Slipping

A trip to Barcelona, good friends who volunteered to watch the Peaceable so we could get away, some more good friends who stepped in when the first ones were suddenly called away.
Sunflowers coming on. Watermelon for dessert, watermelon that does not raise hives on the inside of my mouth! Thunderheads building up all day on the horizon, and lightning at night -- but no lightning bugs here, alas!
But here are birds that sing their hearts out, at 3 a.m.
Dogs. Affectionate dogs, smiling dogs, disobedient rotten ill-mannered dogs that run away and do not come back when called. One of them (his name is Harry) ran off today and came home with his toes and ankles in tatters. Three stitches and a splint, 40 Euros later, his foot is taped to a ballerina en pointe. He will do it again if he gets a chance.
Paddy's hearing is not good. Paddy's had a cough for months now, and yesterday had a chest X-ray done to rule out really bad things. Paddy is 73 years old now, and getting older. It is hard to get my mind around that.
We talked today about things he did when we first moved here, things he cannot do now. No more ladder-climbing, no more scrambling down into the passages under the floors, no more wrangling roof beams and tiles. He gets breathless just lifting Harry into the car.
There is no shame in that, not when you are 73. I need to stop thinking of him as the same guy who walked 20 miles with me along the Maumee River on Sunday afternoons, back in Ohio when he was but a lad of 60 summers.
Paddy is still very much alive, still full of vinegar and toadspittle. But I mourn what is gone, what the years have taken away. I think he does, too.
I am depressed, I will not lie about that. I've dealt with depressions before, so I know the signs and symptoms. I am letting this one just do its thing. I am not fighting it. I try to stay busy, keep reading books, keep getting up and exercising each day.
But I am not out in the village so much, I am not engaged with the neighbourhood, and I am missing things. Someone is angry with us, apparently -- someone was very rude to Malin and David last week when they were walking our dogs out in the fields. I cannot figure out who it was. It makes me sad. I want to keep amistad with everyone, but I am not out there doing the maintenance work.
The head of the Diputacion was here in Moratinos this week, paying a sort of State Visit. I would love to ask him to have the Tourist Office erect a big sign near the bodegas, explaining to visitors what bodegas are and why they are special. I am not sure my Spanish would be equal to the job. I am not sure the head of the Diputacion would be interested in talking to a foreigner. But it is all academic. I did not even know he was coming until after he was gone.
My Spanish is slipping. It is always slipping.
There are so many things I would love to do here, but I do not have Spanish enough to do them.
Pilgrims come, sporadically. Antonio the homeless guy came this week, and a houseful of Germans and Americans. They overwhelm us. We cannot really handle more than three of them at a time any more.
There is a perfectly good albergue in town, and a hostel, too. Pilgrims do not need us to take them in nowadays. I wonder why we keep it up.
I trained a couple of hospitaleros this week, but I feel a bit hypocritcal doing that. I have not served in a Federation Albergue for months, and I have no plans to do so anytime soon.

And as you can see, I am not writing so much, nor so well.  
I live in a gentle fog. I do not feel like doing much. Leaving the house is an expedition. Using the computer is an ongoing ordeal. Feeling excited about life, or pilgrims, or wedding anniversaries, or... whatever? Seems like a lot of trouble.
It is sad, but it is the truth.
And it will pass.

