Adjusting nicely

chicks growing, Jake staying, AC working, language understanding

We are in the dog days of August. Today at 10a it is 85 degrees Fahrenheit with an expected high of 95 later this afternoon. Jake lays in the deep shade of the quinta courtyard. The roosters of the eastern flock were leery of him at first but now will saunter up to his dog bowl and drink from it then sit in the dirt next to him, dog and roosters rising every now and again to scratch out more dirt for a deeper, cooler hole.

Being able to look out any window of the quinta to see the garden is a delight that has not dimmed. I don’t know how Jake feels about the garden views but I think he likes not having to navigate the steep staircase at the palaceta each morning when he has to go out and do his business. At the quinta, he just walks out the door and he’s on huge shady patio with a two-level garden just steps away.

So far he has not been tempted to go on walkabout, though with his new residence at the quinta he is literally steps away from the road that leads to the Back 40 and off the property. There is a pinch point there, where the towering Monterey pine is less than ten feet from the long stone muro that lines Olive Tree Road. On walkabouts past Jake has sauntered through this portal to freedom, but for some reason now that he is only steps away from the portal he does not choose to cross this heretofore irresistible threshold. We could easily install a gate there, to keep Jake at the front of the property. The guys, having already built and installed five gates and repaired three others (and for just this purpose, to contain Jake) wouldn’t mind building and installing another.

I’m deciding to trust you, I tell Jake. For now.

And my sweet Jake has proved his trustworthiness though true to form on his terms, in his own good time. One day I checked the patio just minutes after letting him out and he was not there. I went outside, checked the upper and lower quinta garden, then up the steps looking up and down Olive Tree Lane. No Jake. I even walked up the lane to the space that will someday be the Jacaranda Garden - no Jake.

Oh no, I thought. But I breathed deeply and took a moment to admire the view of the village from atop the hill. The morning sun lay yellow on the landscape like a coat of paint, the tile roofs lit up like orange embers.

Then I decided to just go back to the quinta and continue with my morning and trust him to show up.

Which he did! This happened a few more times over the course of three weeks. It was the h who broke the mystery of where Jake is going.

I was looking out the back window, and he passed by, the h said. He watched as Jake moseyed along the new walkway that edges the quinta gardens, down the steps through the fig trees and into the campo.

He’s been going to the campo to do his morning business, the h said. Then sniffing around I guess.

Sure enough, twenty minutes later Jake came ambling up lower Olive Tree Lane and to the back door. I’m sure he first checked the driveway in case any of his friends (Tiago, Paulo, Alberto) were arriving and needed to be greeted. Then, like a good boy, he returned to the quinta.

You could suppose that it’s just too hot to play escape artist but that’s not the case - Jake is always up for a walk, any time of day or night - this picture of him waiting for me to take him on his daily village walk was taken just this morning. He has never and will never say no to a walk - that would be like saying no to possibility itself. Jake likes to sleep but he likes to visit friends, scan the news left by other dogs, and leave some messages around town even more. And yet, rather than take liberties and go see them himself (he definitely knows the way) he waits for me, his back turned to the tempting portal.

Good boy, I tell him. Bom rapaz!

Walking over to the palaceta to take care of the orphan hens is like walking into the past. Already it seems like years and not weeks ago that we lived there among the raw wooden floors, dirty walls with strips of ancient wallpaper clinging to them, black holes in the floors and ceilings.

The palaceta smells of chickens - not chicken, mind you, but chickens - because half the double living room has been commandeered for an orphan hen nursery. We don’t mind the smell - it’s nice to be greeted by four excited little hens every morning. Yesterday I found a picture of Princess Leia the day we rescued her, an itty bitty puffball about 5 days old. For most of the first months of her life she stood on my shoulder behind my right ear, under the wing of my hair. Most people never even noticed her little yellow feet sticking out. Now she’s taller than my head if she stands on my shoulder, which she still tries to do before settling for my thigh or arm.

