Toro Toro Toro!

Dear People Walking the Camino Right Now:

If I already told you to stop in here on your way past, please don´t let my manic postings scare you away. We still like pilgrims just fine. We just really really needed a break.

And we took a nice one, a day trip to the big Vendimia Fiesta in Toro, near Zamora. Toro is one of my favorite places in Spain. They not only have the very best red wine there, they also have the very best Gothic church "portico de majestad" I ever saw. It was enclosed soon after it was finished, so it is still almost intact, with all its brilliant colors and wonderful characters gloriously alive. Just seeing it can make me smile for DAYS. (this image is lifted from a guidebook. Like most architectural photos, it is an insult to the original. Still..)

Another big treat we found is the Romanesque porch out front is covered in scaffolding. The rows and rows of little sculpted musicians and kings and prophets out there are getting a scrubbing and preservative treatment, after lo these nine centuries. And there was a guide there to take us up onto the construction site so we could see the sculptures RIGHT UP CLOSE! I love this stuff! (And it was free, too.)

The wine was not free, but we tasted a good bit of that and bought several cases of delicious un-oaked and 4-months-oaked Vino de Toro for the bodega. 

The chimney project is coming along, slowly but surely.
So if you are out there walking, come on by. I promise not to bite you. 

We will keep Patrick on a short lead.

Nest O Frenzy

There have been so many people in and out of our house for so long that I am beginning to wonder if it´s safe to leave Paddy alone with them. (He is fed-up with pilgrims, and mutters vague threats anytime there´s a knock at the door.)

It is October. It´s time for all good pilgrims to GO HOME. Instead, for some unknown reason, they are coming here. Every night for at least a week, at sundown. In twos and threes, exhausted and broke and hungry, often brought here by well-meaning neighbors. We are nice to them, show them to the salon, let them cook their dinners if they want to, so long as they clean up after.

Tonight it´s a Swiss and a German and a big tall Spaniard. They´re in there now, chattering companionably and periodically yowling along to the guitar. One of them is wearing extremely strong cologne, or maybe he´s spilled some. I hope to God it isn´t soaking into the mattress or the rug. It´s making my nose run, two rooms away...

Usually the pilgrim wave would have abated by now and left us with a few days of peace, but not this time. Maybe it´s because the pilgrim hostels are closing now for the season, and more pilgrims are on the road later in the day, looking for cheap lodgings. Maybe it´s the "occupancy effect," the fact that we have a full house already: Brian in one spare bedroom, and Annie (an invited guest) in another, attracts more people just through sheer mass.

It´s getting hard, having strangers in here. It´s true, pilgrims are pretty much the reason we came to live here. Still, we´re going to have to start turning people away, just for the sake of our own sanity.

I am questioning my sanity these days. It´s not just the weirdness I wrote about previously. I am having great bursts of Organization and Tidiness, completely foreign to my usual menu of Sloven and Chaos. I want to get writing on the book, but instead I am dragging the dining room furniture into the patio and scrubbing the floors, or I am leading a work gang of amateur masons on a concrete-mixing and hauling expedition to the heights above our bodega chimney. I´m working hard and losing weight and not eating or sleeping very much.

I told Annie, our wise visitor, I think maybe it´s to do with My Time Of Life. But she stepped in with something wise and wonderful:

I´m nesting.

"Remember when you were pregnant, and you couldn´t wait for the baby to come, but labor wouldn´t start?" she said. "You started putting everything away, and cleaning the house, and making everything perfect, so you could concentrate on the labor once it started, and the baby, once he arrived, would be your focus. You were nesting, getting ready."

"So you´re going to write this book, and it´s not ready to happen yet, but it´s about to," she said today. "And you´re doing the same nesting thing now. When the writing starts, you won´t have to think about the dust in the corners or the state of the woodpile. You can relax into it. You can´t rush it. But you can get the place ready for it."

(And you can make sure there aren´t tons of extra people hanging around the place when "It" arrives, eh?)

