Navigating the curves and potholes on Easy Street

It’s hot lately, every day in the high 80s or higher for three weeks. We don’t really notice how hot it is until we are standing for prolonged periods in the direct sun, which isn’t often as much of the property is heavily shaded. So is much of the old part of Belas, where we live, which is why we walked most of the way to a cafe yesterday at 12p, aka the apex of the heat of the day, before really noticing just how hot it was. As we moved from sunlight into the shade I became aware of the warm imprint of the sun wherever my skin was exposed and was glad I remembered to put sunblock on. It is still such a marvel to me, that a day can be so hot, but the shade so cool.

It’s been so hot we briefly debated if I should take Jake home while the others - the h, our youngest daughter Sophia and her namorado Tasan proceeded to the cafe but in the end of course we all went and brought Jake with us. If he didn’t take such joy in the process one could almost regret the decision, with Jake stopping every ten steps to sniff the news on the plantings, motos, recycling bins and stone walls along the way.

We walked past the churrasqueria which had a line of more than a dozen people; Carlos waved at us. Bom dia, his voice booms through the window of his little shop where Elaina packages up the chickens and adding olives, cheese, a pan of cooked rice, and drinks to orders while working the register.

At the park in old Belas - what I call the village park, what is officially known as the Memorial Park of April 25 - every shaded bench is occupied. A group of workers were hanging out near the water fountain and grinned at Jake’s ritual of drinking from our cupped palms one, two, three times. He drinks seriously, his ears forward, letting us know when he wants a refill and when he is finished. We passed a group of older ladies and I spotted my friend Margarita in their midst, and we lifted our chins at each other and smiled. Somewhere behind the walls that border the Queen’s land, the local flock of wild Italian parakeets were squawking high in the trees.

By the time we arrived the cafe was out of pastel de nata, no surprise since we don’t arrive until nearly 1p. The h and Sophia picked out a boxful of pastries and we sat at a shady table and sampled a few, trying to move our knees out of the way of Jake’s drooly chin. A woman at a nearby table stared at me and I wondered if I know her. She kept glancing at me the whole time we were eating; at one point she said something that got the other two ladies at the table to turn their heads and look at me. They saw me looking back and their eyes darted away, embarrassed. I was starting to feel self-conscious, but it was not until we stood to leave and I caught sight of my reflection in the bakery window that I remembered, oh yeah, I dyed my hair purple when I was in the US. That’s what they were looking at. The next time the lady glanced at me I waved at her.

The kids took the train to Sintra yesterday and had a good day zooming around in those little go-cart cars you can rent for a few hours. Today they are helping the h at the chicken coop, mounting the protective netting, getting us one step closer to re-homing the baby hens in the coop/courtyard.

I know it’s ridiculous how sad and worried I feel about the thought of them no longer living in the living room. It will be a better life for them in the coop - of course it will! Chickens are not meant to sit in the sunshine stripe on a couch in the afternoon, which is how I found them today - the moment I appeared they leaped on me and roosted on my arm. They are not meant to roost on the backs of leather armchairs gazing out the window at the sunny front courtyard framed by two palm trees, which is where Sophia keeps finding them when she wakes up in the morning. They are not meant to peck around an indoor tent and the window well of a dining room; they were meant to do the double-footed chicken moonwalk and wallow their wings and feather duster bottoms around in the garden dirt. Their evident joy in these activities every day makes it clear that like any teenagers, they can’t wait to escape their parents and experience life. And like any parents, we won’t let them until we know that they are safe from the fox that took their moms and sibs.

Meanwhile the property improvements continue apace as the h installed the bathroom sink - another big milestone, as currently if it is not a shower day we still have to step outside to the outdoor sink to brush our teeth and wash our hands and faces. This is not such a huge deal, you may be thinking, except for the fact that it is impossible to turn on the outdoor tap at the quinta without spraying oneself directly in the face, requiring a change of clothes if you happen to forget this detail which I always do. It’s okay to laugh, I still do.

It falls to me to tackle the canning of the tomatoes. Canning is one of those things that is full of decisions you didn’t know needed to be made. Should I can them whole? Halved? Crushed? Why does the recipe specify salt only when the tomatoes are not whole? Does the water have to cover the lid by more than an inch really - can it be a half inch? And if you don’t can’t cover the lid by more than an inch, can you freeze the tomatoes instead and if so can it be in freezer bags or does it have to be jars or plastic containers with lids?