The h dropped Sophia and Tasan at the train station to go explore Sintra, then headed straight to Leroy Merlin, every Portuguese home renovator’s home away from home. An hour and a half later the phone rings, it’s the h. I think I locked the keys in the car, he said. He ended up taking a Bolt home, not feeling up to explaining to the Leroy Merlin people that the car might be there after closing time because the keys were trapped in the trunk. I didn’t blame him, recalling as I am sure he was the time we were at Leroy Merlin back in our first month in Portugal and an “English speaking” cashier was brought to the register to answer our question (do you have camping gas?) He was so confident yet unintelligible that at one point the h leaned over and whispered Is he speaking English? He was, bless him - just not in a way we could understand. I could empathize.

It’s times like these I really feel our foreigner status - what is an irritation in the US that can be easily solved with a call to triple A became a half day odyssey of phone calls in broken Portuguish. In the end we figured a call from Tiago would be faster and more efficient with a better ending for the car and all involved - a Portuguese contractor asking a favor from a store that made a lot of money catering to contractors. The car was retrieved courtesy of a spare set; the lost keys were discovered the next day, inside Leroy’s where the h had dropped or set them down and some kind soul turned them in.

Jake has been delighted to see Sophia and Tasan and each morning he has trekked over to the palaceta to sit in the courtyard waiting for them to emerge, then notifying the neighborhood with his booming bom dia bark. He was especially delighted at the extra food coming his way in the form of leftovers from restaurant meals and a doubling from two to four the number of people available to beg treats from. After three weeks he is adjusting well to life in the quinta - I think he’s happy not to have to share his meals with four irritating little hens who won’t stop standing on the edge of his food bowl darting their beaks in to steal blueberries. Having air conditioning to retreat to during the high heat of the day is also a plus.

This week we are making some final patches on the walls of the coop, and the h will install a couple more roost bars. And sometime soon after that - maybe late September - we will release our orphan hens to start their lives as members of the flock, scratching around the chicken courtyard during the day and sleeping in the coop at night. I don’t know how I’m going to manage letting these hens run around living their best chicken life without worrying to death about cats and rats and foxes.

And roosters! Just today while the girls were enjoying their daily outing in the front courtyard and garden, scratching about and pecking at the small green shoots of weeds pushing up between the calcadas, an older rooster suddenly broke from the cover of the Secret Garden and went straight for Leia, his head thrust forward in an attitude of almost predatory interest. The h moved to block the rooster’s path, but roosters are masters of the feint and he was no exception, leaving the h spinning while he gave chase again, Leia squawking in surprise and indignation.

I picked her up and held her against my chest while I gave the rooster - one of the anonymous members of the Italian gang - a firm kick on his feather duster butt. He screamed like a giant baby and ran off into the Secret Garden with the rest of the gang. Notice his markings, I barked at the h. When Ana’s friends ask if they can buy a rooster, he’s #2 on the list, right after Taylor Dane.

The h continues to push all manner of projects forward - installing a sink with a tap in the bathroom was the biggest, allowing us for the first time since moving here to actually wash our faces and brush our teeth indoors. He found the sink and pedestal right here on the property, back behind the cottage amid the some mattresses and other detritus. They were filthy and looked ready for the junk pile but a closer inspection showed no chips or cracks in the porcelain, and once cleaned up look indistinguishable from new. Best of all the space for the sink is quite small, and the found sink fits in it as though designed for it.

Last night, still suffering jet lag, I worked at my computer until 3a. When I was ready to turn in it felt like a small miracle to wash my face and hands and brush my teeth without having to make a jarring trip outside, putting on waterproof shoes and strapping on a headlamp to pick my way through a pitch black house (making sure I put something in the door jamb so it doesn’t blow shut and lock me out) then perform my ablutions whipped by wind and drenched by a leaky hose.

While our workers are on vacation they left us their car and work truck, so we’ve had the use of a vehicle for a couple of weeks now. It is absolute heaven to go to the store and pick out all the heavy things we want, not even telling the h to take it easy in the juice aisle, knowing we don’t have to haul it all home in backpacks.

We have been blessedly free of the sound of Jake waking us up in the middle of the night panting - back at the palaceta in the tent that sound only happened during especially warm nights and always signaled that he needed to do his business, or that dog barfing may soon commence. Whenever Jake’s panting engine fired up it meant one of us needed to get up to light his way down the steps and escort him outside, then wait for him to do his business. Sometimes he’d finish and just flop on the cool limestone calcadas of the courtyard for awhile. I’d drift to sleep sitting on the front porch steps, listening to the wind rattling the palm branches high above me, then wake with a jerk only to find I was now alone in the courtyard with the moonlight, Jake having gone back inside.

