Summer at the door

I have not quite shaken off the dream of France. Pau is amazingly beautiful. The fresh preparation of seasonal vegetables at Clos Mirabel inspired me and I’ve been searching for recipes for fava beans and onions which are plentiful now.

This year’s freight of Japanese plums is epic, and I’m thinking maybe we should make some jam. It’s a holy thing, each morning, to go out to a tree, tug a branch and pluck a golden plum from a cluster of them. They taste between a peach and a plum. They look like galaxies of little yellow suns and have come to represent for me the true nature of Portugal, this sweet plentitude born of rough soil, the rugged rainy and windy winter and spring becoming the extended long dry hot summer and producing something small and perfect and beautiful and juicy. You must not wait to enjoy the plums but eat them greedily as they will soon be gone. It’s nice to get nice fruit at the nice supermercado on the avenida but it’s even nicer to pull the fruit off your tree, wipe it off on your shirt and eat it for breakfast, your chin dripping. Last year my sister in law Kirsten could be spotted every morning leaping into the lower branches of the plum outside the garden apartment patio. She’d eat a few fistfuls while chatting on the phone with her mom in far away Los Angeles.

The sycamore tree is in full bloom, spreading a great halo of leaves over Lower Olive Tree Lane and dappling the side of the garden apartment with shady leaf imprints like the world’s biggest, best flocked wallpaper.

The pintainhos of Sierra Nevada and I Dream of Jeannie’s peeps have grown up. Some are like replicas of adult hens and roosters, but about 30% smaller. But some of the baby hens - about twelve weeks now - are baby monster hens. Penny Lane the hen is bigger than mom Sierra and aunt Jeannie, as are her twin friends Pie and Cake, which shows how much early nutrition counts for early size. Eddie Haskell has more confidence than should be allowable, a perfect mini-scale rooster right out of The Italian Gang playbook along with his peep-bro-buddies Teddy and Freddie and Neddie Haskell. Some are still hilariously chick-like, half-fuzzy and half feathered like Fuzzy Zoeller and Tiny Little Tina and MaryAnne, giving them a perpetually alarmed look. The h has taken a liking to Fuzzy Zoeller and they have a thing where Fuzzy will peck the h’s shoe and the h will carry him about for awhile.

We are getting 2-3 eggs per day now, and I know which hen laid which egg at a glance. We’ve given away a few dozen eggs already, to Alberto and Rosa, and Paulo the baker, who has been really upping his game in the bread he is sending our way, so fresh and soft that we will stop whatever we are doing, wash our hands and toast some up with a quick bica. When my friend from Belleville - also coincidentally named Sandy - asked what was for breakfast I was so delighted that she could scramble up four eggs and a toasted whole wheat seed roll with a meia de leite.

Sierra is now permanently a coop hen; I thought she’d rejoin the northern flock as soon as possible but she knows how good she’s got it and is the first up on the roost bar at night, settling her feathery rump in a way that leaves no doubt where she’s spending the night. One day not too long ago Jeannie rejoined her brothers and cousin Han on the roost bar, leaving her eight babies next door in the little room where she raised them. She sits on the roost bar at the end closeset to the chicken-wired window that looks in on her eight babies, which seem fine on their own, fitting well on the top rung of a ladder the h made of tree branches, a kind of chicken jungle gym that has become the preferred perch of Jeanie’s peep, offering height as well as a view out the door, where I appear every morning like a magician carrying food and calling their names. The sound they make as they come flapping down is biblical.

I am happy to report that both Sierra and Jeannie are laying in their respective nesting boxes. And the new little hens - ten, we think but we are not yet certain - have six nesting boxes waiting for them, and in the meantime are having “the best place to lay eggs” modeled for them on a daily basis by Jeannie and Sierra.

The h has tractored up the Back 40 and where before it was just a wild jungle of weeds more than waist high, now you can see the design of the land, the way it has been bordered and terraced with walls, demarcated with trees, and rolling with berms of wildflowers. There are four distinct campos, perfect places to have long wavy sidewalks through wildflowers arriving at the door of a writer’s shack, all the comforts of an off-the-grid home away from home for writers writing or painters painting or singers singing, or walkers pausing on their Artist Shack Tour of the property, sharing a social minute or two, maybe sitting on the porth to chat and take in the view with a nice cup of tea before the walker is off to the next artist at the next shack. It’s a walk of four miles, basically wading through wildflowers the whole way. I can’t wait til some painters visit and paint it.

