The Quinta Quickens
The Quinta Quickens
all the things I'm going to do some day
In old timey books when a woman reached the stage of pregnancy where she felt movement in the womb it was referred to as “quickening”. I’m borrowing the term for our guest house - officially named Quinto do Serrano, after the priest (Father Serrano) who used the place as a chapel once upon a time, a long time ago when the big house - the palaceta - was a school run by nuns.
The lower unit of the guest house is quickening - almost viable for us to live in, awaiting only water heater, window and floor installation. The windows are a necessity - many are broken, the wooden casements rotten. The water heater is for the luxury of indoor showers - we still have on-demand hot showers outdoors, but I am looking forward to being able to bathe without having to wear Crocs, and without an audience of chickens who I feel are judging me.
Already we spend more and more time in the Quinta which is fully electrified; of an evening we will make dinner using the air fryer and induction burner, or grill vegetables, eating our meal to the dulcet sounds of the dishwasher doing its thing, and/or a load of laundry washing and drying. One of us may jump up and get a box of green juice from the refrigerator - we still cackle delightedly at the knowledge we can have a cold drink whenever we want, and no longer have to eat all the food from a delivery because the leftovers might spoil or attract vermin if left on the counter of the palaceta where we still sleep in a tent on the bare wood planks of a bedroom on the second floor.
Someday very soon I will wake to the sound of roosters crowing outside my window and look out to see the Quinta courtyard filled with chickens awaiting their breakfast. I will pad IN MY BARE FEET across the clean floor to the bathroom where I will flush the toilet after doing my business - no more pouring water from a bucket into the bowl to make it all go away.
Then I will stroll past the kitchen and grin at my refrigerator because thats what you do when you live for the better part of a year without refrigeration, you treat the ice box like a sentient friend which it sort of is.
I will then pull on my clothes without having to exit a tent, shivering in the cold because a, I will have slept in an actual bed and b, we will have actual heat from our mono split and radiator.
I will flip a switch and illuminate the room with a lamp instead of turning on the flashlight app of my iPhone to see in the early morning dark. I will greet Jake with a kiss and not have to anxiously light his way down a candlelit winding staircase, fearing he will slip and fall on dark steps worn smooth and slippery with time.
I will feed the chickens then come back into the house and brush my teeth at an actual sink in the bathroom, and not holding a hose in the carport. I will brush my hair looking into a mirror hanging on the wall - a new mirror, not an old one melting in a quicksilver cascade as it leans against a pile of boxes.
I will make oatmeal on a stove in a functional kitchen and not in a camp stove balanced on a cutting board that lays across a gaping hole on a termite-decimated countertop. I will not fearfully check the rat trap, should the rain have driven in an unwanted visitor through any one of a billion openings in the house, having gone to bed certain my windows are not broken, the casements flush to the frames, the shutters in good working order, the front door without gaps.
I shall take my latte and sit outside at a table on the patio beneath the low spreading limbs of the loquat trees, the white faces of the calla lilies turned with mine toward the pretty yellow flowering trumpet bushes and the peach tree the h saved.
Life is good, I may say to the h, who will agree and will perhaps say, the chickens are in the garden again, and I will not really care, empathizing with their interest in the sudden bounty of plenty after living rough on this property for so long.
Later that evening I will relax in a chair, knowing I will not have to distribute rechargeable lights throughout the house, dimly illuminating the kitchen, bathroom, staircase and pantry. Before sleep I may sit propped in bed and read a book by lamplight - no headlamp strapped to my forehead, no lying on my elbows until they get rough and sore.
Just before sleep I will wash my face at the bathroom sink, not having to put on my rubber bottomed shoes and go out into the cold windy dark to perform my ablutions by headlamp and garden hose, and bringing two full buckets of water back into the house and grunting up the steps to the bathroom.
On my way to bed I may notice a tea mug in the sink and put it in the dishwasher, smiling because I know that never again will there be a morning where the first thing I have to do is strap on knee pads and carry a heavy dish drainer full of dirty dishes out to the carport for washing.
I will sleep well, not having to be zipped into a tent or under mosquito netting, knowing I will not wake covered in bites because mosquitoes were able to slip into the house through any number of broken and cracked windows and find their way through gaps in the netting to my bare skin.
When I wake again I will not have to immediately hunt for the fly swatter and begin the endless task of chasing the huge zippy black flies that follow the same path to the inside as the mosquitoes. It will be a glorious day, rain or shine, because I am here with my loves, with things to grow and do and plan and write about.
