The Daughter's Second Visit

"you have a toilet seat now?! cool"

I keep boomeranging out of sleep at night, then I’m owl-eyed with exhaustion by 4p. A nice nap fixes that but also ensures I eject like a fighter pilot from sleep no later than 4a. It’s not just garden variety jetlag either - I have come home to a different home. It takes some getting used to, being comfortable and having one’s basic needs met without a five hundred yard jaunt into the wind or rain or cold or dark. And all the sounds at night are different, the incessant call of the roosters replaced by the white noise of the dehumidifier and AC.

While I was gone window installation took place on the top floor and garden apartments of the quinta. The lower floor is already electrified with an indoor hot shower and flushing toilet, a monosplit offering heat in the winter and AC in the summer, and a mostly operational kitchen including, most important and life changingly, a dish washer and a refrigerator as well as an air fryer and induction burner. We also have a gas grill outside on the patio.

the three amigas have grown amazingly

A week is a lot of time in the plant and baby chicken kingdoms, the denizens of which have, while I was gone, taken great leaps forward so as to be almost unrecognizable. The chicks are tall and leggy, while Leia is more regally hen-like every day.

Right before I left I noticed the reedy sound of an insect that sang from the campo - essentially, a green space - between Upper Olive Lane and Lower Olive Lane. Then I heard it from the fruit orchard, another time from the depths of the hillside where the a fig tree sprawls.

It took me a day or two of being home to locate it but yesterday I heard it singing its end-of-summer song above the pool house, in the P orchard (so named for it’s housing of pear, persimmon, and pomegranate trees). Today it must have found a place among the potted plants that sit on the garden apartment patio. It loudly sang as I passed, as the h passed, as Jake passed, but fell silent as the two roosters approached.

In the eastern flock there are eleven roosters; two of them hang back during feeding time, then follow me to the door hoping for a handout and to avoid trouble with the big blonde bully that is Sean Cassidy. They peck furtively at the little piles of grain I leave them behind the big plastic trashcan, for once not squabbling but eating in quick, businesslike fashion.

This morning our neighbor Alberto dropped by with a lemon tree he grafted from one of his own mature trees. Tangled in the branches were two pretty sunflowers, which now beam in yellow splendor from a mason jar vase on my desk. The h offered an espresso and we all ended up having one, Alberto telling us no to milk on account of his diverticulitis. Causa tu dor? I ask and he grimaces and says yes he feels pain every day. The doctors they want to cut and I have the bag he says, indicating where a colostomy bag would go.

I say no, he says.

I winced sympathetically. He shrugged. In his t-shirt and jeans he holds himself like a man younger than 72. And he works with the energy of a man younger than 62.

The next day Alberto’s car did not make its usual appearance in our driveway, parked in the shade produced by a huge dead tree stump in the approximate shape of a hen.

Did you see Alberto this morning? I ask the h. Nope, he says. A little later something occurs to me. Hey I think Alberto is thinner, I say to the h. I noticed that too, he said, thoughtfully. A cool finger touched my heart.

If he doesn’t show tomorrow, I’m going to text him, I say. Alberto usually makes an appearance at his garden on Saturday mornings, when we might share a coffee and a chat before he retreats home for the weekend.

Hey where is Gwyneth, I asked the h. She was there this morning, he said. She’ll be back tomorrow morning. But she has been nowhere to be seen. Either the fox got her, or she is off somewhere sitting on eggs.

Sadly, I’m betting on the fox; it appears our southern flock is down a hen, too, with little Rita Hayworth failing to appear for any meals this week alongside her remaining sisters, Betty White and Rosie the Riveting.

I was home just four jet-lagged days when Sophia arrived with her boyfriend Tasan. They’d been visiting Spain after their graduation from college. It’s their second time here together, but Sophia popped over from London for a few days between Christmas and New Year’s so this post is actually mis-titled, it is her third visit in less than 12 months. Tasan was just recovering from something, they wondered maybe something he ate? They slept in and then toured around noting the changes since their last visit, which was among our first visitors, their bed being just a mattress on the floor and no electricity anywhere. Now they are up off the floor, three rooms are electrified, the kitchen glows with rechargeable lights and there is a whole other house that is operational.

