New Old Norms

nothing is new and everything old is new again

I’ve been thinking about routines, how after nearly a year here Jake’s is so established now, and not all that different from the routines of his home in northern California. Feeding time is the same, and he’s walking in the morning and afternoon to and through the city parks, with a weekly jaunt into the municipal park to wade/swim the creek or ramble off leash in the trail up above our slice of the avenue, in the hills.

In San Francisco we’d occasionally take a left from our place and head down Sacramento Street, which always put an extra bounce into Jake’s step as he mentally prepared to charge ahead into every store and go straight to the counter where the cashier would be standing or sitting, often talking to a customer and unaware of Jake’s expectant self already sitting with a paw lifted.

If there is one thing Jake loves as much as swimming and greeting friends, it is the unbelievable fantastical fact that some shopkeepers will give you free biscuits.. To Jake’s great satisfaction it is much the same in Belas as it was on Sacramento Street; our walks take us past shopkeepers at different points of the morning journey, and one of them is almost always certain to feed Jake’s hatbi, whether the vet, the pet store owner, the dog walker, the park worker, the occasional older person passing by or sitting on a park bench who will produce a packet of treats from their pocket.

Today’s drizzle is a break in a week of gorgeous days, weather like you get in Hawaii or San Diego, the sun warm, the breeze kind, the sky so blue. The h has been harvesting potatoes which are now drying in a large bin, and onions that he’s tied together n a long braid that now hangs in the pantry like in a cookbook of impossibly rustic recipes.

Yesterday we let the four orphan baby hens into the garden for a supervised hour. They did the Chicken Moonwalk and dug themselves little trenches and wiggled their feathery butts into the soil, their legs sticking out in relaxation. Their little sounds of joy attracted Jack Black, who pushed his brightly combed head close to each of them and even joined in a chicken moonwalk or two. Potsy came over to peck gently at their baby feet, as if to ask, Are you even real? The rest of the flock stood at a distance, watching with mild interest.

Maybe they are all thinking the same thing we are thinking, Hens, praise be! It’s easy to forget the flock is still facing the trauma of the recent loss of half a dozen hens to the jaws of the fox. We’re down to four adult hens - in December I have videos showing more than a dozen; not all were yet named, even. All adult fox-taken birds have been hens, but also, the four surviving orphans of these attacks are all hens, which will bring our total to eight in a few months.

That’s a better balance with the close to two dozen roosters we have, nevertheless some of those guys are going to have to go and last night we identified one - the one who is attacking the rooster Taylor Dane, who is missing feathers and can often be heard squawking during the attacks. We call the attacker Darth. Little does Darth know we already have a buyer for him. Soon it will be bye bye, bully Darth.

Thanks to the productivity of the horta, we are slowly returning to our norm of salads every day. At the moment we have cucumbers, zucchini, lettuce, cabbage, yellow and green beans and tomatoes coming in so regularly it’s too much to cook/eat, so we’ve begun freezing, and canning supplies arrived yesterday.

We are growing the same alface and espinafre that we favored when living in the States, though kale has been replaced with cabbage, which is another new norm we’ve wholly embraced. Cabbage is good! It is the Sally Field of vegetables, likable and capable in every genre. We are rapidly learning all the many preparations available, as well as how to keep/store via pickling. My favorite thing to do with purple cabbage is make a pickled slaw and put it on top of everything because it is so pretty. Making kimchee is something I’ve been wanting to do and with such an excess of cabbage looks like the time is now.

Saturday we had lunch over at Alberto’s Dumbledore-esque workshop with his wife and son, who spent the morning helping him harvest the first batch of what must be more than twenty kilos of potatoes. The sardines were grilled then laid on cornbread; the first bite takes the meat off the fish leaving a cartoon fish skeleton exposed, to be lifted out whole and placed to the side, leaving the next bite bone-free. We had little potatoes and salad and pimentas to go with the sardinewiches, all the veggies harvested just a few minutes before lunch. To wash it all down the h and I brought a bottle of vinho verde and a pitcher of raspberry mint lemonade that was a beautiful pink color, made with lemons from Alberto’s garden and mint from ours.

It was a lunch of homely beauty - all the plates different, the table with a tablecloth, the bowl of potatoes with a towel on top to keep the heat in, a plate of cheese to start. After, Alberto disappeared into the deep recesses of his workshop to make the espressos. Rosa brought one to her son, giving his hair a motherly little tousle as she did so. There were little glasses for aquavit to drink with the cafe for those who wanted. I tried it, it made the hairs in my nose feel like they were on fire. Everyone laughed at my surprised face. Rosa’s father drink every day with his cafe, Alberto said.

Come see my garden, Alberto said. It’s different every week, as new crops come in and different ones are planted. The corn is chest high, four rows of it separated by plots of beans and other crops. I admired the beautiful purple tomatoes, the passion fruits hanging all sinister like pod people. There were four kinds of tomatoes reddening under the sun. A zucchini that I’m not sure isn’t an almost-born pod person, so large it was.

