Happy Portugal Day, from Portugal

Today is Portugal Day or to be more precise Dia de Portugal, de Camões e das Comunidades Portuguesas (Day of Portugal, Camões, and the Portuguese Communities). Portugal Day is Portugal's national holiday, celebrated annually on June 10th. It commemorates the death of the national poet, Luís de Camões, and celebrates Portuguese culture, heritage, here and among the entire Portuguese diaspora.

I would have known it was a national holiday by 8:20a because of the quiet of no rush hour. This morning the village is sleeping late, except of course for my roosters who have been bellowing since 4:45a. The village will be alive with visitors today as people come from out of town to get a celebratory box of fou-fous, a pastry that is made exclusively here in Belas. Fou fous figured prominently in our decision to buy this property - we got a box after we’d jumped the fence and had a look around the property, which was dangerous with broken glass, wire, scrap metal, crumbling walls and steps and brambles and creeping forget-me-not and English ivy. It was late in the day, no cafe was open except Fou Fou de Belas so I bravely tried my Portuguese with the owner and came away with a box of six, which was pretty much the only thing we would eat until after we closed on the house the following evening in the realtor’s office in nearby Cascais. I guess we were both feeling pretty nervy.

I love that my adopted country brings everything to a screeching halt mid-week to memorialize a poet. Some of my favorite people are poets. I think America should have an America Day that memorializes Walt Whitman, maybe, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who, coincidentally, was nicknamed by her husband The Portuguese in a book of sonnets inspired by her). Kids would get off school and associate poetry with liberty and good things to eat.

I was just reflecting yesterday how…ordinary everything seems, now. Living here continuously has de-foreignified my eyes. I no longer think the grocery store shelves are full of ‘strange’ products, as of course milk and eggs belong in the shelf stable aisle where else would they be.

The sidewalks no longer seem narrow at all - when I first moved here I was constantly worried I’d trip and clumsily fall to my death in traffic while walking Jake my first week here. The sidewalk is less than twelve inches wide in places, and traffic moves briskly along during rush hour and for whatever reason - nerves? - Jake always decides he has to squat right at the narrowest part because it cannot wait.

But now, I’m acclimated. Now, I barely think about the sidewalk and will frequently walk along without even looking where I’m going, absorbed in picking out a podcast or listening to a language lesson. I can pick up Jake’s poo while balancing on one leg and changing the station on Spotify while on a 6 inch expanse of sidewalk next to 40 mph traffic and not flinch.

I regularly scan the dumpster areas I pass for useable furniture specifically chairs. I think I’ve collected about 25 now. My goal is to populate the Quinta dos Galos conference center only with found chairs that we’ve repainted garden colors like snapdragon pink and orchid mauve and daffodil yellow and old vine grape. Today we’re going to paint a green chair (sycamore leaf green) and a marigold orange chair in honor of our adopted pais.

Probably the most subtle yet significant adjustment has been with my eyes. When I first came to the area I noticed first and foremost how ancient everything is - from the mossy walls that line the narrow highways and byways to the collapsed and abandoned windmills and cisterns and aqueducts, to the grande quintas boarded up under decades of English ivy growth, everything looked so old to me. But now it never occurs to me things look old so much as they look timeless. The traditional calcada sidewalks and red tile roofs are no longer a daily reminder that I’m somewhere else; that’s how “here” looks, now. The clotheslines that stretch from window to window across Portuguese apartment buildings are a welcome sign the rains are over. Sleeping on air dried sheets is one of the nicest pleasures ever.

I’m now accustomed to being followed by roosters everywhere I go. I’m a nobody to most of the world but here I am a legend and the flock talks in low voices amongst themselves as I pass, speculating on my mood, my intentions, my direction.

We now have flushing toilets in three of the four domiciles on the property. I can’t get over how light and bright the palaceta looks. I remember how dark it was when we first entered with our strange cylindrical keys, how dark it was and how still that darkness. The h had a headlamp and went into each room, swallowed whole by the darkness until he could fling open the creaky wooden shutters. The palaceta faces east and is cool and shady in the afternoon; it’s so dark and cool inside that when you step outside you find yourself surprised at how warm and sunny it is, you feel almost like a vampire.

