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.

Czechs and Balances

Sorry things are so short and snappy, but these days are VERY long and very busy. Our moods are balancing out a little, mostly because we are so very occupied. We now have two smiling young Czechs working here, with occasional oversight from James the Handy Neighbor. Today they installed a new concrete floor in the despensa, and they are just now, at 8:10 p.m., using the leftover cement to finish up the old salon floor the bozos left undone. It´s cool having another language going on.

Tomorrow we put the lovely new (and much taller! No more dinged foreheads and busted brows!) despensa door in place, and hopefully Cañizo the Electrician guys will show up and get crackin´on wiring up "the living end" of the Peaceable. Today an actual albanil from Palencia came to look the place over and start an estimate. Paddy and I stomped some mud and water and straw together to make cob, which will go into the despensa doorway tomorrow. (it´s the muddy clay stuff that most of the old buildings around here are made of.) And Pastrana the Plumber, who finally go the hot water flowing in the Sahagún place, promises to come to Moratinos on Saturday to price out the tuberia.

Paddy´s hard at work making garlic soup for our dinner. We don´t have eggs to drop into it... a strange circumstance around here! But supply may be starting to meet demand. Yesterday Moratinos was awash in pilgrims from Australia, Czech Republic, Finland, Oman, Poland, and Canada, and James and Marianne threw a barbecue of sorts over at their project. While we did the washing-up at our place, Julia the Neighbor came over with a box of figs from Edu´s tree. We all chatted a while, or at least we listened to Julia go on about life in the village.

One local concern is the mouse plague. The junta a couple of weeks ago gave the farmers long red tubes to partially bury in their fields. Deep inside they put poisoned grain, down where the storks and pheasants can´t reach and hopefully the rain water won´t flow. The mice are supposed to go down the tubes, eat the grain, and scurry off to their eternal reward.

The distribution point for the tubes and grain was right outside Julia´s place.
Someone spilled some of the grain on the ground. Julia´s chickens plucked it up. So Julia´s chickens are no more. Laying hens aren´t easy to get this time of year, and we know how well-kept her critters are -- they took in someone´s overgrown Easter duckling a while back, and Lucas is now 8 years old, a useless animal by all accounts, but they couldn´t just let him live in misery on an apartment balcony in Santander.

So we gave Julia two of the Gladyses. She and I went out into the corral with a big plastic grocery bag, popped in two hens, and off they went down Calle Ontanon. (I made sure neither was Blodwyn.) And so we are down to three hens, three eggs per day. It´s a much more reasonable number for two people, one of whom is watching his cholesterol. But we are feeding four hardworking people now, and I can only hope Castilian Poor People Food is enough to feed us all -- I used all three of today´s eggs in the tuna salad we had for lunch. And Patrick the Czech is vegetarian, so eggs is one of the primary proteins we have on offer.

Oh well. They ARE pilgrims, accustomed to living rough and eating god-knows-what. Good thing. That´s exactly what we have to offer them!

I missed my Girls Night Out in Salamanca the other day, but hopefully we can make it up tomorrow in Zamora. Tomorrow is also Libby´s birthday. She will have to celebrate out there on the Camino someplace... I haven´t heard from her in three days, so I take that as a good sign.

So the hard labor continues, which distracts us from our woes and worries and gives us some really visible progress to look at. Life is good.

keep away.

We have a Czech pilgrim named Patrick toiling for us by the hour. He´s living in the old salon. He sings and plays the guitar at odd moments, but works very hard. He made us feel all hopeful and purposeful.

I was planning on meeting my pilgrim bud Wanda in Salamanca today for a Girls´ Night Out at the Convent, but this morning the lights went out at the Peaceable Kingdom, and the power won´t come back on. The electrician is only taking messages.

Paddy went for a walk with the dogs, and hasn´t come back. It´s been 3 hours.

Patrick the Czech is clearning the tons of old moldy straw out of the barn, a job neither Patrick nor I can bear, allergy-wise. Patrick the Czech is vegetarian, and has been sleeping outdoors for almost a week. I haven´t figured out how to tell him he can, indeed, shower and do his laundry, please! (Still I am very grateful he´s here. James found him, and brought him over, knowing the straits we´re in just now.)

