Hot in Beautiful

a report from Illinois and Portugal

I spent the past week in the US going to a conference in Nashville then visiting my mom in southern Illinois. When I departed Portugal summer was in full swing - temperatures exceed 94 Fahrenheit and remained in the 80s until well after midnight. To my surprise the midwest was even hotter, with the heat index regularly reading 110-115. I had forgotten about that kind of sticky heat and humidity, when a fifteen minute walk at ten in the morning brings sweat trickling down the sides of your face.

It was strange being off the fazenda for so long. I left the h with instructions how to take care of the animals, a duty that mostly falls to me while tending the horta and the garden, pruning trees etc. fall mostly to the h with his verdant thumbs. Make sure they have a bedtime snack, I reminded him about the hens. They like to scratch around before they go to sleep. And in this heat you’ll need to walk Jake before 8a and after 5p.

We’ll be fine, the h soothed me. I hate being soothed. But he sent me pictures of himself with the hens - perched on his computer and his neck - and plenty of Jake looking dapper in the dappled shade and I was soothed.

The conference was busy, with twenty thousand attendees cruising around the conference room floor looking for free schwag and asking a lot of questions; I spent eight hours a day handing out stickers and answering questions about our products. There was a brief reprieve in the ceaseless river of humanity flowing past when the 45th President of the US stopped at the conference to deliver a speech. Independent presidential candidate RFK Junior also spoke - he was a planned speaker while DJT was added at the last minute, introducing a whole new element of security mayhem to the event. Then, a short flight and twenty minute drive and I was in the unreal quiet of the Illinois cornfields, where my mom lives in a little subdivision of houses that have been there long enough for the little saplings I remember when they bought the place to become towering, graceful mature trees forming a leafy canopy over the cul de sacs.

I’ve been talking to mom daily for the past four weeks, as she recovered from a series of setbacks that required me to call and wake her up at 4a for one of her new meds. Those conversations were always brief by design; mom is a natural talker and sleep was already challenging for her.

My eyes confirmed what my ears had already told me: mom is frail these days, feeling her age after a chain of events in the past year brought her low: the death of her husband of sixty three years, a case of pneumonia that had her in the hospital for eight days, followed by agonizing pain from a bulging disc, a UTI, and all the predictably awful side effects of taking pain medication for a period of four weeks.

My gosh, she says. And here I was feeling so good about myself when I turned 86 - I was going to the gym and I was out there in the yard weeding the garden and going places with your Aunt Annie… Good grief! (mom shares an affinity for Charlie Brown’s favorite curse substitute. I am a cusser but try not to be around mom, she doesn’t approve).

It was good to see my family, and both familiar and strange to be back in the landscape of my childhood summers - I’d forgotten how gray and lowering the summer sky so often is, always threatening rain. I remember scanning that sky for funnel clouds driving through thunderstorms, or on the rare days we’d get to go to Six Flags over Mid-America, a park with rollercoasters which I cared about a LOT when I was a kid. Everywhere crickets sang their late summer song.

We spent the week getting mom’s affairs in order to move to assisted living, sharing meals and running errands - together if mom had the strength, me alone or leaving her to rest in the car when she was feeling too tired. I watered her ferns (for the last time, I wonder?) and the little fledgling tree that dad planted just before he passed.

No, that one died, my brother corrected me, and I felt so bad I replaced it, but now it’s dying too. I don’t know what’s wrong, he said, but I think I do. The trees and flowers and bushes in the yard flowered under dad’s regular attention. Now they are an afterthought in the lives of people who are unused to the demands of the plant kingdom.

After visiting financial planners and doctor’s offices and bank representatives we had lunch at a local diner and once seated in the booth I felt keenly the absence of my dad.

It was also familiar and strange to be with my mom, so diminished, resulting in a role reversal of sorts. Her back numbed by pain medication, she had not felt the heating pad she slept on burning her skin, fragile as paper. The resultant first and second degree burns looked awful, covering her entire lower back and requiring someone to change the dressing daily. I felt a sort of awe, doing this, mom so vulnerable and small as she leaned on her bedroom dresser as I went about the cleansing, dressing and re-bandaging of the last remaining wound - healing, yes, but even after four weeks disturbingly deep. At the end I’d re-adjust her clothing, apologizing for the intimacy.

It’s okay, she says. I can’t do it myself, after all. I carefully rubbed lotion across the expanse of her lower back, now mapped with large, purpled burn scars. It’s strange, you know, to live somewhere twenty five years and then suddenly you just won’t any more, she said.

What is the strangest thing, being alone? I asked.