And so, presuming my head is aswim with the next great best-selling "life abroad" volume, I made a list of all the great Nesting Achievements we chalked-up in the past month, with help from many hands. They are legion. I am proud. Among them are:

Major "spring cleans" of the living room, kitchens, bathrooms, and potting shed.
Re-roofed the Hermitage/dispensa.
Got the garage and woodpiles in order, got the chainsaw working and got a fine new sawhorse made;
Got the dogs and cat flea-treated and wormed, and got Blodwyn back on her feet;
Dodged a bullet in Torremolinos (we turned out not to be the last resort after all!)
Cut brush
The Kangoo-mobile got its vastly overpriced 50,000 km. "checkup";
Hauled 16 tons of concrete up the bodega (this project is still in progress!)
Harvested grapes with the neighbors, and lots of other veg from our own little garden;
Got all the outside walls painted;
Did our share of church-sitting duty;
Hiked the Camino San Salvador;
Made three new friends;
Got a tetanus shot;
Watched a Pittsburgh Steelers game WAY late at night;
Spent a day at a donkey farm;
Danced in the moonlight on the Equinox;
Canceled my private health insurance and overpriced car insurance;
Planted heather and lavender in the patio, and tore out the spiky cactuses (yow!);
Found the missing Leonard Cohen CD, and my lost address book;
Got my mobile phone working again;
Hosted pilgrims, pilgrims, pilgrims from Canada, England, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Finland, Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, Colombia, and the US of A.

The car still needs new tires on the back. We still gotta finish that bodega, and get it stocked with this year´s wine. And sometime in between I still need to blog... like now. It is 2:16 a.m., and I am out in the summer kitchen where it is quiet and cologne-free and the computer works. (something is very wrong with the wifi unit.)

So, Book Muse? When you decide to show, we´ll be swept and stocked and ready for a nice friendly stay. Just be sure to shut the gate tight behind you when you come inside. And never mind that muttering man on the sofa.

Indian Head Massage

The perky blonde peregrina said she´d trade a couple days of rest here for Indian Head Massages, an Ayurvedic therapy she uses in her employ as an Energy Worker.

Paddy and I answered identically, in unison. "I don´t have an Indian head."

And that is The Line of the Week.

Things are getting weird around here. The Harvest Moon beams blindingly down from the sky. Time and the light play tricks. The sun rises later and sets sooner, noticeably sooner. Out in the tall spruce tree, honest to God, a screech owl has visited every night for the past five. Flocks of strange birds fly over, southward to Africa: snow geese, strange wrens and robins. One day this week all our swallows disappeared.

When Max the Cock crows, the dogs howl.

Still it is hot and dry in the afternoons. The sky fills up with thunderheads and great winds blow all the dust off the fields, but it comes to nothing. The world is brown and dry. The fields want rain, the farmers say.

But long as it´s dry work continues hard and physical, at least for Brian, and often for me as well. The big roof job is done, and we moved on to installing a chimney in the air shaft over our bodega cave. It´s a bigger chore than we´d imagined: pick-axing, shoveling, chopping, hauling dirt and timbers out, and hauling in concrete beams, wire, broken tiles, and tons of concrete both dry and wet. All of it up and over a 35 percent grade. Brian decided this chimney is to be his Masterpiece, his Moratinos Memorial for the next 100 years. The workbench in the garage is littered with notebook paper, scribbled-over with quadratic equations and curious diagrams. (Maybe it´s a chimney. Maybe it´s an ancient formula... this region long ago was known for its alchemists. Maybe Brian just LOOKS like a Pittsburgh yinzer.)

Estebanito is now involved as well. He spent a long Saturday morning with us, mixing cement and hauling us around in his front-end loader. I don´t think he knew what he was in for. I don´t think he approves of me pitching gravel and hauling hods. (I should be home butchering lambs, perhaps?)

The fun continues tomorrow morning.

How dull this blog must be... like watching cement dry, eh? There has been much in between to keep things lively, as somehow the Pilgrim Come Hither Vibe has been in full oscillation through the week. We had a full house last night, with four fine ladies from Ireland, South Africa, the Alpujarras, and Ottawa rolling in late from a town far down the trail. The Canadian, who is also a Shaman, took us all out to the labyrinth for a Harvest Moon celebration. It was fun, but chilly.

