all the little details

From the first, the house has felt familiar and welcoming - from the tiles to the shutters to the huge trees to the flock of feral roosters.

The house is 111 years old, built the same year Portugal saw its first revolution, transitioning from a 700 year old monarchy to a republic. I don't yet know the story of the builders of the house, or even the last owners, who seem to have vacated in the 1970s based on the dates of literally thousands of magazines they left behind, stacked and strewn in an attic room.

No way was I going to carry all those heavy magazines down four flights of stairs; I opened the attic windows with their floor-to-ceiling wooden shutters and tossed the magazines out by the armful and they flapped their way down to the courtyard below. There were hundreds of PC World magazines, which I perused at some length. I too worked in the PC industry, during the 80s and 90s. I often traveled to Europe, at least twice a year and often more - Germany, France, the UK, Italy...it's possible my path crossed that of the man who read these magazines more than forty years ago. It's possible that we sat in the same room at one of the big industry conferences, or wandered the aisles of one of our industry events like Comdex at the same time. How strange that would be, two owners of the same house separated by an ocean and decades not yet lived.

From the first, the house has felt familiar, though that may be simply because it has features of other houses I've owned, this one being sort of a culmination of everything I've liked all under and on top of one roof. Roof pediments, for example, and the ceiling medallions and crown molding and the wooden shutters with anachronistic opening and closing mechanisms - I love all of these details.

Then there's the tile - from the first look at the outdoor patio behind the kitchen, the h and I held hands under the table so the real estate agent on Zoom, gingerly walking around the property in his Italian shoes and filming via iPhone, couldn't see how in love we already were.

There is tile everywhere - some in good shape that we'll keep, some in good shape that we'll repurpose, and some chipped out of the wall by the previous owners or, more likely, thieves that visited the house as it sat empty decade after decade like a genteely aging lady in her finery with only the dust motes as company. Tiles are the artistic pride of Portugal, a case of form following function - tile doesn't rot like wood in the humidity, and traps coolness so that even in the the scorching summers, a house with its shutters closed and floors tiled stays tolerably cool.

Sadly, the kitchen features cool antique tiles that have been removed and can't be replaced - individually hand painted scenes of a farm kitchen, including carrots, a hare, a sheep, an elk, onions, and, weirdly, a roasted pig's head on a platter (an image so macabre I had to borrow it for a modern gothic horror story). Many of these tiles have been chipped off of the wall, so we'll be looking for an artist/tile studio that is willing to try and re-create the tiles.

Our project is more restoration than renovation - the house has walls of stone many feet thick, so knocking them down isn't really a thing. Which is fine by me - I've always preferred to uncover the best a house has to offer, and fit myself into it, than try to build the perfect house around me.

The property features a lot of different types of trees - I could do a whole post on them, and I probably will. Another feature we really like is all the hardscaping - the place is a veritable fortress of walls; since they haven't been cleaned or painted in an age, they make the place seem more ancient and haunted than it really is.

Of course it's not really haunted...but I wasn't so sure for the first week, because of all the unfamiliar sounds. It just *felt* haunted in the way places with no plumbing and electricity can feel - undisturbed by human breath, layers of ancient dust everywhere, and no comforting sounds of civilization - no water running, toilet flushing, music playing, television in the background. In the absence of these sounds, the banging of a loose shutter in the wind, the fluttery sound of a bird frantically seeking a way out of the attic, and the ever present roosters crowing and hens cluck-clucking take awhile getting used to.

Week two in the house was better - we had a generator and vacuum cleaner and a tsunami of bleach, and every surface had been cleaned at least once - when the h announced that he'd have to spend two nights in Lisbon at a hackathon. There isn't a lot to do in the house for relaxation after the sun goes down - with no power, my laptop is only good for about an hour, and I have to conserve my phone battery in case I need to call for help, which leaves me with strapping a headlamp on and scrubbing floors, walls and shutters. Shadows pool darkly in the corners of the room I work in; the nighttime seems to have seeped into the house and fill the empty rooms. When I go to bed I am not too tired to be scared of all the sounds I hear outside, but I am too tired to go look and reassure myself it's nothing but the fat hedgehog we've seen wadding across the courtyard in the moonlight, or the local cat in which case I'd fire a few rocks in its general direction, having stacked a pile by the window.

I don't want to hit the cat, just scare it. I have seen the hens fan out their wings to protect their chicks, and watched them snap their beaks at roosters who got too close, and seen them freeze in place for hours, their chicks huddled out of sight beneath them, waiting for danger to pass, and I don't want a cat around making life harder for them. Though this cat, a black and white youngster, seems to recognize it's no match for any of the roosters on the property. I once came around the corner of a wall to see the cat sitting in a field, stock still. Around it in a loose half circle stood five roosters, also stock still. It was like watching animals play freeze tag; for the five minutes I stood there watching, the roosters and the cat maintained their standoff. Maybe the cat saw the video I saw, where a rooster makes short work of a hawk that tries to steal a chick. Roosters are badass, and keep a close eye on not just the hens, but the property in general - you can't enter the property after dark without raising a conversation amongst the roosters, they are better than watch dogs.

Which of course, is another detail I love, this feral flock of chickens that have lived here so long the people in town feed and water them, and no one ever complains to us about the cockadoodle-dooing that starts at 4:45a and essentially does not stop until about 7p - I guess everyone has just grown used to them, as we finally have.

In the end it's hard to say exactly why we love the house so much, we just do. Some things feel meant to be.

"I feel like I've been here before," I tell the h.

"I know," he says, surprising me. "I feel that too - like your ghost already lives there and we've just joined it."

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