The team in my Portuguese dugout

rainy day reflections on building community in a new country

Last night a national weather warning binged on my iPhone. Torrential rain next 48 hours, the message said. Flooding possible. Our last national weather warning was in September when the combination of a long stretch of hot dry days combined dangerously with strong winds. Hard to believe that was just a month ago.

It rained hard most of the morning, keeping the workers away but also giving the air and the houses on the property a clean, washed look. It rained only intermittently in the afternoon and evening. By 10p it was dry. It was kind of nice to have a day off; in the past week, in a race against the coming rains the workers have been virtually surrounding us, climbing the scaffolding all over the quinta apartments repairing cracks, sanding and scraping, getting ready for painting. We’ve chosen a shadowy green color, with grey trim. The house is visible up on its hill from the main avenue that cuts through the village and I think the green color will look cool and shady under the sycamore and pine trees, and smart next to the pink house next door, both of our front yards with bright yellow trumpet flowers in the spring.

Walking over to feed the chickens I saw Alberto’s car in the driveway and wondered what he was up to on such a drizzly day. Soon enough his voice could be heard hallooing outside the garden apartment, and he came in with a rush of droplets and a bag of fresh bread - my favorite seed rolls, a brioche, two milk rolls. He also brought some stainless steel towel racks. One will fit perfectly in the garden apartment bathroom, just below the glass shelf, also from Alberto and recently installed by the h. It holds a pretty scented candle now, warming the medical white glare of the tile and porcelain. 

Earlier in the week Alberto brought over some more glass shelves, perfect for a little mirrored alcove in the kitchen.

We don’t have enough surfaces in the garden apartment. Counter tops are on order, a central island for the main room is on order. Today we brought over from the palaceta the little wooden table with glass topped wicker that Alberto gave us.  It will go perfect in that corner, I point out to the h. Opposite the beverage station, a nice place to sit and have a coffee. Especially for drop in guests. All that is missing is the YELLOW CHAIR, I say, my voice strategically loud at the end of the sentence. 

As if to prove my point, Alberto knocked at that exact moment, bearing his gifts of bread and metal and glass, and naturally the h offered him a coffee paired with carrot cake, the first thing the h decided to bake in the new Italian oven. You installed already? Alberto asked. He stood as he ate the cake and drank the coffee because as I already explained we do not yet have the yellow chair.

What yellow chair, some may be asking. There was and has been a yellow armchair in the window at the Continente grocery store the h and I frequent, walking to and fro with backpacks. The last time we went to the store, the chair was there, but priced at 179 euro, where it has been stalled for a year. My friends Mark and Tricia went to the store while visiting three weeks ago, and reported the chair was priced at 175 euro.

Yesterday was the first time we’ve been back to the store since that reported price drop aaaaaaaaaand there was no yellow chair in the window. This of course means nothing, because I know for a fact that this same yellow chair has a clone in another store in another city. And if there is one in Mafra there is probably one in some other branch in some other city within driving distance. Portugal is a small country. 

Anyway I wasn’t disappointed at the absence in the window as this is at least the sixth time, maybe eleventh or thirtieth time it has disappeared preparatory to reappearing.¹
Also, we were on foot, with backpacks, and it was raining - sub-optimal conditions for carrying home a chair. The plan is to buy it the next time that it appears in the window at the most recent and lowest price, $175 euro, when we also happen to be driving a car. Which will be the next time we go shopping. Really we can borrow a car whenever we want, we could borrow one right this minute from Tiago, I could just yell “Hey h, whatsapp Tiago, ask if we can use the Honda for an hour” it would show up in our driveway within hours because Tiago is awesome that way.  But I’m content to let the opportunity to purchase the chair - and thus the chair itself -  come to me organically. For some weird reason I feel confident the chair is going to be mine no matter how many fake-out roadblocks the universe puts between me and it. 

This is not the first time in my life I have pursued an object of desire that is the color yellow. The moment I saw the 1992 Limited Edition Madza MX5 Miata in sunburst yellow, it was love at first sight. There were three of them in St. Louis Missouri the year they hit the market. All at different dealerships, and I visited each one. But I refused to pay a premium for it. It was a great looking car, but yellow is not for everybody, and also the Miata’s low profile on a busy highway can be disconcerting, especially when you find yourself surrounded by big SUVs and commercial trucks and cargo vans, you have to drive defensively while maintaining the shifty nimbleness to leap out and away as soon as possible. You have to really like driving to drive a convertible in traffic.

I made an offer for each yellow Miata, and was greeted with incredulity, laughter, even anger. I have an obligation to the Mazda Corporation, ma’am, one of the salesmen told me, with an admirably straight face.