We’ve completed a lot of tree work in the past few months. A big dead tree that has long clawed the sky on the south eastern edge of the property has been cut down, sawed up and carted away, all except some of the bigger portions of the mighty trunk, now huge logs and disks that sit on the ground like benches and stools in a circle around the firepit we will dig into the ground and line with tiles. We know a chainsaw artist from Alaska that may enjoy this job of carving stools and benches from the remnants of the silhouette that has long dominated the horizon of this property with its dead black reaching scarecrow shape. This firepit will be a short distance from a writer’s shack that will take the writer far from the palaceta and the cottage and the garden apartment, floating on the top terrace of the property’s seven terraces (there will be seven writer’s shacks, one for each terrace level). Some big branches down from the last series of winter storms still need to be moved out of the Secret Garden.

The h and I have picked out the tile for the bathroom in the casita (cottage), a beautiful mix of textures in tea green and cream white and black. All fixtures will be matte black. When you look out the window, you see the palaceta fronted by the twin palms like a picture in a frame.

Around the property there are maybe four trees that look swing ready, so I hope to get those up before the end of summer. Big thick ropes, and oversized wooden seats. The other day someone on Substack sent me a video of four chickens perched on a swing that gently swung in the breeze. Maybe the h can build one, she said. She is one of many people who refer to the h as the h I’ve been thinking of putting a dymo tape label on the tractor that reads “the h’s tractor”.

We’ve gotten in the habit of taking a property walk in the morning after the chickens are fed, and in the evening just after sunset, the chickens safe in their coop. It feels like a small miracle to me, to go to the coop at 7:30p and the entire flock has already put itself to bed, everyone in their designated roosting spot for the night. They all look at me as I come in and check around before closing them in. Good night, I say to them, and a few will warble and shift on their roost. Sleep tight, I love you and tomorrow will be another great day, I tell them, locking the two doors to the coop, and then locking the doors to the runs. Nothing is getting in the coop to scare my darlings, no sir. No wonder Sierra doesn’t want to go back to the fox-haunted garden of the death of her sister galinhas.

We just started letting Sierra and Jeannie’s peeps run around loose all day about two weeks ago. We feared some would wander off and not come back, choosing to go feral, but we needn’t have worried. The flock loves the coop, the many roosts, the feeding zones, the waterers dotting the runs and the rooms and the courtyard. Most of all they love the fig tree which stands like a queen in the upper left corner of the pool level, up the hill where the wall borders the chicken coop courtyard she rears up out of the earth, towering over the coop on the level above, her thick, low, twisting branches flooding down the hillside, the enormous green leaves like a long flowing skirt. The seventeen pintahinhos love to stand among the branches or scratch all day on the shady hillside under the canopy of fig leaves, hidden from the sight of aerial predators and relatively safe from fox attack.

My three little roos, my darling of darlings Han Solo, Yella, and Chaz, are now full-fledged roosters who rooster about taking their roosterly duties very seriously, especially Han who is the first to crow in the morning and can be heard all day long, his confident little voice in the distance as familiar to me as the sound of Jake’s bark. The other day Major Tony Nelson - once upon a time the boyfriend of I Dream of Jeannie - tried to enter the lower swimming pool courtyard and Han chased him away and his neck stayed ruffed up for a good half hour. Good man, I told Han. Way to be on your rooster toes.

Lunch time is truy hilarious as the entire coop flock has been waiting for me, knowing it’s coming. Chaz will be mounted on the lower pool house wall and wll crow, and the message makes its way back to the coop, She’s coming!!! SHE HAS ARRIVED, THE LITTLE FOOD BEARER IS HERE!

All seventeen chicks will crowd out the door and down the steps and compete to occupy the prized geography beneath the soles of my shoes. I have to scoot my feet in a shuffle in order not to crush them beneath my clodhopper quinta shoes, which are Danners by the way and I couldn’t love them more and really want a new pair in black suede.

I spread the food around the coop courtyard and everyone goes mad. I check the waterers and take any that need refilling down to the carport and refill them. The flock will gather around a new waterer and drink reverently, their little beaks pointing at the sky in a touchingly self-serious way, especially among the littlest ones. One day I lay out chunks of watermelon, remembering how crazy Han and Yella and Chaz and Jeannie were for it back in the living-in-the-palaceta days, pecking and pecking and their wiping their beaks on our pants legs and shirt sleeves, left to right-right to left, swipe swipe then back to plunging their whole heads into the red pulpy mass. At the end the rinds lay completely denuded in a watery red puddle. You guys are vampires I’d tell them and they’d make big watery poops and then ask to sleep off their sugar buzz roosting stickily on our arms and shoulders.

The other day I had Jeannie in my arms and bent over to pick something up and suddenly boom boom two more adult sized chickens landed on my back and walked up to my shoulders. Who is that on me, I asked the h. It’s Chaz and Yella, the h informed me and just then Han Solo walked up and began measuring the distance from the ground to the top of my head with his beady red eyes. OK off you guys, I said, but let them hang around on me for awhile and pretended it didn’t make me sentimental. They remembered riding around on my shoulders, peering out at the world through a safe curtain of my hair, yellow feet splayed stolidly nos meus ombros.