It´s getting chilly around here at night. Enough to make an owl screech.
Enough, apparently, to make Max the Rooster feel like a real man too. This morning he made a running jump at the Irish peregrina, which made her shriek like a banshee, which scared the bejeezus out of me.

Blodwyn the chicken is unwell, and the medicine and handling she´s getting these days is bringing her back to her old pet-chicken ways. When we leave the back door open she pushes through the hanging screen and struts down the hallway to the dog-food supply, or sometimes right through the front door and into the patio. Yesterday I came into the kitchen and saw her settling into Paddy´s favorite corner of the sofa.

Blod´s sick. She´s looking for comfort in company. She asked me today to pick her up and hold her, so I did. The dogs gave me the fish-eye.

The dogs are glorying in all the pilgrim traffic -- so many scratches on the head, backpacks to sniff, scraps to gobble, and boots to hide in the barn. Una and Murph have caught many mice in the past few days. Or Murphy does, anyway. He brings them still living to Una, who deals them the coup de grace.

Paddy is in a dark humor. He watches live horse races online in the afternoon, drinks wine, and grumbles about the meaninglessness of it all. His eyes and hands and bad leg all bother him, and he does not watch us sling cement.

But the Shaman´s Indian Head Massage did make his sore shoulder better, he says. The rest of him is hopeless, he is sure of it. Still, tomorrow he is off to see David, the local masajista who helped me so much when I had tendinitis.

Ayerveda. Reiki. Chiropractic. Massage. Weird stuff, for a weird time.

It works for me.

Cunning Old Benedict

My hands are stained and nicked. They look like I´ve murdered someone, but so do everyone else´s. We are cut and bruised and aching in the riñones, but we´re smiling, too. It is late September, and the grapes are ripe, ready for picking. Every extra hand is needed to get them all in on time.

I thought we had enough work of our own to do. We were already worn-out from the roofing project, the long hike over the mountains, framing-up a new book, and wrangling with the health insurance company that will not let me go. The stresses of living far from the homeland and family seem to pile up this time of year.

This afternoon Kathy and I sat together in the cool darkness of our bodega-cave, tasting a Bierzo reserva that´s right at its peak. She leaves us tomorrow, after two weeks of good company and great help; we were setting up for a nice Girls´ Afternoon in the Wine Cellar, the last for who knows how long?

But Brian rolled up with a wheelbarrow. We poured him a cup of vino, and we started plotting our next project: We´re building a chimney on top the bodega, so wandering pilgrims do not fall down the ventilation hole and die in there. (We have no light or electricity at the cave, and all the materials and tools for the chimney will have to be hauled up a very steep hillside that´s pocked with other chimney-holes and collapsed bodega-roofs. We like challenges here.)

And while we considered, and sipped our lovely vintage, a figure darkened the doorway.
It was Milagros, always a character to be reckoned with, a knife in one hand and a bucket in the other. It´s vendimia time, she said. Come on over to the vineyard and help out!

Brian once helped with a grape harvest in Italy, and Kathy was game for a bit of rural diversion: it seemed like a much better plan than anything we´d imagined for the afternoon! So we locked up the bodega, gathered up some knives and buckets and dogs, and headed over to the Promised Land, a vast stretch of fields on the other side of the autopista. Over there Esteban and Milagros and Leandra and Carlos keep their long-suffering vines of red Mencia and white Muscat grapes.

Two by two you take a row, and cut the vine from near the root, where the fattest, sweetest grapes grow. The harvest isn´t heavy this year, Esteban said, but other vines in the district, picked last week, provided an exceptionally sweet and mellow mosto -- the fresh-pressed juice that turns, in time, to wine.

Milagros said dogs like to eat fresh grapes. We gave Tim and Una a few, which they politely tasted, but they seemed more interested in chasing critters. We tucked into the job, and spent a good two hours out there in the cool breeze, filling great buckets with grapes and emptying them into a huge trailer behind the John Deere.

We stooped under the sun, doing work with a visible outcome, toward a final product we can taste right now, or wait a few months and taste in another form altogether. The dogs dug for field mice. Brian sang his great big rendition of "Blowin´ In the Wind."