The garden apartment, our temporary new home, is much smaller than the palaceta, where we have been living since taking possession of the property. We chose the palaceta for the simple reason that it is already armed with a house alarm, enabling the h to lock up his power tools if we left the property. It was a bit grim in the palaceta in those early days, everything so dirty, the rooms so full of the detritus left behind when the bank seized the property decades ago. Lace curtains stiff with dirt hung at the bedroom windows. Unpatched holes in the ceiling and floor made it clear where the most recent water leaks came from. Faded flowered wallpaper curled from the wall; ancient carpeting the color of old blood crumbled underfoot, when you walked your shoe made a soft sticky fwaaaaap sound.

At some point water had flooded into the pantry via the windows, leaving the deep sills and the tile walls coated with muck. It took two days of scrubbing with bucket after bucket of boiling soapy water with vinegar, then a round of bleach. We will want to re-tile and re-floor the room but for the time being it has been clean and sanitized enough to use again as a pantry.

The kitchen tile was streaked with wide swaths of burnt grease tracking all the way to the ceiling; the wooden cabinets were gray from longtime sun exposure. The sink was gone, all the hand made tiles with their sinister folk drawings of rabbits and antelopes, onions and suckling pig’s head on a platter, carrots, etc. had been chipped off the walls (they left a half dozen in place that were too high to conveniently reach). The bathrooms had similarly been looted of sinks, marble, tile, and faucet fixtures.

None of the rooms in the palaceta were in “move in condition” - we knew that when we bought it. On the other hand, all the rooms are enormous, with high ceilings and large windows, sometimes of the floor-to-ceiling variety, with beautiful locking shutters. So while our tenure in Brokedown Palace, as we affectionately call it, started out pretty gross, we cleaned out and cleaned up and scattered rechargeable lights everywhere and it became first habitable and sometimes even comfortable especially when the wind wasn’t driving the rain into the kitchen through cracks above and under the door.

In contrast the quinta garden apartment is much smaller and prettier to look at, all surfaces new or newly painted. The main room is a long rectangle that will become a combined living/dining. At the far end of the rectangle are locking floor-to-ceiling windows opening onto the upper quinta garden; at the near end there are double glass doors separating the living space from the laundry and bathroom. There are two rooms on either side of the long sides of the rectangle - three bedrooms and the kitchen.

When I lay in the tent at night in the palaceta, I could stare at the open bedroom doorway, where the extremely pitch blackness of the hallway pressed inward. I could imagine things in that darkness, shuffling down from the third floor; I kept closing my eyes only to find my eyelids rolling up like window shades at the slightest sound (and there were many, many slight sounds). It didn’t help that I’d wake the h up and say, Did you hear that? Sometimes he’d go check; sometimes, he wouldn’t even put his clothes on. What are you doing?! I’d whisper-yell. Going to see what that sound is, he’d whisper back, strapping on his headlamp. Oh my god, I said. What? the h asked, his naked form pausing at the door and looking back at me, blinding me with the headlamp. It’s just that there is not a woman on earth who would go stark naked to investigate a noise in the middle of the night in a new place, I said. I have boots on, the h said, and clomped off into the dark maw of the house.

Each time it was nothing of course. Then there was one time when it very much wasn’t nothing - in fact it was a heavyset man with a bag filled with our valuables - but by that point we were on night number ten, and both of us were tired of going down to check and see what that noise was. Are you sure you hear something? the h asked. Yes, I said. Yes definitely, shhh. We waited for the sound again…but there was nothing. Maybe not, I said. Neither of us went down, so the thief - whose name is Ricardo - who had been standing right at the foot of the steps listening (AND HOW CREEPY IS THAT) took that moment to slip away and make a clean getaway (or so he thought - he didn’t know about AirTags.)

In contrast when I open my eyes in bed in the garden apartment, I can see 98% of the apartment from my place in bed.

As wonderful as it is to live between painted walls, walking on clean solid flooring and standing under ceilings without gaping holes and the occasional piece of rotted wood or insulation plopping to the floor, the quinta garden apartment is not finished per se. And yet, the things that need finishing won’t take much time and are of a nature I don’t notice anymore i.e. cosmetic. All the rooms have one coat of paint and await another. I have plans for painting the ceiling in two rooms that feature plaster molding and medallions.

