Fall, again

Fall feels especially fall-y in Portugal

Outside the wind blows in powerful gusts. The Monterey pine drops fistfuls of pinecones onto the roof of the garden apartment, a sound exactly like the sound the roosters make when they go tak tak taking across. We spend our days outside as much as possible, all of us, humans passing dog and rooster on this road or that stone staircase. The little salamanders that live in the muros that line the property pulse, spreadeagle, in the sun. The days are long and cool and beautiful.

There is still no sign of the oven. Email updates stated it had been delivered; the h, after many tries, finally spoke to a human in oven customer service, letting them know the oven may have been delivered just not to us. Oh, laughed the oven customer service lady. That oven was not delivered. It's August! she said, as if that explained everything - which, in Europe, it actually does. Now what, the h asks her. The oven lady says not to worry, just to wait, so we do.

The h brought in a final raft of tomatoes. Tonight I’ll harvest the last of the lettuce and make a warm red pepper and goat cheese salad.

The newly painted walls and gates stand out crisp in the autumnal air. Everything looks fallow - the weeds mowed to a stubble, the false lavender and geraniums in the garden wearing the last shreds of summer color. The petunias, of course, have been stripped naked by the merciless henlets. Only the sunflowers look in season, though we can’t really enjoy their color - they stand with their backs to the house, their bright yellow faces turned toward the sun.

The municipality is finishing up the road work, last night the avenida was supposed to be open only to local traffic but a few folks figured out the barricade is no longer at each end of the street, and tested the freshly repaved road. Judging by the way they took the corners, the newly smooth surface appears to be having the unintended consequence of making it much easier and more pleasant to speed. Still the road is pretty, if such a thing can be said of a road - wide and smooth and unscarred, it wends through the heart of the village, opening to a straightaway as it passes our property and into neighboring Idanha then narrowing again as it winds its way between ancient walls into the rural countryside.

finishing up the repaving in front of our property

Yesterday I felt something hit my arm. I looked down and it was a grasshopper so green I had to squint a little. An orangey leaf drifted down to rest next to it on my sleeve, a perfect little tableau of fall on my mustard-colored sweatshirt.

The olive trees rustle in the wind, in the fall sunshine they seem to almost glow with an inner silvery green light. They are so bushy with health, it’s hard to believe they were pruned back to agonized stumps just a few short months ago. See? the h keeps saying.

Somewhere on the property an owl makes its enquiries. Jake sleeps longer and better in the cooler temps, either spending a few hours each night on the patio in the windy dark, or lying at the foot of the bed below the open window. I like falling asleep to the sound of the wind in the trees, a sound from my childhood. Then, I listened to the far off sound of trains in the distance; now, it is the call of roosters that fills the night.

There is still so much work to do. Tiago has been a ball of energy, juggling tasks as effortlessly as those plate spinners you see every once in a while, keeping hundreds of plates going at once. Today he cleaned up the pile of broken arms (i.e. branches of the plum trees the h pruned and yes it’s a Heart of Darkness metaphor so what) in the quinta upper garden; in the middle, he took a break to re-located the outlets in one of the garden apartment rooms. Then when he saw we were going to the store with our backpacks he *ran home to get his car so we could drive to the store*. He was so insistent it would have been rude not to accept though we felt bad taking him away from the umpteen things he had going on. It is no problem, do you understand, he says to me with a grin. “Do you understand” is one of his verbal fingerprints, a pure reflection of his personality - responsible, conscientious, direct, self-aware. We are so lucky to have him as a worker but even more fortunate to call him a friend.

While the walls of the cottage are drying, Gianni the craftsman finished muro repairs including the wall that borders the campo. He made it look smooth and effortless and we walked over to admire it. You can see he’s an expert, the h murmured. You could, too, just by the way he wields his tools - quick, smooth, sure. Gianni noted with a combination of Portuguese words and finger counting that he’s been doing stone work more than 30 years.

Soon all the walls of the property visible from the street will be resplendent - repaired and repainted.  The new path that now runs south of the fruit orchard is complete - a canal of fine white stones separating the fruit orchard from what will become hydrangea gardens, when we get them planted. The south-facing walls get indirect sunlight all day long, and the chickens don’t tend to hang out there much. The hydrangea in the garden one level below - an area with the same light and soil type - was going gangbusters, even producing two dusty pink pom poms of blooms its first season, until the flock re-discovered it. Now it’s a shadow of its former self but I’m sanguine - winter is coming, the rains will keep the flock away from the kitchen garden and the hydrangea will have a chance to re-establish itself.

This week a pool company came out to have a look at the enormous pool that yawns empty behind the house. If you don’t want that deep end, the pool guy said, you can fill it partway; a pool within a pool. Jake prances and barks, showing off for the workmen. I can swim! he boasts. Just fill the pool and watch me!

It’s been so windy, it whistles through the cracks around the old windows in the palaceta, pushing open the door where the henlets sleep so that when I arrive in the morning, it’s never certain where I will find them. Sometimes they have found their way to the second story where they like to roost in a shaft of sunlight on the bench press bar and stare out at the Secret Garden.

More often lately it’s been the pantry where, unbeknownst to me the h had knotted together some onions and hung them on the side of a baker’s rack, which was in easy reach for the hens if they stood on a plastic container that holds pasta, which they did.

So that’s what that funny smell has been, I say to the h.

Oh yeah, he confirms, They have onion breath, onion feet, onion feathers.

Alberto is back from his feiras. Did you have a nice time, I ask him and he grimaces. Tooth pain and stomach pain were his constant companions, it seems. I am sorry to hear it; he is a man of such tremendous energy, its difficult to see his light dimmed in any way. He is on antibiotics, he assures me, and later waves to us from the top of the wall bordering his horta, resting his elbow on his earth tiller. We wave back; Jake woofs. He has been exceptionally happy this week with the return of his constant compadres Tiago and Alberto. Jake has always been one of the boys, everywhere he goes making effortless friends with all delivery truck drivers, motorcyclists and men working in garages.

Yesterday during the henlet’s daily constitutional in the garden Alphonse wandered by. Usually he minds his own business but the h and I both noted how he walked in a peculiar head-down way, arrowing straight for Yella Amarela, who he attempted to seduce, rooster-style, grabbing her neck in his beak and mounting her. Before he could get any further the h got up in his feathery face and since then Alphonse has kept his distance, not even trying to score extras from me during this morning’s feeding.

I am DISAPPOINTED, I hiss at him. He saunters away.

Yella was none the worse, innocently eating petunias. I feel a fierce need to protect these four little henlets who so narrowly escaped the fate of their mamas. They are the start of a new generation of the flock, we are moving from the days of suspicious, vulnerable creatures, wild and tree-roosting, to a domesticated little community, trusting and free ranging during the day, safe and coop-occupying at night, no chicken ever wet again or cold again or hungry again, no whole peeps’ worth of pintainhos ever lost again.

The roosters are molting and I keep finding their emerald and sapphire tail feathers everywhere, like a Mardi Gras parade passed through during the night. I remember waking last night and hearing a chorus of roosters carried on the wind and, thinking it was a dream, drifted back to sleep.