A Raucous Rising

Hounds howl in the shaggy dark barn a meter of adobe away from my pillow. Daylight through the blinds. Time to get up. Paddy hears my footfalls, and sets the coffee machine to gurgling. Suddenly Artie Shaw Begins the Beguine, and drowns out the yowling from the barn.
Bob the canary digs jazz. He tunes up his day-long concert repertoire.
Down in the kitchen Rosie and Tim haul their weary carcasses off their beds to stagger over and wag "good morning."
Paddy does not wag. Paddy's been up for a couple of hours, but his rising does not count for much.
I feel significant, getting up. When I arrive, the day really starts, at least for a few creatures.
I round-up pickings from last night's dinner. I change into shoes. I take the scraps out back to the chickens. Tim comes along to make sure the hens don't get anything he deems edible. I call to them as I stride across the yard, "Chicka chickalee, chickatee!"
They love that. They come running, chattering, fluttering, speaking their hen tongue, hungry. I pet the ones who like to be petted. I collect their eggs -- misshapen or thin-shelled eggs become treats for Tim.
Three scoops of chicken feed, two flung along the ground, one in the tin cylinder. I carry the basin over to the studio to change their water, I throw yesterday's over the garlic patch. I will soon have a harvest there, our garlic is so mild and tender.
On the way back inside I start a load of laundry.
Back in the kitchen I down a coffee. Paddy dons his boots and hat. He fills his pockets with dog biscuits. Rosie and Tim are moaning by then, so ready to go.
Their deliverance draws nigh. We head out to the front gate, where they are fitted with leads and sent out into the driveway to wait just a little longer.
I stand by the big barn door. Paddy sings out "Open the cage! Start the music!" and I swing the door wide. The big dogs pour forth in great bounds of joy, leaping and yipping across the tiles, through the flower bed, down the terrace to Paddy at the gate.
We grab little Ruby first -- snap on a lead and put her outside with Rosie, to save her from big Bella's rambunction. I take up the double-ended lead and collar the greyhounds. These two know the drill, but they're so full of beans it is hard for them to keep still. Their long tails draw great circles in the air. Harry yodels and grumbles and groans. Lulu grins at me with all her great white teeth, shifting from one foot to the other, side to side, while I try to snap things onto her collar.
Paddy has the biggest challenge. Bella the Mastiff bellows and leaps at the door. She knows how to strike the lever with a paw, and when she's lucky the gate bounces open for her. Paddy and I used to wrestle her into a "No Pull Harness," but she's figured that out as well. We cut our losses, get a simple lead onto her collar, and follow the flow of wagging, panting, honking hounds down the front steps and onto the street, pulling the gate shut behind us. We each steer our fleet of three critters, each of them determined to go his own way, braiding their leads round our legs.
Somewhere among all this mayhem we determine which walk to take -- Paco's Vineyard, the Tumberon, the Labyrinth, Grand Canyon, or Promised Land? We weigh up the factors: Do we need to be anywhere this morning? Has it rained recently? Are there lots of pilgrims around?
This morning we took the Promised Land option, and within the first ten minutes we had a day's worth of action!
The Promised Land is a great, wide swath of fields, ditches, and tractor paths spread out for miles on the other side of the big A-251 four-lane. A convenient bridge carries us there, and keeps the critters safely away from the traffic. Once over the bridge we usually let all the dogs run free for the first quarter-mile or so. They are busy sniffing, whizzing, and chasing one another in circles, rejoicing in their freedom -- the Promised Land is Dog Heaven. And this morning, within five minutes of starting down the road, Bella flushed from a ditch a full-grown roe deer!
The whole boiling of dogs took off after it, yipping in delight. But the fields are still waving with standing grain, and the critter got a head start and it knows its way around. Our lot came straggling back within a moment or two, panting and waving their tails, bounding through the grain like dolphins through waves. Big fun, so early on! And we still had at least another hour to go!
We topped the little hill just before the Swimming Hole, a stand of whispery trees beside a deep irrigation channel.
Lo and behold, there was a car down there, parked. And a little tent.
And as luck would have it, a little black dog. A barking dog, running up the road toward our pack of six unleashed, wound-up, slavering beasts. And behind it came running a woman, shouting.
A woman in black tights and a fashionable striped blouse. A beautiful woman, calling to the dog. In French.
Maybe our dogs were too whacked from chasing the deer. Maybe they were overwhelmed by the glossy little black dog's grand courage, or the glossy woman's beauty. Or just the bizarre sight of two young women camping out in the Promised Land -- miles from anywhere. How did they find this place? Where were they going?
Women who spoke no Spanish, no English. Women from France! 
The greatest marvel was that we had no trouble, no snarling nor biting. Everyone behaved beautifully. We walked right past the tent, the car, the other lady. The little dog jumped inside, and all was well. We topped the hill, went right round to the vineyards. We wondered what could be next -- Flying monkeys?
But we saw only a Least Weasel, a fast black streak across the dusty road. No more creatures, unless you count the larks, the goldfinches, the swallows, the dozens of sparrows dust-bathing on the path.
The sun climbed up the sky. We shed our sweaters, tied them round our waists.  
Home by 10:30, time enough to get things done -- feed dogs, hang out the damp laundry, hang Bob's cage out under the gazebo, answer emails, write up a shopping list. Harry, Lulu, and Bella stretch out on the warm patio tiles, tanning their elegant hides. Tim curls up in his beloved bed, in the cool salon.
This is what morning looks like at Peaceable.
We are not changing the world. We produce no masterpieces, we heal no diseases, we make no real difference, doing what we do.
Still, this is what happiness is made of.