What’s the main difference, I asked Sophia.

It looks like someone lives here, she said. It doesn’t look abandoned anymore.

There are flowers everywhere, she added. And the green house!

The h has transplanted petunias into the built-in planters of the front courtyard. Our late summer/fall flowers are all reds and purples. Sophia’s right, the flowers give everything a lived-in, cared for look.

There is also the newly planted fruit orchard, the fresh white paint on yards and yards of repaired walls, the old green gates replaced with shiny black, the calcadas repaired so that the sidewalks are no longer erupting upwards.

The biggest changes are not in the palaceta but the quinta which has been transformed from a junky apartment with the cheapest available tile covered by even cheaper pergo, the most ineptly installed drywall and missing kitchen ceiling to a beautiful garden apartment with smooth wood floors and traditional trim and baseboards painted so creamy white you want to lick them like frosting. The tiny L-shaped kitchen has a new tongue-and-groove wooden ceiling that along with stainless steel appliances provides a nice modern counterpoint to the traditional shuttered windows and plaster ceiling medallions.

Lower olive tree lane

Although the temp climbs into the mid 80s during the day, the evenings are fresh and wind-tousled and at 65 F what I always think of as perfect sleeping weather. At night I go out to the outdoor sink, the air is summer-soft. The wind moves restlessly through the trees; close your eyes and the sound is like water washing up on a beach. An owl hoots nearby. The second call comes from directly over my head somewhere, maybe in the great umbrella canopy of the Monterey Pine above me. Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-whoooo, it calls.

By the end of her first day Sophia, too, is sick to her stomach, able to consume only tea and saltines. I give her a mini coke on the premise my grandma used to keep coke syrup around for treating nausea. After sunset I walkie talkie them to remind them we can bring them coffees, a toasted peanut butter sandwich, a bowl of cereal, chocolate milk. Thank yoouuuuuu, Sophia says. A minute later the walkie talkie speaks up

Hey Sandra are you there over.

I’m here over.

We decided a toasted peanut butter sounds pretty good over.

OK I’m on it over.

Tasan will walk over for it over.

We send Tasan back with a care package of fresh squeezed OJ, a heated roll butterflied and spread thickly with peanut butter and paper thin apple slices dusted with cinnamon.

Since coming back to Portugal I have felt shy about my Portuguese again. Everyone and their brother will be on vacation in August, including my language teacher. I’d forgotten that from my corporate days, how our European counterparts all took the month of August to travel. Our two workers are off for three weeks, happily leaving us their cars for the duration of their vacation. Neighbor Alberto and his Rosa will be leaving in two weeks, spending a couple of weeks in the north. Last year the churrasqueria owners Carlos and Elaina closed up for the final two weeks of August, a period that exactly overlapped with the visit of the h’s mother and her husband. The apartment of neighbors Ana and Jonas across the street is dark at night - this time last year they took a long camping trip with their kids.

The h is tending the garden and fruit orchard and olive trees. The olive trees the h and crew cut back so brutally in June are growing gangbusters, helped along by a long string of days of hot sunny weather. After the big trimming party we held in the Secret Garden, including taking several trees down, the sun is finally penetrating the canopy again and the leggy boxwoods that form the winding paths around the half acre Secret Garden are rapidly filling in. The flock spends its days lazing among the bamboo that grows around the koi pond near the chicken waterer.

There is a watermelon in the fruit orchard that is near to ripe; apparently we must wait for a yellow spot to appear. We have so many tomatoes, soon we will need to harvest them all and do something with them. Alberto says we can peel and de-seed tomatoes and freeze them.

