Cheddar Redemption

OK, so we were supposed to meet Mario Bozo at noon today in Mansilla de las Mulas, halfway to Leon, to discuss him coming back to work. (he´s our builder from Leon. He walked off the job in August with LOTS of our money and less than half the work done.)

He didn´t show up for the meeting, and he didn´t call.

Paddy got hold of him later. Car is broken, he said. Nothing about his telephone being broken, but hey. He´s coming over Monday, to Moratinos, he said, if we tell Jose the Milagro Boy to not beat him up.

We probably will not see him then, either. And if Jose beats him up, I´ll personally cheer. This Mario dude is not just a loser and a lowlife and a lying thief. He is a killer of hope.

Paddy is taking it hardest, which is why I am feeling angry.

Oh, and Tino, one of my favorite Spaniards, is moving in February to Minneapolis. Don´t ask me why anyone would do that to himself, but I think it must be Love. Nothing else could make anyone that crazy. This country will be a little less highly-flavored without him around.

A couple of good things, though. Libby, my daughter, is here with us. That´s not news, but it´s a real plus. She plays Scrabble with us in the evenings (and usually wins, ´cause she plays strategically while I go for the big long showy tactical words. Paddy just pulls the occasional 110-point 8-letter world-beater now and then.) Libby does Spanish really well, and is helping with tough language things like car insurance and Mario and writing legal letters.

In a couple of weeks is Thanksgiving, and Libby and I are going to Paris for a week. While there we are making a giant holiday feast for 14 people. One of them is a Parisian restaurateur. OMG. Anyway, I will just follow the good old Pittsburgh recipes and hope the crowd is OK widdat. (we won´t tell them about the Campbell´s soup, OK?) Most of them are expats of one kind or another, and the feast is at the fabulous Boulevard Clichy apartment of my best bud Jeanne.

We´ve been throwing Thanksgiving at her place for three years now, but before it was crammed into a tiny place several blocks away, in a kitchen reminiscent of a sailboat galley. This year will be different: big new apartment, new kitchen, and my family´s recipes! It´s been a very long time since I took on an entire monster feast, and it IS a little scary, especially with Jeanne´s high standards and lovely cutlery and napery... I kinda wish Ryan was coming too.(Ryan stayed with us earlier this year, and is a tremendous cook and raconteur, and he knows French, the perfect scullery maid.)

Libby and I have cute little matching aprons to wear, and a long list of ingredients to shop for -- shopping for food in the 9th arondissement is a feast for the senses! We can visit with Nicolas, my dear little godson, and go to art shows and museums and cemeteries after the party dies down. (I don´t have a thing to wear, alas!)

Patrick loves Paris, but he won´t go. Got to stay with the chickens, he says. At least while things are so up-in-the-air. I am not sure how I feel about this.
I hope he is OK.

Tim took a walk today in the sewer ditch. He is still peeved at me for bathing him. Una caught two mice. Even though it´s getting downright cold outside, the pilgrim tide just keeps flowing in.

We have cheese. Our Welsh Friends brought three types of cheddar: mature, more mature, and really old. OMG. I love my family, but it is very difficult for me to share real crumbly sharp cheddar with anyone.

Life is hard. But I have three pounds of cheddar in the fridge. I can cope.

Gobsmackin´ bozos!

Our Welsh friends Colin and Margaret,(plus Roger from Devon, in England) rolled up to the Peaceable Kingdom right on time yesterday, bearing great sackfuls of cheddar cheese and Polyvinylacrylate. (One of these is for eating. The other is for sticking concrete to plaster to wood, etc. It´s not a good idea to confuse the two, but it only has to happen once.)

We barbecued a great pile of lamb chops with rosemary and yogurt, Paddy made couscous and green beans. The herbs were from our garden, the firewood from the mountain of scrap out back, the lamb from Justi and Olivia´s flock, and the new wine was from Leon. Everyone feasted hugely. Roger, a retired lawyer with a plummy accent, told us about owning two donkeys and one-tenth of a racehorse. Colin and Margaret, who stayed here back when the house was intact, said this blog exaggerates the dire nature of our condition... the place is in a lot better shape than I let on!

So my apologies for misleading anyone. We DO have a roof, and a second floor, and even some walls in there. So all is not lost!

Anyway, we all repaired to the Irish pub in Sahagún after dinner, where the Guinness flowed freely and many opinions were aired. In the middle of all this Paddy´s mobile phone trilled out its merry ¨Mexican Hat Dance" tune, which means someone is calling.
Pad went out into the entryway to answer, as Real Madrid was playing football on the big screen and little else was audible over all our opinions.

