Another Beautiful Update

sexy beasts

An Italian Affair

Today is a big day on Quinta dos Galos, we took delivery of a tractor, a fancy red Italian job that comes with many important-looking attachments. A fazenheiro amigo from Puerto Rico helped negotiate for a wholesale price during a visit in February. The delivery, demonstration of how to use the front loader, flail mower, rotary tiller, and various other attachments (all of them glowing red and orange as if with pent-up energy to get GOING), driving it up Olive Tree Lane, making the hairpin turn to the Back 40, moving construction materials around, mowing down the chest high weeds, and driving it back down to the driveway took most of the morning and involved the kind of crowd of men that one is accustomed to seeing if one has spent time on farms. It is a 55hp machine, the perfect size everyone agreed for a property of 5 acres.

It’s a hazy day, rain in the forecast later in the afternoon. Despite the overcast skies it is hot; I brought out a pitcher of water (I bought the pitcher at the local co-op), a ramekin full of Alberto’s lemons, sliced, and a plate of dried fruit and biscoitos for the menfolk.

Everyone shouted their obrigados over the roar of the tractor. The atmosphere was jolly. The tractor looks as shiny, sleek and sporty as a race car among the ancient muros of the quinta. Jake followed the tractor up Lower Olive Tree Lane barking happily that he, too, is one of the guys. He was mad when I made him come inside with the womenfolk (me). I don’t yet know the Portuguese word for tractor but I’m going to be calling it a machina beleza for the foreseeable future.

The roosters were disturbed by the tractor goings on, and called back and forth incessantly. Maybe they saw the red machine with it’s mechanical “tail” and felt threatened. Giant red rooster alert! they warned. But I’m still the prettiest, they yelled. No, I am! I’m the biggest! I’m the best! Faux fights broke out in the driveway. everywhere you looked a galo perched on a wall, watching the goings on and giving his full-throated opinion. All in all, a very noisy morning on the quinta.

One man’s trash

Here in Beautiful when you have something you don’t want anymore - a suitcase, a chair, discarded tricycles, vinyl flooring - you put it next to the dumpster, so people depositing *their* trash can pick up *your* trash and take it home. I’ve left dishes, pergo flooring, drywall, a tattered armchair - all of these things disappeared within 24 hours of me abandoning them to their fate.

I have been known to carry home chairs that look to be in good condition. We have a building that as of now has no roof but at some point will be fixed up to act as a conference center for groups of writers and software teams. It will need lots of chairs, as will the future Jacaranda garden where we are putting a stage in the corner, for readings, musical performances, maybe weddings. Whenever we find a good wooden chair next to a dumpster we carry it home, sand it and paint it. We’ve accumulated maybe a dozen chairs of various styles this way.

In the past couple of weeks we’ve also acquired a small three-legged mid-century modern table that just needs a little love and a footstool that will look just fine when I repaint it and replace the tatty pink fabric with something amazing - I’m thinking apple green velvet. I found both of these items while taking Jake for his late night walk. During these walks I often talk to my sister in farway Illinois, she has a long commute to her job in Missouri so it works out perfectly, she can crab about her boss - who is maybe a nice person when at home in her jam-jams but tends to be by turns an utterly absentee manager or overbearing control freak in the office - or I can tell her the latest news at Quinta dos Galos. She reads this newsletter but she’s my sis so also privvy to the parts of the story not (yet) being told for public consumption, of which there’s a lot, or, maybe it’s just one thing, but with many tentacles reaching into all areas of my life.

I must be a funny sight to the locals, walking along with my elderly dog in his mosey mode (no matter how long Jake has been out walking he is never, ever in a hurry to get home, and as soon as he has detected that we are homeward bound his normally jaunty pace slows to a senior citizen crawl), me with my airpods hidden by my hair so apparently chatting to no one, a piece of furniture balanced on my head or toted in front of me like a baby bjorn for mobilario moveis (mobile furniture).

the space under this window was once a giant hole where the orphan chicks liked to play

Palaceta improvements

When the workers began working in the palaceta they were flummoxed where to start, as every room featured a unique disaster. the lving and dining rooms had giant holes in the ceiling and floors. The bedroom had a bizarre plaster job that looked like a baby with giant fingers make finger prints in the just-plastered walls. I guess it was a trendy look back in the day but it just looks like a heinous mistake now. Windows were missing, the storage areas on the top floor not yet emptied of the junk left behind - ugly chairs, cheap furniture, piles of magazines and other detritus. The concrete walls crumbling where beautiful custom make tiles had been chipped away to be sold in the markets in Cascais.

Start with the roof, the h told Tiago and his crew. The incredibly rainy winter meant the quality and durability of their repairs was tested and retested, early and often. At last we achieved a dry indoors, even as the final inverno temporal, Senhor Martinho, howled through the village, felling trees and branches and collapsing walls. The house is now electrified, though only with bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling in each room. The whole place smells of dust, but that smell is actually pleasant compared to the smell of old rotting wood and perpetually wet plaster that has permeated the place for decades.

