Spanish views from a small town

It's been six months since the last time I wrote. I've been tired, and haven't felt much like putting my thoughts into coherent words and sentences. I haven't been helped by the age of my computer (it's screaming out for change; it still uses Windows 7), nor by this platform of Blogger. As I write, it underlines everything I've written in red, squiggly lines, reminding me to spell check because it's all wrong. Yet, I have my computer set to English, as well as trying to find an input language on this thing, and check @English@. It also won-t coincide with my keyboard. I just put quotation marks around the word English, yet it gave out asperands. It also gave me a hyphen instead of an apostrophe in won-t. Yet, when I pull up an empty page on my word processor, everything coincides correctly. And one time in March, when I found enough energy to write, I tried to put in photos from my phone and the entire entry was somehow erased. If I return and keep writing, ...

It's been a rainy midwinter, so far. It hasn't been cold, except yesterday morning, and only because the night before had been so clear that valley fogs formed. It has been a strange vacation, though, because our daughter has taken a job so that she can help pay for the next few months she has left of her vocational course. That means she's not home except for the holidays themselves, since the job is in Santiago, so she stays at a friend's apartment. The job is in a bookstore. Her main job is to package presents and help out customers. Her coworkers are nice people, but she is amazed at the amount of customers that could very well be labelled "karens." Sometimes because they're rude, other times because they act entitled, others because they treat the store clerks like lackeys. She's surprised at how few people are actually empathetic towards her and the others.  She's also surprised at how badly children read. Our daughter has always been a reade...

I have not been writing at all, lately. I have curled into myself, and begun a hibernation of sorts. I still go over the book I have written, detecting holes and trying to plug them, while I despair of it ever becoming something anybody wants to read. I have a painting that is sitting, waiting for the final touches that never seem to come. My thoughts refuse to leave my head. Partially, it's because the world is so messed up, so wrong, so much worse, that a small despair has crept in, that, no matter how much I, or anybody, cry out against it, nothing will change. I feel we are like ants that can do nothing about the anthill we live in because we have no say in anything that goes on. We merely continue plodding forward, building our anthill further out, ignoring the tunnels that are caving in as a consequence. So, I turn to nature, and take my walks whenever I can. Of late, that is not too often because of the weather. And the few days that are good, I have errands to run or work t...

All Hallow's Eve approaches, with its mythical creatures ready to roam the night, banging on doors and demanding their ration of sugar. A night that was once believed to herald a new year, and on which the veil between the dead and the living was thought to be spider web thin, is now a horrendous commercial holiday meant to sell candy, everything pumpkin spice, and costumes of all kinds, including witch costumes with their pointy hat and misshapen broom. Fellow blogger Donnalane Nelson mentioned the witches of history in her blog, The Expat Writer , talking about how they had been treated, and how many are now being exonerated from the crimes they had been excecuted for. She mentioned that Scotland was the country that holds the record for those hunted down and killed. I assume part of the reason for such zealous hunts was the arrival of Protestantism in the form of strict Scottish Presbyterianism, that would tolerate no religious rival, especially Catholicism. We had our own witch...

I had heard of Ruth Matilda Anderson, and had seen some of her photographs, but had never really paid attention to her work, despite knowing she had travelled these lands in the 1920's. Apart from photographer, she was also an ethnographer, and observed and wrote about life in 1920's rural Spain. Yesterday, we went to an exhibit with some of her work at the Museo Provincial de Pontevedra.  The exhibit was set up with some of her photographs on loan from the Hispanic Society of New York, including a painting by Joaquín Sorolla, master of light and shadow. The curators had set up scenes mimicking some of the photographs, dressing up mannequins and using props. The exhibit went through the different means of living, and daily life, to the clothes in use at the time, ending with the scene Sorolla painted in Vilagarcía, of simple people eating a picnic on market day.  From the start, my mind went to my mother. She had been born in 1929, three years after the most recent photographs...

September is here, and summer is mostly over. With September has come the rains after two months of drought, compounded by a drier than usual spring and winter. There are cities and towns that have already started to ration water. Arqueological sites and ancient villages are appearing from under the receding waters of reservoirs. The earth is bone dry and grasses and shrubs, that normally stay green all year, are turning yellow and dying.  It has been a bit of a boring summer, at least in the month of July. I did go on the maritime procession to celebrate the Virgin Mary on the 16th. It was the first time I had ever gone, and I loved it. I will try to go again next year. I have left Catholicism far behind, but the procession was wonderful. Other than that, I didn't do anything interesting all month, except give classes. Even those were diminished this summer, partly because now there are no recuperation exams in September for those who fail in June, and partly because my regular st...