It was Mario, the Head Bozo, the builder who walked off our house rehab job back in August with about 30K total in extra Euros in his pocket. (For some reason making business calls at 10 p.m.) He told Paddy he really wants to come back to work on the house.

Paddy was so gobsmacked (and maybe a bit Guinness-ed) he didn´t know what to say. So he told him to call back in the morning.

And miracle of miracles, Mario did. (Only a half-hour late, and right in the middle of our morning arrival at Moratinos, which also included a loose dog and a roofer.)

The phone call tells us a thing or two:
Mario must´ve gotten some legal papers finally, and realized he´s in the doodoo unless he does something quick
OR Mario is going to try to get some more money out of us
OR Mario´s really going to honor the contract and do the work agreed-upon.
OR We´ll get nasty and legal on his butt and try to make him cough up about 30,000 Euros, which will take a long time and may never happen anyway, seeing what a sad sack this bugger is.

So. Back on the phone with Paco the Red lawyer, who seems to think putting Mario back to work is a good idea.

Things are moving along. I really had hoped never to see Mario´s scavey old face again, but hey... even if it means he just does another couple of weeks of work before he buggers off again, that´s two weeks of work done that we already paid-for. We already have estimates in hand from other contractors, so we´re ready when and if that occurs. (if he does it again we´ll just call the cops this time.)

Hey! We´re going to have a habitable house one of these days!

The weather continues gloriously sunny and chilly as a well-digger´s knee. The Sahagún apartment doesn´t have a thermostat, so it gets pretty nippy there at night, too... but I am glad we have that place to go.


Our buds rolled on to Rabanal del Camino this morning. They are part of the ´working party´ that closes up the English Confraternity´s fabulous pilgrim hostel up there in November... that is how we know these guys. We were volunteer hosts at Refugio Gaucelmo the summer of 2003, and Colin and Margaret were our replacements. Great people, like most hospitaleros. And now if we ever want to hang out in Wales, or Devon, we have a place to go!

If we ever get out of here. By the time our Dream House is finished we may have neither the money nor inclination to ever leave it again.

Unless, of course, it is Thanksgiving time. In which case tradition dictates we go to Paris.

November Light

It´s been a whirlwind around here for so long I am starting to lose track of things. And people. And commitments.

Since I last wrote our friend Patrick the Czech said goodbye and headed on down the Camino. We had a little party for him, partly over at the James´ place, where he drank way too much tequila and played Pink Floyd hits on his guitar (that´s "Pinfloy" in Spanish), and he then showed us all how to roll our own cigarettes. Which may prove useful someday if and when I take up smoking!

As you can see, Libby has finished her Camino and is back with us! She lost about 15 pounds out there and is looking smokin´ hot. She is still recovering physically, so we haven´t yet put her on the chain gang.

Today we took a long drive north, into the Leonese mountains visible from our place on clear days, to a tiny end-of-the-line village called Lois. For some reason it is home to many luminaries in the history of Spanish education -- back in the late 1600s there were endowed primary and Latin schools here for the local boys, who in their turns grew up and became luminaries. Impressive. The town today is neat as a pin and only somewhat touristed, seeing as there´s not a whole lot to DO up there...And the twisty turny road up there, which follows a babbling trout stream, is populated by the occasional cow and horse. (there are no fences. The place was private pasture well before the one-lane road went in, so animals still take precedence.)

Even with its educational past, I didn´t see any children up there at all, but for the usual sprinkling of noisy tourist kiddies.

Aside from all this, we are having reputable contractors in to give us estimates on the big job ahead, and we´re taking a very large percentage of our savings OUT of the US dollar, which is going right down the tubes. America doesn´t seem to care about its currency, long as prices stay the same at home. What a gang of ostriches. May God have mercy on us all.

We decided there´s no hurry with the contractors, seeing as we have a warm place to sleep. I wish we had taken this attitude last year. It would have saved us countless tears and Euros, but we can´t seem to learn from others.

Here are some pics, too, of the amazing light. And one of the many trailer-loads of ´hunting dogs´all over the place these days... it´s quail season!

A Day for the Dead

So here I sit before the butane heater, Nov. 1, 9:50 a.m., in our kitchen in Moratinos. Two dogs and Patrick the Czech stare at me quietly as I type. I think they are waiting for marching orders. Or maybe I am just fascinating.