Back then, pre-electricity, evening fell faster indoors than out, darkness pooling in the corners of the rooms. Back when we used only candles and headamps for light, before we had a nice selection of rechargeable lights from Ikea, the darkness was like a presence in the room with you. Especially the darker darkness at the centers of the holes that yawned in the ceilings above us and in the cellar below.

Under the heavy professional tread of the tractor the landscape of the Back 40 is beginning to take shape. There are maybe a sixty or seventy trees dotting those four acres, and the h is making his way through them one by one trimming away dead branchlets. Every evening we take Jake on a walk through the Back 40 and every evening we’ll see one of our neighbors walking their dog and, spotting us, scurry off in a nothing-to-see-here kind of way so we’re not always able to introduce ourselves. We haven’t been in a hurry to put up a fence around the land but if we don’t soon the municipality of Sintra might declare the area a health hazard, there is so much neighborhood dog poo collected.

The part of the property that will be known as the Jacaranda Garden has finally been cleared of all brush. When we arrived it was filled with weeds that stood higher than my head. For a long time we used the area as a receptacle for all brush and limbs and felled trees the h chainsawed into logs. Then it evolved into a burn pit. Now it is a large walled sunken space about 40’x25’. The h and I planned out the garden which will involve some kind of water and stone element from stone carver Antonio.

For the last couple of days running, three bright green parakeets have been landing in the loquat trees behind the garden apartment They clutch the ripe plums in one yellow claw and nibble daintily. Do they get juice on their feathers I wonder, and is it an irritating sticky feeling that makes them look around for a birdbath to do a wash up?

The neighbor was washing her car and her dog bolted free and seized Mr. Shaun Cassidy in its jaws and commenced to run away but one of our workers, Paulo, stepped in. The dog dropped Shaun, and Paulo brought him to me. Shaun was quite literally screaming his head off like he was near-killed but Paulo just smiled his Paul Newman smile and pointed out to me where the dog had gotten hold of Shaun. Tiago and I discussed that while Shaun was not bleeding, something had clearly happened to his leg, he could not put weight on it. It didn’t look broken to me but what the heck do I know about how chicken legs are supposed to look.

When Paulo set Shaun down the rest of the eastern flock bristled at him (Shaun, not Paulo) and acted like they wanted to jump him. Tiago and I agreed Shaun needed a chance to recover, unchallenged. Tiago and Paulo constructed a makeshift pen using some leftover chicken fencing and zip ties and the corner of the garden wall. We stashed Shaun there with food and water. At night I put Jake’s big dog kennel in there for protection but Shaun ignored it so I stopped. At first Shaun sat with his back to me, a stunning dignity in his preparation for death. I can’t stop you, his broad feathery back said. But I’m not going to participate.

Now on Day 4 of his recovery he is hopping around pretty well. I think another day or two we can let him roam amongst his kind again. Leif hangs around constantly, either standing on the wall above Shaun’s enclosure, or standing on the other side of the chicken wire from Shaun. It is very touching. He is never more than two feet away. I’m here, boss, he seems to be saying.

The rest of the eastern flock has lost all direction and credibility. Anyone wanting to challenge Shaun’s authority could do so now but the flock has instead broken into three factions that just mill aimlessly about. Gwyneth for some reason will no longer leave the safety of the fig tree at the back of the campo - I had to go back there yesterday just to do a wellness check. I was glad to see her. Jackson and Jacques hang around Leif either around Shaun’s enclosure or perched on the wall of Lower Olive Tree Lane.

The rest of the roos of the eastern flock hide in the brush of the campo, scurrying away in an undignified way if they see you looking at them. Without the Jupiter-like gravitational pull of Shaun’s brawny leadership, the northern flock now saunters up Lower Olive Tree Lane and eats breakfast right under the nose of Leif Garrett who, without Shaun’s bulk to back him up, no longer attempts to police the boundary line of the eastern flock.