What I Reckon

Today is June 7.

June means lush early summer, seeing which of the seeds planted out back might actually live. It means clear blue skies, and on the 9^th, my big sister Beth's birthday. (My sisters’ birthdays are the only birthdays I know for sure. Not even my own childrens’ are so memorable (I was busy those days, dammit!). Birthdays are reckoned numerically, you know. And me and numbers? Well… no. This mind does not reckon numerically.)

Today is the day of the Belmont Stakes, a mile-and-a-half series of Grade-One Thoroughbred horse races broadcast around the world from rural New York, USA. The main race is “the final jewel of the Triple Crown,” but most American horses never run so far. American horses usually race for less than a mile, fast and furious. This race is old-fashioned, downright European. It sorts the speed-demons from the capital-TH Thoroughbred Horses. The Belmont is why so many shiny USA ponies win the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, but finally are sorted-out in the long run.

Maybe that is where we get “in the long run.” From Belmont. The real test.

Patrick and I spent a couple of hours early today looking at racing forms and videos of old races, having fun, enjoying one another. Since I was a little girl I had a feel for horses – like lots of little girls. I learned to ride, I learned to compete, and I learned about aesthetics and athletics on the hairy back of a horse. I was not a talented rider, but I learned to look at horses, learned to see at a glance which  type and breed it was, and which animal was in tip-top condition and who is not-quite fit. Paddy, a horse-race handicapper from way back, taught Puritan old Me to read the Daily Racing Form, a publication he re-designed when he moved from England to America, a while back now. From the DRF, (and from the stock market) I learned I am not so terrible at numbers when it comes to spotting trends. I learned to make that pay.

Anyway, it is June. June 7. According to the great FaceBook Oracle, this is the birthday of Sandra Svoboda of Detroit, a journo and friend I worked with back in Toledo, Ohio. Sandi is talented, outgoing, articulate, good-looking, well-traveled, and well-connected. Her FaceBook feed has more than 100 “happy birthday” messages today. This made me think. It sent me on a scan of the people on my own FaceBook Friends list.  

I was shocked to see I have more than 400 FB friends. I did not know that I knew 400 people in this world, much less 400 people with internet access and (I assume) desire to have contact with me.  

So I started reckoning. Here are my mother and sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins in rural America, my step-sons and in-laws (some I have never met) in metropolitan England. Here are second-cousins in Maryland who are US Marshals in search of international criminals, a beloved brother-in-law who is a sheriff’s deputy in El Dorado, Arkansas, my nephews and step-grandchildren in two countries whose parents have (maybe wisely) blocked their access to my thoughtless language and lefty political and religious opinions.

Here are the people who sat at other tables in the lunchroom at Apollo Ridge High School, the stoners and cheerleaders and drum-majors, people who kinda liked me anyway, outsider that I was back in 1978. Here’s my college roommate, a public defender married to an Indian-American called Amit, who advised  me on how to behave when my son married into a Pakistani family. Here’s the guy who taught me how to draw and shoot rotoscope animation cells in 1980, now working for Steven Spielberg. Here’s a wonderfully funny editor from my long-ago stint at the Beaver County Times. Here’s a Hare Krishna, a Mormon, Benedictine nuns and holy rollers, a genuine whirling dervish, Anglican deacons and priests of several stripes, a Vegan Jew and some crystal-packing New Age feminists. Here’s a Czech pilgrim who stopped here in 2007 and showed me how a drop of dish soap makes cement creamy-smooth but sticky enough to make walls from. Here are professors, lawyers, musicians, painters, scientists of DNA, dreamers, priests, prophets, editors, carpenters, weavers, moonshiners, movie stars, models, analysts Freudian and Jungian, cowpokes, bronco-busters, bull-shitters, politicians, and poets. Even a couple of international criminals, the people my second-cousin the US Marshal tracks down for a living.

