Glass, Metal, Wood, Stone

reflecting on the importance of things

Recently I was in a writing workshop where we did that exercise Ray Bradbury swore by, telling a story using only nouns. My story lately is chickens, animals, construction, heat, languages, work.

When you buy a property that’s been abandoned for decades and all the buildings are missing some combination of roof, floor and walls, there is no real ‘timeline’ for the ‘project’ because there’s no one project, but rather one thousand eight hundred seventy two variously sized projects all happening simultaneously. There are always projects in stages of prep, beginning, middle, ending and that rare but cursed category, neverending. Some projects develop sub-projects. Our to-do list is never ta-done. You’d think big projects like putting in a ceiling and floor where the old one just rotted clean way would be the most satisfying but in fact you cannot underestimate the satisfaction of having something really simple like a place to set your coffee mug or a table with a vase of flowers.

The past two weeks have been all about glass and metal and wood and stone. For all the changes in the past year there has been precious little beauty unless you count the natural kind which of course you should cos when the chips are down that is sometimes all there is, and it’s a lot. Enough, even. But even the natural beauty around here was buried under ruinous things: ivy, creepers, garbage, water damaged wood. The first couple of months all we did was cut, haul and burn. The first thing we purchased in Portugal was a chainsaw. The h likes Stihl. He found a dealer and the young man who helped us spoke very little English but was all smiles as the h bought a chainsaw and a weed whacker and a little Honda water pump. We went back to buy other power tools. I entered his WhatsApp info into my phone under Superman. I showed him. He looked puzzled. Voce e o homen de Stihl, I explained - You’re the man of steel. He laughed very satisfactorily. My first Portuguese joke.

Uncovering the beauty of this property is a slow process. Neighbor Alberto estimates that absolutely nothing zero nada zilch has been done to the place in more than fifteen years. The last person to live here was the son of the son of the man who added the swimming pool to the original house and grounds built at the turn of the last century. The family hasn’t lived here for some thirty years but the final scion to inherit the place stayed until the early nineties. The baker man, Paulo, says this final familial inhabitant is why all door and window hardware and tiles in the hallways and kitchens are missing. He removed them and sold them, Paulo said mournfully, and we winced at the pain of it. It has been a bit inconvenient, not being able to close any doors. The h bought and installed a door handle for the guest room so visitors can close Jake out of their room as he is a major bed hog and barks, runs, snores and farts in his sleep to boot. We’ll pick out hardware as one of the final projects for this apartment, for now only guests get privacy.

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The olive trees lining Olive Tree Lane - both upper and lower - are filling out nicely and once again provide a privacy screen to anyone trying to watch us through binoculars from the high rise apartments to the east. Not that I think anyone does that but I couldn’t help but think about it back in the days when the only hot shower was obtainable in the carport, where the h installed a propane tank and an instant-on water heater, we hooked up the hose and put in a shower head and voila.

But with the olive trees trimmed back, I had a clear view as I showered of the setting sun reflecting off the windows of not-too-terribly-distant apartment buildings…say, a half mile away. I remember how when I went to New York City for a work trip and visited a friend in his office building and everyone had telescopes in their offices pointed out the window at the surrounding hotel rooms and apartment bedrooms. I was so mortified that just the night before I’d changed my clothes in my hotel room leaving the curtains wide open, liking how even thirty two floors up in the air the skyscrapers were rising all around me checkered with light never realizing a dozen telescopes were aimed at my unintended peep show.

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The horta is a marvel of rows of potatoes and beanpoles. We are drowning in garlic and onions, a delightful way to go. Summer will start pummeling us with tomatoes any day now. The h brought in the first basket of cherry tomatoes and they feel like sunshine bursting in your mouth. I like to spread piles of them on a cookie sheet along with a can of white beans and cubed up Feta, salt and pepper and roast for twenty minutes. Top with fresh herbs like parsley or spring onion. Drizzle with olive oil and serve with crusty bread. Sorry no photo, we ate it all!

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You may think I way prefer showering indoors but the truth is I liked that carport shower. Showering outside, like sleeping on a screened-in porch, is one of life’s little luxuries you didn’t know you needed til you have it, then realize how have I been living without this.

Our friend Craig put us up for a week while we were in home limbo, having released our apartment in the US but not yet closed on the property in Portugal. Craig lives in one of many idyllic little villages with names like Sleepy Hollow and Strawberry in Marin county, which is just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Craig and my h are mountain biking buddies and most of the guys have outdoor showers set up so they can rinse themselves and their bikes after a ride. Craig’s outdoor shower has a bamboo mat, a nice long shower curtain I could pull around the entire area and close with magnets (nice touch, Craig, if you’re reading this). It had one of those rainfall shower heads. Showering while the birds were singing all around me then letting my hair dry by walking around in the perfectly warm morning California air examining his herb garden, coffee mug in hand is possibly the most perfect way to start a day.