Luckily Sophia has retained her loyalty to childhood favorites like pasta. black beans and rice, French toast. Last night we made a simple pasta with a fresh roasted tomato-onion-and-basil sauce. On the counter a loaf of classic white bread thaws, which means we’ll be having French toast tomorrow for brunch. The h orders real Vermont maple syrup from Amazon. I like mine with butter, caster’s sugar and cinnamon, and strawberries and bananas.

While the outside bursts with growth, we are now for the first time in all of our time in Portugal (about 18 months) living a cool, bug-free existence indoors, with air conditioning and running water. No more feeling our way up and down pitch-black stairwells to go to the bathroom in the palaceta; no more stooping inside a tent every night to sleep. We have moved to the garden apartment of the quinta, which is fully electrified and with all-new windows. It is amazing to finally be able to open the shutters and see the outdoors, the afternoon light steaming prettily through the branches of the trees that form a latticework of shade over the house and garden.

Before the windows were replaced we kept the weather and bugs at bay by keeping the shutters closed, which also gave the place an unfortunate basement-of-the-rectory feeling. Now every window frames a garden vista: there’s the deep shade of the plum trees out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the back of the house, the distant view of the palaceta through the dappled green of the medieval plane tree from the north facing bedroom windows, the pretty flowering almond tree, the burgeoning figs. All of this shade keeps the apartment cool as a cucumber during the heat of the day.

In the morning I wake up and put my bare feet on a clean floor that looks like wood but in fact is a highly engineered, PVC-free linoleum replacement from Germany. I walk on this clean, smooth, splinter-free, carpet-nail free chicken shit-free and waterproof surface to the bathroom. I put the kettle on for tea, grab my phone and get back in bed, leaning against the cushioned headboard while I do a few language lessons and read the news. At some point the h brings me an espresso. Obrigada, I tell him.

Later still in sock feet I pad over to the bathroom, take a shower and then emerge from the bathroom in a towel with no wind whipping the shower curtain into my face and drying me instantly while perversely making my hair seem chill and even wetter.

I stand in front of my locker choosing my clothes, got dressed, and do not have to shake anything first to rid it of house centipedes. I may accept a second espresso from the h along with a glass of fresh squeezed OJ and a piece of toast. When I finish I put the dishes in the dishwasher - no need to load them into a tray I will later have to carry 700 yards to another house to wash, then carry them back to put away.

In the kitchen I cut up grapes and blueberries and apples for my little hens and head over to the palaceta where Sophia and Tasan do not generally rise before noon. I set out a plate of apple slices and a pan of toasted cornbread for the kids. Then I opened the door to the hen nursery and the four of them came rushing out, jumping on my feet in excitement for their morning snack.

The orphan hens quickly join me on the couch and roost on my right arm. Sophia and Tasan rise and snack a little on the fruit and bread and say they’ll be around soon for coffee. Walking back, the sun has climbed higher and has begun to shine with a steady intensity that has me shrugging off my sweatshirt. Most of Olive Tree Lane is dappled with shade. In fact pretty much everything is dappled with shade around here given the many very tall trees.

Back at the garden apartment I open the door and cool air whispers out. I round the corner through the traditional double glass doors into the main room which is like a long boxcar and contains the nice smells of toast and coffee. In the corner a stick of sandalwood incense burns from a mini coke bottle. Later that evening I return to the garden apartment and see for the first time the light from within, warm and yellow and welcoming, spilling out the windows onto the patio.

Tomorrow we will take our sun hats off their pegs and head outside to dig weeds and plant sunflowers. The h must stage a couple of emergency interventions at the green house for potted plants not doing so well. Tomorrow there will be tomatoes to process and more tomatoes to harvest and process. Tomorrow we’ll eat cucumber and tomato salad with green leaves of basil and mint and white cubes of feta, everything from our horta except of course the feta. Everyone will vote yes to pick the watermelon lying passed out in the fruit orchard but the h will make us wait, saying it has to be just perfect.

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*Alberto showed up on Sunday, and regularly this week, even with Rosa once, but definitely working less hours due to the tremendous heat