Blue (in) Green and Gold
a jazzy update to life at Quinta dos Galos, Belas Portugal
Last Thursday Alberto came hallooing up the driveway with a bag of rolls for us, a bigger bag of day old bread from his baker friend for the chickens, and a plate of sardines. I made lunch for Rosa and made extra, he said. They were excellent. If you’re American you might be picturing an itty bitty fish that fits in a little rectangular can - yeah, no, these are different. Meaty and salty and delicious. To accompany we had salad from our garden; I made a honey mustard dressing with a local honey we bought at the chocolate fair last month.
Come to dinner for Easter, Albero instructed, and showed us a picture of the beautiful leg of lamb he’d ordered from the butcher. The dinner was marvelous, and we stuffed ourselves with perfectly roasted lamb, new potatoes, salad, and a variety of sobremesa. We arrived bearing gifts - an armful of lilies from the garden, an African violet, some fancy chocolates and two bottles of wine, and departed with a gift - a loaf of sweet bread to bring home, it was baked to look like a golden basket containing two whole hardboiled eggs baked right into the bread.
Work on the property commences at a rapid rate. The Palaceta is now electrified and fully plumbed! It seems like another lifetime ago that we had to pour buckets of water into the toilet in order to “flush” it, back in that first 17 months when there was no running water or electricity, just us in our tent on the second floor. Back then, our first toilet was a bowl with no seat - we didn’t get a seat until our first guest was about to arrive. It’s not that we didn’t think we needed one, it was simply that every single thing we did back in those early days with our rudimentary Portuguese and our unfamiliarity with how to get anywhere to get the many things we needed was an ever present challenge.
Plus, it was difficult to prioritize - yes, we needed a toilet seat but we needed to kill the rats first so they couldn’t get at the food that we had to keep in the cabinet because we had no refrigerator. So I had to get the cabinets prepared and the h had to kill the rats…then we could focus on niceties like toilet seats and rechargeable lights, which couldn’t be purchased until we had a generator to charge them up with. Back then having four candles scattered about the pitch-black house at night felt like a win.
The anteroom to the master bedroom has been re-plastered. I was wondering what we were going to do about those awful walls, with their giant thumb-print divots all over. I guess that kind of textured wall was cool back in the day, but honestly it just made visitors gape in horror, far more so than the holes in the ceiling. Someday it will be an awesome room - it has a fireplace and floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the koi pond and the swaying tops of the bamboo that ring the pond. The windows on the west side of the room overlook the pool.
We picked out the tile for the casita (the cottage) bathroom and I’m excited to see how it will look. I won’t describe it because it sounds weird when I do but I trust my taste and look forward to posting pictures, stay tuned. Next, we’ll select tile for the kitchen, which is less urgent but will be one of the first things we do in this renovation process that is strictly ornamental. Adding beauty to my surroundings fills my soul. At the moment the main way I do that is picking bouquets of wildflowers and scattering them around, despite my allergies.
In chicken news, a sad development: two of I Dream of Jeannie’s pintainhos have passed away. I am flummoxed as to the cause. I found one lying nearly dead next to the roof tiles we use to feed them. Was it trampled? I was able to revive it for a bit but despite my efforts it died in my hands. A day later I noticed one chick seeming lethargic, not joining in the melee that is the normal feedings. I checked it over, it seemed okay. That night for some reason Jeannie chose to sleep on the windowsill and her chicks scrambled to pile under, on top and around her. The slightly lethargic one joined the peep, apparently happy. I closed them in and the next morning only eight emerged for feeding. With trepidation I stuck my head in the coop and saw a pintainho lying dead on the floor beneath the window sill. He’d been dead for awhile, there was no question. I assume he fell from his perch and unable to fly up and rejoin mama and her peep froze to death - pintainhos need to stay pretty warm until they are ready to leave mama, and these are about two weeks away from that.
Sierra is no longer sitting on her babies, electing to roost high with my three little roos. She is also laying again - for a wonder, she is doing it in the nesting box we have in the coop for that reason. Her eggs are much larger than the eggs of I Dream of Jeannie and Betty White. Each hen lays at a rate of about two eggs every three days. We are collecting 9-12 eggs a week now. The baby hens - about ten of them - will be laying by fall and then it will be a real eggstravaganza1 around here. How nice it will be to send our workers, the baker and Alberto home with fresh eggs.
In a relatively rare event I spent an entire day off the quinta, which I am owed as the h took a ten day trip to Costa Rica not too long ago, enjoying temperatures in the 80s while the chickens and I shivered in the last of the winter storms including, memorably, one morning of hail and one night of trees being blown over in the Secret Garden and the Back Forty.
I walked around delighted with the energy of the city; I had a meeting, met up with a friend and went to a cafe, went to a wine bar, and then heard a Miles Davis retrospective at a jazz club. It was a strange experience, hearing Blue in Green in my new life here - the last time I heard this performed live I lived in St. Louis, and was sitting next to my boss Ken who in addition to being a statistician was also a jazz bass guitarist - I guess it’s no coincidence that much of the music he introduced to me sounded a lot like math.
I am a lover of many types of music and while no jazz aficionado I am always up for a new experience so usually accepted his invite to go hear bands I’d never heard of - Bill Frisell and his International Quartet, the Yellowjackets. But it was hearing Blue in Green the first time that opened the doors of jazz for me. Or maybe it wasn’t hearing the music so much as Ken leaning over and repeating a quote by Miles Davis - don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there, a line that to my surprise works as well for writing as it does for music.
As the song played my mind drifted back to the quinta - now that we have acquired a tractor, walking the Back Forty is no longer like being on safari, parting chest high weeds to beat a path. Instead, all is flat green-and-gold stubble, and the trees are much more prominent - there are about a dozen olive trees plus various and assorted others that I have not yet identified, though a couple will be just perfect for swings that will offer a view of the entire village while swinging high into the blue cloud-strewn Portuguese summer sky.
sorry not sorry
Looks like things are moving right along. I guess I take for granted that I can run down the road and pretty much pick up anything I need for the house.
“Suspend to the end.” Hahahaha!
I can’t possibly love your updates more!