Oh My God What Have We Done

Giving a tour of the property to our family guests, I had a panicky feeling inside that manifest as a mild tic under my left eye. I can talk a good game about not sweating the small stuff but the fact is I am a very anxious person born of a very anxious father; omnipresent anxiety was so much the natural state of my life that I did not even recognize it until I smoked weed for the first time, but that’s another story for another day.

I (mostly) manage my anxiety through running, yoga, being with my dog Jake, meditation and work… and by taking the example of my decidedly non-anxious husband (the h).

As we went through our renovation spiel of what was and what will be while looking at different overgrown or collapsed parts of the property with the fam, I became more and more distressed. This isn’t one project but two dozen, and every project is in a state of being partially started or partially completed. Nothing is really 'done’ yet; some things are still just a plan. There is no end date as yet to moving into a house that does not have a hundred ways for insects and rats and what-have-you to enter. The lower story of the quinta awaits windows before we can move in, but I’d prefer to wait til we also have a kitchen sink, a bathroom sink, and kitchen cabinets, though these are things that are nice rather than necessary.

If someone had shown me a photo of myself now, three years ago, I would have said Oh my god what have we done, were we kidnapped? I told the h. He laughed.

The palaceta is still more haunted mansion than not; moldy wall paper paste stains the walls in interesting patterns (there is one stain that looks exactly like a whirling flamenco dancer). Dark holes gape in the stately ceiling in three rooms downstairs and two rooms upstairs. I still wonder if the bat I woke one night to find flapping around the living room is living here somewhere. Neither of us actually observed it flying out the open front door; it could easily have floated up through one of the holes in the ceiling to the second floor, then up through another hole in the ceiling to the rafters where it hangs upside down even now, biding its time.

“This is the guest house, we tore out this wall and had to put in a ceiling in the kitchen because it had fallen down and become the floor”;

“This is where the hole in the roof became a hole in the floor, courtesy of rain pouring in”;

“This is the pool house where we found the dead flat cat, we’re going to put the kitchenette over here”;

“This old moldy mattress is the last of twelve mattresses we hauled out of here”;

“We’ll fill this pool as soon as we replace those couple of dozen tiles”;

“This is the four acres that are still covered with three-foot weeds that need to be mowed before July 4th or we will be fined $1000 euro like we were last year, per fire control regulations”;

“This huge pile of branches and tree limbs is only slightly less huge after paying a huge truck with a huge claw attachment to load it up and carry it away”:

“No, the chickens are not staying in the coop yet, we still have to hunt for eggs.”;

“This is our bank account that used to be a lot bigger til it developed a Portuguese renovation project-sized hemorrhage.”

Just kidding on that last one, it’s not something I’d say out loud to a visitor - I can keep the voices in my head in my head, most times.

The only thing that feels like it is going as it should is the garden and the fruit orchard, where we have planted things and they are now growing. Just this week tiny bunches of grapes have appeared on the wild vines the h has strung into an arbor.

To be sure, some things we planted did not grow; some started to grow then mysteriously died. Some died of non-mysterious causes - chickens eating them, wind knocking them over, rain drowning them. But for the most part, it’s all going and growing the way a garden should.

Today is super windy, the tails of the roosters swirl around like the skirts of ice skaters. The flock didn’t want to go up to the chicken coop to eat, which I can hardly blame them. If I were them I’d prefer to stay in the underbrush out of the wind, too. Twelve followed me; the rest loitered near the pool. It took me many trips, banging a cup on a bowl, to persuade (most of) them to budge. I went back to try to lead the stragglers - one hen, four roosters - up to the coop. One of the roosters jumped one of the hens, right under my feet, tripping me. I fell but managed to roll to the side and thus not tumble down the steps. As I lay there the other three roosters piled on the hen, who disappeared under the melee. Alphonse, my favorite rooster, came running up to get in on the action.

I’m disappointed in you, I shouted. He didn’t care.

For awhile I knew where the hens were laying their eggs and we collected almost three dozen in three weeks. After all the cleanup in the Secret Garden and the fruit orchard you’d think I could find where the hens are leaving their eggs but no. And when I do find one it’s too late, some rooster has already eaten it.