We are waiting for José Luis, the latest contractor wannabe. He was supposed to be here an hour ago. Paddy just phoned him. He´s on his way, he says, with the barroom laughter booming in the background. Paddy´s fretting. It´s 10 now, and the Mass for All Saints starts at 11, and he really wants to go. He even brought some go-to-meeting clothes for the occasion. I have never seen an agnostic so caught up in a Holy Day of Obligation.

I´m not going, and I am the token Christian around here. I spent last night dealing with asthma, and now I have the inevitable medicine hangover, and really need to try to sleep. Strangely enough, The Peaceable Kingdom isn´t a good place for rest.

Unless, of course, you are among the 40 or so people in Moratinos who are dead.

Like almost all tiny Spanish villages, Moratinos has a walled cemetery out in the fields on the edge of town. Each family has a couple of plots therein, where generations of their ancestors are interred in their turns. As new bodies arrive, what remains of the old are taken out and hauled off to God-knows-where. It´s end-user recycling at its finest, and it´s been going on since the Middle Ages at least. (Big cemeteries are a waste of valuable crop land.)

Here in Moratinos you can see three layers of monumental markers on some family plots. Up against the cement-block walls are beautiful wrought iron crosses, their enamel RIP identifying plaques long gone. Who they once honored is forgotten, but everyone knows which is supposed to stand where while it rusts away. Taking one out to decorate the house would be unthinkable.

In front of some of these are standard Franco-era white concrete crosses, with the names and dates still legible. And smack up against their faces are the flashy new polished marble tombs of the most modern and well-to-do departed, with resin plaques portraying the Holy Family or Last Supper or Ascension.

Today being All Saints Day, the big iron gate is open and the villagers are buzzing in and out, tidying up and laying new bouquets of flowers. I was there this morning, and young Christy joined me, the film-star pretty daughter of the Juli family. She pointed to the simple grave of a man who died at age 49 in 1990. “That´s Nino. He used to live in your house,” she told me. “He was single. A shepherd. He lived there alone, just with the sheep and dogs and cats. It´s not such a good thing to live by yourself.”

I asked how he´d died so young – most of the people lying here lived well into their 80s and 90s.

“Over at Edu´s garden, just across the pasture from your house, we found him in the well. He drowned. So nobody lived in your house, really, since 1990. Just his sister, you know, and just on weekends in the summer. And that´s why we are glad you live there now. It was a lonely place for so long.”

After the Mass today, Don Santiago will lead a procession up to the cemetery and bless the graves with Holy Water. Everyone will say a decade of the Rosary. And then they´ll all go home and have a big dinner with the family. It is good to remember the past and honor the dead. Some of the people in today´s parade must know their bodies, too, will be lying under that patch of ground soon enough, and every November 1 their families will surely show up with flowers.

It´s 10:30, and the half-hour-til-Mass bells are ringing. The builder is here, and one of the chickens is loose in the patio, and I don´t know the current location of Tim the hen-slayer. Gotta go. Gotta live while I´m still above ground.

John Deere Does Sahagun

I think the pilgrim gave me her germ. My eyes are not working right. They keep falling asleep. My bones hurt.

There´s a big agricultural fair this weekend in Sahagún, and the throngs pouring in to view the latest trends in tractors and turkeys have snatched up all the good parking spaces. We are told there´s been an agriculture fair in Sahagún since sometime in the 1300s, long before John Deere was a twinkle in his daddy´s eye. (Although manure-spreaders and cement mixers were probably fixtures already in most civilized homes.)

The electricians are happily chopping channels into the walls and plaster and adobe, freeing the Living End of the Peaceable Kingdom from its more unpleasantly shocking tendencies. They have the hugest drills I ever saw, which may give rise to their jaunty and carefree air. The light they put up to illuminate the patio is not in keeping with the decor. (this is not because the light actually works, or is less than 30 years old. It is to say it is very industrial. But what the heck. We´ll get to charming and characteristic and rustic sometime down the road.)

The power keeps going on and off. That is my excuse for not answering all my emails. Be patient with me. The place is absolutely coated in plaster dust, and I don´t feel good.

Libby is in Palas de Rei, about three days short of Santiago. The doctor this morning told her to not walk for two days, or she will do some real damage... she´s got a sort of sciatica pain in her left leg, top to bottom. So she decided to only walk a mere 15k tomorrow. But I pulled the Mom Privilege card and told her No, Don´t Do That You Stupid Kid or I´ll Whup You Good. Palas de Rei is not exactly a swinging hotspot, but neither is the osteo ward. And in Spain, she´s got no health coverage.