After rough living for sixteen months, I sometimes feel I’ll never complain again. For example, cooking on a single induction burner, an air fryer and an outdoor propane grill is quite a bit less convenient than cooking on a range with an oven below it..but it’s waaaaaay better than cooking on an induction burner powered by a noisy gas generator whose racket prohibits conversation while its fumes perfume the meal. I could probably cook this way for the rest of my life without any problem but h if you are reading this NOT REALLY, get your wife a PROPER OVEN AND RANGE.

Before the generator we often missed meals - in those early days we were not accustomed to not being able to go to a restaurant for dinner at 7p. We’d maximize the daylight hours for work, then, exhausted, want to eat dinner and go to bed…only to find there was no dinner to be had for another couple of hours. We might stop at a cafe for a beer to tide us over, and then have another just because those pony sized bottles are so cute, and it was so restful to sit there watching village rush hour traffic and feel our sweat dry. Then we’d go home with the aim of cleaning up and at the earliest possible moment walk to the closest restaurant. But unaccustomed to beer on an empty stomach and after a day of heavy labor we’d more than likely doze off sitting there in the sunset light streaming through the entryway. We’d wake at 10p stiff and still needing showers and with all the restaurants already closed. We’d debate ordering Glovo food delivery but would always be too hangry and woozy to actually pick anything. More often than not we’d have some tea and go to bed and wake at approximately 5:00a with a lion in our bellies. Then it was read the news and make pour-over coffees on the camp stove until it was time to walk up to Continente grocery store with our empty backpacks. The store opens at 8a, and also contains a vet, a pharmacy, a bookstore, a bakery, a laundromat and a cafe. For ten weeks we were the first customers of the day, always ordering the same huge breakfast. After eating we’d do a quick shop, careful not to get too many heavy items for the walk home, just a mile but with a series of steep downhills.

For the first six months I washed dishes twice a day in a bucket of water in the carport, wearing knee pads and elbow-length rubber gloves. For six months after that, I used an aluminum fish cleaning sink, which meant no more kneeling, which was so awesome I forgot life could get yet even better with an actual dishwasher until it arrived. It had to be installed in the quinta while we were living in the palaceta, necessitating we carry plastic dishpans full of dishes up and down Olive Tree Lane, but I practically skipped every time, even in the rain, even if it was one or two in the morning - if you don’t know that a dishwasher is freedom, you haven’t done your share of dishes in this lifetime.

This past weekend I sat up in bed and read a book. This was a huge milestone, a thing that once upon a time I did nightly (with tall piles of books cluttering my nightstand) but have not done at all since moving here in February 2023, for the simple reason that sleeping in a tent means no headboard to lean my back against. I can and do read on my phone, of course, but I have missed the physical act of reading a physical book. I tried laying on my stomach and reading while propped on my elbows, alternating with rolling over to my back and holding the book above my head but it was not very comfortable and having to wear a headlamp made it weird. Most of my reading move online as a result, skewing heavily towards nonfiction and longform journalism and leaving a fiction-sized hole in my heart.

Now in the garden apartment we have a bed and pillows. Strangely, it took some time to get used to sleeping up off the floor in an actual bed - even Jake had trouble settling into the new comfortable routine and drove us crazy asking to go out, to come back in, to get off the bed, to get back up on the bed. Here we were in a controlled climate, not sweating, no mosquitos, no extraneous noises like two dozen crowing roosters, recently showered even… and the three of us were tossing and turning and sighing and muttering for the first four or five nights like three princesses lying on a hidden pile of peas. There was a silver lining though - before in the palaceta if I couldn’t sleep I could furtively look at my phone and hope the light didn’t wake up the h, or I could go downstairs, light a candle and work on my novel in the ruined front room and pray the bat that had once entered the house but whose exact location since then is unknown did not choose this moment to reveal itself by flying out of the hole in the ceiling. Now, I can sit up in bed and read a book using the nifty little book light the h bought me just for this purpose.

Last night I stayed up til 2a reading my latest purchase - You Like It Darker, Stephen King’s collection of horror shorts - and making notes for a few stories that have been percolating in the horror lounge in my mind, including one I have tentatively titled The Blood of the Rooster which sounds like a classic horror tale but is in fact a recipe, a Portuguese specialty, which explains why we have at least two people per month stop by the property and ask if they can buy one of the roosters.

Oh I know some people who would definitely want one, says neighbor Ana when I ask her if she knows any interested rooster buyers. But you know, they’re going to EAT them, right? she says. Not keep them as pets?

