To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
I’ve always loved this song by The Byrds, and woke up singing it for some reason. I am listening to it as I type and figure it’s a pretty good organizing principle for all the stuff I am thinking about and reporting on from Project Renovation Land here in Portugal. After all, just two years ago I came to Portugal for the every first time, as an afterthought to a trip I was taking to Italy, then Norway. You’ll love it, the h said. We should live there, the h said. And when I got here, I agreed! Almost two years to the day we are here, with many changes and transformations in our lives, this renovation project not even the biggest.
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
Our fruit trees are growing tall. Alberto stopped by with more lemons and to talk plans for grafting the oranges and plums when the time comes. Not now he says. Entendo, I say. For everything there is a season. He smiles. Entendo, he says.
I love that you can’t enter the fruit orchard without opening a little gate. On one side, you even have to open two gates! I can picture God chasing Adam and Eve from the garden, how hard it would be to close the gate behind themselves. Who willingly turns their back on a lifetime of free fruit? Soon the fifty steps from one gate to the other will bring lemons, limes, sweet and bitter oranges, yellow and purple plums, grapes, avocados and olives in reach.
Over at the horta the zucchini are coming, first in a trickle, soon a flood. We’ve sliced them in half longwise and scooped them, grilled them, and filled with a three bean salad heavy on the cilantro with buttered bread crumbs. Another time I made a ratatouille which came out smoky and tomatoey and good. We’re going to need a plan, though, the amount of zukes I see on the plants makes me feel more nervous than triumphal.
The green and yellow beans have really come a cropper as my Grandpa would sometimes say. We eat beans at every mean, sometimes they are the meal. My favorite way to cook them is to parboil then finish in the pan, cooking in butter or olive oil and adding salt and pepper. Jake loves them.
A friend brought us a pink salt with a subtle chili fire in it, we’ve been using it a lot. We’re also eating cucumbers diced up with tomatoes and lots of basil and parsley from the garden, adding bits of feta.
The onions are coming in - the pearl and the grande, both grown from seedlings provided by Alberto. Soon the beets will be ready too, and I will turn them into a sauce the color of rose madder, a gothy sauce that mixes the sweet earthiness of beets with caramelized roasted garlic undertones that makes an excellent pasta sauce, especially served with fried sage leaves. Add a little balsamic and olive oil for an awesome pizza sauce.
We’re going to have to pickle those radishes soon. How does one store potatoes?
The h managed to save the passionfruit vine, which had a couple of weak weeks but now is growing up over the wall. It will bud funky geometric flowers that will become banana passion fruits (maracuja), which will look good next to the morning glories which are also growing gangbusters, with multiple vine tendrils headed up the wall. By next year they should be a purple waterfall down the carport wall, like the hair of the Queen in a story I read once,. It wasn’t really her hair but flowers braided into it that were purple, and she wasn’t really a queen but only elected by the Labradors to act the part in their parades, because a) labradors have a love of ceremony and b) who better to preside over a ceremony than a queen with flowered hair?
We’re getting to know the village better, too. We’ve been following a new Sunday protocol, get pastry at a padaria or pastelaria we haven’t been to yet. There are 14 within a 10-15 minute walk from the house, so we’ll be going to a new place once a week for awhile.
As well, we ate at the newest village restaurant Ti Gusto for the first time. I made the reservation and the nice man on the phone just went with my Portuguese, though it’s beginner flavor must have been evident. It was the same when we arrived - the server who showed us to our seat exclaimed “boa Portuguese!” before chatting us up in English. But he alway switched to Portuguese when he spoke to me, so that I could practice. It was a nice touch - a restaurant that is all about the fresh food and great service and it’s just a ten minute walk from our house.
We went with one of our guests - a visitor from DC who has been a friend since we were six year olds in kindergarten together - and her new beau, a quick-wit who speaks five languages and to our delight knew all about ginja, ordering it for the table, which the owner of the restaurant brought to us on the house. We had a whole roasted fish topped with garlic clams, and with side dishes of two kinds of cabbage and sweet potatoes.
If you think cabbage isn’t cuisine bless your heart, ever since I ate the purple cabbage at Ti Gusto I have been obsessing over it. A little voice in my head keeps asking, Was that maple I tasted? It was that good, it’s I’m-going-back-just-to-eat-it-again-and-persuade-the-chef-to-tell-me-how-he-makes-it good.
A time to kill, a time to heal
We’ve stayed steady at four adult hens. The h films the fox each night, crafting his plan. We plot the end of its predations. One of the hens needs some attention, the roosters are leaving bare welted skin from pulling out her feathers while attempting to mate. Poor baby looks a bit tattered. Meanwhile we raise the four orphans of the two most recently fox-slain hens - all the orphans, as it happens, are hens.
By sheer coincidence (OR IS IT) when I had my residence card meeting in Cascais, the one that went so well and the nice lady said in such a certain voice that I’d get the card in the mail in one or two weeks* so I let myself get cocky** and bought an adorable ceramic hen as a kind of totem, and now she sits on the coffee table, either portending or bringing this plethora of baby hens to our home***.
