But here in Castilla y Leon, Easter is an entire week long -- two weeks, really. Sahagún, our market town 9 kilometers west, has a fine 500-year tradition of Holy Week worship, concerts, parades and pasos. So I decided to indulge.

Pasos are larger-than-life statues of Jesus, Mary, apostles, Roman soldiers, leering Jews, and other characters (and even animals) that are arrayed to portray scenes from the last day´s of Jesus´ earthly life. The Confraternity of Jesus the Nazarene, a sort of men´s prayer group - social club reaching back five centuries, keeps a collection of ten fine hand-carved antique pasos in a chapel-turned-paso-museum in Sahagún. These are mounted on heavy floats and carried by volunteers through the streets at particular moments of Holy Week, part of religious services that commemorate the Passion story. Drum-and-brass bands follow along, playing flashy and dolorous tunes that sound, to me, like bullfight music.

Carrying a paso is supposed to be a sacrifice, a heavy penance for the year´s sins. Confraternity members vie for a turn under their favorite tableau. They dress in matching purple gowns, and sometimes hide their identities under spooky pointy hoods. (So spooky, indeed, that the Ku Klux Klan later adapted the look, for more evil purposes.) All this is well-known to Spain-watchers everywhere -- colorful confraternities and pasos and heavy music are standard Holy Week pageantry from Seville to Santiago.

But kicking off every year´s Easter events is an oddment that this year I caught. It may kinda sum-up a lot of Easter, in its way: the Subasta de Pasos: the float auction.

Two Sundays before Easter, inside the confraternity chapel, with the pasos arrayed behind them and the sun streaking down through the incense smoke, Officials of the Confraternity (with Leandro the Plumber prominent among them) sat behind a purple-draped table. Before them was an iron handbell and a wide copper offering plate. And to each side stood a stout man in his best Sunday suit, grasping an antique staff topped with a tin Sacred Heart. The crowd filled the ten pews provided, and standing-room crowd spilled over the tiles and out into the plaza.

I had a camera and a notebook, and must still have that Working Press vibe. People stepped aside and handed me forward for a better look. The veterinarian who saved Murphy´s seventh life last summer took my elbow and led me to a front-row seat, right next to a woman with a hand-drawn score-sheet. She was official, but friendly. I settled in for the duration.

First up: Paso of the Trumpet.
Not a popular choice. Last year a group of schoolboys carried it, for only 15 Euro. The year before it went for 30. At first, nobody bid anything. The crowd grumbled.

The scowling Jefe rang the bell and called the place to order. And one of the stout men cleared his throat and sang out in cadenced, formal Castellano: "Is there a devout brother to give an offering to carry this holy image?"

The devout brothers sang out: this year´s crop of local Army recruits won it after two bids. It went for 30. Slow start. Things did not improve with the Bombo or the Banderas, two other minor images. The jefes exchanged glances. The auction is a major fund-raiser for the confraternity. Times are hard in rural Spain. But the Devout Brothers were just warming up.

Christina, the scorekeeper beside me, whispered explanations. A particular family or drinking club or prayer group or parish might have a particular devotion to one or another image, she said. They try to "win" their paso at the auction, then gather up enough strong shoulders to carry it through its appearances in the next week´s pageant. It´s hard work, she said, but a big honor. It is expensive, but somehow it is worth it. After Easter they have to bring them back.

As the larger and heavier pasos came up for bid, el paso del Cruz Grande went for 600, 650, 811, then 1,150 Euro. Leandro smiled. In 2010, it fetched only 400. In 2009, a measly 275. The Santo Christo de los Entierros saw similar success, and the Virgin of Solitude went for 1,650 Euros to a lady in Prada.

"This being the third call of 1,650 Euro, for La Virgen de la Soledad..." the second stout man sang out. His voice was going hoarse now. No more bidders. He banged his staff on the floor. "Buen aprovechadla!" he called out. "Enjoy it in good health!"

Ten pasos, ten nice bids. The auction ended with several groups of young men easing the lighter and (perhaps) less-valued pasos carefully through the low door of the shuttered San Lorenzo church next door -- the Mudejar landmark is falling down, and there´s no money to do more than shore it up.

Once the saints made daylight, the mozos cantered off with them on their shoulders to their club headquarters or hideouts. "They will practice with them, how to walk with them on their shoulders, how to make them bow, how to set them down gently," a bystander shouted to me. (We foreigners always understand better when Spanish is delivered at 80 or more decibels.) "It´s how they learn. It´s how I learned. And this year I´m helping with three pasos!"

I would love to carry a paso down the street during Holy Week in Spain.

If I had a big group of Devout Brothers, I might pony up 30 Euros, myself. Maybe get together an international immigrant group and bid for the right to carry Las Banderas. It might be shocking or unacceptable to some people, but we are sinners, too -- some of us might even be Christian! It could be done. If we could learn the steps, and rustle up some matching robes, and figure out when to be where... (Fiesta times and places are never posted. Somehow Spaniards know when to show up. We are always an hour early.)

And throughout this Holy Week, that is what was done. As it´s been done here for generations. Very Spanish, if not very Catholic. It made me think about Holy Week, and sacrifice, and Easter, and the entire Judeo-Christian economy of redemption and salvation and ongoing access to God.

Maybe some of the College Hill Presbyterians would say the Confraternity of Jesus the Nazarene is populated with Pharisees and money-changers, the kind of people an enraged Jesus kicked out of the temple in Jerusalem. They might find an annual devotion to a particular wooden image to be idolotrous -- relying on a carved bit of wood to endow the carrier with good luck or better access to the Almighty. (Jesus is supposed to be the sole conduit for that, you know.)

But maybe it is just culture. They auction-off pasos, and carry them around for a week, because they always have done. Because it is fun, because they want to, because it binds them together as a community. Because they have a perfect right to do it, strange as it might seem to outsiders.

As strange as bunnies and chocolate crosses, plastic grass, and not a single day off work for Easter.

All About Me?

2011-04-20T21:40:00.001+02:00

The air is full of springtime and thunder and yeah, some excitement. Holy week is here, and the shutters of several long-shut houses are rolled up, and smiling, familiar faces have reappeared, if only for a few days. We now have a bar in town, so the men (Paddy included) have been over there two nights this week, watching the big Madrid-Barcelona football matches on the TV. Out on the Camino with the dogs yesterday we saw a huge rainbow, spanning the sky from Rioseco to Escobar, moments before a downpour drenched us all. The garden is going wonderfully well, or parts of it are -- the potatoes and lettuces are practically jumping out of the ground!

This week Nieves walked through, a pilgrim I walked with on the Camino San Salvador two years ago. (We met over at Bruno´s for coffee.) Several other old friends and associates expect to stop in during coming days, including a group of 10 students from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and a week later 13 students from the University of Michigan School of Architecture...(we´re going to play in the mud, and call it "cobbing" and "adobe forming.") Maybe most of all I look forward to next week, to seeing my sisters. Beth and Mart are coming all the way from Arkansas and Pennsylvania to see me, and The Peaceable, and whatever little bit of Spain we can cram into just over a week. I occupy myself with planning our sightseeing odyssey, with cleaning up messes left way too long, with dreaming of big new projects. Even though there are plenty of big old projects still pending, or half-started.

Dael, a Scotsman who made a pilgrimage through here a couple of years ago, will arrive just after my sisters leave -- he plans to stay around through most of May, helping out. He calls himself a "dogsbody," which sounds nasty and funny at the same time. We shall roof, we shall paint, we shall, hopefully, discuss the practicality of the big new possible projects. We like Scotsmen around here, generally. They talk sense.

In summer especially we welcome willing dogsbodies. People who stay and work with us, in exchange for room and board and fellowship, and sometimes tobacco and whiskey.

All this good stuff in the offing, and still I feel rather low.
Maybe it´s the stormy sky, the bright sun cut apart by clouds and rain -- it is finally acting like April!
Maybe it´s just the big shifts and changes going on here. Maybe it is my ongoing inability to write anything more demanding than a trail guide or a diary entry.
Maybe it´s Paddy. We are getting up one another´s nose lately, together all the time.
Perhaps it is depression, still sniffing around the door.
I find myself very much missing the people and creatures who are no longer here.
I miss my grandfather, and my Dad -- people who have been dead for decades. And Juli, who still really ought to be here.

And then Kim sends me a video. And I think, Jeez, Reb!

And when the rain slows down I take Lulu out for a run in the dark wet streets of Moratinos. I see the lights on in the houses that are usually empty. And I know this is just a feeling. Like Holy Week, like the bloody tearful suffering statues parading through the streets of Sahagun, it will pass. It´s not real. I am spending way too much time stuck in my own thoughts.

And it´s not All About Me.

Big News for Moratinos!

2011-04-16T18:42:00.000+02:00

Albergue Hospital San Bruno is OPEN today!
There is no lawn yet, and there are a few details that need to be sawed-off or tucked away. But more than anything else, there are PILGRIMS in there this afternoon, writing assiduously in their diaries, drinking beer, and basking in the sunny little patio.

The smile on Bruno´s face stretches from ear to ear. He´s undergone every kind of nightmare, expense, and bureaucratic shakedown getting this job done. He is probably a saint by now.

So if you find yourself in Moratinos, stop by the big house on Calle Ontanon and give him a big pat on the back. And then pull up a bench and buy yourself a nice gin and tonic, or a big plate of authentic Italian pasta. You might even book in for a clean, fresh bunk. Custom-built by Segundino, the carpenter next door.

Crowding Into Quiet

2011-04-15T17:11:00.002+02:00

Fred & Co. Pictures by Rachel

Above us, beyond the chatter of birds, the pine tree lows. Little brown seeds rain down. Look close. They are tiny pine cones.

Today the dogs are happy. Lulu finally emerged from the barn, and is lying in the sun by the well. Harry is flung alongside. Paddy reads in his sunbeam, and dozes off his lunch.

Friday afternoon at The Peaceable. Just us, after a week of people.

This is becoming thematic, I know. When the weather breaks and the days are long, the Pilgrim Vibe goes out from among us, and gathers in the wanderers. They stay and play and work and enrich us, and they go. Then we feel happy to be alone again. For a while.

First, on Saturday, was Rachel, a pretty, tiny Czech girl who wanted to stay a while and work. She has no money. I said OK. There´s plenty around here that needs doing. (I had asked the camino to send us a big strapping hardworking guy, but I have a soft spot for real mendicants.)

In her wake came Jean, from Paris, via Philadelphia. His family is very very Catholic, he said. He was “looking for a new way to be.” He was clearly smitten by Rachel.

She worked like a yeoman, sweeping and mopping, scrubbing and lifting and shifting. He dithered and stood by, like his hands were too big. It was hard finding jobs for him to do – he is small and thin, with the big nose and wide forehead of a hermit or a revolutionary..We potted plants and hoed the garden. He helped Paddy and Rachel empty out the studio in the old kitchen They washed down the floorsand shelves, then put everything back in, in better order. A monumental job I wanted nothing to do with.)

Jean left after a couple of days, having written a three-page letter to young Rachel, telling her she´d shown him A Better Way.

Rachel shrugged.