Are you stealing my sun? the h joked. Our zukes are a good size, but nothing like the unsettling monster we were looking at. Alberto laughed.

I tell Herbert, I talk to them, he said.

That’s not fair, the h says when I show him a picture of Alberto’s zucchini next to the zuke he has brought from the horta. You can’t compare his gourd to my zucchini. And that isn’t even my prize winner, he says.

I will have to remember to tell Alberto that the h has in fact taken this advice literally, and has begun talking to his plants in the greenhouse, and they are responding with little unfurlings and stretchings. The h told me this in an awed whisper.

I’ve never seen them do that before, he said. I can’t help laughing because he’s up there now chatting with them, urging them on to grow bigger than Alberto’s. Men are so competitive.

Look, the h texted today. I was working in the palaceta, and he was somewhere on the property - maybe in the cottage with Tiago. The text was not what I expected - a picture of a nice espresso with a good crema.

I’m enjoying an espresso, the h wrote. Come on over I will make you one!

I went through the drizzle over to the quinta and the h showed me his latest acquisition delivered by Amazon. We didn’t have espresso cups but we did have the ceramic ramekins. The h warmed them up and then showed me how to make an espresso and froth the oat milk and then we enjoyed our nice perfect little bicas.

Outside it is all mistiness. The newly painted wall in front of the campo shines crisply through the gloom. The left side of the wall is slumped and stained with age and moisture. Looking at that little expanse is like a metaphor for the whole project - on the left, how we found it - down but not defeated, on the right the future of how it will look, solid and defined, in the middle, an open field (campo) - literally. Ours to define.

Oh look, I said during lunch at Alberto’s, whose workshop sits at the top of a hill, his garden spreading out down to the road. We can see our place across the street, Alberto and Paulo’s cars parked in our driveway, roosters strutting about.

It’s different, seeing it from this angle, I explained. I often wonder if anyone can tell if someone is living there now.

Oh yes, Paulo says. Now, it looks like it is a place in the hands of someone who cares about it.

I like the sound of that. From where we sit I can see the fresh coats of paint on the walls and gates and garage. The weeds are tamped down, the olive trees filling out.

Rosa mentioned the repairs to the casa pequena - the cottage which is no longer a ruin presiding at the top of a ruined property but is now fairtytale book neat with one door and two windows and a cap of red tiles for a roof. It looks….crisp, like it is standing at attention looking out over the distance, where before it sat slumped with its head in its hands

the cottage when we arrived

.Sim, e a minha melhora casa na propriedade, I say, hoping it means what I mean it to mean which is, It is my favorite house on the property, which it is. As small as it is, it can seat sixteen at a lunch or dinner party, or a euchre tournament like the kind we have with the h’s family when we get together for Christmas, all seventy zillion of us, every other year. 2026 is an ‘on’ year, and so the family Christmas will be here, in Portugal where we will be prepared to receive the tidal wave of humanity that is the h’s family. The h has seven brothers and sisters, more than twenty nieces and nephews, all of whom seemingly are now having babies, some even two. Even our own Agatha presented us with our first neta, another new norm - being grandparents.

Yesterday was as sunny as today is gray and Jake on his walk paused at every intersection angling to take the long way - a true norm. It was Monday and the butcher and churrasqueria businesses were closed. The vet across the way had their front door propped open per usual and Jake leaned into the crosswalk, stretching his leash to the limit, craning toward that heavenly gate to free biscuits.

I was embarrassed when a car stopped… now we had to cross, it was the only polite thing to do with the driver waiting. Jake tried to be a step ahead of me at the vet’s open door but he was foiled by a customer exiting the store. I tried to keep him moving away from the open door but he dove over the threshold, triggering the bell that sounds when a new customer enters the shop. Jake knows that bell brings the owner to the front of the store, and that once there the owner will laugh and give him a biscuit … so he really lunges when he sees the open door, often jerking me half off my feet.

We do not starve you, I scold Jake who ignores me as he sits at proud attention directly in front of the vet’s bulk biscuit t bin, which makes it difficult for the vet to actually retrieve the biscuits, especially when Jake begins to dance with excitement.

Lucky for us the vet is a lovely man who does not mind being bossed by our cheerfully gluttonous American dog. He always says senta and makes the sign for Jake to sit, which Jake does (again) and gives him one treat, then gives another to me, because he knows that if I don’t have something with which to lure Jake out of there, Jake might actually sit indefinitely in front of that bin, even after everyone leaves and they turn out the lights, such is the power of free biscuits.

This new norm of stopping at the vet’s little store is exactly like the old norm that we enacted every time we went past the Pet Stop store in San Francisco, where Jake insisted on stopping in and getting some freebies, and sniffing at the merchandise.

Wherever you go there you are, I tell Jake as he exits onto the narrow calcada sidewalk and heads home from his walk without further complaint, his tail in a high curl as he walks. Free biscuit, mission accomplished, that tail says.