*I did not
** naturally
***but not my residence card
The chicks are growing but during their daily roost still try to get under Princess Leia, who tolerates it but wants to get under a mama, herself - she’s not quite ready to be a mama, her demeanor suggest. She’s more like a big sis, showing them how to chicken and offering leadership but, it must be said, competing unfairly for food, using her superior size and weight to be a, well, hog. We love her so, though. Her feathers are coming in a beautiful black-tipped bronze, and she has white wingtips and a white racing stripe. Her fuzzy little head looks like someone gave her a swirlie.
The littlest orphans have all named themselves: There is Amelia Amarela, who was a solid yellow color as a baby. She is the oldest of the three babies, a bit taller and always hanging around Leia, who sometimes seems to get annoyed but Amelia doesn’t care, is alway the first to stand and lean or sit and lean on Leia. She worships her.
Then there is Jeannie, as in I Dream of Jeannie. She is the littlest by a few hours or a day, and she is often left behind in a room while the other three troop out to the next destination. She’ll look up from whatever she was dreamily doing and cheep loudly and piteously, Where did everyone go? Hey! Little help here!
The third, Black Haired Cher, looks just like Jeannie except the stripe on her head is darker, and continues down her body between her wings. She’s alway singing too, so yeah - she’s Cher.
They like to roost on the h and on me, even Jake if we’re not available. I found a necklace with a fox medallion and was wearing it when the four of them roosted on my collarbone yesterday and took turns pecking it. Curiosity, I wonder…or swearing their vengeance on the creature that orphaned them and brought them to my living room?
This morning they darted outside the open front door and without even t he smallest hesitation one by one parachuted off the porch, running as fast as they could to the garden next to the carport. This is where Leia was born, and also where she was orphaned; in between she spent the first four or five weeks of her life in this patch, and you can see she remembers, her confidence leading the chicks about is admirable.
Rooster Jack Black comes over to supervise, sometimes Sette too. Could they be the fathers? Certainly I see an echo of Jack’s white tipped wings in Leia’s (in fact that’s how he got his name - Jack Black of the White Stripes). I think the roosters both saw the bird of prey when I did, the way it flapped overhead then tilted its great wings to u-turn into one of the taller trees in the Secret Garden, the better to spy on the pintainhas twittering just beneath the ivy, shaking it gently. We gathered them up.
Awhile later, while I was inside working I heard the h talking urgently to Jake, who was on the porch. What are you DOING out here? he asked. I went to the door and he passed me Amelia. She was out here all alone, she was screaming he said reproachfully. She must have scooted out with Jake, I said. Did you have an adventure? I asked Amelia. The h reproached me This is NOT funny!
But it is precisely because that is Amelia’s personality, headlong into whatever is new. She’s the boldest of the babies, first to try a new room or follow Leia up the steps, but she’s still just a baby who hates finding herself alone.
Should I pour you a bowl of cereal, I ask the h. No thanks, he said. I’ve already had breakfast with Alphonse and I liked that, the h making his life sound like a Michael Cain movie: Breakfast with Alphonse.
He goes to check on his girls, as he calls them - the petunias and sunflowers that are germinating in the same room where the chick brooder is. Someday the room, which gets tons of natural light with windows that look right onto the thicket of bamboo that surrounds the koi pond, will be part of a twin sitting room but for now it is a nursery to baby plants and baby chicks.
A time to build up, a time to break down
In the process of being re-roofed the cottage has gone through some changes, with a wall removed here and a window becoming a door there, and a formerly blocked up door now freed to perform its intended function. With all the ivy and dead tree branches pruned away, it is now possible to see that the cottage sits in a multi-tiered pocket of the property - the P orchard just below it, a deck that will flow right and left of it, a staircase to the next tier where the boule court will be hidden in the shadows of the huge trees on the tier above. There are four tiers in all, each demarcated by an old stone wall where the ivy keeps trying to re-establish itself, and which the h says he’ll allow but on his own terms.
The plant that ruined the world, Alberto said of the English Ivy. It had flowed up and over every portion of the property in the sea of time where it waited for us. It killed one tall palm, and had a foothold on the other three palms. It was tangled in the hair of each of the twelve olive trees, lethal Medusa snarls the h cut through with a chainsaw. It pushed between bricks and rocks, exploding walls outward to vomit concrete and dust down the hill.
Now most of those walls are repaired, waiting only to be power washed before we repaint them (this time including an anti-mold agent). They will make a beautiful backdrop for the morning glories, wisteria and bougainvillea we will plant and train to replace the invading ivy.
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A year ago today I was in Alaska at the Copper River salmon fishing when I got the news that my daddy had suddenly died. He had dementia and his decline had been slow and then suddenly it wasn’t. We had to drive into Valdez to get a wifi connection. There in a rainy parking lot, a cafe behind me, sailboats at rest in front of me, my sister narrated the twenty-four hours that elapsed between daddy passing and my sister getting hold of me on the phone. We cried and the low gray cloud-roiled Alaskan sky cried with us. The cloudy majesty of Valdez will always be poignant to me.