So I will go and curl up in my bed in the apartment in Sahagún til I feel better. Don´t worry. Be happy. And I have health insurance.

Monosyllables: grout, slog, bog, dump, Swiss, gifts

Lots happens in a few days. We are cramming a whole lot of living and working and whining into small spaces of time, which seem to fly past us. Thanks for your patience. We only have an internet connection in Moratinos, so gone are the long, pensive evenings of blog-crafting. (by 10 p.m. we both are sacked out cold at the apartment in Sahagún.) But as for writing, am back to working on deadline! Hooah! (the picture here is the view out our balcony window. That´s the church of San Juan de Sahagún in the morning light. Nice, no?)

The tiles: there are just over 200 of them! Me and Patrick the Czech just spent the past three days laying them into concrete, trying to level and line them up just so, with the little foursquare patterns just right. Not as &%%$ easy as it first appears! After much fussing around and swearing (and some singing, too,) we got an acceptable center bit laid down, with ´white cement´ (which is really sandy brown) laid all around the edges. We couldn´t tile all the way to the walls because the walls are angle-free. The despensa is, after all, just a cave made of mud.

It is an extremely amateur job. I am in for a hard slog getting the film of grout off the faces of the tiles... I ran out of energy before I could get that all finished up. There´s only so much one person can achieve after 9 hours on her knees. It is drying now. A real tile-layer would weep. Still, I am kinda proud of it.

I´m prouder of the dolphin mosaic. James built a step outside the despensa door, and I embedded the mosaic fish into that. I grouted it today, with special marble grout. It´s looking good! And the wall next to that, I used cob (the same mud-straw mix our house is made of) to repair some bad spots, then James showed us about mixing up slip from red earth and water. It puts a really lovely coffee-brown color onto the adobe and cob. And we now have a cool little niche outside the despensa door for a candle or a little Graven Image. It is good to stay busy.

Yesterday was a case in point. In the morning we poured concrete and scrubbed tiles, and Paddy made vegetarian rice and spinach for lunch, and at 2 I got a call from Miryam, a Swiss pilgrim who is part of the Couch Surfing group (if you are a traveler and don´t know about Couch Surfing, check out their website! It´s a wonderful idea Ryan showed to us.) Anyway, Miryam was in Sahagún, and we agreed to put her up in the apartment for a couple of days, so we took Tim the Dog with us into town to meet her.

Miryam had a bad dose of Pilgrim Lurgy (a stomach virus romantically attributed to bad water or Pilgrim Menu dinners) the night before, so she´s taking it easy. Fine for us, as we have so much going on, and are incapable of staying up late. Paddy took Tim to the vet. (Tim still has a nasty cough.) Miryam and I met a great crowd of pilgrims outside the albergue, Americans and Kiwis mostly, all of them feeling green around the gills. It´s kinda fun to be the one who knows stuff about the town!

We loaded the dog and Miryam into the furgoneta and headed back to Moratinos to drop off the dog and check on Patrick Czech´s progress in plastering. We stopped at the dump on the way to drop some broken tiles and concrete. Big mistake. It rained all day yesterday, and the place is a bog with a single-lane road leading to it... no turning back. We got the debris dumped, but that weight may have been what was keeping us on the road! On the way down the mud reached up and took control of the car and dragged it sideways into a ditch. It was an eerie experience indeed, and thankfully we did not roll right over on our side.

Poor Miryam. Innocently touring the beauties of northern Spain, she finds herself stranded in a rural dump turned mud bog, with two dusty foreign strangers and a stinky, honking dog. I took her picture.

Long story short, we phoned up the Milagro Brothers, and Estebanito drove out with a tractor and pulled us out of the hole. No harm done. Thank goodness for mobile telephones, and kind neighbors with heavy equipment! When we got to Moratinos we found the electricians had been there, and started installing the new mains box on the outside wall! (For unknown reasons they buggered off early, though. Maybe we need to move furniture (AGAIN!) out of their way? To where will we move anything? The mind boggles!) Oh, and the postman brought a care package from Kathy in California... full of marshmallows for Thanksgiving sweet potatoes! I love surprise packages!

After all that Miryam took us to dinner at the best place in town. We had fresh grilled mushrooms and roasted red peppers and lamb ribs. She was still feeling peaked, and settled for rice and artichokes. We all slept very well. Living is tough, but full of little gifts, too. I think our luck is slowly changing.

What Lies Beneath

A few months ago, Una chased a mouse into a neighbor´s yard. She disappeared into the gaping maw of a building whose side wall had collapsed god knows when. She wouldn´t come when I called, and no one was around to look askance, so I followed her inside.