I thought of St. Benedict, whose Rule pretty much codifed monastic life as we know it. He very wisely fitted periods of hard physical work into the monks´ everyday rhythm of prayer, study, eating, and sleeping. "Idleness is the enemy of the soul," he wrote, sometime back in the 6th century. "Therefore, at fixed times each day, the brothers are to be occupied in manual labor." So even the priests and theologians had their turn hoeing the garden, at least in the early days.

Can´t argue with that. And I know that picking grapes clears out the mind almost as well as a long walk does. The worries of the past week went into the bucket with the fruit.

Mountain Goats

It´s official now. The Camino del San Salvador -- pilgrim trail that goes from Leon northward over the Picos de Europa and on to Oviedo – is now my favorite camino.

I walked the last four of this five-day camino this past week, and enjoyed it immensely.

Not that it didn´t try to kill me again. I think the difficulty and danger is part of the reason I like it so much. When you roll into beautiful Oviedo and have that big glass of wine and touch the foot of the Jesus statue in the cathedral, you know you´ve really achieved something. (And my Protestant soul finds it pleasing that Jesus is the star of this show.)

The impact of what you´ve done doesn´t hit you til the train ride back down to Leon: the mountains! The 20-percent grades! The 5,000-foot altitudes! Oooh, I feel downright heroic when I finish up this hike in one piece...

But first, Piers Nicholson.

Piers is a certified character. He wears a halo of wiry white hair. He is an MIT and Oxford-educated entrepreneur who lives in Epsom, England and knows all about rare elements and their industrial applications. He designs and builds latitudinally-correct sundials, is on the board of the British Sundial Society, and maintains almost 100 websites, including the leading sundial information site and a Camino de Santiago photography site that qualifies as one of the oldest and most comprehensive. He the upcoming Master of the Worshipful Company of Tylers and Bricklayers. He is 74 years old, and on Monday night came bounding up the steps of the little pilgrim hostel in Buiza singing “To Be a Pilgrim.”

He bristled and buzzed with electronic gadgets: a mobile phone, a book-reader screen, a Spanish-English translator, two each of GPS navigational units and digital cameras, two battery chargers, and all the related wires and converters. We were in search of The Lost Trail, a four-kilometer piece of Camino that escapes the notice of just about every hiker out of Buiza bound of Poladura de Tercia. Except me. I found it when I walked back in March. So I was enlisted to show the way to Piers, who intends to use his marvelous machinery to map its mysteries.

That is what we did. He stuck close over two days of very tough terrain, very high altitude bushwacking, freezing rain, three nearby lightning strikes, hypothermia symptoms, barbed wire, and a couple of falls. (While shivering inside a stormcloud I saw a miracle occur before my eyes, all around me: the water drops, condensing out of the mist like silver slivers, then blow away downward as ice crystals. Beautiful. And cold as hell!)

Piers took a licking and kept on hiking, at least till, at long last, bedraggled and soaked through, we got down to the highway just south of the Pajares Pass. We split up there. I walked 4 more kilometers down the truck-infested, fog-bound 17-percent grade to the pilgrim hostel. But Piers? No. Piers stuck out his thumb and hitchhiked south, to pick up his rental car.

I am tough. Piers is tough and smart.

At Pajares hostel we met up with Kathy Gower, yet another tough person. She came to us fresh off a flight from her home in San Francisco, California, USA. She said she´d slept on the bus from Madrid, that she´d taken herbal jet-lag pills, that she was just fine to walk on in the morning. And so we did, she and I. (Piers had to go to Burgos in his rental car.) We took the very best path imaginable: down the sunny western side of the Pajares River, all the way to Pola de Lena.

A river path, I thought... low-altitude! We might get our feet wet, but I was ready for a break from the heights. It was not to be, however. This path, like those before, climbs upward and tracks along the faces of the mountains alongside the river, which roars and trickles far down the cliffs below. Woodland paths, sometimes paved with medieval skill, passing through apple orchards and fig trees, cow pastures and tiny stone villages. The sun shone bright all day, the blackberries were ripe and ready for snacking, and we closed each pasture-gate we passed through. It went on for hours, for two days. We drank local cider and ate döner kebab. I got a tetanus shot at the health center in La Pola, where the barbed-wire cuts on my left hand were all the ID I needed to qualify for free treatment. (They didn´t even ask to see ID. I was in and out in five minutes. Viva Socialized Healthcare!)