Oh, and pilgrims. Pilgrims, pilgrims.  

I think they all are, somehow, pilgrims. People on a holy path, on their way to some sacred place.

Not all my FB friends are educated, articulate or even respectable. Some feel I am rather scruffy and common and American. I am cool with that. I have no great desire to join them at the villa in Provence or the shmooze at the gallery. I would only be bored, and probably would be boring. 

And so, on 7 June I encourage every one of you to have a look at your FaceBook Friends file, or your email address book. Reckon all the memories, the mugs and old lovers and geniuses and idiots in there. And consider what they’ve given you along all the many miles of your journey – the seeds they sowed, the robberies they witnessed or committed, and the joy and tenderness they may have brought you, too.  

FaceBook, they say, isn’t so cool any more. But it is warm, if you let it be. It is what we’ve got, far away as we are from one another.

Appalling Behavior

Three creatures deeply dedicated to appalling behavior 

There are tons of people behaving out there, and some of them are behaving very badly.

May is a big, big month on the Camino de Santiago. Thousands of people are on the trail, hundreds pass through our town each day, each on his own deeply personal journey of faith and self-discovery.

Unfortunately, few of them are on a pilgrimage.

Maybe it´s just the sheer numbers -- put too many animals in a cage and they´ll savage one another. Maybe it´s the uptick in Americans and French people on the trail, people accustomed to comfort and cosseting and convenience, people from consumer cultures where Money Talks, and the Customer is Always Right.

Maybe it´s the unusually cool, damp weather.

Or maybe people are just awful.

Talking to other hospitaleros, talking to restaurateurs and bartenders, talking to pilgrims themselves, it seems there´s an awful lot of bad behavior happening these days. I have seen some of it myself, with my own eyes.
Stupidity. Cluelessness. Cultural disconnects. Or just sheer bad manners.

This week in La Rioja: An ancient nun was locking up a village church, heading back to the convent for her lunch or prayers or nun business. Three pilgrims arrived just then. They wanted to see inside the church. The nun said no. The pilgrims told her she was un-Christian, they´d walked miles, they were PILGRIMS, that all the churches on the camino are locked-up, but the churches in their country are always open. The Catholic Church in Spain rakes in millions, they said, but evidently does not care about pilgrims´ spiritual needs.

Sylvie, a Canadian hospitalero who volunteers over at Bruno´s albergue, was passing by just then. She understood the language the pilgrims were speaking to the nun, who clearly did not understand them. Sylvie told the pilgrims to stick their spiritual needs someplace where the sun don´t shine. Sylvie is short and stout but not to be trifled with. The nun clung to her. And when the righteous hikers finally left, the nun began to cry.
I think it is safe to say: Proper pilgrims do not abuse elderly nuns.

Paddy and I were miserably sick last week. We took two days off from the pilgrim business, for our sakes as well as the pilgrims´ -- we were contagious. When six bright-eyed young pilgrims arrived on Thursday evening, I told them (eyes streaming, nose red and running) that we were unwell. We do not have room or food for six people, that they should go over to Bruno´s place.

"But you don´t understand," a young man said. "It costs nine Euro to stay at Bruno´s. We don´t mind if you are sick. We are healthy."

These are not the words of an evil person. Just a very thick one.

Just yesterday, driving out of town, I turned the corner onto Calle Real and glanced up the street. Pilgrims were pouring into town. Pin´s car was parked in front of his house. Between the car and Pin´s front gate was a pilgrim, a female pilgrim, crouching with her pants round her ankles, clearly visible from both east and west. With wide fields and generous ditches stretching for miles around town, this person relieved herself on Main Street, on someone´s very doorstep. Appalling.