Daddy would have turned 88 this year - he died shortly after his birthday, and only one day after mom’s. He would have liked this project, back in the day when he had endless energy for such projects, sharing his talents for rewiring someone’s electrical panel, installing their new bathroom or light fixtures, putting in kitchen cabinets, re-roofing a house…in his lifetime I bet my dad made a million trips to the hardware store - quite a few of them with a really small version of me wearing his blue baseball hat riding passenger beside him of an early Saturday morning.
I’m sad my dad will never get to come here, never get to meet Alberto whose workshop rivals his in organization, and exceeds his in the number and size of metal working machines it contains I can imagine them in that workshop with all of its secret corners to turn, the sun filtering in through clear tiles in the roof, Alberto pouring them each a bica with a shot of aquavit.
Holy cow, my dad would say when the alcohol punched the back of his throat, fumes crawling into his nose. He would marvel at Alberto’s crops but dad was more of a flowering shrub and flowers kind of guy - ornamental, Alberto would say not with disdain but also not with the respect he gives the growing of sustenance. There is only one flower that earns the careful undivided attention Alberto gives his life-giving crops, and that’s his wife, Rosa.
You’ve got a beautiful place here, I can almsot hear dad say. That’s a koi ocean, he would joke of the pond with its six foot fountain. I can imagine him looking around at the flowers and flowering shrubs in the courtyard, the garden bursting with vegetables. He’d undoubtedly have a joke about doing work on not one not two not three but four houses not to mention various and assorted other buildings, but he’d appreciate the work that has been done and enjoy meeting Tiago and Paulo, and maybe consulting on the electrical panel for the palaceta.
The koi pond is for now triumphantly empty. It has been the scene of much drama - two hens gave birth to two peeps down there, and had to be rescued after heavy rains put all the nests and everything to perch on underwater, leaving only a floating log for the drenched babies to cling to. We found a hen drowned in there; we found a rat’s nest at the top underside of the fountain, where they. could cling when the waters of spring rose and rose. It didn’t save them, though - they drowned too.
We found all kinds of household detritus at the bottom when we drained it; it was a job lasting several days to scrape it down to it’s cement bottom. Now it sits, the coral fountain and surrounding rocks, edged with bamboo, awaiting its next life, the fountain fountaining, koi koi-ing, and hopefully a few frogs singing and turtles turtling, to the degree such can be compatible with those beautiful deadly koi cruising the pond.
There will be a bench engraved with dad’s initials, where someone wandering the Secret Garden can take a pause and rest in the music of the fountain and the proliferation of the lilies under the swaying, light-filtering bamboo.
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together
I spend a couple of hours a week harvesting broken glass and tile pieces. Though I am constantly removing them, leaving the path clear for sweet chocolate dog paws, the chickens with their constant scratching are constantly unburying new shards. There seems to be an endless supply to them. Still it’s not unpleasant to go on a glass walk, carrying my separate bags, one for trash glass and one for future mosaic projects.
Yesterday I was walking down the quinta road. The temps have been high lately, the sun shining with a Hello Summer I am Finally Here intensity. But there is a nice breeze and it’s ten degrees cooler in the shade and I was walking down the quinta road dappled with this shade, roosters pecking here and there and following me at a polite distance. There was the sound of the wind rattling the leaves of the medieval plane tree and I stopped and looked at the sunlit grape arbor and the apple tree heavy with the blossoms that will soon be apples and where the tall twin palms rose up next to the deeply shaded Secret Garden. I thought how beautiful it all is, and how glad I am to be here. I stood and listened to all of the trees making that whispery sound they make in the wind so it sounded like dozens of voice saying welcome welcome welcome or maybe they’re saying well done, daughter, well done, it was hard to tell with the sun blurring my eyes so. The roosters stood still with me, and when I started walking again, they followed.
We’re going to have a handful guests converge on us, beginning the middle of this week til by the end of the weekend we’ll have four visitors. We don’t have quite the beds and the pullout we ordered won’t get here in time so we have to solve that, plus get some linens. The h is going to install a new sink in the quinta bathroom, and an old sink in the palaceta kitchen. It might be nice if we have a barbecue outside on the clean, expansive quinta patio.
There went the noon whistle. It goes off every day at precisely 11:58a, which gives me just enough time to connect to my noon Zoom language lesson. There is something civilized about a noon whistle, the h says He’s a punctual guy, the h. But me, I’m a horror writer, and I think there is something about the whistle, it’s regularity, that begs to be included in a horror story. The Noon Whistle - it has strong Shirley-Jackson-The-Lottery vibes, though I live in a very different kind of village than that, or anyway I sure hope I do.****
****JK, I am blessed to know some really wonderful vizinhos since we moved here! If anyone is the weirdo it is me traipsing through the village with my shirt that says Read Horror Books
Beautiful writing. I never in my wildest dreams thought I'd become in love with chickens!