Today Betty White had her breakfast at the top of the steps that lead down to our apartment. Normally she stays way down at the end of the lane, where it meets the driveway. Her coming to where I live for her meals is like Mary Tyler Moore staying on the bus and going straight through Milwaukee all the way to New York City. All because Shaun is on the injured reserve list. Chicken politics are interesting.

The h and Alberto have been welding every day now. They are making the island that will go in the center of the central room in the lower garden apartment, a sort of combination dining/living area that used to be two impossibly small rooms and is now after a moderate amount of r demolition one impossibly long narrow room. Yesterday the h got a funny look on his face, whipped out his tape measure and ran to the house. What’s going on, I asked, interested in anything that required emergency measurement. The h didn’t answer, just hurriedly measured the doorways and windows. Oh no, he said. Oh no. Oh no.

The table was too wide to come through the doorway. The h and Alberto are working off a plan, but somehow a small miscommunication about whether 80 cm pertained to the total width (top + base), or the width of only the base, resulted in a welded table that was too wide to get inside. The h texted Alberto last night to tell him of the problem.

Today as I fed the flocks breakfast I noticed Alberto was already over at his garden, a full hour earlier than normal. I hadn’t expected to see him at all today, it being Portugal Day and a national holiday. And sure enough, I glimpsed him in his potato field and he was not dressed for gardening but in a button down shirt, which always means he is just stopping by.

I reported this to the h. He’s probably over there working on the table problem, the h said. Sure enough as soon as the h appeared in his garden Alberto spotted him and hustled over. As usual he brought a bag of rolls for the h and I, and a bag of day old loaves for the chickens. Bom dias were exchanged, coffee enjoyed, then Alberto announced that he didn’t sleep at all last night, thinking how to solve the problem of the table being too wide. I had already accepted that we might just have to use the table in one of the other houses - not a bad outcome at all - but was interested in how Alberto had figured out how to solve the problem, which he did nicely.

Huh, the h said. I never even thought about it that way. A whole career of problems in that solution, Alberto laughed. Tomorrow, I make.

The weather is nice. The sunshine is mellow, the breeze fresh. Everywhere the fecund smell of things growing. Last night it was so pleasant I took the sleeping bag and went outside and lay on the built-in bench that lines one entire side of the house, looking up into the leafy limbs of the plane tree. I could have slept like that all night but a mosquito kept whining in my ear and so eventually I came back inside but tonight I think I’ll put our tent out in the garden. There are few things nicer than sleeping outdoors with classical music playing on the radio.

Jake is enjoying the weather too. Most days he sits on the back porch weatching the workers paint the side of the house, then after a half hour will rise and walk around the corner of the house to sit on a patch of artificial turf and watch the roosters moseying around the patio. Then he’ll rise and come to the back door and paw to be let in. If we don’t hear his knock he’ll bark, and someone will let him in, and he’ll lay sprawled on the cool floor for awhile, alert to anyone going near the treat bin. He might ask for a boost up to snooze on the bed behind me as I write, or snooze aginst the h’s leg as the h works on his computer. A half hour of this and then he’ll go out the back door again to sit on the porch under the shade of the orange and plum trees and watch the traffic on the avenida below us, at the base of the hill our house sits on.

Soon the entire Garden House will be painted, the h and Alberto will finish the island table and we’ll pick out just the right bar stools. We’ll install some glass shelves that Alberto built and then our little lower level garden apartment will be nearly complete, needing only some wood rot repair, a second coat of paint for each room, and buffing up the terrazzo floors of the entryway.

The bathroom fixtures for the casita have arrived; the tile should be here soon. We have approximately two months to get the casita ready for a friend of the h’s mom who is slated to stop in for a night or two in September.

The horta produces steadily. We are eating massive amounts of lettuce and passion fruit (maracuja). The h pulled the first strawberries off the strawberry tower and they were delicious. He also pulled some disturbing looking carrots from the earth, as if they came directly from the mind of David Cronenberg. They looked hideous but they were delicious - I roasted them with balsamic and honey and served with toasted sesame seeds, yum. We ate most of the onion harvest caramelized on pizzas this past weekend. This week the tomatoes will start coming in. Summer is here.