A long time ago it was a cowshed, the far end of a long, plain, mostly uninhabited house on Calle Ontanon. There wasn´t much there but some rusty old plows, worm-eaten beams, fallen timbers, and tons of adobe bricks where the wall once was. One other thing I did notice, however, right by the entrance... several stacks of old concrete floor tiles, half-buried in the debris.

I pulled one out. It had a simple design stamped into its surface, nothing fancy. Very old-fashioned, 20s, or 30s style, obviously long forgotten. Hmmm, I thought. These would fit in our place. We had similar tiles in the hallway of our house, (here´s a pic. of Una standing on them) back before they were ripped up to make room for the underfloor heat system.

Anyway, Una caught her mouse and we left. I kinda forgot about the tiles, but I did find out the end of the building was owned by Pilar and Anastasio. I was surprised at that, because everything to do with that couple is neat as a pin. They wouldn´t let a building fall down that way, I thought. But then again, this town (and dozens like it) is full of fallen-down adobe houses. It´s all due to Spanish inheritance law, and bull-headed family members, and the impermanent nature of adobe.

For centuries, when a man died his wife and children inherited his property in equal parts. If all he owned was a house, all five of his kids automatically got a share. (the widow was allowed to stay there as long as she lived. Never mind the house may have been hers to start with...) Anyway, the Tierra del Campos region is suffering from severe depopulation. Pop may have left the place to the boys and girls, but all of them have moved off to Vittoria or Madrid or Berlin, as nobody wants to farm anymore. Some of the kids probably want to sell it. Others want to use it for a summer place, to use during the fiesta. (that´s how our place survived.) But when the gang can´t agree, the house is often neglected. After a few years parts start falling off it.

The big long building up the street is a case in point.

This week the tiles came to mind again, as our despensa floor took shape. On Thursday morning I peeked in the barn and the tiles still were there. I screwed up my courage and my Spanish verbs, and knocked on the gate at Pilar´s house. She understood what I was saying, but said she couldn´t remember any tiles being in there. She got her keys and we hiked up the street. I showed her what I meant.

"They are not nice. And they´re not mine," she said. "The piece of the house next to this is mine, the standing-up part. This fallen-down bit belongs to Edu. The whole place is divided up four ways," she explained, pointing out where one portion had been given one kind of window, another had pink paint, etc. That all happened so long ago no one knows why any more.

Edu is almost deaf. He has a huge smile, almost like he´s wearing someone else´s teeth. He lives down on the corner, across from the church, and lately supplies the village with exquisite figs from the big tree in his yard. So me and Pilar hiked down there. (She was really enjoying this.) Milagros, scenting gossip, came out of her place, heard the tale, and joined the parade. We found Edu inside his barn, doing something under his tractor. Once upright, we shouted to him what was up. He knew right away about the tiles.

"They are not nice," he said. "Not fashionable. My mother hated them, and my father was supposed to put them down in the cowshed, but he never got to it," Edu shouted back. "They are not nice. But take them. Help yourself."

"I have some money," I yelled. "I´ve gotta pay you something." I don´t think he understood me, or maybe he didn´t hear me.

"One thing though," he said. "Go get them fast, before the roof comes down."

I was over the moon, not just because of the coup, but because I´d taken on a somewhat complicated matter and I´d made myself understood! Me and Danek the Czeck went to get them in the furgoneta, and we found there weren´t just 40 or so tiles all standing in file against the wall, There were were layers of them, probably more than 100, buried in the foot-deep debris that covered the floor. They were filthy, some were scarred and pitted, but we cleared them all out of there and brought them back to The Peaceable and loaded them into the trough. I scrubbed until the sun went down and I couldn´t see them any more, and in the morning scrubbed some more. I found some that are in pristine condition, others almost beyond use. Four of them together form a simple, repeating pattern on a soft yellow background. I hope to use all of them someplace or other around here: maybe on windowsills, floors, kitchen backsplash, or stairway risers. Cool!

And I did some research on hydraulic tiles. You still see lots of them around, and in places like New York and Barcelona and Brazil, they are enjoying a vogue... especially the more complicated and fancy ones. Ours is more homey, a bit like this one, but not nearly so shiny or colorful.

The concrete floor in the despensa needs to dry out a bit before we install tiles, so we have ours all lined up on end along the front of the big house. The plastering is coming right along. The electricians are due tomorrow. I´ll let you all know how it all turns out.