She went with me to the bodega on Monday to put up a new layer of whitewash. We ended up stripping the concrete off, back to the bricks. I had a temper tantrum. She shrugged. “Big job,” she said. “You have water coming in from behind the bricks. You need to repair the roof, or you will need to do this job over and over.”

(I know about that roof. I bought the materials needed for the repairs back in the Fall. Esteban already said he´ll kindly bring a tractor-load of dirt over to finish it, once I get the asphalt rolled out and pegged down... But Patrick and I cannot do this kind of heavy job ourselves. This is why I asked The Camino for a strong young guy.) I did not tell Rachel all this.

“It is damp. Let´s let it dry out a while,” I said. “Fred is coming. He will advise.” We spread the busted concrete down the tractor-tracks outside the bodegas, to keep it driveable when it rains. We went home, and prepared for the next day. Another pilgrim was on her way, in addition to Fred.

And so they came – Fred fluttered in from France, bearing big, beautiful Malbec wine from Cahors, indistinguishable (to my amateur palate) from nice Bordeaux. Annie walked here from St. Jean Pied de Port, ready to be trained as a volunteer hospitalera.

So the following day I spent with the ladies round the sunny patio table, discussing the practicalities of radical hospitality. I.E., how to:

*start a wave of peace, love, and harmony that lasts from 1 p.m. to 8 a.m.;

*clear out a clogged sump drain;

*make a public prayer on the spur of the moment;

*register credentials and assign bunks to large groups of exhausted, cranky people;

*properly react to bedbug infestations, forest fires, and demanding tourists.

All that fun stuff you gotta do when you´re running a pilgrim albergue. We did the course fast and efficiently. I stripped my voice.

In the evening we all walked out to the Promised Land. We had a big, merry dinner round the kitchen table, with Fred demonstrating the workings of the new copper moonshine still he´d bought that afternoon at the ferreteria. We listened to guitars. We looked up at the stars, and the half-moon. Paddy and I smiled at one another in the dark.

It took another day for everyone to go.

We were happy to have them. We are happy to not have them, too.

We love pilgrims. And we love our privacy. That is why everyone who buys the new 2011 edition of the usually-excellent John Brierly Guide to the Camino Frances ought to note the following corrections to the Moratinos entry:

Moratinos (pop 20) Hostal Moratinos new hostal at entrance (under construction). Continue down main street calzada Francesa. The main street of Moratinos is Calle Ontanon, as is easily seen from the signs along the buildings. There has never been a Calle Francesa in Moratinos. This "Francesa" error dates back to the Gitlitz and Davidson guide of 1992, and has been repeated by every guidebook writer ever since.
Albergue The peaceable Kingdom recently opened in sensitively restored private house in the main street (summer only) Albergue Hospital San Bruno, a private albergue created by the Confraternity of San Bruno in Brescia, Italy, is opening on Holy Week (hopefully) in a sensitively restored private house on the main street. It will stay open all year. (Peaceable Kingdom is a private "casa de acogida" that has offered emergency backup help to pilgrims since 2006. It is very much NOT an albergue). Parish church dedicated to St. Thomas with large shaded porch and (F). Continue out onto gravel track all the way into San Nicolas del Real Camino etc. etc.

(I told John Brierly I was not happy. He said he is sorry, that this won´t happen again.)

So it was a busy and somewhat stressful week.

Everyone left this morning, everyone but me and Paddy.

Lulu came out of the barn at last.

Harry stopped barking.

We pottered around the patio, we went to Villada,for a fabulous Friday fish menu del dia.

We are back now, in our quiet home with the lowing tree, the twittering canary, and the dogs, groaning and twitching in their sleep.

The concrete will wait for tomorrow. Maybe then the strapping young pilgrims will arrive, fresh and ready for work.

Pretty Rough

2011-04-08T18:52:00.001+02:00

Last summer in the Promised Land. By Kim.

Got a great running start yesterday on the Camino Invierno Trail Guide update. Three and a half hours of work covered a good 100 kilometers of trail. It is delicious and nutritious, this kind of writing. It is easy, once I have all my facts in notebooks and binders alongside. I just sit here and reminisce, really... long as I plug in the mileage and the hostel phone numbers now and then. Such a treat.

This morning, though, was so incredibly blue-sky beautiful I let myself nest before I sat down to write. Paddy took the dogs out to the Promised Land on his own. I started laundry, I washed the floors (which exerts on dogs almost as strong a pull as wet cement). I pulled some lamb out of the freezer for dinner. I don´t know what kind of lamb it is. Time will tell.

I pulled weeds in the garden. I gave antibiotics to the ailing brown hen. I watered. I went to the little potting shed/bathroom off the patio to find some plant food, and was reminded the place is a shambles. And so I started on that.

I pulled out everything in there: 80-liter bags of potting soil, sacks of river rocks, unidentifiable roots and bulbs, broom handles, haircut-clippers, shampoo, crinkled old band-aids, hairbrushes. This was our bathroom for a year. This was all we had, from October 2006 to about May of 2008. We showered in this tiny tub, with its tiles ready to pop off, its fussy hot-water supply, its stylish curtain – I loved the way the colors combined on that discount-store shower curtain, bought somewhere outside Pittsburgh, emigrated to Spain.

This now-spider-infested curtain is why our towels are turquoise-blue and lime green and pink and pale yellow, and even violet now and then. The curtain showed me how these colors harmonize in such a cheerful way, even when the rest of the world was gray. That shower curtain helped me get by.

It is time, today, to throw it away. We no longer use it, or the shower. Instead I washed it.

It hangs now on the clothesline, alongside the second generation of towels it set in motion: olive green, robin´s-egg blue, navy. They move in the breeze,flags for an afternoon. They are dry now, but too pretty to take down.

This little bathroom was slapped-on and furnished sometime in the 1960´s, or maybe the Austin Powers 1970´s, with groovy chrome towel-bars and delta-wing mirrors and a NASA-inspired medicine cupboard. In the winter the pipes freeze inside the walls, and in spring they leak. The roof is failing. We have no real use for this bathroom any more. We have two new ones inside the house.

We maybe ought to tear it out, and just expand the patio a little, extend the existing plumbing to carry water in and out of the barn on the other side of the meter-thick wall of adobes.

Later. After my prayers are answered, and an architect or garden designer or Someone With A Vision shows up and tells me some startling, affordable, and wonderful thing to do with it. We are in need of architectural vision here. And maybe some spiritual vision, too. Our roles are changing. We ought to change our house to accommodate what is coming next. But we don´t know what that is.

Meantime, the little bathroom needed a serious spring cleaning. So I took an allergy pill and started moving out things.

First went the spiders. Then the dust. (Paddy swept, ceiling to floor, and did the initial hosing-out.)

We moved out the Far-Out Bathroom Furnishings Collection, the sacks of soil and stones, a hundred little plastic pots and saucers, fertilizer, insecticide, bleach, and toilet paper. I scrubbed down the walls with a brush, hosed them again, and swept gallons of soapy, dirty water out the door and down to the sewer drain. Eventually I put most of the stuff back in there, rearranged and humanized. A huge black bag of junk went to the dumper.

It still looks pretty rough in there.

It does not make for memorable blog copy, I know. What sticks in my mind about the whole operation is what I found inside the old chrome medicine cabinet.

In there, behind the clippers we once used to cut the hair of Paddy and Anselmo, (they said it was a fine job, but they both looked pretty rough), behind those dried-up bandages and dessicated deodorant sticks, were two bottles of perfume and a lipstick.

Byzance and Cool Water, each in its own blue glass vial. Real perfume, from back in the days when I wore real scent, to a real job in a real life, dressed in real clothing. It was too expensive to throw away, so I brought it with me to our new home in Spain. Once here, I evidently forgot all about it. When your days are taken up with hoeing and hiking and just hanging out, no one cares much about your scent, unless you get downright stinky.

The scent still is very strong and fine. I sprayed some Cool Water on my wrists, and have enjoyed a whiff now and then all day, ever since. I liked it then, I still like it. (Apparently little yellow butterflies like it too, as they are fluttering ever nearer to me as I write!)

And the lipstick. Chanel, in a long tube, a color with a French name: Rosier-des-something. I opened it up, twisted the screw, and it emerged intact, after all these winters and summers in the potting shed... Quality stuff. I put some on. I mashed my lips together and looked at my reflection in the chromium shimmer of the Austin Powers medicine cabinet. I expected, I guess, to see the same woman who last applied this lipstick to these lips.

She is gone. Lost somewhere out there on the trail to here.

My hair stood in tufts atop my head, the way the wind blowed it out in the fields, after my shower. My eyes were puffy, but gone are the dark circles that used to hang there. (I may have eye-bags, but they are not yet made of leather.) My cheeks are hollowed-out where they once were round. The crisply ironed button-down shirt is now a blue tee with the seams giving way.

I look pretty rough.

My red lips looked odd with the rest of my face, like I was eating cherries, or running a fever.

I smiled at myself.

I like me better this way.

I kept the scents, but threw away the lipstick. We have room for only one Rosie here, and she is a pesky adorable rat-dog.

Oh, the lamb, from the freezer. I looked at it, now that it´s thawed. It is a lamb´s head, skinless, his eyes still shiny. We´ve been eating the rest of this critter all winter, and now we have to look him in the eye. I do not think I have a recipe for this.

I think the dogs are in for a treat.

Bees and Casimiro

2011-04-07T01:24:00.001+02:00

It is wonderful to walk a camino again in springtime. It is even wonderfuller to be home again, and writing it all up into a guidebook other people can use to walk it themselves.

morning outside A Rúa

(I apologize for the strange confab of photos. Blogger is jerking me around again.)

River Sil, road, railroad, road

Casimiro

Kitties of Raigada

Huge church in tiny Montefurado

As most of you know, I walked four days of the Camino de Invierno this week, in company with five intrepid hikers from the Netherlands. I covered only about 80 km. of the actual 220 km. camino – four tough days through slate-mining country that I missed-out on last year. The remote stretch from O Barco de Valdeorras to Monforte de Lemos, to be exact.

It is a beautiful, difficult, and very Galician camino. It is not for beginners or skinflints or people with weak knees. It is a lovely walk in spring or summer, but its name means "Winter Camino." A misnomer. This would be a miserable, muddy slog in wintertime. This should be "The Vineyard Way," or the "Honey In the Rocks" Camino, or maybe "Path of the Roman Mines." Something should be done, but I fear it is too late.

So, why did I go back up there, seeing as I did chunks of the Invierno two times last year?

After finishing The Way last year, I wrote an English-language Invierno Guide for the Confraternity of St. James of London. I relied on other pilgrims to provide the on-the-ground information for those miles I missed. They are reliable people. They did their best. I still was not happy with it.

My name is on the front of that book, and I felt I had left a big hole in the middle of it, not having written it all from first-foot experience. And that is why, the first chance I got, I went back. This time with company. Company who spoke some English. and carried a top-of-the-line Global Positioning Satellite navigation unit! And this time I had a proper guidebook, one much more comprehensive than the one I wrote. It is written in Spanish, by José Rúa Pérez, a guy who lives along the Invierno path. It is full of glossy photos and mileage charts and even some maps! It is rather heavy to carry along in a backpack, and it is rather pricy: 26 Euros. And like every trail guide in the world, it has a few wrong things in it.