Kathy and I chatted, but spent plenty of time on our own, too. We petted kittens and donkeys, and chatted with a young evangelical, a forest warden, the bread delivery man, and several lonely old ladies. Most of them offered us water or food or fruit, or the use of their bathroom. I think this is how the Camino Frances was, before the great pilgrim flood overtook the place. It is rarely traveled, tough, and extremely beautiful.

It is too difficult to ever become another Camino Frances, but who knows? It was once rather popular, if legend holds true. Back when pilgrimage was all the rage, in the 13th century or so, travelers to St. James´ tomb in Compostela were lured off the main pathway and northward to Oviedo with the promise of relics from Jesus Christ himself, along with a big collection of assorted teeth, hairs, and bone fragments from a crowd of holy folk. “He who goes to Santiago and skips Oviedo, honors the servant and neglects the master,” the wags used to say.

Nowadays Oviedo sees pilgrims from the Camino del Norte, too, and those embarking on the Camino Primitivo start there – King Alfonso II of Asturias followed that mountainous way west to Compostela, and was the very first Santiago pilgrim on record – thus is his pathway dubbed “the primitive,” or the Original. I must attempt it sometime. I feel if I can survive the Salvador, I can probably thrive on the Primitivo!

But by sheer accident, Kathy and I arrived in Oviedo in time for St. Matthew´s Day festivities. Because we prayed at the cathedral during a certain span of days, we got for free a full remission of all our sins! Almost as nice as a free tetanus shot, eh?

We were too worn-out to stay out late and start running up a new tab. We luckily found a room quite near everything, ate some famous fabada bean stew and some wild-mushroom scrambled eggs, and went straight to bed and to sleep.

We are home again now at the Peaceable, where the roof is now going onto the Hermitage and over by the bodegas the ever-toiling Segundino family is squeezing grapes into wine-making juice. Kathy is up ladders and down trails, always looking for a way to lend a hand. She has been a part of The Peaceable from its very start – she visited here two weeks after we bought the place, and has been a steadfast supporter through all our dark valleys and bright mountain-tops.

She is a fine friend, a great hiker, almost like a sister to me. When she is around, I feel like anything is possible... at least after the aches wear off our ankles and backs!

The Next Big Thing?