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As I write there is a sound of jackhammering above me. The garden house is being re-roofed. The crew was in the midst of finishing the paint job - I still love this quiet green color aptly named Quietude - the house looks like an elegant petit-four sitting on the hill overlooking the avenida, with the great spreading green umbrella of Monterey Pine rising up behind it and the equally magnificent sycamore swaying skyward next to it. They were fixing some rotted wood flashing and removed all the tiles and the wooden rafters were examined by Tiago, who consulted the h, who consulted Alberto, who discussed with Antonio the stone man and everyone agreed all the wood has to be replaced, it was just…rotten.

There was a great racket for two days while a crew of four guys pulled the rafters off. We had just gotten the Jacaranda garden site completely clear of debris, burning the last pile on May 31st, and now the roof is piled there like a giant game of pickup sticks. New wood lines the sides of Olive Tree Lane. It took six men to carry to big crossbeam that forms the peak of the roof.

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Alberto has been teaching the h how to weld. They set out to make an island for our apartment which is long and skinny so we thought a long skinny island with stools would be the way to go. A minor mishap in measuring had reverberations that made the dimensions of the final product..wrong, as in, too high and too wide and too long for the apartment, it is perfect for the cottage and there it now resides. On the second try they nailed it, the table is perfectly proportioned for the space. The stone top is beautiful, white with streaks of black and gray and salmon.

The h found some nifty retro orange leather barstools that are like sitting in baseball gloves. The expanse of tabletop seems almost obscene - we have really lacked for surface area around here, using a little metal cafe table meant to hold two cups of coffee and a pencil to eat our meals. That cafe table is now relegated to the porch for morning coffee, which was always the plan.

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We’ve installed a ginormous metal and glass shelving unit from Alberto, who had made it for his mama’s apartment where it was just gathering dust. It is a seven shelf affair that covers one entire wall of the room and enabled us to finally throw out the Frankentable we’d been using to stack our dishes and tupperware and canning supplies. Overnight our apartment went from cluttered and clunky looking to sleek, modern and pretty. We never noticed the clutter and clunk because we were so glad to have climate control, beds, and indoor hot water and have our dishes stacked on an actual surface and not on cardboard boxes turned upside down.

Step by step, the h likes to say about our progress. I guess he means, enjoy the increments. And if you can’t enjoy, endure…preferably without complaining.

I can’t stop touching the marble top of the new island, whenever I walk by I let my fingers run across the surface. Antonio the stone man says it’s Portuguese marble. Antonio also provided the Angolan granite we selected for the kitchen counters. Alberto brought him by the house yesterday to show him how his stone looks and he grinned at us and gestured from his chest to Alberto’s, We do good work together, eh? We all agreed that they did.

Yesterday it reached one hundred degrees outside, and today it will get close to that, but this marble table top is cool as a mortuary slab under my laptop. The h bought some lights that magnetized to the metal base and are motion activated, so at night the table lights up so the the orange leather chair seats and and white marble top glow as you walk past. It’s super swanky.

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Every day we take Jake on a property walk, and each time I bring two sacks - one for found pieces of broken tile, and one for pieces of broken glass. It is hard to fathom just how much broken glass is sown into the soil of this place. I have finally learned the reason why. At one point the last remaining scion of the family that owned it had a sign (it’s hanging in workshop now) saying, in effect, “Will buy your junk”. He was letting people back in with trucks and trunks and just unload a bunch of crap, and he’d pile some earth over it, the h said, pointing out the indistinct piles. Using the tractor the h discovered the Back Forty has a couple of landfills like this. Like a wound on the landscape that left a trail of broken glass and tile like blood to the scene of the crime.

I throw away a few bagsful of glass each month - it used to be much more glass, much more frequently so things are looking up. I have no idea how to estimate how many shards of broken tiles I have - a barrelful? How does one measure such a thing? I think I have enough for the mosaic I want to install on one of the muros edging the property around the Secret Garden and Picnic Flats, a deeply shaded area with a tall concrete wall like a blank canvas, moss flowing down the rocks at its base. I’d like to put a woman’s profile on that wall, with speech bubbles that are hummingbirds made with a mosaic of shards of tile.

There is a new marble-topped table in the casita (formerly known as the cottage) with sleek adjustable black leather stools. We’ve begun to install appliances - fridge (azul!), induction burners, Instant Pot, toaster oven. There is an excellent fold-out sofa that fits perfectly in the bedroom for now. We’re waiting on tile for the bathroom, which will be installed at the same time as the new toilet, shower, sink and cabinet. If all goes well it will be guest-ready in August. I can’t wait to see the finished product. I also can’t wait to give my very stylish friend Jen free reign to help finish it out with cool old furniture finds. She has excellent taste and buys the neatest things at a place she refers to as the Creepy Furniture Store (CFS). Jen’s apartment is right out of a novel by writer Diane Johnson if she lived in Lisboa instead of Paris, full of awesome old stuff the CFS owner is shocked she wants.

Oh yeah antiques here can be pretty cheap, says my friend Ana. We Portuguese don’t like old stuff - everything here is old. We crave new.