So I waited. I visited the cars once a month, rotating. Once, a dealership moved the car from their dealership at the southern edge of the city, all the way over to their dealership at the northeastern edge of the suburbs of the city…and I found it, and began visiting it at its new home like some groupie. Eventually one of the three Miatas was sold; another was hail damaged. After more than TWO YEARS since I first stepped into the Mazda showroom, my phone rang one day and it was the salesman in charge of the third and last 1992 Limited Edition sunburst yellow Miata in the greater St. Louis area, and he was willing to sell it to me at the price I had never budged from, not since the first day I walked into the showroom grinning at the sight of the car. He was quite surly about it, too, but that did not dim my enthusiasm ONE JOT. My grin was so huge driving that car home, the top of my head was in danger of toppling off.

You may be thinking Miatas suck in the winter and the rain and you’d be right, but it didn’t matter because I was in love, which made the as-yet-unknown-to-me fact I was soon to move to Texas where I’d live for more than a decade in temperatures perfect for all-year convertible driving just icing on the yellow cake.

After Texas, the Miata took me further west, all the way to northern California where it was parked for stints in various neighborhoods around San Francisco: the Marina, Cole Valley, Japantown, Pacific Heights, the Castro, and finally in the Presidio, a national park just a mile from land’s end for the city, the state, the whole of the  continent. 

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After the weather service warning we woke to rain that was hard enough and loud enough, the h says, it drowned out the sound of the coffee bean grinder and the  espresso machine. I didn’t hear either because now we have doors that can be shut, like other normal people in a normal house.². This of course was first coffee - when Alberto stopped in for a coffee later in the morning, the h was actually having second coffee, much as hobbits have a second breakfast.

Soon after Alberto left there was a knock at the door and a wiry man with a tanned bald head and handsome features stood there smiling at me. He looks a bit like Joao, I immediately thought, remembering the man who installed our solar panels more than a year ago.

I’m here to talk about the panels, he says, and I went to get the h and the h had to put his shoes on to go out to talk to him, Jake on his heels and bouncing up the steps in joyful greeting. But the penny still didn’t drop for me til the man said He remembers me! Jake remembers everyone he’s ever met, I say. Then it clicked. 

Joao, tu lemrbro, I say, Claro!  I ran up the steps and gave him a big hug and he laughed and said I didn’t think you remembered, but of course I do, how could I forget. Those were very very early days, when the h had the solar panels installed . It was easily within the first couple of months we were on the property. What a day of drama! Our neighbors were still in the habit of thinking of the parking in front of our driveway gate as the free for all it had been for the previous decade, and when Joao and his partner arrived for the installation they had to spend an entire morning walking up and down the street knocking on doors until they found the owners of the cars that were blocking their ingress into our property so they could get the installation job started. What struck me was how good natured they were about it.

Despite the rain, this past week represents a Great Leap Forward in terms of daily comforts and conveniences:

• the new oven/range was delivered and installed; I now have four burners and am not limited to baking in a 5 inch x 5 inch air fryer basket.

• our 10G wifi was installed and I am zooming around the internet like the Roadrunner, beep beep

• the h ordered, received and mounted to the wall a large screen TV. But isn’t it too big? Alberto asked. I showed him how I can project my laptop screen onto the flat screen. Or talk to my mama on Zoom while sitting on the couch, I tell him, and he laughs. My TV, he gestures with his hands thisclose together. That’s all I have, he says.  

• the h, with Alberto’s help planted six fast-growing bushes along the low shared wall between our driveway and the back of our neighbor’s house. I’m here to help plant, Alberto announced upon my opening the door to his halloo and knock. Now? Okay, the h agreed, and I did not see him for what was starting to feel like a really long time when he came back to the garden apartment with the whites of his eyes showing. I am so tired, the h says. In addition to the bushes they planted a dozen passion fruit vines, a lemon tree grafted from one of Alberto’s own, and two birds of paradise. Also some cabbage and salsa and radishes and peppers and swiss chard and beans.

• copper wire installed on trumpet bushes, which are now nicely recovering from snail attacks, the big broad leaves re-growing in clusters.

• the baby henlets continue to be healthy and full of beans. I’m a bit frustrated I don’t have them out in their coop yet but there are just so many priorities in a single day. I want them to live their chicken lives! But safe from the fox.

• as the rains of late autumn begin, the flock is intact - the fox has made no more predations, though he is still out there. Each day I look for Betty White and Sierra Nevada, each day I give them a few extras - peanuts, watermelon, sunflower seeds.  The flock is much clingier in rainy weather, and rise to follow me en masse whenever I appear over in the Secret Garden or the front courtyard. The solo roosters I find the most touching, tap tapping behind me hoping to be fed apart from the others. Jack Black hangs out in the p orchard, Stanley hangs out in the apple orchard above the garage, often in the company of Justin Bieberoo. Jackson Pollack hangs out in the campo avoiding the massive and ill-tempered Sean Cassidy. Alphonse is a mysterious one, always the first to appear whenever I wander over to the palaceta side of the property - same with Potsy. But these two merge with the rest of the flock, while Jackson and Justin and Stanley and Larry are loners or bullied and in the absence of the attention of hens to fight for, preferring their own company.