Belas is well named. in the spring purple wisteria crown the old walls. Jacaranda shed their purple confetti on the calcadas, and bouganvilla swirl their pink and red skirts everywhere the sun burns hot. Everywhere Jake and I walk, we end up under some bouganvilla, it’s rich pink-red waterfall of color tumbles over the tops of walls, over the tops of trellises, over park benches, from above fountains.

It was everywhere in our neighborhood in San Francisco too - just another one of those echoes of there that are here, like the replica of the Golden Gate bridge, like the way trumpet flowers and birds of paradise flourish, like the towering eucalyptus and the graceful Monterey pine, like the short distance it is to the sea — all of which surround us in our new place like old friends.

From the beginning, wherever we went in Portugal, I was reminded of northern California, a place we lived for decades, longer than anywhere either of us (both midwesterners) have ever lived. It’s beautiful there. The only place I will live longer is the place I’m in now, the place we’ve been for a year, a place called Beautiful where we will - if we are lucky - live out the years of our old age before sailing for the western gate as we all must do.

Looking around the lunch table in the shade of Alberto’s workshop, breathing the fecund scent of the sunshine lying over the garden just a few feet away, hearing the sardines sizzle on the grill under the the sound of the h chatting with Paulo, the faint music of a radio emanating from another room in the workshop…I have to say I felt pretty lucky.

At my language class on Monday - a Zoom call with an instructor where we speak Portuguese to each other until I feel like my head is going to fall off - we talked about all the guests the h and I have been having, and what else is happening in our lives. Pedro explains the Festival of St. Joao to me; I reveal that the host of the birthday party a few months ago has invited us back, this time he is the birthday boy.

Oh that’s good, then he’s not mad, Pedro says, and I remind him the host may not even know about what happened. It was another guest who alerted me with a really great whisper, like something a Hollywood writer would come up with: There’s a sh*t situation on the first floor, stat! I leapt out of a conversation I was part of to race downstairs where Jake had decided, not being able to find grass, that the front porch landing was the best place to do a number two. A reaaaaallly big number two with multiple satellite locations.

I stood there with that pile at my feet and the sounds of the party wafting outside. I knew all the doggie bags etc. were in the car, a block away - I couldn’t leave the pile there and go get the poop bags, people were bound to have to step over it as they left the party. I had to get rid of it now. It took me five traumatic minutes of going inside for paper towels, back outside for picking up poop, then all over to find a garbage can to dispose of it, THEN strategically scatter leaves where I was unable to clean the sidewalk better…all before anyone could come out and encounter it.

Meanwhile the h was having a nice chat upstairs with the host and having TWO PIECES of cake while I locked myself in the bathroom for a couple of minutes to scan all over to make sure I didn’t kneel in dog poo or something. It’s just the kind of thing that happens to me. I didn’t, but I’m still scarred by the whole thing and could not leave fast enough. As we left the host and his wife waved us off and we were walking down the sidewalk with me hissing Don’t step on the leaves!

As luck would have it Alberto came over after my Portuguese lesson with lunch again - this time, a largish container of little fried anchovy fishes. They were very salty and delicious - we had them with cucumber and avocado salad and a big slice of fresh bread. We’ve received a bunch of fresh pao deliveries lately, courtesy of Alberto’s baker friend.

Last night as the h cooked up beans and potatoes from the horta I returned to the palaceta to fetch some things and on the way back crossed paths with a longish rat. The h has a plan for Senhor Rato, so I just gave it an “and stay out!!” spray with the hose in the underbrush where it disappeared.

Most of the time the baby hens run around the house at will, and when they get tired and their feet get chilly they gather together to sit on or near me/the h/Jake. But if we’re not around they still choose to sit on the furniture, especially in a patch of sun or a sea of warm down.

It has become my favorite part of the day, when the orphan babies begin cheeping from behind the night-curtains we’ve rigged in front of the hutch/brooder. At 6:30a I pull the curtains and they race to stand in front of the little door that leads out of the brooder. Then it’s a race to the plate of blueberries and apples I have carefully sliced up and set out for them, getting nine and even twelve pieces out of each blueberry because 1) the blueberries are really big (and tasty) here and 2) the smallest orphan hens can’t eat pieces much bigger than one ninth of a blueberry.

If I sleep til 7:30a the h will let the girls out, as he calls them, and it won’t be long before they march cheeping into the bedroom and around the tent, chanting in their cheepy voices Get up! get up! get up! In some ways they are very much like the goose and her goslings in Charlotte’s Web, in some ways, having baby chickens perching on our wrists while we drink tea and chattering underfoot while we cut vegetables, and racing off the porch like little paratroopers when we open the door is like living in the pages of a fairytale, a place where you talk to plants and they grow a little extra just for you, a place where you give creatures names and they come when you call.

Good night! I tell the little orphan hens every night when they hop into their brooder. Thank you, girls, for another great day! They each accept a pat and cheep as they eat their pre-bedtime snack. Goodnight, I say as I close their night curtains. You are all very brave! I can’t wait to see you tomorrow! I pretend they understand me, these fairtytale creatures that as babies escaped the jaws of the fox and somehow found their way into my happily ever after with the h and Jake, here in our castle, in Beautiful.

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