Watching the seventeen pintainhos strut and zoom around the coop courtyard reminds me strongly of days at the lake in South Carolina where the h’s mom has a lake house. When we were in our 40s, each of the h’s siblings had children all in the same approximate bandwidth of age, i.e. three to thirteen. It was a constant mob scene, with twenty five or so kids just being kids, eating and yelling and yelling and eating in between swimming and wakeboarding. The way the pintainhos run around the courtyard curious and interested in everything is a lot like the constant surfing of those two dozen nieces and nephews surfing in and out of each room of the lake house, yelling into the void who has my socks and where are my flip flops and wait for me if you’re going out on the boat!

The h tractoring in the back 40 has become a familiar sight in the bairro. Sadly it has not caused the people who are walking their dogs on or land to start picking up dog poo, not even when their regular walking route becomes unusable for the disgusting amount of crap that has accumulated. I have thought about posting a sign, COME ON, PEOPLE, spelling out the words with old dog turds. Sheesh.

One day the h was on the tractor backing and filling around a mound of cacti and a guy leaned out his window, gave the h a thumbs up and then tossed him a mini bottle of Sagres beer. Another time a woman brought her son, about age 6, across the street for a closer look at the tractor which is shiny and red and Italian and streamlined and as sexy as any Lambo, imho. The boy touched the tractor like it was a Superhero conveyance no different than the Batmobile which it is, my friend, which it is.

Different friends that were here about nine months ago have returned, their travels bringing them back through the area. It’s been fun to compare their pictures then with the improvements now - we’ve made more progress than I sometimes realize. Renovations, like writing a book and running a marathon, are accomplished step by step.

The palaceta is light and bright, the windows thrown open in every room, the wood floors sanded a smooth pale oak, the walls and ceilings re-plastered. I feel sorry for anyone who never makes it up to the third floor, which I have gotten in the habit of calling Jo’s Garrett and which will be my office area with a space for tea and entertaining so in effect almost no one will see it unless you are a poet and ask to see my volumes of poems in three languages, or want to read one of my horror short stories.

The next big palaceta goal is new windows, and as part of that process we will remove the iron grates that are still screwed over some of the windows and doors. When those are lifted off it will be much lighter and brighter inside, and the place will lose the slightly haunted gloom permanently shuttered rooms always acquire.

Our containers are on their way across the ocean to us, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen my stuff and it’s going to be weird and exciting to unpack it all into the waiting houses. If you are taking notes we do not recommend shipping your stuff across an ocean unless you have an extraordinarily good reason for doing so and if you do under no circumstances should you own the container and that’s all I’m going to say on that subject so as not to jinx it knock on wood. The h has been a superhero navigating this obscure, obfuscated process - a whole new bureaucratic world of bills of lading and insurance needs et cetera et cetera. Our stuff is not particularly valuable but it’s our stuff and it’s cool and accumulated over different periods of life and countries traveled to and I am so looking forward to seeing our rugs and art - especially the stately Durer’s Rhino - in their new forever homes. I know it sounds weird but I have this couch from the Houston period of my life, and another from the Austin period of my life, and another from the San Francisco period of my life and they’re all going to go in the same room and it’s going to be so cool.

Today by a funny coincidence we happen to have two visitors both from the midwest. We brought home lunch from the churrasqueria with some vinho verde and potato chips. It was good. Then we took our guests on an update tour including a visit to coop courtyard. Today Jeannie left me an egg, and Betty White grumpily snapped at me when I stuck my big bare face into the pampas grass to see if she’d left an egg. I’m not done yet, she seemed to be saying. Buzz off! Sorry, I whispered. I will bring her some sunflower seeds later. She is such a good girl. Every morning she waits for me on the wall at the end of Lower Olive Tree Lane. Most of the roosters of the northern flock (the Sharks) will not venture past the mailboxes or risk the roostery Jet wrath of One-Eyed Leif Garrett and Shaun the Brawn Cassidy.

Betty White has no such squeamishness, she simply starts eating with the eastern flock and if anyone complains she puffs herself up to twice her size and dares them to stop her. I quickly lure her down to the driveway and over to the angel trumpet garden or even the wide casita steps, which allows me to separate the roosters pretty effectively. They are bossy but also lazy, and will not climb too many steps to police what other roosters might be eating. They look like such divas, their tails waving from every step of the long white stone staircase, like Rockettes on vacation.

As I write I can see up the steps of the lower garden apartment and into the horta where the rows of potatoes are already knee high. Mine are growing faster than yours, the h teases Alberto. Of course, because I taught you everything you know, Alberto responds, unruffled. Beyond the horta the pear tree has filled out beautifully from the pruning the h gave it last year. The property is bathed in sunshine, everywhere you look a thousand shifting shades of green. It does not at all look like a place there has ever been floods or rats or bats or killer foxes or nighttime intruders. How far we have come in just a year.