Spanish views from a small town

Fourteen years ago, a well-to-do couple from Santiago de Compostela adopted a one-year-old girl from a Chinese orphanage. They had obviously passed all the tests that couples who want to adopt have to go through and were allowed to bring the child home to raise as their own. They happened to be the first couple in the area to adopt a Chinese child (since then there have been many such international adoptions, including a couple neighbors of mine). They were even interviewed for a news program when the girl was six years old. They were a happy family, walking through the medieval center of Santiago. The child was happy. The parents were happy, too, and mentioned that adoption was just the same as having a child of their own, that it was something that would be permanent, "for the rest of our lives," as they mentioned in the interview.  Everything seemed to go well until the parents divorced and the mother got custody of the child. The mother became depressed. One day two years...

In the neighboring town of Lousame, up in the hills, there is an old mine. About fifteen years ago, my husband and I went to its abandoned headquarters to check out the ruins. It was a decaying fly caught in the flypaper of time. Some of the buildings were falling apart, the roofs caving in. Many of them were surrounded by briars and impossible weeds. There was a building with compressors, another with unidentifiable machinery, a well head, offices, what seemed to be workers' barracks, and a few other buildings and The low building to the left is the office. houses, one of which was occupied. It was strange, being able to squirrel into some of the buildings, such as the workers' barracks. They were attached, simple, two-story homes. In one that we could enter, the occupants had left some things in the kitchen, and in a room there were old schoolbooks from the 1970's. In the offices there was a little window where we assumed the workers collected their pay. There were ma...

Tomorrow (today, rather, as it's after midnight already) there are regional elections in Catalunya. The party in power at the moment, as well as some other independent-minded Catalan political parties, are taking these elections as a sign of whether or not the regional population wants independence. If the ruling nationalist party and its allies win a majority of seats in the Catalan parliament, within eighteen months a plan for independence will have been implemented. Could Spain be falling apart again? Catalunya has always been slightly different from other Spanish regions and ancient kingdoms. It was liberated from the Moors by the French, and formed into different counties, that owed allegiance to the French kings. (You don't bite the hand that liberates you.) In the tenth century, however, the French kingdom became debilitated and the Count of Barcelona did not renew allegiance with the first king of the Capet dynasty. Catalunya became a collection of counties with the C...

After years of driving, you tend to accumulate anecdotes. Generally, those anecdotes are created as a new driver and, when you're old enough, they seem funny and you seem stupid. But you've learned to laugh at yourself, so the mortification has been left behind with your numbskull youth. I got to thinking about my driving history from an article in the newspaper about a driver who was absolved of drunk driving charges, even though he had had a blood test and the result was over one gram of blood alcohol content. He had been brought to the cops' attention when, some months ago, he drove to a rural health clinic and asked for a doctor to attend to a deer he had run over. Said deer was outside, in the car. The personnel went, hmmmmm, and called the traffic cops. They took his BAC, but the judge decided that by then it had no relation to the moment he was behind the wheel. That at that moment it could have been within legal limits, only to mushroom later because of the time e...

Cats. My favorite animal. I have four, and they each have a different personality and are accordingly, easier or harder to get along with. Or with each other. Alliances are formed, fronts are set, a scapegoat is found, and peace then comes round again.  Tigresa was a misnomer from the beginning. She's more of a paper tiger. She is a very shy cat, greyish with other colors, between tiger and calico, and usually becomes the scapegoat of our little feline world. Though at other times she and the others will make up and they will curl up and sleep together. Any sudden little noise while she's awake and she is suddenly on the lookout, waiting to see if it's fight or flight. While she's asleep, be careful how you awaken her. She may suddenly jump up and skedaddle. I'm the only one she trusts. Even so, if I startle her, she makes sure it's me before she relaxes again. Matrionuxca (or Nuxca, the x pronounced sh) is the boss. She's just a week younger than Tigres...

Money is very tempting, no matter who you are. And if you are in a job where you handle both power and money, you are likely to fall. As do many politicians in Spain. Every other day we hear of a new "operation" against corruption either nationally, or regionally. There are names that have a whole charge of meaning behind them; Filesa, Rumasa, Banesto, Roldán, GAL, Naseiro, Gescartera, Malaya, Gürtel, Nóos, ERE's falsos, Campeón, Pokémon, Nueva Rumarsa, Bárcenas, Bankia, Tarjetas Black, Púnica, and dozens of others that have been closed, remain open, or have just been opened. And all of them since the Transition and Constitution in 1978. No wonder some of the older people pine for Franco and say there was no corruption back then. There was, it just wasn't allowed to be made public, and now no one wants to turn over a pile of dung to let the smell out.  All of the major national and regional political parties have been implicated at one point or another. The latest i...

It's past the middle of September and the grapes are already ripe. People have been picking them these past couple of weeks to make their own wine at home. We could hear our neighbors under their grape arbor this past weekend, talking and laughing as they picked the grapes. Though the grapes aren't for them, since they don't make wine. A relative has taken them. The big wineries have almost finished by now, but the local families are still starting to make their wine. We don't make wine any more. My father is the only one who used to drink it, and now he can't drink more than a glass every other day. If a brother-in-law doesn't come to pick the grapes, the birds and the wasps will take care of them. Our variety doesn't make the best wine. It's called catalan , and I assume that's because after the philoxera decimated the local varieties at the begining of the twentieth century that variety was brought from Catalunya because it was resistent. We hav...