• the cottage is fully painted, inside and out. Sitting up there on the penultimate hill of the property with its crisp white walls and blue trim around the windows and doors and traditional red clay tile roof,  it is the brightest thing under the lowering gray skies. Wow, Joao says. He is one of the few people who saw it before any transformation had taken place - when it was a two room dump missing half the roof, full of piles of insulation batting and old wooden beams with giant rusty nails sticking out of them, and a bathroom so filthy you immediately imagined yourself describing it to others by  asking “Do you remember the bathroom scene in the movie Trainspotting?”  I can’t believe it, Joao tells the h. Now, it has become a special spot. 

While he’s here, Joao tells us the story of being in Queluz and talking to someone about a recent installation they’d seen, in Belas. For a guy named Herbert. I tell them, I did this installation, for the same Herbert,  Joao says and I smile inwardly³.  It’s a small world, the h says. It’s a small town, I laugh. You don’t necessarily expect people are talking about you but in our case they probably are, since our property has been abandoned so long and has suddenly, with all the tree trimming and vine killing and junk hauling and wall fixing and painting, become noticeable again to passers by.

Your Portuguese! Joao says to me with approval. It’s so good! What happened? Um, I study a lot, I tell him. He compliments my pronunciation of the nasal oao sound.  It’s very difficult for people who don’t have the sound in their own language, he notes. You do it right!

Thank you again for your help with the truck shipment, by the way - you were right, I told him.

I was referring to the saga of helping an acquaintance in the US move a load of artworks from a showroom in Lisbon to our property for storage, a task that sounds straightforward but took two rainy, miserable weeks to arrange and complete, even with the expert assistance of Joao and Tiago, and involved an unbelievable number of mishaps, even for Portugal.

De nada, de nada, Joao says, insisting he is available for any task that requires understanding Portuguese, whether the language or the people.

typical Portuguese dugout, this one close to my house

It’s good to have people like Joao and Tiago in our dugout. No one ever says dugout, people are always saying it’s good someone is on your side. I suppose it’s because I’m a born midwesternener - we’re the weirdos who prefer baseball to basketball and football - plus I was a softball pitcher in college, but I like the term dugout better than side. Dugouts are cool, and in the way of Portugal itself are designed with resting in the shade in mind - a bench, a roof, a pleasant view. The people in your dugout are both teammate and cheerleader, and who say dugout things like “you can do it!” and “let’s go, little one⁴”, or even “your Portuguese sounds so good!” My dugout in Portugal has about a dozen people in it now - people who have provided help and support when we were robbed, when we couldn’t get the front gate open, when someone tied their horses to our trees, when we needed a safe place to lock up our power tools, when we needed help feeding the chickens, when we needed help finding Jake when he went exploring, and then help fencing him in to stop further explorations. People whose names have appeared in one or more posts in Under the Jacarandas, names that might even feel familiar to regular readers, like Alberto and Rosa and Tiago and Paulo and Catia. People who are here nearly every day and people we see only once in awhile and people who are in the background like a safety net ready to catch us should we fall, all of whom have been politely insistent we allow them to help us with everything from interpreting a letter to lending a car to checking on us when we had COVID to navigating the slow and oftentimes bewildering bureaucracy that is apparently the authentic Portuguese experience for immigrants and native born alike.

I’m so grateful for the dugout that has formed around me and the h, not just helping with the tasks at hand but also always there to cheer us up and cheer us on in this gargantuan, possibly ridiculous, maybe-crazy-maybe-not, usually filthy, often tiring and oh-so-glorious task we’ve set for ourselves.

1. There is something sort of cute about how whoever is in charge of such things puts different pillows on the chair, positioning it next to different pieces of furniture - a desk, a coffee table, a small table between it and an apple green chair - trying to tempt someone, anyone to buy it.

2. if you are reading this and wondering what I’m talking about, we have just finished living in a tent, sleeping on the floor in a house with no electricity or indoor running water, and holes in the ceiling and floor, and sometimes rats - and once a BAT - for more than a year

3. I just finished a book for middle graders, The Jake of Everything, featuring a character called the herbert, who can fix things, make maps, and gives good advice. The h, of course, is a herbert.

4. I was the first woman in my family to go to college, and it would not have been possible without the Golden Arm, my dad’s affectionate nickname for my right arm, which has the peculiar ability to throw a ball underhanded at speeds exceeding 75 mph. Not a lot of people can swing a stick of aluminum or wood at a projectile traveling at this velocity; even the few people who hone the skill can only accomplish it less than three out of ten times, a fact that won me a scholarship onto an NCAA Division I softball team, where I was part of a pitching staff par excellence that led my team to the College World Series my freshman year, ERA < 1.0 thank you very much. My catcher that year was Kelly, who called me “little one” because at 5”3” and 90lb I was the smallest player on the team and maybe in the entire NCAA. All of which I hadn’t thought about in years, until we were looking at the house in Portugal and the realtor translated the tiles where there were Portuguese words written on either side of the door, This is the house and the nest of the little one. When people say, why did you move to Portugal I sometimes say, It is written.