But it was a boon to us all, nevertheless. The Dutch used that guide, together with mine, to travel successfully from Ponferrada to O Barco in the two days before I joined the party. They are opinionated people, and had plenty to say about both guides. They will draw all kinds of information from both, no doubt, for their upcoming production. Their book will launch hundreds of pilgrims along this difficult and comparatively costly camino... pilgrims from the Netherlands and Belgium or maybe South Africa. People who read and speak Dutch or Flemish or Afrikaans.

The rest of you English-speaking lot, for now, will have to make due with mine. The updated CSJ guide. The one I am sinking my teeth into writing right now.

Much as I love the walking, the writing afterward is even better. It is here I boil off all the dreary, impatient, frustrating, grubby, prickly parts, and distill the remainder to rosy Prose. Here I can remember the rainbow-colored bee-boxes, slate roofs glittering through the morning haze, a gnarled tree heavy with blossoms, buzzing with bees. Abandoned bread ovens crouching in broken buildings, their mouths smeared black Os. And long, deep, green valleys with roads, rails, and river all tracing the same letter S, S, S.

Plum jam. Plummy Mencia-Godello tinto from Valdeorras. The wide, placid water of the Rio Sil, a shady, cold footbath in the little Rio Lar, and a babbling brook called Saa.

And Casimiro, an 85-year-old farmer who lives in a crook of the river and railroad, who grows his own food and makes his own wine and cheese, baskets and barrels -- And homemade liquor. He gave us all a shot, even though it was only 11 a.m., even though we still had a long way to walk that day. He filled the empty spaces of my backpack with walnuts from the tree overhead, and he talked... He lives in the house where he was born, where his grandfather and father were born, where his own son was born... (The son lives now in Madrid. He does not visit often.) Casimiro and the wife are happy here. They hoe the garden, they plow between the vines in the vineyards up top, following behind the white donkey. They watch the trains pass by, heading east, heading west.

“We will be on the train east on Sunday afternoon,” Mariann from Rotterdam told him. “We will wave to you when we go by!” Casimiro laughed. “My son used to wave at the people on the trains, when he was little. Anyone who did not wave back he said they were crazy,” he said. “It is important to notice people. Even the ones you don´t know.”

Not many people pass by his house. When he was a boy, farmers from all around came to have their grain ground at his family´s gristmill. The battered cart-track we had followed down the mountain to his door was once the main highway through these parts, he said. And before that it was the Roman road. It carried the minerals mined in these mountains down along the river and on to Lugo, the regional capitol.

Now it brings only the odd hiker or biker, or a forestry crew. A gang of friendly foreigners must have been a nice break for him. I hope it was.

Casimiro was a high point of this camino. Casimiro and the bees.

The Camino Invierno is populated with bees, and beehives – honey and wax are the glue of the local economy, along with wine and stone and minerals. Hollow trees are full of bees. On hillsides all along the way are stone circles built centuries ago, with beehives set up inside, where the wild boars could not enter and overturn them.

I don´t know any bees personally, but I admire them greatly. If I was not allergic to bee venom maybe I would try to keep a community of them myself. There is something upright and righteous about these creatures – they pollinate flowers and crops, they care for one another, they work hard to make useful things. If you mess them around they will kick your ass, but they want most to just mind their own business. They sing so beautifully together.

Out on the Invierno trail are many many hillsides – farmers keep bees on crags where nothing else can grow. When the breeze is blowing right, you can hear the hum of bees, even when their homes are hidden from sight.

But back to the path: I am very happy to say the waymarking along this formerly-mystifying stretch of camino is brand-new and not at all bad. Anyone who wants to make a run at the Invierno should go for it, without undue fear of losing himself on top a mountain. But he should take a guidebook with him. A guide written in his native language.

He should be careful of his footing and careful of his knees. He should stop at Casimiro´s house. He should try to continue on and finish the Invierno at Santiago de Compostela, where all the Caminos de Santiago end up.

And he should remember when he is on his way back east at the end to watch carefully when the train goes past Montefurado, past the bend in the river, where the arroyo empties in and El Molino stands against the mountain. Out in the driveway on Sunday afternoon you may see, like me and Marianne saw, the old man and old lady, standing in the driveway, waving at the strangers on the train.

Marianne whooped with joy. We flew past at 100 kilometers per hour, but we waved out that window like a couple of maniacs. We´d have been crazy not to.

Que Será

2011-03-26T14:16:00.002+01:00

All still is somewhat in ordnung, except for a profound disquiet way down at the base of everything. Maybe something like was felt in Tokyo, while the earth shifted hugely only a hundred or so miles north. Maybe the great city felt the earth moving, literally. Or maybe it was the great lifting upward of so many souls, so suddenly lifted together out of their ordinary lives and daily bodies. Tokyo had to feel something.

A disturbance in the Force, perhaps. A stirring in the Wine-Dark Sea, as Homer would have put it.

Here, all is quiet. I can almost hear the bulbs and peas and seeds in the earth, pushing softly up at the dung and dark to where warm and light are. The past week was quiet at its base, but the surface was whipped by the whirlwind that is Fred, Federico, the guitarrero. He swept in on Monday, bearing suitcases overpacked with Extra-Crunchy peanut butter, über-sharp cheddar cheese, and (glory be!) the makings for authentic Mexican tamales. He slept, then swept out again, northward to France.

I love me a good tamale. When in Madrid I try my best to find them, usually sating the urge at Mas Que Café, a Peruvian lunch counter at Mercado Anton Martin. (This is one of our favorite restaurants in that great city -- lovely staff, great food at great prices, and unbeatable atmosphere. It is formica among the hand-trucks and lettuces and fish-heads of the market stalls. But there´s all the whip-slender inmates of the Flamenco-dance school upstairs, and the smiling knife-grinder from the stall next door, and the Bearded Intellectual horndogs from the revolutionary bookstore... all of them mixing it up and knocking it back, smoking and laughing and oh so alive, here and now.)

Here at The Peaceable it rains. Tim has tossed himself into his dog bed like a furry salad. Patrick is online, peering hard at the Daily Racing Form statistics for the Dubai World Cup.

Me, I am making a half-size feast of tamales. It is an elaborate rite, filled with sidesteps and substitutions. The foodies say you must have lard for the cornmeal-and-lime dough, but the local lard is too intensely piggy for my taste. I use instead a part of my precious, hoarded Crisco vegetable shortening, a chemical concoction my caring American family sends to ensure my continuing arterial decay, and half "cuisine et pâtisserie," a posh block of pretty much the same stuff, supplied by my remaining friend in Paris. (This contributor is Miguel Angel, who is himself a native Mexican tamale-eater. So it is fitting.) (Fear not, I do still have a couple of friends in France...they just are not in the capitol. Thank God.) (And yes, it is true. I do not care for Paris, any more than Paris cares for me.)

Which makes me think, guiltily, I let my Parisian godson´s birthday go by without sending him an illustrated book of Greek myths, as I intended. Ingre DÁulaire, read as a child, gave me all the base in Classics I ever got, or ever needed: Greek, Roman, and Norse. DÁulaire, (with a generous salting of native bullshit) proved sufficient for my academic progress, even as a major in European history, even as a Master´s candidate in church history, even as a professional writer and journo in religion and art and culture. The Greek Myths are the tales that stand behind our fairy stories, our movie and novel and narrative plots. We keep repeating them, over and over. The Greek myths, and the Bible, and maybe Bach and Beethoven and Billie Holliday and David Bowie ... I made sure my children had these to hand, too. And so I will try to do with my godson, who I have not seen for a couple of years now, but who I still feel responsibility for.

Heavens, I am discursive today. It is Lent, so I am not even under any outside influence!

Maybe it is Demeter, or Persephone -- the mother-daugher spring-and-summer pair, who oversee this blog post. Maybe it is because the earth is coming alive, but nothing else is really happening yet. Yet. The expectation is so... there! Or maybe it is a warning to you, blogueros, that I am off, yet again, to the Camino de Invierno. This time in company. A team of Dutch guide-writers is walking that way, doing a deluxe tourist-oriented guide, taking their time, taking a good GPS reading, taking notes... I asked if I could tag along, over the mountains from O Barco de Valdeorras to Monforte de Lemos, the part that sickness and weariness made me miss out on last year. And they said "sure!"

And so I go. Maybe I will write.
Like the peas, and the Dubai Cup, the urge to write rises in the spring, toward the light.
Maybe.
Let´s not expect anything. Let us just be thankful for what is. Bulbs, peas, seeds. Que será, será.

Alles in Ordnung (kinda)

2011-03-19T20:57:00.002+01:00

The sun is glorious.

I cannot seem to write anything comprehensively, so I default to sorting out things.

Patrick and I have an important commonality: Even though we live in a rambling and spread-out place that requires lots of upkeep, what we maintain is a great resistence to orderliness. This translates into many things. We can happily live with plenty of racket around us – over-loud music, yapping dogs, people shuffling in and out, the bread-man blasting his horn, tractors and occasional dirt-bikes revving outside the walls. I think it comes from working in newsrooms for years. Deadline pressure teaches one to focus on the task at hand, even when the archbishop is lap-dancing at the next desk.

Disorder is another commonality. Even though we stripped down our possessions to a minimum before moving here five years ago, and even though we continue to discuss minimalism and simplicity, we still manage a degree of environmental clutter. On the patio, even when things have been tucked away for winter, are scrub-brushes, dog-combs, rags, shutters, loose tiles, window-boxes, and dead jasmine. These things happen while you´re carrying out a bigger job. You set down that jug of glue, that water-glass, that turnip-seed packet or umbrella or dog-coat or bit of broken-off walking stick, just for a minute. The minute turns to a month.

Inside the house it´s pens, papers, magazines, paperbacks, maps, recipes, business cards, notebooks, salt-shakers, dog treats, and cables for cameras, computers, and mobile phones. I am not sure where all this stuff comes from. I certainly do not know where it all goes. We shift it all around now and then. We put the clutter into nice colorful boxes, and stow them on shelves. Things look nice for a little while, til a new layer of the same kind of stuff builds up again, or someone needs a camera cable or a compass or caraway seeds or muscle liniment. By then they have vanished, never to be seen again.

Right around the full moon of March 15 or 20, it hits critical mass. The sun reappears, and one morning a bright beam slices through the windows just so. I realize... This Place Is Out of Hand.

And this is why now the patio is home to a clematis plant, climbing up a new arbor, fertilized with homemade clematis food. The herb garden is weeded, seeded with cilantro and basil, with the parsley, oregano, rosemary, mint, and lavender looking bushy and bright – and three kinds of thyme tucked into their own little section. (Kim and Frank built the bed for me last year, when I was out camino-ing. It is one of the best gifts anyone´s given me.)

I told you last time about the random bottle from the bodega that turned into something lovely? So I went over to the bodega this week with a corkscrew and a flashlight and a glass and a big jug of water and had a good look. And taste.