We’ve been careful to only buy or build what is absolutely necessary because we have enough furniture to furnish all four houses on this property - literally. It’s been sitting in a storage facility in California wine country waiting for the final bureaucratic dominos to fall for us to bring everything to Portugal. All of our worldly belongings are en route at this very minute across the Atlantic Ocean. Our containers - four 20’ metal mansions of memory - are slated to arrive July 5. Then, because everything of this nature tends to go off without a hitch¹ as planned, they should be delivered to the property no later than July 10th (actually I don’t know I am just making that up, as if writing something will make it so).

It will be strange and wonderful to see all our things again, picking out where everything goes. I already have a mental map for the major things - for instance there is only one place the Chinese wedding bed will fit, but luckily it’s the perfect place (the west room of the double living room). The antique Vuitton trunk will go in the main bedroom suite. The modern wooden dining set will go in the palaceta breakfast room and the great round pedestal table with purple velvet chairs are bound for the palaceta dining room.

The perfect spot for the red leather loveseat will be in Jo’s Garrett aka my future office under the eaves on the third floor. The loveseat is some very expensive Italian brand, elegant with silver feet, that a friend gave to us. If you can haul these monstrosities away you are welcome to them no charge, she said. Or someone will pick them up tomorrow.

The h and I scampered over to her house in the Marin headlands and with a complicated use of harnesses and carabiners somehow got the loveseat to our place in San Francisco, then hauled the matching seven foot long couch all the way to Tahoe where it graced our family ski cabin for years. I spent many happy apres ski days on that couch in front of the great stone fireplace in the bedroom of that cabin which was pretty basic but featured the absolutely most comfortable bed in the world, bar none, something I’d always forget but then instantly remember again when we piled in, me the h, Sophia aged nine, Jake a puppy, all of us riding that California king like a big boat into a deep restful sleep, the snow heavy outside and us warm in the flickering firelight.

That snazzy red loveseat will once again grace a private room of mine, the room farthest from the front door of the house. I always end up claiming that room in every house I’ve ever owned. I’ve always liked secret places, hidden doors, etc., maybe because Nancy Drew was an early influence. In the Presidio the farthest room from the door was my boudoir and contained the elegant old Vuitton trunk holding all my prettiest lingerie, a bookshelf, and the loveseat. I never got around to finishing the elaborate paint job I had planned for that room, something I still regret. This time will be different, the loveseat in the garrett will be surrounded by rugs and poufs and books of poetry and floor pillows with the love seat cozily stashed in a nook beneath the window that overlooks the courtyard, just under the spire that decorates the very front center of the roofline of the palaceta. As for the long couch, I’m not sure yet where that will live but it’s fun to think about.

I looked up the retail price of the sofas and gasped and called the friend to offer her money or a fancy dinner and she laughed and said No way, she was happy to get rid of them because they were so badly sun faded, and restoring them meant chemicals she didn’t want her small children in contact with and that would be impossible to prevent this being the main furniture they owned and had already replaced. You’re taking it off my hands, realy, she insisted. The h ordered the leather dye directly from the manufacturer and set about restoring the color and now they look like Ferraris, they are so sexy with their modern silver legs. After a couple of weeks the dye was set and did not transfer onto skin or clothes and the couches piled with cozy throws and blankets plus my grandma’s handmade quilt became favorite resting places for the family, instantly integrated into our city and mountain lives. I’m glad they are sailing across the Atlantic and join us here, close to where they started life, manufactured in Italy and bought for an apartment in Berlin by my friend and her is-he-or-isn’t-he-a-spy husband.

Things are like that, more than the thing themselves, more than mere objects of desire - they are the memories attached to it. Things are more than the wood and metal, glass and stone they are made of; they hold the imprints of friends and family until they themselves become friends and family. Our things are the past manifest in the present, as temporarily ours as life itself.

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It’s going to be another super hot day today, over one hundred degrees (Fahrenheit) again. Then this mini-heatwave is expected to break and temps will fall back to the high 70s F which is more normal for this time of year…though the run of days with abnormal rain or heat are becoming normalized. One wonders what the temp cycles will be like in a decade or two. Are people still moving to places like Arizona these days, where it’s not endurable without air conditioning? Speaking of which we’ve had the air conditioner on today and Jake is lying directly beneath it, panting lightly. Most places in Portugal do not have air conditioning, and almost no one has central air but rather a mini-split that also provides heat like the one on the wall behind me. It was welcome last night to sleep in air conditioned comfort and no mosquitos.

My mom just turned 87 and was pleased as a little kid at all the attention we showered on. her. I talked to her on Signal the night of her birthday and she regaled me with all the places she went and the things she bought and her nice gifts. We kids got her a Fitbit and now she’s walking again, so that plot succeeded. Cherry pie instead of a cake (I’m a pie girl, myself), a plant, some cherry candy, balloons, and a new outfit made it a perfect day. As she chattered I watched her nostrils and felt a wave of deep affection for how she still can’t use the iPad right and I never properly see her face even if we have been talking more than an hour.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to enjoy nature today.

1. hahahahahahahahahahaha seriously now is the time for you to focus your friendly energy on the following request of the universe, Please universe if you have a moment help smooth the waters real and metaphorical for the Belas rooster lady’s containers to arrive in a reasonable timeframe relative to the promised deadline, thank you kindly amen.