Last night and this morning at Bruno´s albergue, a pilgrim demanded special food, extra bedding, free refills, discounts. When the backpack-transport service arrived this morning to take her bag, she wanted it delivered to the train station in Sahagún. The service does not deliver there, Bruno told her, it´s not safe to leave bags unattended.
"Then you should just deliver me, along with the bag," the lady said. "You won´t have to worry then about my bag. I won´t take up much room in the van. It´s only nine kilometers."
"I don´t have a taxi license," the delivery lady told her. "You should just call a taxi."
"I am a poor pilgrim. I cannot afford a taxi," the lady said.

Fact: The person calling himself "a poor pilgrim" always has perfect, white teeth, and usually wears $200 boots. He drinks up all the wine at dinner, steals the toilet paper, and leaves 10 cents in the box.  
Paddy calls these people "ghastly."

Equally ghastly are a couple of albergue owners east of here, who are taking advantage of the current crowds. In dormitories with bunkbeds, the lower bunks are often reserved for the injured or elderly. This spring, they are gouged an extra 2 to 5-Euros for a bottom bunk. Disgusting.

Yes, I am whining. Admit it, you love reading about these awful people, because you are not one of them!
 
The Camino de Santiago really IS a magical place. Amazing things happen here. People discover God´s grace in action, they experience generosity and kindness and acceptance like they´ve never seen before. Before they are finished the buttoned-down and self-possessed often find themselves sharing their food, hearing the confessions of broken-hearted strangers, and binding up gory wounds on rainy roadsides. It is glorious and wonderful and very varied.

And among the crowds thronging the path and looking for something are plenty of sharks, lowlifes, losers, addicts, pikers, thieves, cheapskates, whiners, and manipulators. Some are pilgrims, others are the townspeople or churchmen or volunteers charged to care for them. They´ve been part of the camino scene for a thousand years, and they´re not going away anytime soon.

I stood up on top the bodegas yesterday, marveling over the floral spectacle of May on the Meseta (while looking  for two badly behaved greyhounds). I considered all the human awfulness going on out there in the world. I watched two more pilgrims pounding into town, saw them marching round the foot of my hill, checking out the little hobbit-house doors. I wondered if one of they were stopping to have a pee against the door of my bodega. (Yes, that happens, and yes, it does smell after a while.) I stepped over the crest of the hill and down toward them, just to be sure they kept moving. A man was there at the door of our little cave, but he was not sinning against me. He was snapping a photo. I clambered, casually as I could, down the steep hill to the little lane where they stood. I said hello as I found the foot-holds.

They looked up and smiled at me. The straps of their backpacks squeaked as they reached upward, as they took my hand and my elbow, as they helped me down the last two steps. They were gentle.
I thanked them.
"It is nothing," they said, in Italian. "It is steep. Be careful in those shoes, there are thistles here."  

They´d met suspicion with kindness.

We all are humans, we all are sinners, some more appalling than others. We all need to be forgiven. Even me.

And we need to forgive one another.  

Exit Oliver

Oliver arrived just in time for me to leave, just in time to put my mind at ease. He is an agent of Divine Providence and Chaos at the same time. Oliver is a true child of St. James, or maybe Peter Pan. He is a born hospitalero, a phenomenon.

He stayed a few days at the Peaceable to help Patrick deal with the dogs, just until Paddy´s son Matt could get here from England. Matt and Oliver got on really well, and Paddy didn´t mind the extra help, so Ollie he stayed on a few extra days. He stayed right through til I got back from America, because he didn´t want leave without saying goodbye.

Oliver on the left, redneck on right

Meantime, he washed the windows. He swept the back patio. He cut the grass front and back, and wheeled a couple barrow-loads of sand over to Bruno´s place for making cement, in exchange for using Bruno´s mower. He shared the pilgrim room and downstairs bath with Howard from England and Bev from D.C. and Sarah Jean from North Carolina, each in their turn. 