Mom thought about it. Not hearing him breathe, she said. That’s hard to get used to.

Though it will be strange to visit mom in a place that has never been home to me, it will be no less strange - and a lot less sad - than going to a well-remembered home that no longer contains the presence of my father, something that fills me with a fresh surprise and grief each time I go through that familiar front door.

The birds feel his absence too; though mom has not set out the birdfeeders dad delighted in, the birds are still checking in. A finch has taken up residence in one of dad’s birdhouses. The hummingbirds, missing their red sugar water feeder, settle for hovering over mom’s colorful impatiens plant.

Returning to Portugal was a smooth affair, though my residence card is still caught up in the system somewhere. No one even asked me about it, barely glancing at me as I went through passport control. When my Uber pulled up to the gate, Alberto and Rosa were backing out of the driveway, just headed home for lunch after a morning at their one-acre garden across the street. Seeing me, they parked and rushed over, Alberto hugging me and taking my bags from me, Rosa hugging me and exclaiming over my newly violet hair with a laugh.

The chickens followed us in a little mob to the door, so that Alberto had to wade through rooster tails to get back to the driveway. Then the h was there hugging me and welcoming me back, with Jake barking and trying to dock between my knees.

I spent the next day touring around with the h looking at all the advancements made on the many many projects in progress while I was gone, including the heat declining from the mid-nineties down to a more civilized high seventies-to-high eighties in the day. The evenings are lovely - typically low 70s, cool enough that air conditioning is not needed, warm enough to walk around at midnight in a t-shirt. Which we did, me jet-lagged and figuring it was as good a time as any to try out the new walkie talkies the h got us. They work great, by the way — we can contact each other from the palaceta to the cottage, the cottage to the quinta, the quinta to the palaceta.

The Portuguese sun shines down with a hot intensity unlike the sun I am used to. Even the locals wilt under it. The broad green leaves of our trumpet flower bushes in our garden hang limp. Everywhere the roosters laze, their backsides buried in the dirt so they look flattened, like rooster cupcakes melted in the sun. The orphans are always escaping out the back door - they make a beeline for the kitchen garden, where a hydrangea has finally started to grow after being murdered by a gang of roosters last fall, when it was first transplanted. They immediately scratch out shallow depressions in the dirt and wiggled their feathery butts in, their little dinosaur feet limp with ecstasy.

In eight days the hens have grown amazingly. They are now very distinct from each other in size and looks. Jeannie still has a pretty little face, Cher looks like she has long black butt-length hair, Yella is less amareha but even more peculiarly independent. Princess Leia is getting downright regal.

The h cleared away the brush in the front courtyard garden (getting himself bit twice by a spider in the process, how’s THAT for horrific). When they tire of the kitchen garden the Gang of Four will scratch among the trumpet bushes and blue nile lilies. They peck so many ants and insects into their gizzards they actually feel heavier when it is time to carry them inside. On my second day back, the roosters began gathering to watch the little orphan hens scratching around. Normally they are pretty chill - the ones that come the closest (Alphonse and Potsy and Jack Black) are well known to us. But today a new rooster wandered close in - Taylor Dane. Before I knew it, he’d leaned in and plucked up I Dream of Jeannie by the neck, which bent into an upside down U in his beak.

The last time I saw a rooster do that, he killed the chick with a quick shake of his head, so I’ve been hyper alert about roosters around babies since then. They have enough odds stacked against them without their own kind turning on them.

LET GO! I bellowed. The h lurched toward him, scaring him and Taylor Dane dropped the little galinha. I connected my left foot to his feathery butt and tossed him a foot away. He yelled his indignation. Oh yeah well you’re the first one that is going on the list for the Great Rooster Giveaway, I told him. You’ll be someone’s dinner before she’s laying her first egg, buster. They’ll use your blood for their sauce and toss you into the compost for the rats to finish what’s left.

The rest of the Italian gang backed off to a polite distance, perhaps shocked at the specificity of the threat. We’ve had a rooster stolen, we’ve had attempted rooster theft too, even an attempted theft that resulted in the rooster’s death…and we have a superfluity of roosters. Nice guys are definitely going to finish first, and we’ll be identifying the roosters who will make the best companions for our little orphans, finding the Han Solo to our Princess Leia, the Major Nelson to our dreamy Jeannie, the Sonny to our dark-haired Cher.

The biggest news: while I was gone the window crew came and put in the new windows on the top and bottom floor of the quinta. They are amazingly smooth to operate, opening up from the middle like normal windows but also tilting open at the top. We have floor-to-ceiling windows opening out onto the garden in the aptly named garden apartment.