I haven´t written in a while because I´ve been thinking.
I´ve been thinking while I stay very busy doing heavy work.
It´s hot here still. We´re in the heart of the dry, brown period of the year, the only couple of months we have when the fields are not green. Everyone´s sneezing from the dust.
In the house are Brian, the handyman from Pittsburgh, and Megan, a pretty couch-surfer from California.
We´ve got the back yard looking as good as a Appalachian-style mud-brick corral can look without recourse to bulldozers.
The outside walls are now resplendent in a coat of fresh ochre.
The woodpile is two layers deep and under cover. The timber pile is sorted-out, and the scrap – boards so studded with nails and spikes, staples and clasps they´d tear the teeth off the chainsaw – is stacked out back waiting for a day calm and cool and damp enough for a bonfire. We spread gravel out there, so when the rain finally arrives we can visit our chickens without wading through gluey mud.
It´s been forever since it rained.
On Monday I meet with Piers Nicholson, a cartographer from the Confraternity of St. James in London, to hike up and waymark the mountain path over the Camino San Salvador. I am praying the rain holds off until we finish.
Brian, meanwhile, is tearing the tiles off the leaky roof over the Hermitage. The waterproofing membrane will be delivered on Monday.
So, of course, for the first time in weeks, the sky to the north is piling up with lead-bellied clouds. A breeze is picking up. I located a massive sheet of black plastic that dates back to the first entry on this blog... the May when we had no roof, the May with unprecedented rainstorms!
I am thinking about those old stories nowadays.
While I´m chatting with the visitors and ordering people around, I am also thinking. I get the usual mind-racket of Tarantino movies and books I want to read, who´s coming over next week, airline ticket prices, currency exchange rates, Una´s medicines, and the latest rant on www.pilgrimage-to-santiago.com.
But late at night when everyone else is sleeping I think about the Torremolinos puzzle, and money, and future security, and how to distribute funds to pay for next year´s maintenance projects.
Most of all, I am thinking about a book.
I want to write a book.
This is a condition that descends on me like a long season. I usually respond to it by editing someone else´s book, or outlining a few good ideas of my own.
I know how to write books. Four of mine were actually published, but they are not anything I´d recommend for light reading. (They are mostly guides to herbal medicines and alternative treatments for specific illnesses.)
And like most people of my persuasion, I have committed a novel.
It´s a camino adventure story, 14th century. It´s been kicking around in some form or another for a good 15 years now, and I believe that by now it is unpublishable.
So I think I (maybe with Paddy) should write something I know. A Peaceable Kingdom book.
It will be great fun. I love writing on a long-term project I can get my teeth into.
So while I saw firewood I slice and dice our experience into topics, chapters, characters, seasons.
Paddy and I discuss. We don´t argue, not yet. But we´re both thinking it.
We have a book here, and we have an audience, too. We just have to get it written.
Once the roofing jobs are done and paid-for, and once the Holy Year hubbub dies down, and if a quiet place and time can be carved-out, and a story arc can be established while we still are living the story. I´ll need an editor. Eventually I will need to find another agent. Perhaps, someday, if the stars align and I meet the Devil at the crossroads at midnight, a publisher!
Or maybe we´ll publish it online.
But I am running way out ahead of myself. (Kim the graphic artist/former shimmering butler, who is herself not above getting ahead of myself, made up the book cover above. It will be hard to live up to!)

This, right now, is the hardest part of all – getting past all the excuses and just starting the work.

Today I re-found a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, one of my favorite poets. It says:

If the angel
deigns to come
it will be because
you have convinced
her, not by tears
but by your humble
resolve to be always
beginning; to be
a beginner.

A Long, Strange Trip

In the past few days Paddy and I have been to the south of Spain and back north again. You can drive from north to south in a day, but it is a killer LONG day. Spain is big. The dogs wanted very much to go, but we said No.

We visited a royal palace on Wednesday, and a harpy´s den on Friday. In between was a lonely Nepalese, a cute little blond boy, a kindly victim of her own generosity, and a tap-dancing squatter. Among and upon us all was El Sol.

The Sun was the biggest player in all the last few days. Everything that is done and not done is due to his supreme zapping power. And down south in Malaga province, he´s as big a hitter as I have ever seen.

We went Wednesday, leaving the Peaceable in the hands of Brian, a house-painter and Pittsburgh native who did a forced-march camino in August, survived, and returned.

We headed out early across the Castilian plains for Aranjuez, just south of Madrid. We got there early afternoon, and drove in circles a while trying to find our hostel. A royal palace and massive manicured gardens tend to play havoc with the flow of traffic and actual real-life humanity.

We have been to Aranjuez twice now, and have never found the palace open. National monuments here can be as hit-or-miss as banks are in the United States. But the gardens and duck ponds and courtyards were open, peppered with charming stone harpies with Belle Epoque hairdos. The grounds and buildings are very symmetrical, and we had moments of Escher-esque weirdness looking down passages and through gateways. And then we discovered the speed-metal bistro with Marilyn Monroe black-light decor and Campari with real soda, from a siphon! And then dinner at a restaurant with the döner kebab Turkish takeout downstairs, and Spanified Indian cuisine up, and the waiter from Nepal who was just dying to be our very best friend forever. And I then parked the car, legally, right outside the door of the hotel. Surreal, all of it.

The next day we drove the rest of the way down, via La Mancha and Grenada, to Malaga and the coast and finally, Torremolinos.

It is hard to write about our trips to Torremolinos without a lot of background. I know most of you are more interested in Moratinos, but sometimes we who live in Moratinos must scurry southward for a time. Part of Paddy´s family lives down there, in a raffish, sunny coastal town akin to Margate or Atlantic City. It´s in Spain, but it´s full of expatriate working-class Brits and Europeans. Its high-rise holiday rental apartments were thrown up practically overnight in the 1960s and 70s, and they were settling into a long, slow decline before The Crisis hit a year ago. Now things are starting to feel desperate.