Oliver is from Germany. He has lived along the Camino de Santiago for the last seven years, fetching up the first two years at a commune in Ponferrada, where he learned how to meditate. From there he worked a while at the Albergue Aquarius in Santiago itself, a flower-power place known for its creative use of pilgrim labor. Oliver found himself there, or at least found his calling. He loved the pilgrims, he didn´t mind a bit of cleaning, he downright enjoyed cooking for them. He decided to live on the trail, to serve full-time.

I met Oliver out on the trail, on one of his many camino walks. He came here when Peaceable was still a half-finished project, and stayed to lay concrete in the patio. I met him again in Finisterra, way out at the end of the trail. He ran an albergue there for a while, and later he lived on the beach, drumming up business for a couple of local bars. Our paths crossed now and then. He always greeted me with a big hug and a puff of spliff, if he had one. Oliver likes to smoke, and he likes to share.     

Oliver speaks German and Dutch, Italian and English, and a good bit of French as well. He is moody. When he is "up" his boyish joy can be overpowering. When he is "down" he can almost disappear into philosophy. He is outgoing and fluent, and he knows just about everybody on the western end of the camino – the drifters, bosses, saints, and perennial pilgrims. That is how he ended up at Murias de Rechivaldo.

Murias is a shabby old town just outside Astorga. Its rundown schoolhouse was the only albergue in town until about five years ago, when suddenly the townspeople turned their redundant stone outbuildings into private pilgrim accommodation. Simón, the friendly geezer who kept the keys and occasionally cleaned the albergue, was somehow related to the mayor. Oliver needed a place. Simón put in a good word.

And for two years Oliver had his dream come true – a steady hospi gig in a place he liked very well. He did some big work there. He painted and pointed, he tore out the paneling that was home to a community of hardy bedbugs, he swept and mopped and welcomed the simple kind of pilgrims whose needs do not stretch to wifi and washers and dryers and central heating.

There are fewer and fewer of those pilgrims around, Oliver said. Beds go begging in his place. His clients wash their clothes by hand, and sit chatting under the trees out front while the laundry dries in the branches. At the posh privado over the road, capacity crowds pack the porches. Each stares intently at his little hand-held screen as he waits for the lady to deliver his laundry, dried and neatly folded.  

“Wifi is ruining the camino,” Oliver said. “Those pilgrims don´t talk to each other. They bring their old lives with them in their IPads. They never really leave home, they never really experience what the camino has for them. They are not free. They are addicted. I am sad for them.”   

When his albergue closed for holidays or disinfection, Oliver walked. He came here two summers ago and ran Bruno´s place for a week, in which time he gave a name to our particular flavour of marijuana.

I had just harvested a big, healthy plant, and I asked Ollie to test-drive the product. (I have asthma, I cannot smoke anything, and I never enjoyed that numb sensation. I grew marijuana for the simple reason that I can. It is legal here, in small quantities.) Oliver was delighted with the idea.

He reported back the next day. “Rebekah, your weed is very quiet. I thought for a little while it was no good, I felt nothing,” he said. “But then I got up and moved about. And I felt light. I felt nice. I felt… fluffy.”

And so it is called now as well, when we have it around: Fluffy.   

Last year Oliver decided to close the albergue and spend winter back home in Germany – he´d met a girl, he said. He stopped here on the way. He was manic. He preached grace and peace and healing, then moved on. A few days later, in an albergue in Burgos, all his money disappeared. He shrugged his shoulders and headed back to Murias, reopened the albergue, and settled in to earn enough money to walk home again to Germany.

In tiny Murias he was a friend to the unemployed young men, a drinking buddy, the only blond German who had ever carried the banner in the patron saint processions.

But not everyone in town liked him so well. He was a foreigner occupying a municipal post – a very low-down position, but in a small town those jobs are, by right, held by some local cousin or in-law of the council members. The man in charge refused to register Oliver as a town resident, which would qualify him for health care. He refused to put Oliver on a workers´ contract, even though Oliver was entitled to both.  

Finally, the council decided to “monetize” the municipal albergue, put it to work making a profit for the town. A suitable daughter and son-in-law were installed in the albergue, and Oliver was told his time was up.