I am doing heavy work again, too, clearing out the construction debris upstairs and out back and hauling it by the furgoneta-load to the dump. I hope it is not a mistake, that we aren´t expected to live among the rubble until an estimator comes and determines the degree of horror left behind by Mario & Co. If I don´t keep busy I will lose it. We are working very hard and sleeping the sleep of the righteous every night.

There´s still no hot water at the new place. It´s a schizophrenic existence.
If you were planning to stop in for a friendly visit, this may not be the best time.

The plot thickens. So does the concrete.

It´s Monday, a lovely new week has begun. The little birds are forming flocks for flying south. They sprinkle themselves across the sky like pepper on an omelet.

We´ve decided to stop whining now and get on with it. Mario the contractor is not coming back, and if he did I might just cold-cock the guy. Bring on the lawyers! And the cement mixers and tape-measures and power tools! We are going to try to do some things ourselves.

On Thursday, when we were out flinging concrete in the orchard, three big Rumanians showed up out of the blue. They said they know that &%$ lowlife Mario, he stiffed them on their wages, that Mario´s abandoned the project and they will finish the job. The whole thing was WAY suspicious. We told them no.

First things first: Libby walked in the door on Friday, and she was darned lucky to catch us home. We were coming back from a morning dog-walk to San Nicolas, and were set to help Segundino and his family with the grape harvest. Their particular grape-patch has featured in dozens of pilgrim snapshots in the past few weeks, since it´s right along the camino, and Segundino (the village carpenter) stood three or four very creative and effective scarecrows out among the crop - real local color irresistible to passing photographers. It looks like all the birds stayed away, and mice, too. I never saw so many grapes in my life!

About 20 of us went among the staked-up vines with scissors, knives, and secateurs, dropping clusters of purple and green grapes into big black buckets. When those were full, we tipped them into a remolque wagon to be hauled off to the bodega. It was heavy work in the bright sun, lots of kneeling and up and down, but we made good progress.

Segundino´s extended family lives in the corner of the Plaza Mayor, but they tend to keep to themselves. When the Milagros are out there in their lawn chairs, playing Mus into the gloaming, the Segundinos don´t usually mix in with the rest. They are friendly enough, though. They have a talking parrot named Berta who sits out on the square sometimes and whistles at pilgrims. They keep an assortment of farm animals inside their little compound, including pigs! They´re one of the few families that still uses their bodega for making and storing homemade wine.

I made friends this summer with Mary Angeles and Flor, the sisters, who worked like yeomen mixing cement while the men worked up on the roof. All working together, they put a new second floor and roof on what had been the empty shell of their grandfather´s house. They work all together in the vineyard in October, and when February comes they all help with the pig-sticking, too. So Friday being the Fiesta of Our Lady of the Pillar, the traditional grape-picking day in Spain, we told them we´d come and help. We lasted about 45 minutes. But I think we did good.

Libby showed up right then, and was a great refreshment. She skipped a couple of days walking when her ankle went bad, and she´s been contending with the Pilgrim Stomach Virus everyone has. In two weeks she´s lost 15 pounds, and she looks very good. It took her a little time to get going, but now she´s on her way to Santiago again!

But I ramble. James the Neighbor is over at his place laying flagstones on the hard-packed back yard, making a porch. In many ways our experience reflects theirs...they went through the Big Dreams phase, and the Lowdown Contractor phase, and are now in the Live in One Town and Work in Another With Only One Driver phase. He´s now moved into Do It Yourself mode. He thinks the heaviest work is already done on our house, and the remaining finish work (floors, walls, windows, etc.) are within the ability of hardy DIY people to master. "Just lookit me!" he says, his clothes covered in mud and concrete. "If I can, so can you!"

James could sell snow to eskimos. But I will take what inspiration I can from the environment around me. And so was hatched The Despensa Plan, an idea dear to Paddy´s heart.

The idea is to make the despensa (aka ´the cave´) into a truly habitable room, using concrete, plaster, insulation board, and leftover floorboards from our stalled house project. It will keep us busy, if nothing else. But before we can start working, we need to empty out all the stuff we have stored in there.

Which means we have to put it somewhere. Which means we have to organize the great jumble of belongings in the barn. Everything´s a shambles here, and it seems we spend most of our time shifting junk from one place to another. But we can´t get overwhelmed. No.

We can just do. Get on widdit. Take it day by day.

And now I need to go take an allergy pill and help move things ´round the barn. Someday, people, this is going to be a great house.