Pensioners are seeing their monthly checks shrink as the Euro gains strength and the dollar and British pound weaken. Fewer people are taking overseas holidays. Shops and restaurants and closing earlier in the evening or the season, or are leaving town altogether. Wages are down. Beach-view balconies are festooned with "For Sale" signs.

Part of Paddy´s family owns two tiny rental apartments in Torre, bought years ago as “investment property.” We went to see one of the flats. It´s called “Aries Penthouse,” which means it´s on the topmost floor of a five-story, 60´s era complex groovily named for signs of the Zodiac. The hallways are clean, but the tiles are chipped, the lights only have half their bulbs. A full dustpan was left standing in the elevator, going up and down all day along with the tenants.

Like the rest of the apartment doors in the place, Number 512 stands behind a locked iron grill. It was occupied until last June by a scary old harpy called Mary Carmen.

The battered door swung open. The electricity was switched off, so there were no lights but the sunshine through the windows. The smell slipped over my nose and mouth like a clammy hand.

Mary Carmen left everything behind once the locks were changed, including a refrigerator full of food. That was the start of summer, right under the roof, in a beach town. The sun did its worst in that closed-up, un-air-conditioned space. I knew there had to be former cheeses in there, but I did not look. I was afraid there might be a body.

Mary Carmen apparently collected sheets, pillowcases, doilies, scarves, exotic ethnic condiments, single shoes, Portuguese holy cards, textbooks on criminal law, empty cleaning-fluid bottles, maps, magazines, costume jewelry, and ribbons from funeral wreaths, and stacked them willy-nilly into a space intended for two people and minimal belongings. The leaking roof turned the walls and ceiling black and peeled the paint from the walls, but she did not complain. When the toilet broke off the floor, she had someone repair it with a bucket of ready-mix concrete and a large chunk of what might be asphalt. The kitchen shelves and cooker and counter apparently fell to earth years ago, along with the built-in closets and light fittings. But when you owe tens of thousands in back rent, and the sheriff´s eviction notices are layered on the front door, you don´t ask for too much maintenance.

The roof was repaired a few months ago. But what remains is mildew, neglect, and about 16 tons of useless junk.

We came to Torre this week because Paddy and I are considering buying this place. We thought it may be a win-win situation, a way to help ease the load on the family down south, while gaining for ourselves a little bolt-hole, a warm, English-speaking place to curl up in the winter and also provide a beach getaway for family and friends who need a break. But this...? I could feel how hard this was for Jo, the relative who showed it to us. She´s a big-hearted woman, overwhelmed by grasping people, the language, smell, wreckage, and many years of loss.

And the heat. I felt ill. We gathered up a stack of unopened bills, snapped some photos, and fled.

We sat down at a cafe and gathered our wits. We found a builder who will empty out the place next week. (Will he use a shovel, or a fire hose?) Once the walls and floors are visible, then he can determine what work must be done to return the place to habitability.

Then we will decide what to do. Part of me wants to bolt. Another part knows we can´t just leave things this way.

Oh, the tap-dancer is another of the family tenants, the American woman downstairs in Aries. She speaks fluent New Jersey but says that is just because she´s Jewish -- she´s really from California. The cute little boy is Sam, our "Spanish" grandson, a little O´Gara who is very much a two-year-old these days. He rules his family with a sticky lollipop fist, but does it all so charmingly you hardly notice until he´s gone to bed and the silent, cool evening breeze blows across the patio and the wine is poured.

The moon is shockingly bright down there. The sea is lapis blue. The fish-and-chips are tip-top, and we can buy pork and beans, fig newtons, cheddar, dog chewies, Valdepeñas Reserva, and kippers, all kinds of things you can´t find up here in Palencia. Sam is there, and his parents, and his grandma Jo, all of them beloved. And that bright bright sun, so fine in winter, and so utterly smiting and stultifying in September.

We talked it all over on the long drive back, and I think we have a plan.
Next time we go, though, I think we will take the train.