Of course, I am well aware of that. Still I sometimes consider it, as it would solve a problem. Thanks to the recent predations of Senhor Fox, the ratio of roosters to hens in our flock is way way off and my hens are embattled; this spring their little backs were pink and raw where the roosters yank at their feathers during copulation. I dressed the wounds and they have healed, and introducing four more hens this fall will be a help…still I hesitate to sell any roosters, knowing they’ll meet a quick ignominious death which just seems wrong after all they have survived. They’ve lived here so long, and because the property is large enough, their co-existence is largely congenial, any fighting never moving past elaborate posturing. There are even a couple of notable friendships - Sean Cassidy watches out for Leif Garrett, who is blind in one eye. Alphonse and Potsy will come into the house together, walking side by side (in my mind, Alphonse has a voice like Michael Caine). Since losing Stella and the brood to the fox and blind adoption (we rescued three chicks), Stanley, after a period of grief that was heartbreaking to observe, has become gentleman friends with Justin Bieberoo.

In fact among all the two dozen roosters only one of them is on my sh*t list, Taylor Dane, and that’s because he picked up a orphan hen by the neck. Was he just curious? Was he seconds from shaking her and breaking her neck? We intervened before she was hurt, but I still haven’t recovered from the outrage. Taylor knows it and walks around me leerily and I’ll point at him and say THAT’S RIGHT I AM WATCHING YOU. I joke a lot that the roosters better watch out and toe the line, but when push comes to shove I’m not sure I could sell them off to their fate. I’m more sure I could butcher one and serve it at my own table, knowing it had a good life right up to the end. I’d much rather give them away to anyone planning to let them live out their little rooster lives doing what roosters do - scratching, roosting, crowing, protecting hens, enlarging the flock - no problem, but so far all of the enquiries are from people seeing red, i.e. they have the sangue de galo on their mind.

In the garden apartment the h has constructed a handy little beverage station where he can brew an espresso with frothed oat milk, or tea, serving them in cups he has gently warmed. It is a step up from the palaceta where he brewed French press coffee on a camp stove at an ancient kitchen tile counter covered in plastic sheeting wearing his underwear, a pair of boots and a down jacket. I can still recall the feeling of triumph when we ran out of camping gas, found a store that carried it and managed to convince them with our bad Portuguese that yes, we really were asking for camping gas in the middle of winter, please and thank you.

The list of finishing touches on the garden apartment can probably be addressed by the time our next visitors arrive in late September. We’ll have to polish the terrazzo floor in the laundry room and enclose the water heater in a cabinet. By then we hope to have kitchen counters, shelves, a kitchen sink, and some form of dining room table. (at least we’ve graduated from eating dinner on an upside down printer box).

It’s hard to believe that just sixteen months ago I fell asleep in my smoke-smelling Carhartt’s in a tent in a room whose walls and floor were still damp from being washed for the first time in forty years. Then, the house was crammed with the left-behind detritus of a family, including couches and clothing, mattresses and magazines all floating on a sad sea of broken things: toys, vases, computers. There was a Trainspotting-level dirty toilet bowl with no seat or flusher, there was no electricity, there was nothing you could touch that wasn’t sticky from the dead dust of decades. We took cold bucket showers sitting on a folding chair in the carport, cooked and ate amidst the fumes of a gasoline generator, made a two mile round trip to do laundry with our clothes in backpacks, and celebrated in the middle of the night when we heard the rat trap snap shut downstairs in the pantry.

Now, I sleep in a climate controlled environment with a spotless floor and clean bathroom with hot water, I can run a load of dishes and laundry while I cook a meal or work at my desk with its good overhead lighting. My desk is even a little cluttered, the way it used to be when I took all the other modern convenience stuff for granted, and straightening and dusting little thingamabobs that decorate my workspace - the head of a Pinocchio puppet, three plastic spiders, the disembodied head of a plastic lamb, seashells that hold earrings and a ring, a plastic wolf, a red plastic rooster, a green plastic hen, a tiny brass worry bird - is a small task that I actually enjoy.

Who knows what luxuries await me sixteen months from now? Just imagine! Maybe I will have a blow dryer...or an iron for my clothes! Maybe I will even have clothes - I’ve essentially been wearing what I packed way back in February 2023. With luck, my hens will be well-settled in their coop, and producing eggs. And of course I will have finished a couple of writing projects… first among them, The Blood of the Rooster, published here in my Substack publication Horror Boulevard.

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