I found we have some nice wine ready for this year or next. We have a few things that want a couple of more years. But most of all we had empty racks!

Now is a good time to buy some kinds of wine, so that is what we did: we went and spent 182 Euros on Rioja and Ribera del Duero crianzas and a few cosechas.. Sixty bottles or so. Cheap ones. Wine that is OK now, but likely only wants a couple of years in the dark to turn into drinkable perfume. (Or so we hope.) I racked them according to region and age: Toro, Ribero del Duero, Rioja, Navarra, Ribera Sacra, varietals, odd French things, 2007, 8, 10. (I don´t do “vintage.” Still too highbrow.) I will need to shop for white wine after a few weeks, when the new white wine comes out – the Rueda, Albariño, Bierzo... If Patrick goes to France for his holidays I hope he will bring back some of that beautiful green Gascon rosé, because my sisters are coming to visit, and they will never otherwise taste that wonderful taste.

It is an investment, wine, even though I never spend more than about 4 Euros for a bottle. The pilgrims surely do help us burn through the stuff. (The really good ones I keep aside for friends and family and supporters. Just so you know. Unless we have exceptional pilgrims!)

I very much enjoyed myself sorting out the vino, even though I don´t do well in caves generally. I thought about the earthquake that hit here on Monday, and I looked at the bits of earth that have fallen lately from the bodega ceiling. And then I stopped thinking.

Out in our back yard, otherwise known as “la huerta,” the garden beds are ready to roll. I´ve planted peas, butter lettuce, purple lettuce, endive, cabbages, carrots, turnips, spinach, and a few potatoes – in beds I can quickly cover up with plastic if and when the frost arrives.

I put in an Eden rose, a fragrant climber, on a trellis that lately was a barrier fence at Bruno´s albergue. It will make the back yard much more welcoming and pretty, I hope. The back yard still has a long way to go before it is civilized. But I rather like having a bit of Savage Nature around. Like T.S. Eliot (or was it ee cummings?) said, when you live on a farm you never can be bored – there is always something to do, some bit of wildness to bring back under the whip, always something to put off til next week.

But I digress.

In other orderliness I did up our taxes (well as I know how). We put the bread-baking cupboard back together after it collapsed. We finished up the woodpile, we hauled some old timbers into the huerta to make a new potato patch, I moved manure and sand and dirt by the barrow-load. We even hosted a goodly number of pilgrims in the middle of it all, and treated them well I think. They are bombing through here now, pilgrims.

Paddy turned 70 years old. Which means maybe I should not be working him so hard.

Today, in the bright sun, Patrick and I pulled out the patio table and chairs. We rubbed them down with teak oil, readying them for another year of merriment.

One note from outside our gates: Dear Bruno finally got all the pipes joined up and the permits stamped. The Hospital San Bruno pilgrim albergue is good to go, at long last, at vast expense... On Sunday he and his longsuffering and mostly invisible wife will host a great pasta feast at the New Italian Albergue, for all the townspeople of Moratinos.

And next week, everyone assumes, the albergue will open its doors. For the first time in history, Moratinos will offer pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela an official place to stop and stay. I sincerely wish them all the best. Moratinos was the last village on the camino with nothing to offer pilgrims. This had to happen.

But The Peaceable. What will become of us?

Maybe this is the question that is casting me down these days. Maybe we are now obsolete. Maybe now no one will find his way here, past a hostal, past an albergue... maybe now we will only get the homeless wanderers, the poor bodies who cannot or will not cough up the six Euros for a pilgrim bed at Bruno´s place.

We may have outlived our usefulness, Camino-wise.

What will we be now? What will we become?

Vamos a ver. We shall see.

Time will tell.

Treasures of the Deep

2011-03-10T22:58:00.001+01:00

Rosie heading home, the Italian albergue in the background

I sat in my chair on the patio and ruminated.

March is a cruel month. It gets my hopes up, makes me think that yes, Spring really is here, I can plant the garden and pull out the patio furniture... and then it sends down a snowstorm to remind me, No. Not for a while yet, kiddo!

Even though we have good pilgrims, and we are healthy, and I have lots of interesting plans to look forward to, I still feel frighteningly depressed some days. In years past I´ve suffered from clinical depression -- a mental condition with physical causes linked to brain chemistry and heredity. I don´t need a reason to become depressed. Life can be dandy, but if my brain is not manufacturing enough seratonin, I feel as if I am living underwater. Everything, even activities and ideas and disciplines I usually love, becomes colorless, dull, boring... and ultimately, meaningless.

Depressed is a very self-absorbed, numb, and sad way to be. When the symptoms start showing up, I get scared. I know there is little I can do to forestall a depression. I can´t prevent it, any more than I can wash it off once it´s oozed over me. So this time I am letting it happen.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist teacher who I love, says to welcome it like any other guest. "Hello, depression. Come on in and take a seat. Have a cup of tea. Where have you been, all these years?"

This way, it keeps its distance. It is not me, it is not "my depression." It is just someone who is in the house today, and probably tomorrow. He will wear out his welcome, but he´ll eventually move on.

Wise people say depression usually has something to teach you, if you stop whining long enough to listen to it. Me, I think depression is like nausea. If you fight it, it just lasts longer and makes you more miserable. Best to just puke and get it over with.

Or maybe it is more like plunging into the deep end of the swimming pool, without grabbing a lungful of breath first. Sound and light and your voice are all shut down and silenced. You feel a desperation inside, a struggle to re-surface, but the water only slows your efforts to move upward again, toward the living world.

But if you let the momentum of your dive carry you downward first, you eventually feel yourself touch the tiles of the pool-bottom. And once you hit bottom, well. You can fold your arms alongside your body, hunker down, and then blast yourself like a torpedo upward and out again into the light! No struggling needed. Just momentum. Just flowing, downward, bottomward... At the bottom, there is something to push against.

I thought all these thoughts out on my patio, with my feet up on the edge of the well. The sun shone, the pavement was littered with dog bodies of several sizes, worn-out from a long morning´s mouse-hunt out in the fields. Paddy opened a bottle of wine, brought up at random from the depths of the bodega earlier that day. I recognized the label: Bodegas de Abalos makes red Tempranillo wine in La Rioja, Spain´s popular wine region. The label said "Crianza 2005," which means it was aged a couple of years before I bought it, and was already judged table-ready at that time. It was nothing to write home about, but it wasn´t bad... and it was remarkably cheap: 2 Euros a bottle. I bought three cases.

I put them in the bodega. I forgot they were there.

I took my glass, had a sniff, then a taste... After three years in the cool darkness, that average table wine has ripened into the full-bodied, wide-open, crisp and delicious Reserva that made Rioja famous. Wow!

Anti-depressants

Playing on the little outdoor boom-box Bebo y Cigala, a wizened Cuban pianist and a Spanish flemenco singer, howling through a bossa-nova heartbreak. From his cage little Bob sang along. And in the hand not holding the wine glass I had a paperback book called "How to Live: A Life of Montaigne" -- an excellent, fascinating book (even if it is a little highbrow).

Books, birdsong, bossa-nova, good dogs, and an agreeable mate bearing Rioja Reserva. What more could I want?

If depression must hang out here he can stay for tea. But he´s not getting any of the wine.

Jesterday: A Lesson

2011-03-04T14:57:00.002+01:00

It was only 10:30 a.m., but out of the snow came three pilgrims. They were hungry, as all the pilgrim-feeding places in the last 14 kilometers are closed.

Still, after 13 kilometers they were smiling, happy, full of life. Ruben, a Basque from Barakaldo, was a big man, 40-ish, a chef at a summer resort up on the coast -- the kind of pilgrim who drinks lots of red wine and laughs loud and then snores like a sawmill all night. The other two were slim and fashionable and in love: Alan from Argentina, a young Sinatra in a black fedora, and Sylvia, a pierced and tattooed nymph from Portugal.

We sat them down in the kitchen. I made some bread last night, and they tucked into that while Paddy made them each a two-egg omelette. We talked about Hugo Chavez and George Bush and the California maharishi that Alan and Sylvia hope to meet up with later this year in India. I had trouble understanding Alan´s Argentine accent, I admitted. So everyone then shifted into perfectly OK English. Accented, but fine -- probably about equal to my Spanish.

After the last of the egg was mopped-up with the last of the bread, Alan spotted the guitar... "Ah! I long to touch the guitar!" he said. "May I please?"

So Fred´s guitar was put to its intended use, and the gray morning round the kitchen table turned to a skilled bossa nova, then a tango. Ruben has a monster baritone voice, which he applied with fulsome emotion to the Beatles: "Jesterday," he sang. Me and Alan harmonized (more or less) on "Wish You Were Here," and then Ruben then made a blockbuster attempt at "What a Wonderful World."Alan suddenly decided the guitar needed a tuning. (sing that song with a Spanish accent. Just try it. It is an absolute scream.) Bob the canary loved every minute, and sang along at maximum volume. Tim and Rosie and Murph did not budge from their usual 10-to-noon posture, best described as "carelessly flung across the furniture."

And so by 11:15 the smiling trio put their coats and backpacks on again, and disappeared back into the winter.

We made more coffee.
"Nice people," I said. "Fun, hearing live music in the place."
"They have a lot to answer for, the Beatles," Paddy said.

* * * * * * * * *

I blogged about the eventful morning, a verson of what you see above. I posted it. After lunch the doorbell rang again. Out on the steps, in the rain, was Antonio. This is the third or fourth time the leathery little Portuguese has turned up here. He travels back and forth across the camino, fully credentialed but obviously not your usual pilgrim. Antonio is a traveling man, a homeless person. A hobo. "Hola, Rebekah!" he said, kissing my cheeks. "I am back!" We are on first-name terms, us and Antonio.

Antonio is walking eastward, to Rome this time, he said. He needed wine to warm himself, maybe a raincoat for tomorrow, and especially a winter-weight sleeping bag. We didn´t have the last two, but he helped to empty out the bottle of Rueda left over from lunch. I told him I´d drive him over to Ledigos, to the next open pilgrim shelter. Paddy gave him 10 Euro for the night´s stay. (Paddy and I are finally communicating between ourselves, when one of us doesn´t really want to host a pilgrim that night.) I remembered an old LL Bean sleeping bag out in the barn, a dusty, overly-heavy model abandoned here a couple of years ago. Antonio was glad to have it.

Antonio never leaves here empty-handed, which nettles me somewhat. I feel like a sucker when he goes. But when I think about why, I have to respect the man. He is in need. He asks for what he wants, he never demands. And if I have extra, there is no good reason for me not to share it with him. We both understand that. That is why he keeps coming back here, and that is why I keep giving him things. (That, and my mothers´oft-stated suspicion that bums are often "angels in disguise.")

On the way over to Ledigos the snow turned to heavy rain. I remembered Kim had left a poncho in the back of the car, for whomever. I dug it out and gave it to Antonio, so he can walk tomorrow.

At the bar in Ledigos sat Don Gaspar, one of our two parish priests, in whose capable hands I left our friend Antonio. I am not sure either was happy about the exchange, but both told me I am a nice person. Both thanked me, and wished me godspeed.