The coop is your homeland! Suas patria! I tell them. Your ancestors lived here 24x7, it’s in your DNA to live here! But they have been feral too long, who can really blame them for wanting to free range around five acres and sleep high in the trees. It’s a great way to live as long as it’s not raining or windy. When it’s raining or windy I always put their feed down IN the coop instead of the courtyard, and they eat without the normal squabbling, and glance around as if to say “Hey, it’s nice being out of the pounding rain and driving wind!” But as soon as dinner is over they head back out to hide in the brush or roost in the trees, beruffled and bedraggled, as if this is the way life is meant to be. If hard is what you’re used to, I guess it’s hard not to make things harder than they need to be.

The other night we were walking up the quinta road and I was feeling pretty good and then saw something low and dark scurry across the solar lit calcadas. I broke into a sprint, shining my headlamp up and down the wall but whatever it was, it was gone. I say whatever it was as though it’s entirely plausible that it was an extra large, rotund gecko or an extra small, swift hedgehog, but of course I already know it’s an effing rat. It squoze itself into a crack in the wall, no doubt, waiting for us to pass by and then continue on its journey up to the compost pile.

The compost pile is about fifty feet from the garden shed which currently houses a hen sitting very quietly on eight eggs. I am debating whether I should install some kind of door so that at night we can lock her in and the rat out. I put down food and water for her each day so she doesn’t have to get off her eggs and go scavenging. Then I worry, can the rat smell the food? Would it bother with chicken feed with the rich compost heap nearby? If the rat makes an appearance at the shed door, would the rooster that stands guard over the hen attack the rat and drive it away? Will the rat drive the hen off her nest and eat all the eggs?

You should sit up there at night and wait for the rat and then shoot it with your air gun, I tell the h. I am half joking, but he says okay. I love him.

Step by step, the h says about the millions of things that still need doing. I ask my Portuguese instructor how to translate this. Pequenas vitorias, he says. I know all about step by step; I have run more than a hundred marathons and a dozen or so ultra marathons, and there always comes a point where you have come so very far, but the pain and misery and the knowledge of how far you still have to go suck away any feeling of accomplishment. You just set your mouth, blank your mind and grimly force your body forward. That’s how the project feels today.

I think I’m just in a mood because it’s gray and intermittently rainy today, the air in Brokedown Palace is cold and damp and we have to wear layers to stay warm. And our local team - the Amadora Estrellas - lost again last night. It’s the second game we’ve been to, and the second loss. Maybe they should get rid of those creepy red mannequins at the top of the stadium that look like Iron Man impostors watching the destruction they have wrought from on high.

My residence card did not come in one or two weeks as promised - this is week four now. And my dad’s birthday is today - he would have been 88, if he hadn’t died eleven months ago. I miss him. He never saw this place; I’m not even sure he understood what it meant when I said we had bought a property in Portugal, his dementia was advancing rapidly by then.

There are good things to be sure - the h had to go to Sintra to work out some details about our property, which had to be done before the palaceta and the cottage could be wired for electricity. It could have gone sideways - bureaucracy here is dependably unpredictable, even byzantine - but it went fine, he came away with clear instructions on what to do next. The workers have been repairing the calcadas on the sidewalks in front of the gates, lining the driveway and the split staircase in front of the palaceta. It’s not the kind of thing a visitor or passer-by would notice, but it’s amazing to not be constantly stepping over holes or tripping when your foot catches on one of the little hillocks of buckling limestone bricks.

It was too windy to burn the past two days so we will solve the massive deadfall problem by renting a massive wood chipper to arrive on Saturday. The four of us - the h, me, our trusty workers - will create a “branch brigade”, passing the pile branch by branch to the chipper operator to feed into the maw of his machine. Looking at it, I despair that we can get it done in one day - the pile is bigger than some of the buildings on the property. All we can do is try.

After a three day visit the sister-in-law, her husband and daughter will take off tomorrow. We will clean like hurricanes, getting ready for our next visitors - another of the h’s eight siblings arrive in a week, for a thirty day stay. It will be good to see them, not least because they are residents of rugged Alaska and not only know how to wield chainsaws and weed trimmers but fully expect to. It will be good to have visitors for whom the primitive state of affairs isn’t really primitive - they conduct their daily Alaskan lives off the grid without electricity, running water, or a flush toilet, so will feel right at home.

Tell me we didn’t bite off more than we can chew, I demand of the h. I am ridiculously close to tears. He just laughs and goes back to watching a video on how to operate his new chainsaw. I’ve never seen him happier. I headed outside to search for eggs. The setting sun was pretty I and found one egg just before darkness fell. Uma pequena vitoria.