Fog
It is foggy and the temp is colder inside than out. And wet! The ground is wet, the air is wet, the trees are wet and drip moisture on you even when it’s not raining. The word humido fits perfectly.
The fog (uma neblina) is just like the fog when I moved to San Francisco, and the same temperature too. Then, I lived in a hundred plus year old house on a busy street, a major west-to-east artery of morning traffic. At one point it was a wharfsman’s house, each room of our house plumbed with its own sink, sailors renting the rooms while they were ashore.
Now, I also live in a 100+ year old house on a major artery, this time to Lisbon instead of San Francisco, the house surrounded by five acres of gardens, trees and other houses, all with courtryards like someone’s dream of old Europe. There is a row of olive trees that marches up the rua to the quinta, another row marching up the road that winds from the quinta to the cottage.
There are orange lemon tangerine and lime trees. There are most especially fig trees, enormous hulking things. There are persimmon, pomegranate, and almond trees. There is a medieval plane tree, and a Monterey Pine which wears a great spreading halo of green lofting high above the quinta (aka the guest house). There are also loquat plum trees, palm trees, and even a eucalyptus tree like the unending line of them going down Lover’s Lane in the Presidio in San Francisco where we lived for ten years, the place my dog Jake lived the entirety of his life until he moved here, where he will live the rest of it.
Jake likes it here. There are sunny courtyards to nap in and lots of space to roam. Although after wandering the entire four acre length of the property, then continuing along for another whole kilometer all the way to where the highways intersect near the grocery store and almost causing me a heart attack, he now roams at the end of four hooked-together leashes. He can go from porch to courtyard to sun to shade and get water in that radius, and he is satisfied if not completely happy. Jake likes to be free as a matter of principle. You can trust me, his dignified gaze says.
“What if I close the front gate,” asks Tiago, one of the workers we’ve been blessed to hook up with. He’s more like a general contractor of everything, a person I see and speak to every day. Today he remarked that my Portuguese is much faster now, and my accent is now proper Portuguese rather than Brazilian. It’s true that when he drove me and my friend Linda back and forth from the supermarket, I didn’t have to ask him to repeat himself very often, and every time he says “do you understand” I have been able to reply sim, or claro or entendo.
I told him the real problem with Jake wasn’t access to the street - he’d never cross it on his own. It was the road that went past the quinta and up to the cottage where it terminates in a staircase that leads up the four acres that stretch south and east of the the house. Jake has several times now taken those steps, roamed across the campo, then stepped over the place where there is a gap in the wall and onto the public walkway.
Each time he did this he came back on his own, except the last time - his visit to the supermarket was interrupted by a nice lady who read the number on his tag and called us, telling us how to reach her for the handoff of Jake.
“What if we block the quinta road,” Tiago asked. I said, Well sure if that road is blocked Jake can then roam free, his access to the cottage steps also being blocked.
Devemos parrar-lo estar um fugitivo, I said, which more or less means we can stop him from being a runaway. Tiago laughed and looked surprised and pleased that I knew what fugitivo meant. Explorer, Jake would no doubt correct. But there is something opportunistic about the timing of his disappearances. Something sly and knowing. It is his nature to appear equally at ease lying around or wandering around. One second he’s lounging in the sun, the next we are frantically searching high and low with absolutely no sign of him.
“A dog like Jake needs his freedom,” Tiago was firm. We both looked at Jake sitting regally in the courtyard, his coat gleaming like 79% cocoa, his golden eyes squinting in the sun. The chickens stood in tableau around him, the roosters on a single foot, the hens pecking the ground around him with fake nonchalance. They think he has the power to feed him, being part of the human flock that attends to such things.
I am glad that Tiago sees the true nature of Jake. The two have bonded over the last six months. Each morning I say “Want to go see the guys?” and Jake trots quickly down the quinta road, tail waving in anticipation. He runs up or down the steps, depending on what unit they are working in for the day. Recently it’s been down; the floor is finally laid in the quinta, which along with the new ceiling and appliances, give the tiny kitchen a nice modern update.