They blessed me in Castellano and in Portuguese, respectively. And during the drive home that made me think, too, about the blog above, and the fun I´d had, laughing at the Argentine and the Basque singing English tunes for us in our kitchen -- how funny it was, hearing "Yesterday" sounding so silly...

And I was struck by my own ingratitude, maybe even my cruelty. Sure, England and America provide the world with a fabulous musical repertoire. But English, the lyric language, is not my personal possession. Here were these tired, damp strangers, taking a chance in a second tongue, paying for their breakfast with songs and smiles. And there I was, mocking them behind their backs for their funny accents.

Me, the person who twists Spanish into bizarre shapes on a daily basis... a foreigner who, after five years in Moratinos, still cannot make some of her neighbors understand more than half the things she says. Hold up right here girly, I told myself. I took a look in the mirror.

We´ve had plenty of pilgrims in the days since I came home: a French Canadian, two Catalan ladies, as well as today´s arrivals. None of them left any money, but what they did bring, apparently, were lessons I need to learn. (Just incidentally, this afternoon, even while I was driving Antonio east, a blog reader from Australia hit the donation button, and paid into our account enough to cover everybody´s expenses.)

* * * * * * * * * *

We live in a magnificent place, people. Not just us at The Peaceable in Moratinos.
You live here, too, wherever you are. We all are parts of the same world, we all inhabit our own Peaceables. We create our own kingdoms. And we are charged, by Christ himself, to be peace, to bring justice and kindness to whomever shows up at our doorstep, or at our elbow, or at our desk.

Patrick and I are not called to be any more heroic than you are called to be.
After today, I hope you are kind to the needy people all around you. And I hope it does not take you so long as it does me, to see the lessons they have for you.

And the music.

Long long road

2011-02-25T05:25:00.001+01:00

I am on my seventh day in the United States of America, land of my birth. It is an exciting and exhilarating and very very exhausting place, America.

I think it is not only the ambitious pace, the odd eating habits, and the harrowing winter weather -- and my habit of lumping some of life´s more unpleasant duties into each of my visits. (this one included a professional conference, as well as visits to the dentist and the Department of Motor Vehicles). I think the main factor, for me, is genetic.

My family lives here.
Families are messy, emotional, demanding things. You don´t know how much you love them until they are threatened. And as you know if you´ve read this blog recently, my mother´s health took a bad turn in the past month. I flew back to the old stomping grounds to stand by while she recovered from an abdominal surgery, and the lab results that came after.

It started out exciting and star-studded, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. While there I spent quality time with my great friend Kathy, my daughter Libby and her Intended, and several old friends sent my way by the Camino. I also met an awesome Franz Klein painting, la Infanta Christina de España (a princess), and a Hollywood movie star (Martin Sheen)... all of them up close. I met an ambassador, an importer of Spanish jamones, and some fascinating college professors, too. I invited them all over to visit, and some of them may well show up in Moratinos in coming months, part of a new intercollegiate pilgrimage study program. (probably not the painting, nor the princess. Nor the star. But you just never know.)

Maybe the best part of the whole trip, though, was driving a little rental car from Washington DC up to Pittsburgh, over the Allegheny mountains on an ancient highway on a Tuesday morning. I turned up the radio, and enjoyed it more than I have enjoyed the radio in a very long time -- starting out with National Public Radio´s deep and wide coverage of revolutions in the Middle East, then fading into the rural stretches of Maryland with country boys singing of fishin´ buddies and pickup trucks and Mama´s Hungry Eyes, then Eminem snarling "Mama, I Didn´t Mean to Hurt You," shifting into preachers calling me to a life of "the joy of holiness," hair-bands howling out how they Sold their Soul for Rock and Roll. Finally, up over Breezewood and onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike I found the jazz station from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, playing old Ella Fitzgerald "Got You Under My Skin" with a weird rhumba tom-tom syncopation. George Benson. Cedar Walton... then a shift up the dial for some Decemberists, Death Cab, and finally Train and Lady Gaga and the Top 40. By the time I rolled up at Mom´s house the NPR news cycle started up again.

The snow in mom´s yard is almost knee-deep. The house was fragrant, my sister Beth had brought over a big pot of beef vegetable soup.

Mom was her funny old self, walking slow, thinner and smaller than I ever remember seeing her, terribly pale. But smiling radiantly. Her hug felt the same, that beautiful Same that is Mom. I did not cry, at least not on the outside.

And so I stayed with her. I cleaned the bathroom, swept the floors, folded laundry, filled up the bird-feeders out in the snow. I learned about the sickness she´s up against, but I didn´t look at the big cut down her belly. I learned that my sister Beth is not only handling all of mom´s paperwork, she is now taking care of that horrific surgical wound, too -- arriving after 8 each morning to change the dressing. (I have known Beth my entire life, and the older I get, the more I have to admire her. I could never ever do that kind of heavy-duty nursing. No way. Not even for mom.)

I visited my grandfather, who at 94 years old looks more spry and healthy than my mom does at 72. I visited my sister Beth, my nephew Joey, my Aunt Esther and cousin Barbara and cousin Pete ... all the people who make this place my home town.

And this morning, me and Beth took mom to the big cancer hospital in Pittsburgh for the Last Word.

The tumors are not invasive, not even really cancer, the handsome young oncologist said. Someday Mom may need more surgery, or some chemotherapy, but not anytime soon. Her bloodstream and vital organs are not compromised. They will check her every six months for signs of cancer, but so far, so good. She is going to be alright.

Mom and Beth smiled politely and thanked him.
I went out into the hallway and sobbed til my nose bled.

The snow is melting, rain is coming down hard, the rivers are rising. It´s almost March.
It´s time to get the heck outta here. Time to go to my own Home.
I drive back down to Washington Saturday morning with the radio blasting, and I will fly out over the Atlantic overnight. God willing, I will be back home at The Peaceable on Sunday afternoon. (I know you come here to read about Moratinos, not Pittsburgh.)

Once there I will scratch my dogs and pass around the goodies I bought for everyone. And I will go to bed and sleep. I will sleep for days and days, because I will finally be able to rest again.

My mom is alive still. The earth is tipping back onto its axis. Life can go on, at least for a while.

Thank God thank God thank God.

Vermut

2011-02-14T00:37:00.000+01:00

The little brick church was very cold inside, as Spanish churches tend to be. And while Don Santiago sang out the Mass, the weak winter sun coming in the windows darkened down. The scanty lightbulbs above the altar shone more and more yellow. The candles brightened and shivered -- the wind roared down the bell tower.

Sometime between the Sanctus and the Padre Nuestro, winter swaggered back in from the west.

After church we scuttled across the plaza and into the little meeting room in the ayuntamiento and gathered close around the butane heater. Esteban slid open the lid on the bar cooler. Out came the grape juice and refrescos for the ladies, and the white wine, the red, and the eponymous Vermut for the men. Sunday, after noon, after Mass...Vermouth. It is what is done here.

It is what we did. Around the table we sat. José took a calendar down from the wall, and on it -- month by month, with remembrances called out from everyone present -- he scrawled everyone´s name, on everyone´s respective birthday. In January we celebrated Raquel´s birthday, and this month, Patrick´s. Today it was Milagro´s turn. In March there´s only one, in April, several. We´ll be in the depths of Lent, but what the hell. We´re gonna have a good old party then, when spring is here, when the rye in the fields is ankle-deep.

En Mayo hay pocos cumpleaños. En Junio? Ningunio.

The wind tossed rain like gravel against the windows. Inside we marched through the calendar, through the year, remembering birthdays and births. Which inevitably led us to aging, and funerals, and deaths -- a primary topic of Vermut conversation. Which of us was born on the day of whose funeral, whose Abuela lived to be 93, whose Tio is still is alive at 96, still sharp. A "mere youth" from Sahagun, aged 78, died last week when a wall collapsed and buried him under tons of roof tiles. In Terradillos, the town next door, another man is ailing unto death -- the brother of Eutichio (or some wonderful name like that -- here we have Agapitas, Hilarios, Heliodoros, even!)

Fascinating.

But it wasn´t all death and dying. There´s news, too: Pepe, "the dueño of Terradillos," this week cut down the little forest out along the carretera and sold the timber to an outfit in Segovia. We´ll hear no cuckoos there this spring.

Paddy told about Harry, our sweet new galgo dog, adopted from the giant dog-pound in Medina del Campo -- part of a great wave of refugee hunting dogs dumped recently outside a shelter in Seville. (He howls with an elegant southern accent, I think. When the neighborhood dog chorus tunes up at 2 a.m. He yodels bulerias, saetas like a Flamenco star at a Holy Week procession.

The nascent character of Roque, a puppy sired by Esteban´s randy mutt Toby, out of Florín´s lapdog Amora and destined for Eduardo´s yard, was analyzed. Eduardo lives alone in a big house across from the church door. His last dog, also called Roque, (known by us as "Pants Dog,") was a vicious brute who attacked Tim one morning out in the plaza. Tim won, but Roque bit Eduardo in the melee. And when later on the dog bit Eduardo again, well... no more Roque. This new pup will be sweeter, calmer, and much smaller. So it was decreed.

The Vermut is becoming a Sunday routine, a healthy, friendly hour out of the week. Everyone is invited, but not everyone attends. Not everyone approves, I think -- but those absent are not discussed. Still, among the people gathered in the ayuntamiento, Moratinos life is recounted, celebrated, cemented.

The rain fell, the wind howled, the pilgrims stomped past outside, hunched inside their ponchos. Inside we were toasty-warm, from the stove, the merry company, and the Vermut.

It´s Christmas After All

2011-02-09T01:12:00.000+01:00

photo Laura Collins: The Metropolitan, Madrid

Madrid was knockout. Our hotel room was right across the street from an architectural landmark, the Metropolitan building. To the left is a photo of the Metropolitan. Yes, even in February, the sky is really that blue! The thermometer on the bus stop outside our balcony read 19 degrees Celsius (66 degrees Fahrenheit) on Saturday afternoon. The rest of the world is buried in snow. I am grateful.

We had a nice weekend, stayed at a fine hotel at a very reasonable price. We hiked around a good bit, had a visit with Candy, an old expat friend from New Orleans and Detroit (author of a Madrid guidebook!) and Paddy befriended a galgo at a restaurant terrazo in the Plaza Cervantes. We discussed our restaurant options at great length, but ended up eating forgettable Indian and Mexican meals... we were staying in a neighborhood unfamiliar to us. Had we been in our usual Madrid digs (Lavapies/Anton Martin) we´d have done much better, but hey. As Paddy likes to say, year-round, when we overspend: "It is Christmas, after all." (This may be the title of my autobiography.)

It was a worrisome weekend, what with my home football team, the Pittsburgh Steelers, being in the Superbowl on Sunday night, and Patrick turning 70 years old on Monday, and my mother in the hospital with an unknown prognosis. Only time would work us through these mortal coils, so that is why we decided to pursue the plans already in motion.

