Progresso Lento
The h went to WebSummit 2023, the biggest event in all Portugal. Even our elderly neighbors know what it is - you don’t have to be an entrepreneur or working in an internet job to know the importance of an event that attracts 70,000 attendees to a small nation like Portugal. The whole country celebrates it.
Most conferences the h brings back a memento or schwag - a t-shirt, socks, stickers, a bag of empanadas from one of the food carts. This time he brought back COVID. It’s my first time, his second, and our symptoms were completely different - he had congestion and a cough and weakness, I felt mostly okay except for three days of a sore throat that had me dreading to swallow. Luckily I was able to get him medicine while I was still well enough to walk to the pharmacy; a few days later he returned the favor, bringing home lozenges that made me cry with the relief, so grateful I was to swallow without pain again.
For two weeks I dragged myself up twice daily to feed the chickens and the dog, then crawled back into bed until it was time to walk the dog, then back to bed again. Our kind neighbor brought us a bag of lemons from his winter harvest; I juiced them, added honey and hot water, my sole source of calories for about ten days.
At the long tailed end of our illness the h celebrated a birthday and decided out of the blue he’d like to grill a steak, something we haven’t done for years. So we bundled up against a steady hard rain and walked up the hill to the grocery store, an effort that wiped me out. Sweating behind our masks we bought only what we had the strength to carry back. I huddled inside under hat and blankets while the h braved the elements to grill. We ate, the dog drooling. Strength flowed back into our bodies, a physical sensation. We slept more than twelve hours that night; I woke feeling more myself, strange since our diets have been mostly animal-free for years now.
While we were sleeping the work at the guest house continued, the collapsed kitchen floor and ceiling rebuilt, dry rot excavated, walls repaired and in one case simply removed all together.
I walked over last night to have a look. In a few days we’ll be ready to lay the new floor throughout and prime the walls for painting. Then we’ll install a sink, replace the now-cleaned stove, and put in a new toilet and wash basin in the bathroom.
We wave at Tiago and Paulo, the workers, from a distance, communicating by text.
The electric company arrives in a week to install the mini-split that will provide heat in winter and air conditioning in summer. As I watch the vapor of my breath puff over my computer screen , the legendary heat of my adopted country seems mythical, unbelievable.
Alberto, seeing us turtling around the property, brings us a tree to plant and a bouquet of fresh picked greens from his garden. For the strength, forte, he says, a hand to his chest for emphasis.
As I was crossing the driveway I found a freshly dead rat. There were no clues as to its demise, no violence done to it. We decided it must have eaten the poison the h spread around the cellar.
The roosters walked unconcernedly past it. It was huge, likely fattened on a steady diet of baby chicks which have all died now, every single one from the winter peeps, even Stella’s last baby who had seemed like it was going to make it, roosting next to her each night in the high branches. I don’t know when little Chico died, sometime during our illness.
The rain continues to pound down, water trickling into the big house from the old leaks, and revealing new leaks in the mud room, breakfast room and two upstairs bedrooms. I sit here writing in a rain hat and boots, unable for the moment to distinguish the outdoors from the indoors and trying not to cry because crying doesn’t make anything better but crying anyway because this two steps forward five steps back is enough to make anyone cry. I know it’s just the remnants of the illness making me feel blue; we’ve accomplished so much in a short period of time. It’s all good.
As I wrote that last sentence the power blinked off. The one light we operate by is no more, it’s thin cheer extinguished. The windows are so fogged with humidity I can’t see out but I can hear cars splashing past on the road. The roosters are quiet as they always are in periods of heavy rain, huddled together in the low brush. Somewhere in the house I hear water pattering down onto plastic. It is, as they say, to laugh.
Carry on…