The other two bedrooms in the quinta are crowded with paint cans and worksite materials - until recently this garden apartment we are now sleeping in has been the main worksite for the property. Today we’ll move all these materials to the upstairs apartment preparatory to finishing painting the lower unit. This is work we reserve for the absolute heart of the heat of the day.

When we arrived here a year ago I felt foreign even to myself; I understood very little spoken Portuguese, and it seemed everywhere we turned we were faced with critical, complex tasks with no clear starting point. The title to Robert Heinlein’s book kept occurring to me, stranger in a strange land. But day by day, we figured it out - how to get hot showers before we had electricity, where were the closest laundromats, how to become ‘members’ of the Continente (supermarket) ‘club’ and get an additional 15% off everything in the store, how to arrange for the municipality to carry all of our dead tree limbs away, how to burn brush according to the fire codes… the list grows by the day, week, month. We’ve identified the futebol team closest to us - Amadora - and I’ve adopted them as my home team and can sing their anthem em Portugues, thanks very much (the h is a Sporting man). As fandoms go it’s going to be a rough one based on the two games we’ve watched - in one, the second string goalie was so uniquely terrible that I sometimes find myself remembering his (entirely self-inflicted) humiliation and wonder how his mental health is these days.

Fast forward a year and we are walking into Leroy Merlin and the h accidentally strides through a checkout lane. O Senhor! they call, but the h keeps going, oblivious. Or so it seems. Later when I tell him he admits he knew they were calling him but no way was he going back just to walk around the counter and re-enter the store. Well look who moved from ‘elaborately anxious not to break the rules’ phase to ‘not all the rules apply to me’ phase, I observed, but the h was way ahead of me again and didn’t hear.

It’s true we are feeling much more confident navigating daily life. Most of that is having friends readily available to help us read messages, get answers, and clarify requests, etc. And part of it is simple nutrition; when we first arrived we had no refrigeration and no electricity so we ate out at restaurants or something we could make on the camp stove, like oatmeal or rice. Sometimes after a long day of physical work all we’d have were a can of sardines and saltines with remnants of a bottle of wine. Once we got a generator, we’d make a big meal once a day - something simple like spaghetti, that guaranteed easy leftovers. But now, with the freedom of a burner, convection oven and grill, we are cooking our greatest hits again - soy ginger garlic shrimp over rice, curried carrot fries, roasted cauliflower, fried green tomato sandwiches with pesto and parmesan, blackened broccoli stir fry. At the moment I have chicken broth simmering on the burner; later, the h will make a soup out of the largish butternut squash harvested yesterday - longtime rituals that have all the elements they’ve always had, but now performed in a different country, and we grew all the veggies ourselves.

Knowing the language better is also a confidence booster. Eavesdropping on conversations at Leroy Merlin, I was delighted to find that I could pick up ~40% of everything I overheard. I still make speaking mistakes all the time, even when I shouldn’t - the other day I re-introduced Sophia to the churrasqueria owners and referred to her as my irma (sister) instead of my filha (daughter). Despite my errors, I no longer tighten up when listening to a native speaker speaking rapidly. Yesterday when Paulo came to the door to drop off the car keys, I was proud when I said Boa tarde Paulo! Tudo bem? Tem Boas feiras? There was a time he would back away from me when I tried to speak Portuguese to him, trying unsuccessfully not to look panicky. This time he grinned and answered immediately Sim, sim boas ferias, ‘brigado.

He understood me, I said to the h. HE UNDERSTOOD ME!

Sophia and Tasan departed on Wednesday afternoon headed for Helsinki to visit a family friend for four days, then returning to the US and their lives as new college graduates figuring out what comes next. Before their Uber picked them up we had watermelon from the garden. The h sniffed a little as we walked up the driveway after seeing them off. I put my arm around him. He loves his girls.

As I write the washer, air conditioner, dehumidifier, and the dishwasher murmur their sounds of modernity in the background. It’s not as pretty as birdsong or as elegiac as the sound of the crickets singing from the end of August about the end of summer, but for the moment they sound almost beautiful.