“It was two years, one month, and five days,” Oliver said. “It was never mine, but it was close. It was a great time. Everything has its span of life, no? It was time for me to go. And now I have a reason to go back. Helena. I am in love with her. She is crazy for me, too. It fits so good together!”

Oliver left this morning, heading east. He is hitchhiking, walking, sleeping rough across three countries. Helena´s dad has a job for him, he says, starting June 23^rd, selling nutritional supplements in Germany and Holland and France.

“I am 38 years old,” he said last night. “A bit young to settle down. I will come back. I still have my dream. Helena loves the camino too. I still want a place of my own here.

“An albergue that is mine. A place that is simple. Something nobody can ever take away from me.”

     

Past, future, presents

Me and my sister Beth

The Peaceable is far, far away from here.
Here is Apollo, Pennsylvania, a little post-industrial rural area in the United States of America. This is the town where my parents grew up, where I did some growing-up, too, a place I could return to someday, if I wanted to. Here everyone is friendly and polite, if a little rough around the edges. It is easy to be here. I know where to find the library (the library where my mom signed a paper so I could see books kept on the "forbidden" shelves), the St. James Catholic Church, the pub with the best white pizza, the Dairy Queen where I sat in a Sunbeam Tiger sports car with my first boyfriend and drank in the glories of the mocha milkshake... three decades back. Apollo is my hometown. My mother and sister and former in-laws still live here. Apollo is my past.
I spent the weekend at a hotel in Toledo, Ohio, another place from my past. Toledo is where my children were raised, where I dug in and flowered as a newspaper journalist, where I met and married a wise-ass Englishman called Paddy O'Gara. Toledo is where my son Philip met a very pretty girl called Raheela. More than a decade later, after our family broke up and scattered to places all over the world, Philip and Raheela called us all back to Toledo again for their big wedding celebration.
.....
And so Philip was enfolded into the noisy embrace of his new wife's people.
And so the two of them zipped off into their future in a stretch limo, with a scheduled stop on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls for a couple of days.
Monday morning we headed back east to Apollo, where I am now until Thursday. From the future back to the past, where the next big event was a drive down Dime Road to visit Barbara.
Barb is my favourite cousin, another person from the past, particularly beloved. She taught me to neck-rein a horse, how to help a dog birth pups, how to turn a Jeep to four-wheel drive, how to knock down a shot of bourbon and not choke. She drives steamrollers and forklifts for a living, and builds dry-stone retaining walls on the weekends. She can set vertical fence-posts on a sheer hillside and shoot a .44, and tell a lowlife to go straight to hell. But she knows how to pray, too. She's praying a lot these days.
Barb has cancer in the bones of her spine and the organs of her abdomen.
I went to see her this morning. She does not look like Barb at all. I held her hands. I never noticed before how elegant her hands are. She is very small, she is in a great deal of pain.
I will probably not see her again.
She is the future, too. Most of my family dies of cancer eventually. We fight and medicate and suffer, but it gets us in the end. Cancer or old age or accident, something gets us, all of us, in the end. Aside from the suffering, there is nothing to feel too badly about. Everybody goes.
Me, too. I go home on Thursday, via Charlotte. On Friday I will be home in Moratinos, the tiny pueblo. My present.


(I promise to post more photos. I have a new computer and have not figured out how to move things around comfortably.)


    

Everybody Knows

I put a stronger lock on the bodega door, because the key stopped turning in the cheap one. It´s a detail, a tiny difference in the everyday. But everybody knows. (They ask me if I´ve heard of gypsies in the area. Gypsies are the local bugaboo. They come from the east and north, and I am told they steal everything that´s not nailed down. I go to Carrion de los Condes every Thursday, eastward. So maybe I have heard something, maybe I know. One can´t be too careful, not with Those People!)

Last week after Mass, I went to Santiago de Compostela for a congress of people like me, loonies who let strangers stay at their houses, with some bishops and nuns and Anglicans thrown in for righteousness´ sake. I was gone for four whole days. In the interim Patrick went to the bar one evening, to see a football match. While there, he had a scary, embarrassing coughing fit. Everybody knows. And after church this morning everyone said "Welcome back, Rebekah! How was the trip?"