Now that we have windows and air conditioning and hot water set up in the garden apartment, the h moved our bed there. The new windows are soundproof, silencing the omnipresent racket of the roosters so that I slept without hearing them somewhere on the property for the first time in eighteen months.

You’d think Jake would like the new setup - comfortable bed and cool temperature, and not having to share our attention with orphan hens or the gang of roosters. But Jake does not like change, it stresses him out, and he has been waking up each night well after midnight panting with his desire to go back to what he is used to, which is sleeping in a tent pitched on the floor of the second story of the palaceta.

So, though the temperature gauge reads a tolerable 70F, Jake lays at the foot of our bed and regular as an alarm starts panting around 2 a.m. It is an irritating sound that makes it seem at least 5 degrees hotter for some reason. On the third night I open the new window with a turn and a tug of the handle. Blessedly cool air flowed into the room; after a moment, Jake stopped panting. I fell asleep listening to the snores of Jake and the h and thinking of mom, unable to sleep in the unaccustomed quiet of a room with no dad breathing beside her.

We toured the changes to the cottage during sunset. As predicted, the little space is shaping up to be one of my favorite places on the whole property. The structural renovations (roof, walls, floor, ceilings) of the cottage are nearly complete; in six weeks’ time the doors and windows will be installed. After that, we will be able to have the power turned on at both the cottage and the palaceta. The cottage windows - one on either side of the front door like a child’s drawing of a house - look out onto the palm trees in front of the palaceta, and over the horta and across the way to the fine old houses the climb the hill on the other side of the street.

I was afraid the hens would forget me, accustomed to perching on the h, but when I walked over to the palaceta to give them their bedtime snack - watermelon and dark purple grapes cut into twelfths - they mobbed me for the food, then, when finished, one by one flew up to perch on my thigh and arm. There they dozed off, their little eyes squinting and their heads bobbing with sleep, fighting it exactly the way human children do, so they can stay up just a little longer.

When they are all dozing, I gently lift them with their little legs dangling limp and carry them to the room we are using as a hen nursery. In the fullness of summer they no longer need their chick warmer and spend the night rootsting on the top of their brooder hutch after they’ve had their fill standing on the window sill and watching the rest of the flock one by one stop scratching around the courtyard and disappear into the Secret Garden for the pre-bedtime roost.

I walk from the palaceta back to the quinta where the h is finishing up installing kitchen cabinets, the night air soft on my face. I don’t have a headlamp but don’t need one - the quinta road is well lit by the solar lights the h has placed along the tops of the walls that border the road, and the big round face of the moon peeks through the branches. All day there has been a nostalgic sound of insects whirring in the heat.

The h’s horta is booming - the tomato plants are heavy with fruit, the cucumbers look fake, the watermelon looks (and tastes) like a small miracle. There are peaches and corn and lettuces. The greenhouse is bursting with marigolds and nasturtiums; the first blue faces of the morning glories are peeking over the wall of the fruit orchard. The h replaced the now-dormant white flowers that bloomed all spring long with pansies in the built-in planters in the front courtyard.

The last two weeks have been all about painting; the green metalwork of our balconies, gates, railings, and grates are now shiny black, while the walls - muros - have been power-washed and sport a fresh coat of white. These improvements have attracted neighborhood attention, with passersby pausing at the freshly painted gates and walls at the foot of the driveway to have a longer look at the place that has become so rundown and overgrown over decades it became virtually invisible.

This afternoon two of those passersby stopped to introduce themselves, a handsome older gentleman named Alfredo and his young nephew. We are so glad you are here! said Alfredo. Please if you ever need anything let me know, I am happy to help.

Jake wagged and stepped toward the boy who shrank away in fear.

Ele e amigavel, I said. Simpatico!

Alfredo said to his nephew, Olha! Simpatico! Turning to me he said Bom português!

Later, as I walked Jake, I ran into another neighbor I’ve met once before. He spoke so rapidly I had a difficult time following. Jake saved the day by sitting and lifting a paw. The man burst out laughing and fished out a little bag from his pocket, opened it and removed a dog biscuit which Jake accepted with his usual alacrity, angling for a second biscuit before he’d even swallowed the first. The man gave him a second, then shook his finger good naturedly at Jake for being a piggy. Jake licked his finger.

I told the h about these meetings later as we sat down to a dinner entirely from the garden - sandwiches of caramelized onions, fresh tomato rounds and lettuce with cucumbers and garlic aioli, and chunks of watermelon for dessert.

It’s nice to have you home, the h said, opening the window to let in the breeze.

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