It was the right thing to do. My sister Beth, always the one to Get Things Done, kept me updated on Mom. And in the fullness of time we learned Mom has a strange and rare condition called pseudomyxoma, which isn´t quite cancer, but isn´t such a great thing to have... but Mom is not on the Fast Track to Heaven, at least not anytime really soon. And I will admit, when I got the news (in the Starbucks on Calle Atocha at 9 a.m. Monday) I found the nearest church and I got right down on my knees right up front and cried like a baby saying Thank You God Almighty. (In Spain, in the cities, the churches are open for this kind of business. How cool is that? The guy cleaning the windows came over and handed me a tissue and patted me on the back.)

And thank you friends, who pray so almighty strong. You already in December proved you can turn gray Galician winter into soft blue-sky April, just by saying "please." So please, don´t stop.

My mother went home from hospital on Monday. Once she mends from the big surgery the doctors will start a round of chemotherapy, to kill whatever might still be inside there. She has good health insurance. She is in Pittsburgh, an excellent place to be if you need a doctor. And she is on first-name terms with God Himself. She is a lot more cool about all this than I am. She makes me look like the weenie I am, all my Buddhism and faith and pilgrim-ism notwithstanding. I am eternally grateful for her. (I am well aware that someday, something will take her out. She is in her 70´s. Death happens to everybody. I just want a chance to get used to the idea, before it happens to her. )

Paddy and I came back yesterday on the morning train. Christina the nun had gone, and another pilg had arrived -- Oliver, a hospitalero from Germany. Like many pilgs, Oliver loves to talk, mostly about Oliver. He speaks many languages, he cooks very well (he made us a lovely simple dinner), when I went to bed at 8:30 or so he was still going at it. I slept for 12 hours straight. We had been up til 4 a.m. the night before, watching the Steelers crash and burn in the big game... Oh well. It is not always easy or cheap, keeping the faith -- especially from a time zone six hours ahead. But we watched the game, with a lively group of Steelers fans around us, and with Adam and Marta, too -- two Madrid-based musicians who´ve been part of the guitar scene here for the past two years. Another nice visit. We are not alone out here.

And so back we are in Moratinos. We have not seen a lot of local action yet -- only Esteban the Mayor, stopping his car to ask us how Mom is, how Madrid was (he is a blog reader too). The weather continues beautiful. The garlic is sprouting, the saffron, the struggling grass seeds in the Somme out back... it cannot last, but it is a beautiful break. I am very grateful. I dried the laundry outside today, on the clothesline. I turned the compost, and turned over the earth in the new garden beds.

Tomorrow we go to Palencia, to see about replacing Paddy´s stolen Resident Alien card. Then we will head southwest to Medina del Campo, to a place called Scooby. Where we will, hopefully, meet the next member of the Peaceable Crew... Scooby is a dog pound that specializes in abandoned greyhounds. They sent us an email on Friday, begging for help. Hare-hunting season is just ending, and Evil People all over the country are dumping their less-than-stellar hunting dogs at Scooby´s doorstep. 160 dogs in the past two weeks... can we take at least one? (there are other ways to contribute!)

And this evening, after sundown, Lulu stood in the patio and cried with loneliness. Maybe we can find a galgo who is more people-friendly, energetic enough to give Lulu a good run every morning, and maybe give her a bit more confidence around humans, a creature of her own kind to help keep the barn warm at night. (Lulu, our greyhound, is neurotically shy, an outcome of an abusive background.)

Four dogs is a lot of dogs. But somehow this seems right. It is downright exciting, really... A galgo, a gift from the campo, for people of the campo.

I will let you know soon how grateful I feel.

Disappearing

2011-02-05T00:33:00.000+01:00

I feel like I disappeared off the earth for a while.

I am not sure what became of the last week or so. A pile of things have been achieved in that time, though: little Rosie Dog has been "fixed;" Tino the Electrician showed up and repaired all the electrical things that were not working (and installed a LOUD doorbell that sounds just like the one that launched us from biology to algebra class, back in eighth grade). Both our computers are running extremely slowly and we don´t know why. It snowed one night, and the rest of the days were sunny and bright. We clipped the hens´ wings, after watching how-to videos on YouTube, so now they cannot fly over the fence and ravage every living green shoot of the back yard. (We also learned on YouTube how to hypnotize chickens. This information could be devestating if it fell into the wrong hands, but we´ll probably try it soon if things don´t liven up. It is eerie, twisted somehow. It just ain´t natural.)

The fields are lime-green. A mendicant nun from Finland has been staying with us since Monday. Tomorrow me and Paddy will go to Madrid on the train. There we will see in his 70th year at an Irish pub on Plaza Cibeles, watching the Steelers win the Superbowl.

And, well... that is about it.
My mother is very sick in a hospital in Pittsburgh. I had planned to go to the USA in a couple of weeks, but only to Washington, DC, only for a couple of days. It looks like I will have to extend that trip... I love my mom terribly. The thought of seeing her so sick, along with the prospect of rental cars and February interstate driving, and figuring out the plane tickets (yadda yadda yadda) it all makes me want to, well...

Disappear off the earth for a while.

So if you don´t see me around here, that is where I am.

Still, many miles away to the west, Neptune shines bright. The Big Dipper is almost touching the horizon. The tiniest sliver of new moon is up there, too, skimming low along the southern sky.
God is in his heaven.
The world keeps turning.
I am going to be OK.

Geordi y Ivan

2011-01-26T14:42:00.000+01:00

The sky was blue, the sun was warm inside the walls of the Peaceable. I chopped down the blackberry thicket out back where the chickens are hiding their eggs. I had the back gate open, to clear the way to the brush-pile. The hens pecked round the green sprouts just outside.

Two men appeared at the gate from off the road outside. The chickens fluttered and squawked. I stood up and said hello.

"Is there an albergue in the town?" one of them asked, through broken teeth.

"No," I told him. "Nothing here for pilgrims. Do you need anything?"

"We aren´t pilgrims, at least not real pilgrims. We´re heading the other way, to Burgos," he said. He was giving me an opportunity to send him away. An honest man, I thought. Lots of travelers pretend to be pilgrims, even though their tennis shoes and bags and bluejeans give them away.

And their weariness. Pilgrims look tired-out. Homeless people are weary.

"Come in and have a coffee," I told them, wondering if I felt like having company. Paddy was ensconced in the kitchen, tapping away at the computer. I peeled off my gloves. My fingers were bloody, even though the gloves are the heavy-duty rosebush kind. I was ready for a break, too.

With coffee they relaxed, and the bigger one, Geordi, started talking. He spoke Spanish with a choppy regional accent I first thought was Basque. They are Geordi y Ivan, brothers, from Girona, up north of Barcelona. They shook Patrick´s hand, they gave me kisses of introduction. In ten minutes we knew their family was split up, their father in Catalunya, their mother in Lugo, way out west in Galicia. A year ago they lost their jobs when the fruit-processing plant closed. Their van was repossessed, and finally they were turfed out of the house by the evil stepmother. They hit the road, looking for work.

"Any kind of work. I can wait tables, pick fruit, short-order cook," Geordi said. "My brother knows all about inventories, warehouses, sorting things out. We worked at a campground for a while, in Ciudad Real, making salads and repairing things, but the campground closed down. We helped with the olives in the south ... but all those jobs are going to the Moros, the Morroccans, the foreigners who work for nothing."

I put some cookies on the table. They vanished. Geordi and Ivan had said "no, only a coffee," but they were hungry.

And they needed to talk. Or at least Geordi did.

They were in Madrid when they heard there was work in Toledo, building a new railway. They had no money for the bus or train, so they walked there, along the highway. Ninety kilometers, three days. In August.
They worked there til the job ran out. They headed north to their mother´s place in Lugo, stopping in the capitol to pick up some warm clothes from the big Caritas charity warehouse. The sleeves are short, Ivan said, holding up his arms -- but the clothes are warm, and free. His green sweater bore an embroidered logo from Xacobeo 1999. A holy year on the Camino.

While his brother talked Ivan excused himself. I thought he might be heading for the shower. I found him out in the back yard with the gory gloves and the sickle, finishing the gardening job I´d started.

Lugo is cold, Geordi said. Their mother´s little apartment isn´t big enough for long-term guests. There was no work for them up there, either. So they´re headed back east, hitching rides along the national road that parallels the Camino, bumming food and coffee and cigarettes, working wherever work can be found.

If I had been on my own, I would have fed them and then politely moved them on. But Paddy was home. And Paddy invited them to stay for dinner, stay overnight if they wanted. They said yes, thank-you, and washed their clothes and bodies, they ate a stewed rabbit with great relish, played with the dogs, and then slept for 12 hours on beds with real sheets and blankets. It made a change, Geordi said, from meals of sandwiches, and bedding down in bank lobbies with the ATM machines glowing overhead.

Geordi and Ivan moved along this morning. They let themselves out the back gate, back onto the highway. They were not effusive in their thanks, and that is how it should be. They have their dignity, those two, even if they don´t have money or jobs or nice clothes.

They are another kind of pilgrim. They do not walk to discover their inner selves, or to ponder the next step in their personal evolution. They don´t tie themselves into knots wondering if someone else´s pilgrimage is "authentic," or if they are getting enough B-vitamins from the Menu del Dia.

They walk to survive.

In my eyes, that is about as authentic as it gets.

Kafka in January

2011-01-20T16:39:00.000+01:00

Seems like I wrote that Calendar blog a long, long time ago!
Since then we went to Belgium for a week of riotous indulgence: art deco, opera, oysters, roast goose, and five days of steady downpour. A good time was had by all, but I bet Filipe is very glad to have his little house back.
Paddy behaved well, seeing as he hates going anywhere. He even admitted that Ghent is a wonderful place. He declared it "very civilized." But he swears he will never leave home again. (Paddy swears a lot.)

Ghent is beautiful, (and so are Filipe, roast goose, and art deco) but I cannot show you the photos.

The trip home was frightful. The airplane from Brussels sat on the runway for an hour before taking off. We got to Madrid airport, onto the subway, and into Chamartin train station just in time to see the Kafka Express, the last Sahagun train, pull out and head north. (I call it that after Franz Kafka, the Czech novelist who took bureaucracy and boredom and turned them into hair-raising literature. If you´ve seen the movies "Sliding Doors," or "Groundhog Day," you will understand what this eternal train ride through darkness does to the mind.) Our computer couldn´t get internet access at the station, and the locutorio was closed.

After much discussion and a flurry of phone calls we learned that Hostal Isabel, our favorite Madrid boarding house, was full-up. We let the travel agent in the station book us into a place downtown. On our way there the subway was packed. Three professional-looking young men at the second-to-last stop took off with our zippy little camera, which was (I thought) securely zipped inside my daypack. And so our Belgium photos are now, perhaps, being admired by a family of Rumanian pickpockets.

They also took Paddy´s wallet. It upset Paddy mightily when it happened, but when we calmed down and checked over our belongings we realized there was no money in there. Just his bank card, his healthcare ID, and his Spanish Legal Alien ID.
I still have all my cards and ID and cash. We have another camera at home. We were not left without resources. Just a monumental pain in the ass.

We got to the hotel. It was noisy, overpriced, and grubby. We took a walk, found Restaurant Bangkok, and drowned our troubles in Tom Yum and lemon grass. We were in the swinging tourist hotspot of Spain´s capitol, but all we wanted to do was go home.