Everybody knows now how the convention went -- the bishops blathered on and on. They know too about the day I skipped out, I flew up to Sarria and back down in a top-down convertible Fiat 550 with two merry Dutchmen, one of them a priest, a dear friend for many years, a majo who visited Moratinos, who helped us, didn´t he? plaster the ceilings at the bodega, he is so tall! Big hands! Good teeth, despite those cigars! Yes, we remember! Yes, we know! Lucky you, Rebekah, such fabulous friends you have! (what about your husband, here all alone, choking in the bar, and you gadding about in a Fiat with tall Dutchmen?)

When we moved to Moratinos my friend Tino, an expat Gallego Spaniard from Xunqueria de Amba, a somewhat-small town in darkest Galicia, gave me a stern warning. "Rebekah," he said, "we have a refran, a wise saying: "Small town, big hatred." Watch out for that. Small town, small minds."

"Tino," I told him then, "this town is only 16 people. You can´t afford to be too hateful in a town so little. People need one another. No one will survive otherwise."

And so it has proved, even as the town has grown -- we now are 23 or 25 year-round people, depending on how you count. There are frictions and factions, yes. One of our neighbors is sure our dogs trampled the pea-patch in his un-fenced garden. He followed us around for three days to make sure we kept every one of our dogs on a lead anywhere near town. (Never mind the other three or six dogs who regularly wander loose through town.) He has a point, however. So we put all the dogs on leads while we walk around in the town. We adjust. Everybody knows. (Everybody rolls their eyes heavenward, too, in sympathy.)

Dogs attack one another, run off together, kill hens and harass cats. Visitors park their cars in the wrong driveway. We fail to cut the high grass, which goes to seed and spreads to the field alongside. Neighbors spread manure on the very day the abbot or the Junta or news reporters are due. We plan and publicize beautiful concerts, and almost no one shows up. That´s life in a tiny pueblo. It does not always go our way.

But there is an up-side, too. We have, apparently, landed on a marketing list.

For some reason, producers and PR guys are sending us top-class regional cheese, honey, and wine to sample. They apparently believe The Peaceable is a destination for high-end tourists. Their shiny packages often arrive at the same moment as the most lowdown homeless travelers. Once I figured out I do not need to send back items I never ordered, I started inviting the pilgrims to taste the goodies, too -- who knows? One of them may be a true connoisseur. At least two of them were shepherds of decades´ experience, professionals who know ewe´s milk cheese better than anyone I can think of.

So yes, it´s true: We give delicacies to derelicts and wanderers, and their "feedback" we send back on the "tell us what you think" ratings cards provided. The honey, like the "artisanal beer", all tastes pretty much the same to me. Jam? Jam is jam. The wine, though... the wine I keep and taste and judge for myself, now that Lent is through.  

And this explains the Audis and BMWs rolling up here lately, looking around, the glossy drivers stamping their pilgrim credentials, wondering what this place is, asking odd questions. We have been mistaken for somewhere else. I am finally figuring this out. But I bet everyone in Moratinos already knows.  

Meantime, the queue outside the doctor´s office on Monday means Rebekah´s asthma is kicking up, Raquel´s bad knee is worse, Manolo´s stiff wrist needs seeing-to, everybody´s blood-pressure medicine in running low. (My blood pressure is always low, it is genetic. Everybody knows.)

The fields are green, heads well-formed atop the rye and soon the barley, the soybeans blossom bright yellow. May and June and the steady breeze turn our campo back to a shallow sea, soft waves flutter these days green instead of blue, grain instead of waves of water. We fall into the rhythm of the grain, and we forget the conflicts that so irked us earlier on, we let them go as we walk out to the huerta, the orchard, the garden, the bower of backyard jasmine. We drink the wine. The cheese melts softly on our tongues.

I know. Everybody knows. But we forget, at least for now, because the sun is out, the swallows are in the barn and ´round the church tower, and soon again the farmers will cut the grain. There will be enough for the rich and the poor, the pijo, the gitano and the presumido, too. Enough for all of us.