Best of all the there are no more dark, jagged gaping mouths in the ceilings and floors. I hated those holes, and not just because the rainwater would pour down during particularly bad storms. They were suggestive, those holes, maybe because without electricity they became yawning dark maws at night, never fully illuminated by the candles flickering on the floor. I was always expecting to see the pale, blind face of an inhabitant of the Upside Down peering down at me before pulling back quickly and making me onder, was I imagining things? and yet also never able to fully dismiss what I thought I saw.

Pintainhos!

The little chicks are growing fast. Sierra is less mistrusting of me, and I can touch her while she eats sometimes. The chicks are hilarious when I arrive for lunch - there are two sets in adjacent chicken runs, and they crowd near the chicken wire doorway and bop up and down excitedly, trampling each other and fluttering up and down in their mania for LUNCH!!!! I show up every day at more or less the same time but you’d think that they have been brutally starved, so excited are they at the sight of me coming toward them with their buckets of feed.

People think chickens are dumb but they are definitely not, they are just very cautious, and sometimes that extreme anxiety can make them seem stupid (a phenomenon that is not at all unique to chickens). For example if I open the gate and a chick shoots out into the courtyard and then I put the food in the run, the chick in the courtyard often gets trapped behind the door and frantically throws itself against the chickenwire fencing toward its mama and siblings who are chowing down with a zeal that is easily the match of a. pride of lions savaging a zebra on the veldt, though rather more cute sounding. If I try to pick the errant chick up it will zoom away in terror, convinced a new era of privation has begun - food denied, outcast from the flock, giant predators grabbing at it…when I successfully herd it back to its run, it will eat very fast and I will wait a few minutes then put my hand over its trembling little back, warming it until it calms down. I know, little one, I tell it. It’s hard to be the low man on the food chain, the anxiety is never ending. I got you.

Every day when I show up with the food Jeannie lets me know she wants OUT of the run. She sees the green grass and ervas daninhas (aka weeds) sprouting between the calcadas in the coop courtyard and wants to graze. She is our sole domesticated hen, and allows us to pick her up at will, and will often sit on our lap for a half hour, dozing in the sun. She has never lived outside, not since her eighth day of life when her mama, Stella and six of her peeplings were murdered by a fox. She lived first in a makeshift incubator - a cardboard box with a warmer; then a rabbit hutch with a warmer, from which she graduated to have free reign (along with Chaz, Yella and Han Solo) of the entire palaceta. She and her fellow orphans spent a lot of time sitting in a patch of sun on the couch in what will someday be the palaceta dining room; as they grew larger they wandered the entire house, eating up all my strands of onions in the pantry (and oh god their breath during that period), rummaging through the trays of potatoes in the cool dark cellar, and perching on the barbell on the weight bench in the future master bedroom on the second story, where they could gaze out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the tall bamboo that encircles the koi pond. Twice a day we let them out into the jardim de palaceta , where they devoured my hydrangea, sunflowers and petunias, dug themselves holes in the dirt and then drowsed in the sun with their feet sticking out in front of them. I am totally annoyed that chickens prefer to eat beautiful cultivated flowers, and not the stinging nettle, thistle and other weeds that grow so plentifully and rapidly under the hot Portuguese sun that to skip even one week of weeding is to invite a level of chaos into your garden that will take hours and hours of weeding and tilling to undo.

Sierra, who is a wild hen that hates the h forever for capturing her and bringing her into the coop, is, in marked contrast to Jeannie, quite content in her new home and never tries to escape. She is a year older than Jeannie, and wiser in the difficult ways of the wild world. She warns her chicks away from me when I arrive with the food, but otherwise appears to enjoy the trade off of free ranging with the utter safety of sleeping at night with a roof over her head, secure from predators, fed twice a day, never having to compete with other roosters or hens for that food, and never having to find herself buried under a melee of roosters, her outraged squawking ignored until the h or I wades in and kicks the pile of roosters away from her. Occasionally the little roos will chase her around trying to mount her but she deftly evades them and sometimes even chases them in turn, her chicks following her so that it looks like Han and Chaz and Yella are French nobles fleeing from the peasants who have breached the palace walls. Ha ha you guys DESERVE that, I tell them. I love them but not when they are horndogging my hens.

As Meninas e Flores

Yesterday Catia, Tiago’s wife, and their three girls stopped by. It was the end of the school semester. I love to see the girls, especially by BFF Ines. I took them to see the baby chicks. Sierra’s pintainhos were running about in their run, but the run for I Dream of Jeannie and her peep was empty. We stepped into her side of the coop and found the ten babies standing quietly around, as if waiting for the appetizers to start circulating at a cocktail party.