Which we finally did. The next morning we took the Zen Train, the morning Regional, which stops every couple of miles. You see the backyards of castles and cattle-pens all across Castilla from that train. It´s great meditative practice, if you have a great expanse of time.

At home the house sparkled, Kim smiled, the dogs wagged as hard and fast as their bums could wiggle, and Murph uncoiled and stretched himself in our direction. Even the chickens seemed to mass ´round the window to welcome us home. We unpacked all our loot from Belgium, took a long walk across the campo, and opened the mail.

Rosie, or Rosey. Or "Rosalia Castro de Arzua"

I found one of Filipe´s t-shirts in our luggage, and his bus pass in my wallet.
I looked up the legal process one faces when one loses one´s Spanish Alien ID card. It is as Kafka-esque as the night train from Madrid. (Spanish bureaucracy is a marvellous thing.)
The complicated dichroic 230v. cable-lights failed in Kím´s bedroom. I went to change one of the bulbs and it broke off in the socket. We called an electrician. He has yet to arrive.
One of the brown hens is ill.
The girlfriend of one of Paddy´s sons has taken up with someone else.
Kim left this afternoon, off to America. We do not know if or when we will see her again, and that makes me sad indeed.

Still, today is not so bad. Paddy is making pulled pork in the crock-pot. Bruno is back from Italy, and great progress is being made at the albergue. A few of the bulbs I planted in November are poking up sprouts from the black mud of the patio. The trees in the ditches are turning yellow, showing signs of life to come.

After dropping Kim at the train station I went round to the Redondo Stihl Boutique to order one of those huge vacuums Miss April is so fond of. Señor Redondo said no, that is too expensive. I must first test-drive the smaller model Stihl vacuum he uses in the shop, a vacuum that sells for less than half the price. He went to find it, and learned his sister had borrowed it. She is building a house, and needs to clean up after the drywall installers. Which made me think this might be the vacuum for me -- three dogs and a cat each day create at least as much dust as the average sheet of gypsum board. But I will have to go back tomorrow, and see the machine at work. Señor Redondo apparently doesn´t want me to buy too much vacuum. I can appreciate that.

For the first time in weeks the sky is clear and bright. Tonight I will take out my telescope. The moon is brilliant, and Saturn´s moons and rings are said to be breathtaking this time of year. I have my little planisphere sky-map, and I think I remember how to use it. I can´t wait!

And so I am reminded: When the world all around me is gray and muddy, I don´t have to just stand there with my head hanging down. I have options. I look elsewhere.

I can even look up.

Weighty Decisions

2011-01-08T19:27:00.000+01:00

Somewhere down in the root of my being, I don´t believe in time.

I keep track of time only in a more-or-less fashion. Not the minutes-and-hours kind -- I haven´t worn a wristwatch in decades, not even when I worked with three daily deadlines. Keeping track of days and dates is about as micro-managed as I can get. Thankfully, Spain has a pretty loose grasp of time, too. I can tell we are coming to the end of one year and the start of another by the number of calendars accumulating on the nail in the kitchen wall.

We have wall-space in our house for a single calendar. Merchants give away stacks of free calendars each December, a low-cost goodwill gesture that gets their advertisements into households throughout the region. This year we have a marvellous array of them, from High Art to Vulgar Girly, and I must decide, somehow, which will make the cut.

First are the little desktop models. One came from Fertiberia, manufacturers of fertilizers, seeds, and agricultural chemicals. Our neighbor Esteban gave these out at the Vermut a couple of weeks ago -- his family runs the Fertiberia franchise in Sahagun. Another desktop model, a shiny folded pyramid, came in the mail last week from a new plumbing-and-heating outfit in Carrion de los Condes. In addition to the days of the weeks and months it tells me TreTak does solar hot water and construction projects.

I don´t need a desk calendar, because I almost never use my desk, because it is in the Salon. (It´s COLD in there in the winter, and in the summer it´s full of pilgrims.) But I want to keep track of the TreTak contact numbers. So when the calendar fell down behind the sofa I left it there. It´s not going anywhere, and this way I know where to find it when/if we get to the lower-kitchen plumbing re-do.

The rest are wall calendars, the kind we can really use.

The one we liked best is the Modigliani calendar, featuring a different Chinese-eyed portrait for each month. We actually bought this calendar, back in November at the Valladolid museum of contemporary art. We went there soon after losing Una, to soothe our hearts with art. It was not a successful outing. The museum was disappointing: lots of mediocre art in a bazillion-Euro restored white-elephant monastery complex packed to the capitals with surly art-history graduates. Our emotions were still were too raw. The Modigliani calendar is what we salvaged.

We started the year with it, but after a week it is proving too artsy for daily use. The numbers on the dates are too tiny to be seen from across the room. And that is what a wall calendar is for.

St. Joseph and The Holy Child know that, and they glow at me from the calendar beneath the Modigliani. Their numbers are bold and black -- they have saints´ days, too, in red, and the phases of the moon with smug smiling moon-faces. They are beautifully old-fashioned, cheesy even in their soft-focus blonde curls. But.
But their calendar is two months at a time, and their picture does not change, and neither does the big 40-point type beneath them:
Supermercado TABOA
Especialidad en TERNERA GALLEGA

Much as I love their wholesome working-class charm, I don´t think I want them hanging around here for an entire year. Or an ad, even one for Galician Veal.

What´s a woman to do? There´s the Camino Cats 2011 Calendar, which arrived in the mail today from a thoughtful former pilgrim in Canada. It features nice amateur photos of cats he saw along his pilgrimage. Murphy is in there, in a typical pose (eating his dinner). I like it very well, but the numbers, alas, are artfully small. I shall put it upstairs in my room.

For sheer brass I considered for a few moments the 2011 Stihl "Chicas ´N Chainsaws" Calendar, a gift from Garaje Redondo, the Grease Boutique where we take our chainsaw for sharpening. I am not a fan of cheap soft-core porn, but I gotta admit I love this thing -- it is barely a calendar at all, the months and dates squeezed into a two-inch border beneath a glossy expanse of stiletto heels, push-up cleavage, and hydraulic hoses. Miss June is sprawled next to a swimming pool, apparently overcome by the pressure-washer coiled at her side. Miss November carelessly caresses a weed-wacker, dressed in a matching purple panties and pumps. (wherever she is, it is not November.)

By far the finest thing about the Stihl calendar is the warning label, printed in characteristically careful German: "The images do not show real-life working situations," it admonishes. "Before you use a Stihl device, read and strictly follow the safety instructions. Please wear proper protective clothing at all times."

Damn. I shall have to stop clearing brush while wearing my silver lamé bikini, I guess...

Like St. Joseph and the glowing Child Jesus, I have a hard time finding long-term lodgings for the Pneumatic Babes of Stihl. Not everybody who comes here will understand their heavy-metal charm. I will have to send them away. Except for Miss April. Miss April poses with a Stihl heavy-duty shop vacuum. I want one of those, and I will ask the good folk at Garaje Redondo to get one for me. Without photographic evidence, they will most likely tell me Stihl does not make shop vacuums -- "no se existe" ("it does not exist") being a favorite response to any request for items not presently on the shelf. (We burn through vacuums here at a terrible rate.)
(not to mention silver lamé bikinis...)

I may be the only person who has noticed there is a vacuum-cleaner in that picture at all.

All this said and written, I admit the calendar that holds the place of honor on the kitchen wall is one we bought -- a 5 Euro donation to the cluster of 12 little parish churches that comprise our deanery. Each page is a color shot of one of the scruffy adobe-and-brick sanctuaries -- Sto. Tomas of Moratinos is May. The days and dates are in bold black and red, with all the saints and moons duly noted. The big decider, the one thing no one else could offer, was the notes on who and where is having a fiesta that month: 24 June, San Roman de la Cuba. 26 June, Población de Arroyo. 29 June, Terradillos de los Templarios.

Respectable. Familiar. Supporting a good cause. Readable from across the room.
And I never have to miss another party!

Don´t Call me "Doña"

2011-01-02T23:14:00.011+01:00

The final day of 2010, in a pew within the great crossing of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, I was a sheep amongst wolves. Or spiders. Or maybe just bitches. But in the end the Grand Flaming Fumigator of St. James won out, and the creepy-crawlies scuttled off on all their many legs, and I was left to find a way to celebrate New Year´s Eve alone.

Ah, but I am getting ahead of myself already, in the first paragraph.

31 December 2010 was a day packed full of fun and excitement, here in the Spanish shrine city of Santiago. It started the day before, when I was, with 20-some other people who waited til the last minute of the Holy Year, inducted into the Arch-Confraternity of St. James the Apostle, an honorary brotherhood based at Santiago cathedral. No one seems to know what the brotherhood really does, or why it keeps going after 500 years. Far as I can tell, it is a way for upper middle-class Camino-heads to elect one another into a semi-privileged club based at the HQ, where they wear clunky medals, greet one another with air-kisses, and shove regular people out of the good seats at big liturgical blowouts.

For many years it was a men-only arrangement. (A particular kind of men love dressing up and doing secret, symbolic things together, especially if they involve food and drink and excluding The Unworthy, and not working too hard. But not all men can be priests...) Now the Confraternity lets women in, if only to plan the banquets and arrange who gets to sit where. For New Year´s Eve 2010, the Closing of the Holy Door and Ending of the Holy Year, was a full-on cathedral spectacular, with all the silver polished and the candles burning, national television, the governor and wannabe prime minister, four-star admirals and generals, (each with his twinkling epaulettes and a chestful of medals) six bishops in shimmering hats and tassels, a couple of hundred priests, and an archbishop presiding over all in full gold-trimmed robe, alb, cincture, and miter. The cathedral was packed. We the newly inducted Confraternity members, were told that seats were reserved for us on one side of the altar.

My friend Christine, also a confraternity member, loves all this smells-and-bells Catholic splendor. She arrived at 3 to grab a seat for the 4:30 Mass, which was itself expected to go on for well over an hour. The sun was out, the sky was blue, the stone bench overlooking Azabacheria was warm and inviting – all these things speak much more clearly to me than incense and splendor and “una lectura del santo Evangelio según San Lucas.” I told her I might take a pass on this Mass.

I was feeling a little hinky. I went back to my room, I tried to take a nap, but no good. So I weighed my options:

On the “minus” side was that long, long sit. And the great clouds of incense. Santiago cathedral´s trademark fashion accessory is a 5-foot-tall silver incense burner they swing from the rafters at the end of special Masses, filling the place with fragrant fog. We´d had that spectacle at the induction ceremony the night before, and my eyes were still burning. With another front-row seat, I could expect early-onset brochitis, or at least a sneezing fit of volcanic intensity.

And the crowd. I deeply dislike big crowds of people.

But on the other side of the ledger... This was my last day in Santiago for who knows how long? Everything interesting in town was closed for the holiday. And Christine kinda expected me – she came all the way from Sweden for this, to stand as my co-sponsor for membership.