Jake will run up to them when they are kneeling and surprise-kiss them, or will bump the backs of their thighs for attention, or docks himself between their knees. Woof woof, he says in his booming voice, overjoyed when Tiago bends down to tousle his head. Jake loves being part of a crew.
With a gate at the end of the quinta road where Jake has been oozing out to get up to dickens, he would be neatly prevented from escaping the grounds without us noticing. He would still have a lot of space to cover within the boundaries we establish.
He could roam the backyard - a mini woods that includes a koi pond and a bamboo forest and an ancient round stone table and benches.
He could go over to the campo (though I’d have to clear the path of broken tiles). The campo was once empty of anything but weeds and construction detritus from previous owners. Now it is filled with trimmed tree branches, the h being handy with a chainsaw and an expert neighbor gardener directing the when and where of pruning the olive trees.
I can burn these branches in a burn barrel in the center of the driveway which I spent all of April of last year doing; this year, but I’m thinking this year we may rent a wood chipper and reduce all those branches to chips for the chickens to walk on in their coop, nesting boxes and brooders
I can picture it like it’s happening: once across the campo Jake could take the steps at the far end and walk past the almond tree surrounded by yellow flowering bushes, up another short set of steps past the garden full of loquat trees and yellow trumpet flower bushes, across the quinta courtyard up the steps. It would not take him long at all to find this backhanded way up to the point where the quinta road turns and leads him off the property.
Finding the way barred at the point the road narrows to squeeze between the towering Monterey pine and a stone wall, he will return down the quinta road, walk all casual-like up a little stone steps to the garden, which he can traverse and exit onto the cottage steps above and beyond the first gate and on to FREEDOM! !Except haha we have anticipated this move and have put another gate behind the cottage, barring the way to the stone steps leading to the back acreage. I am thinking of putting a little sign there “haha Jake you are FOILED”.
With the back acreage blocked off, Jake could mosey through the carport, or back around the kitchen patio of the main house and wander up to the pool area, unless we shut the door that is there, barring the way.
If that happens he can make a left and wander up to the swim house, with its row of little rooms (shower, changing, changing, bathroom) and one giant room bigger than some apartments I’ve had. Or he can proceed past the swim house courtyard and go into the fruit orchard, or wend with the sidewalk around the edges of the orchard, over the cottage steps and to the little apple /quince/grape orchard just beyond the top of the garage where the solar panels are arrayed, high up and with a great view of Alberto’s fazenda across the street, though themselves cleverly hidden from street view.
During one of the very few days of respite from the rain, the workers repaired the front of the double garage and the wall to the left, which had a huge crack that significantly added to the street-level perception that this whole place is falling-down-decrepit, when in fact the issues after a few decades of abandonment are mostly 1) the crap of previous owners to haul away, 2) wood rot and cracked walls, 3) ceiling and floor holes and 3) window frames falling apart and spilling glass into courtyards. We harvest broken glass again and again, the chicken scratching bringing evermore shards to the surface. I set the pretty bits - blue, gold, flowered tile - aside for mosaics.
Now that the walls are whole and smooth, we will repaint when the rain stops and the stone dries, remembering to put in the anti-mold treatment so the white walls don’t become stained with green, mossy growth in all this moisture.
There is so much to do: plant potatoes, build the gates to hold Jake in, install sinks, cabinets and windows in the quinta unit we will move into, continue work on the upper unit, cut down the weeds, trim the trees that hang over the exterior walls, burn or chip all the trimmings, start work on the big house, beginning with plumbing and and repairing the roof, ceilings and floors.
But for the moment I enjoy the warming spring air, and the fact that it is not raining. The fog holds everything in its fuzzy palm, dampening all sounds except the water drip drip dripping and the roosters, calling and calling.