We drove our daughter to her student apartment this afternoon, like every Sunday. Just outside Santiago, on the road to Noia, there was a young woman with a sign that said "Noia". Every time a car went by she held up the sign, looking for a charitable soul. After we had dropped off our daughter we went back along the same road, and she was still there, only a little further on towards her destination. We decided to be the charitable souls and go out of our way home. We stopped for her and put her backpack, tent, and sleeping bag in the trunk. She was young, in her twenties and very pretty. Her final destination was Finisterre, and if she couldn't hitchhike all the way, she would walk. She had already walked the Way of Santiago three times from France. Once, she had continued the Way to Finisterre, where the pilgrims originally used to end their pilgrimage by the lighthouse. That time, the last time, she had remained three months in the town, working at a café to earn so...

We have a rule in our house. Though we are not able to get away for extended vacations (last year's trip to France was an exception), at least during Holy Week or the week of the Guadelupe festival in Rianxo, my husband and I go for a day-long ride through some area of Galicia. Over the years we've visited almost every point of its geography, from the Roman camp of Bande in Ourense, mostly buried under a reservoir except in years of little rain, to the English Cemetery on the Costa da Morte in A Coruña, where the crew of The Serpent was buried after the ship broke apart on the ship-hungry rocks nearby over a hundred years ago. Thankfully, the clouds gave a respite yesterday and we went up to Ortigueira and the coast along to Viveiro, one of the few places we haven't been yet.  Ortigueira is a tranquil little town on the northern coast in the province of A Coruña with around six thousand souls living there year-round. Ortigueira is also famous for its folk festival in the ...

Food. I've written about it before, but it's an everpresent theme and something we think about every day. Every day we choose what we eat for breakfast, what we make for lunch, and what we reheat for dinner. As well as what we can stuff in our face between meals when hunger strikes like an angry tiger. Unless it's a very special meal we usually buy timesavers so that the preparation is faster. We can get together a meal for four in around a half hour or less now. And we do so without thinking much about where the food has come from, except at which supermarket we bought it and if it was on sale. It wasn't always like this.  I have a book somewhere in this mess, I believe, called Russian Journal. It talks about a husband and wife who go to Soviet Russia in the 1970's. The husband is a doctoral candidate at Harvard and gets permission to do research in Moscow University and then-Leningrad. The wife wrote the journal about their stay. In one chapter she mentions a vi...

The fifteenth of September? More like the fifteenth of November. The remains of a tropical storm called Henri, that apparently formed over the North Atlantic (O climate change!), has come wending its way toward us. As it approaches it will suddenly increase its power and punch us in the face. Between today and tomorrow we'll have winds of over 100 kilometers per hour, and in a twelve hour period more than eighty liters per square meter in our area of Galicia, the Rías Baixas. Already it's been raining since last night. In the developed countries of the first world we have become mostly insulated from weather extremes. We now have weatherproofed homes, travel in cars with heat and air conditioning, have good clothing to protect us from the elements. Our food supply is also pretty much guaranteed. Between the chemicals we add to the plants and soil to ensure plenitude, and our ability to import from a part of the world that has not been affected by bad weather, we do not ...

Tordesillas is well-known in history. It is where a treaty was signed between Spain and Portugal in 1494 dividing up the globe for colonization purposes. After that Portugal was essentially vetted from South America and could only keep Brazil. From there it went to Africa and the East Indies to establish colonies. Tordesillas is also known as the town where Juana la Loca (Joanna the Insane) was locked up for more than fifty years in the convent of Santa Clara. There, the daughter of the Catholic Monarchs, wife of Phillip Habsburg the Handsome, mother of Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, and Queen of Castile upon her mother's death, was locked up because she became a political inconvenience, really, rather than for her insanity. Tordesillas is situated on the river Duero, and on the highway that leads to the northwest, as well as the railway. Its industry is mainly tourism and wheat farming. Aside from being a Castilian town of historical importance to Spain and to the world, it...

Today is a rainy Sunday. Unfortunately. Because today is the celebration of the maritime procession of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Thanks to the rain, it's been cancelled. She isn't the patron saint of Rianxo, who happens to be Santa Columba, but rather a much venerated saint in one of the hermitages in Rianxo. A hermitage is like a little church made in honor of a certain saint, and Mass is only celebrated there on the feast day of that saint. There are thousands scattered through the villages of Galicia. Sometimes you'll be driving and you'll see a little church on a hilltop. That will be a hermitage. Their origin is probably lost in a time when a special spirit was associated with a place. Then the Church came and said that spirit was Saint This or Saint That. Others are not so ancient, like the Virgin of Guadelupe. The image of the Virgin was made by a monk in the monastery in Extremadura where the original image was venerated since, apparently, the fourteenth centur...

Yesterday I took a mental health day. It's a day in which I get in my car and go wherever I feel like going, leaving all responsibilities behind for one day. Yesterday I decided to go to Porto in Portugal. It's about two and a half hours away from where I live. I've been there before and I like the city. It's similar to cities I know in Spain, yet different enough to know I'm in another country. It's an old city and the first time I saw it was on a rainy day. Its tired buildings with crumbling façades, dirty ceramic tiles, and peeling paint made it seem ancient and poor. A row of houses.   It looked as if it wanted to retire from the modern world and rest quietly forever on the banks of its river. The next time I saw it, it looked old and poor but lively instead of tired. That day it looked like an old grandmother who threw on her brightest shawl and put on her reddest lipstick to go to the fair. The sun was shining hot and it was near the Eve of St. John,...