Where is your mama? I asked them as they milled around anxiously. I heard a warbling high up and there was Jeannie sitting on the window sill in a shaft of sunlight. I petted her and she made some sounds, as if explaining she was indisposed. Then she stood and hopped down, leaving a pinkish egg on the sill like a magic trick. It was warm to the touch. I picked up a baby and the girls all datinly petted it with a single finger but only Ines was brave enough to hold one. I understood the reluctance, they are such tiny scraps of life, our human hands looks so clumsy and murderous next to their fuzzy vulnerability. Many of Jeannie’s chicks still have down all over them, which combined with the feathers coming in makes them look like they have a bad case of static electricity.

We toured around the cottage, which was a ruin the last time they saw it during our first ever party held primavera passada. Now it is cozy and neat, awaiting only new bathroom fixtures, tile, and light fixtures to be complete. We checked out the pool (ooh la la, Catia said) and I expressed my hope that the girls will each hold pool parties here for their birthdays or just because they are girls. I look forward to the sound of kids screaming and splashing, it is one of the best sounds of summer. My family had an above ground pool growing up - nothing so fancy as the enormous piscina behind the palaceta with its ten foot deep deep end; ours was just five feet across but we crowded into it every day with our friends, playing endless games of Marco Polo and challenging each other to breath-holding contests, or sitting on the bottom of the pool cross-legged with our hair floating upward and pretending to have a tea party, and trying to have underwater conversations. Didja hear me, we’d gasp, water pouring off our faces as we surfaced. I said “Would you like some tea?”

Eventually we outgrew that pool, preferring to go to Turner’s, the public swimming pool on the other side of town. Dad took the pool down, I think I remember him giving it to a neighbor. The brown circle of dead grass where the pool had been remained there for years. I read not too long ago that Turner’s was closing soon, or perhaps it is already closed; the article said the city was unable to afford the upkeep. I spent many long hot afternoons there tanning, swimming laps, practicing my back flip off the high dive, or eating an ice cream sandwich on the shady hillside and watching the swimmers in the chlorine-scented distance.

The Back 40 is tall with weeds and littered with dog poop courtesy of neighbors who continue to sneak onto the land to walk their dogs. I don’t blame them; the land has been vacant for decades, and it’s the most convenient green space for the apartment dwellers that ring three sides of the Back 40. When I see someone back there I always introduce myself and ask them to use a doggie bag, but it doesn’t seem to have reduced the number of piles that are often right in the middle of the path. This irritates the heck out of Tiago, who wants to put the tractor to use immediately to rebuild the wall and fencing around the back of the property, and put an end to the trespassing. I rather like the idea of my neighbors walking their dogs on our land, but if they can’t clean up after their dogs, I guess we’re going to have to do the awful thing and take away everyone’s privilege because a few rude people are too lazy to pick up after their dogs (oh my god I have become my mother). I hate being the bad guy but it is pretty gross, the amount of poo that has collected in the Back 40. When the girls and I picked wildflowers - tiny irises, snap dragons, margaritas and black-eyed Susans - Catia’s cautionary cuidado! to her girls rang out constantly.

Os meninos, de novo

Those boys are back, the h said. A few months ago some little boys (ages 9 to 11, I am guessing) were descending from the Back 40 and standing around on Upper Olive Tree Lane. I think they were chasing a rooster; they were most definitely not expecting to be chased by the h, and as they ran through the adjacent bairro they shrieked to each other, but also laughing, and the clear leader, that scamp, turned to the h and make a praying gesture before racing home. The h came home annoyed, but couldn’t help smiling. They weren’t hurting anything, after all. The trespassing adults letting their dogs crap without picking it up even after being asked nicely are far worse if you ask me.

So like I said a few months have passed and the h happened to be in the cottage doing some cleaning and heard voices close by - too close, meaning, someone(s) had descended from the pinch point of the Back 40 where a gate will soon stand. The h figured that by the sound of them, they were standing just above the old stone staircase (that is clearly marked Privado) just above the cottage and the lived-in portion of the property. The h stepped outside and beheld the same three boys who, upon espying the h, turned tail and ran away, shrieking and laughing. The h whipped out his phone to take a photo but they were too young and fast, and the h only captured a video of their backs as they galloped away. But the ringleader, that scampiest of scamps, can be seen flashing the peace sign as they flee, as if to say Nos somos so meninos com curiosidade, desculpe! (we are only curious boys, sorry!!)

The h - who is old to their young eyes but nonetheless still an elite athlete - gave chase just to add a thrill to their day, and when neighbor windows opened with a bang to see what the commotion was about he stood in the street, hands on hips, theatrically looking for the boys who could be heard playing futebol and laughing on their playground (a sound just as joyful as kids at the pool) just steps away from the Back 40.