And the thought of hearing the cathedral pipe organ, with a brass section and two choirs? Well. It seemed like Santiago was arraying itself for a real Classic Christian do. And here I was in town, with no other real plans. I can take a nap any time, I thought. (That´s why there´s a sermon in the middle.)

So I went.

And yes, a section was set aside for the new confraternity members. But as you might expect, old confraternity members had showed up too, and they decided any reserved Confraternity pew was, by right of seniority, just as much theirs as ours.

They were Ladies of a Certain Age, decked in fresh wigs and old furs, their handbags suspended on chains from their bony wrists, their fists full of rosaries. They wore their coats over their shoulders, to grant them even more girth, and to leave their hands and elbows free for shoving Lesser Christians out of their way.

I´d seen small agglomerations the day before during the Confessional Hour, jostling and cutting into the line outside the single confession-box. When another stall opened across the nave, the stampede swept all pilgrims before it, like a school of minnows in a shark attack. These ladies adore their Holy Sacraments, and God help the tourist who might be staring into the domes and capitals when the light goes on at the Baroque booth nearby.

When I arrived at the Reserved Seating at 3:45, a Confraternity Queen Bee, resplendent in Prada, seated me between two of these Veteran Ladies. And throughout the ceremony they leaned and pitched, sighed and fidgeted, both of them deeply envious of the tiny slice of view I had of the high altar and the video screen mounted on a pillar nearby, a live feed from the TV broadcast. The woman from Pamplona was the most shameless. She couldn´t see the screen from her seat, so she practically laid her head in my bosom in her anxiety not to miss a single moment of the Door-Closing Ceremony going on invisibly a few yards from where we sat.

The Cordobesa to my right made full use of the moments when we stood up or knelt, to spread herself and her possessions over the pew. Each time I sat again she recollected her handbag and coattails and thighs, with heavy sighs. I believe these two beatas wanted me to give up and flee to the comfort of the nearest bar, where the TV broadcast could be seen un-interrupted. But I wasn´t going to give them the satisfaction. They´ve seen all this before. I hadn´t. Way too many times have I let this kind of old Spanish lady go ahead of me in the checkout line at Supermercado Lupa, only to have her step aside to admit several of her friends and family members in front of me, with cartloads of purchases.

Spanish old ladies don´t watch football. Jostling for Position is their contact sport. (They are never too old or frail. I saw one once drive her wheelchair full-speed into the front of a queue for goat cheese at a Renaissance Faire in Benavente). So this day in Santiago was their collective comeuppance. This was MY slice of pew, and I wasn´t giving it up to the Spider-women.

A bit of hubbub arose from the pew behind us. Prada Woman discovered two young interlopers in a Members Only pew. They were pilgrims, freshly arrived, just in time for the Mass. They were scared. I turned and told the Queen Bee the youngsters could have our seats, seeing as they were real pilgrims. Rather than take on the unnamed “us,” she buzzed off and left them where they were.

The Pamplonesa to my left looked at me from her upturned nose. “I am a pilgrim!” she said. She turned around and asked the youngsters where they´d started their pilgrimage.

“Sarria,” they said. “Four and a half days ago.”

The woman sniffed. “I did the entire Camino del Norte three times,” she told them. “You don´t even start feeling like a pilgrim until you´ve walked at least a week. Don´t tell people you are a pilgrim if you only walked four days.”

I thought the girl was going to cry. I patted her knee.

“There are lots of presumptuous, judgmental people around here. Egoistas. Take no heed. Santiago knows his pilgrims,” I whispered, sotto voce. I hope she heard me, and understood.

“Sssshhh!” shushed a purple-robed beadle. I was not the only person talking out of turn, and the music was about to start up again. I turned back to the action.

The Mass was long and windy and spiked through with Latin and Gallego, incense, chanting, towers full of bells and the hands of hundreds of clerics raised to add their juju to the consecration. The organ and trumpets were in full voice, and the choirs were almost drowned-out by the thousands of voices singing the responses – an educated laity is a beautiful thing indeed, especially where music is concerned.

It was a beautiful piece of theater, 2,000 years of church history done up in full emboidered vestments. It went on for two hours or so, in which the Christian ladies on either side of me did their best to not give me the sign of Christian peace nor a slice of pew nor a sideways glance. When the Mass finished, while the organ voluntary blasted its way through the frankincense fumes and the roaring masses, the beatas beat a hasty retreat.

I realized I had a fever. It was way too late for a nap, but I went back to my room and got one anyway. No midnight shenanigans for me, not even the ones right outside the front door. I was done for the day.

I thought.

At 10:30 p.m. Samson, a well-scrubbed young attorney from Sacramento, California., himself a new inductee to the confraternity, rousted me out with a shiny bag of giveaway toy hats and horns, streamers and a tiny plastic pouch with 12 green grapes inside. And so, with another new friend, I celebrated the arrival of 2011 with grapes and bells and multimedia projections across the front of the cathedral in Quintana Square. The fireworks rumbled and shook the great stone pavements, and brilliant burning lights screeched and exploded over our heads, way too close. It was splendid!

A few hours later, on 1 January 2011, I woke up in my little room with cordite in my hair and an edge burned off my little paper fez. I have no memory of my hat catching fire. And I wasn´t even drinking!

It was time to go home.

And so here I am in Moratinos, where our fireworks and our Masses are stripped down to the bare minimum, but our pilgrim quarters are full and our hearts are five times more warm than the most exalted of the ladies of the Archiconfradia de Santiago Apostol.

My membership certificate calls me "Doña," the Spanish word for "Lady" -- a cathedral of a word.

But here in the Peaceable Kingdom there are no Doñas.

Call me Reb instead.

Thanksgiving

2010-12-29T01:16:00.000+01:00

I wrote an entire blog about Sunday´s after-church "Vermut" gathering, but somehow I blew it away into the ether. It was not meant to be. Instead of writing about a single, moonshine-flavored after-Christmas series of parties, I will write about an entire year. (I may post some of the party pics, just for hilarity´s sake.) (If /&&% Blogspot will allow more than one photo upload.)

When I look over 2010 at first it seems like a big tabulation of sad events. This year I lost a lot. Elyn and Gary, the only known Americans within 50 miles moved away in February to Girona. My cousin Micky died in March, at age 45. Max the wife-beating rooster was iced in June. The August fiesta was marred by a fatal accident. Nabi dog was killed, and Una dog faded through October and then disappeared. My friend Juli suddenly was snatched away in November. (I am not saying human and animal losses are comparable -- but they are losses nevertheless.)

But compare that to the great things that came my way this year, and there´s no contest.

In January Una found two starving greyhounds, who became Nabi and Lulu. Tim was lost for a long afternoon, but he found his own way home. Murphy almost left us permanently in August after eating a poisoned mouse, but the vet saved him (he is burning through those nine lives, however...) We now have Rosey, another camino refugee, found this time by Kim.

We traveled long and far in 2010. We visited dear ones in London and Bournemouth, Pittsburgh and Ohio and Washington, DC. We spent three days in the mystical city of Avila. I visited Frank the Scotsman in Miraz, and rescued hospitaleras Leslie the Canadian and Sonomi the Japanese from terrible fates along the Caminos. I did an exhausting hospitalera gig in June in Navarre, and in August I went to Salamanca and Zamora and Potes with Miguel Angel. Kim was here with us for many weeks, and the Peaceable shimmered and glowed. She made it possible for me to walk this year, and walk very very far. I walked an entire Camino in the spring, from Roncesvalles to Santiago, via the Camino Invierno. In September I walked the last bit of the Invierno again, with my dear friend Kathy and her sister. And in December I walked the Sarria-Santiago camino -- the most meaningful and lovely Camino yet. I´m a certified Walkin´Fool, and I hope to keep it up til my feet finally fail me, or the camino stops sending me kind souls like Kim who can help Patrick keep the Peaceable going when I´m out. (This really is a two-person job.)

So many innovations this year: the Italians showed up and started their Epic Albergue, next to Segundino´s carpentry shop, and a new 2-star hostel was begun on the other end of Moratinos. Paddy discovered several topical blogs on conservative Catholicism, and soon spawned his popular online persona "Toadspittle." We got new roof on the barn, a new PC, and new patio furniture -- Paddy served many al fresco meals out under the big blue umbrella in the fine weather. We got a bread machine from Holland, a slow-cooker from England, two new white hens from the Chicken Boutique, and a lovely and powerful telescope to feed my late-night stargazing habit.

The church got a new little Santiago image, the Confraternity of St. James in London got a new Camino Invierno Guide, and throughout the month of November I wrote a novel based on a true, 1,000-year-old story based in Sahagún. (No one´s "got" that yet!) We finally got a new induction hob in the kitchen, after wrangling with the repairman and warranty people for two years.

The other big positive weight on the scale is the people who came here this year. Maybe not quite so many people as 2009, but very high quality people indeed: the Aussie girls of January; Grant Spangler from California; Roger and Ian from Peterborough Pilgrims; reporters from Norte de Castilla and Revista Peregrina; Malin and David and Brian, and then the Camino All-Star Weeks that brought luminaries like George Greenia and Frank Farrell, Mariann the Swiss and Sue Kenney and Tracy Saunders; Ignacio, Adam, Will, Peter, and René, musicians from the Camino Guitarras program; Jackie the Mastiff from Terradillos, and Rainer, the German guy who thinks he is Jesus Christ.

Real, certified (if not certifiable) religious people graced our summer: Verena the Zen Master from Austria, Father Amado the barefoot Filipino Redemptorist, Sisters Miriam and Maria Elizabeth, and Father Calvo from the diocesan art museum in Palencia. The Molloys, Mitch, Derek, Rafferty, Rom and Aideen, and Laura drew closer to our hearts.

Leo and Edu gave us shit, but only because we said our garden needed it.
Two Freds and a Patriç gave us the use of their skills and labors.
Kim gave us a Big Dog Party, and hours of invisible shimmering, videos, prayers, and a friendship with uncanny timing.
Juli gave me companionship, laughs, verb drills, and the best reason I ever found to walk a camino. Her mother Julia gave me acceptance I never imagined I´d ever feel as a foreigner in a tiny Castilian town. She understands about half of what I say, but she lets me rattle on... and she translates it into real Spanish for anyone else who´s trying to understand.

There´s not room here to tell you all the local people who´ve been kind, patient, or neighborly with us this year. We´ve been to their parties and funerals and pig-stickings and moonshine-samplings, and we´ve had them here, peering at our bodega roof and frozen water pipes and demonstrating how to carve up a pig´s leg and drink down many bottles of cosechero. We live in a fine community of fine people. They make our dream of life in Spain come true every single day, in some way or another.

The losses we suffered in 2010 only accentuate how fortunate we are to live in this place, with this great parade of characters going on around us. There are at least as many beginnings as endings, if you think about it. So more and more I use the year´s end as a Thanksgiving, too.

I leave tomorrow for Santiago de Compostela, where I plan to hang out a lot with Christine from Sweden, a new friend, and look through museums that I never had time for before, and attend a ceremonial Mass of Imposition of Medals for new members of the Archiconfradia del Apostol Santiago. I want to see fireworks over the big cathedral for the New Year.

And the old one, too. 2010 was, you know, an Año Santo. A holy year.