Spanish views from a small town

When we emigrated to the United States, it was the year 1969. Two months later, American astronauts would reach the moon. The Soviet Union was beginning its decline but still going strong. The Vietnam war was roiling away in the Far East, and spilling over into Laos and Cambodia. The Cultural Revolution in Mao's China was destroying an ancient culture, and Castro was at the height of power, having recently bested the U.S. at the Bay of Pigs. Small terror groups, founded on Marxist principles, tried to move the Iron Curtain further west in Europe. Communism was the word used to frighten small children to sleep.  In Spain, Fascist Franco ruled. One of his biggest bugaboos was Communism. He didn't want any Spaniard to start sympathizing with leftist movements. (Too late. ETA in the Basque country was not only an independence movement; their principles were also based on Marxism, though that aspect was never greatly bandied about.) My father's old passport from the time had t...

Th ursd ay morning my father had an ophthalmic appointment at one of the three hospitals in Santiago de Compostela. It was a routine appointment for treatment of a problem in one of his eyes at 11:50. It was an awkward time for lunch, though good in the sense that no one had to get up extra early.  We leave an hour before, to allow around twenty minutes for the trip, ten or fifteen minutes for parking and some time to sit until we're tired of sitting. When we arrive, I drop him off at the front door, and I go searching for a parking space. There are many cars, and few spaces. I go to my usual spot and find an empty space on a lawn. (Necessity is the mother of invention; whatever open space isn't cordoned off is free game for parking.) Five minutes later, I meet him in the front hall and we go upstairs. I go to the receptionist with the appointment slip. The secretary takes it, checks the name, and gives it back to me. Suddenly, she asks me for the slip again. She checks it a...

The transition of power is never completely smooth, whatever some might say. Especially not when power is transferred from a dictatorship to a flawed, but functioning, democracy. Francisco Franco, Spain's Generalísimo , died on 20 November, 1975. He left things tidied up. The grandson of the King who had fled at the beginning of the Republic that Franco had defeated, would inherit the country's leadership. Juan Carlos I had been carefully tutored by Franco to continue the dictatorship, albeit now as a monarchy. But the new King knew that that was not what the country wanted. To avoid another civil war, he started the transition to a democracy. It was welcome by most. But not everyone was happy. There were extreme leftists who wanted a more -than- Soviet-style state, the GRAPO (Grupos de Resistencia Antifascista Primero de Octubre) , who were actively kidnapping for ransom, robbing banks, and killing those they considered politically worthwhile. Then there were the remains of ...

Silence is golden. To hear sounds dulled by distance, and be surrounded in the immediate vicinity only by one's own small sounds; the rustle of fabric, the air rushing through the nose, the tickety-tack of the keyboard, an occasional expletive when the wrong key is pressed, the clicking of the second hand on the clock. One's thoughts coherently appear, undiluted by unnecessary noise, pristine as the cold morning.  That is my state on most mornings. When my husband is home, however, things change. The television is turned on. While I don't mind sharing my quiet mornings with my husband, the television is a little island of noise that intrudes on my thoughts, which are then interrupted as small, unasked for items drift in. In the morning I do not care to know how the stock markets are opening in Europe, or how they are closing in the Far East. I don't care about how they are going to "investigate" the latest exorbitant rise in electricity costs, or what one po...

For many years of the almost twenty-six years I've been living here, my intention had been to someday return to the United States. To me, most things were better there. Jobs were easier to find, there was a greater array of food to choose from, everything was in English, and there was snow in the winter. Over time, I have come to regard Spain as home, yet I still wanted to return, even if only for an extended stay with a return ticket at the end. Things have been shifting, what I believed has been discovered to have a foundation of quicksand. The pros of living in northwestern Spain: 1. Most food is fresh and locally grown. Yes, in some supermarkets you will find potatoes from Israel, and blueberries from Peru, but you learn to wait for its proper season or look somewhere else for produce closer to home, and not fall into the trap of paying twelve euros for a kilo of cherries in February. 2. There's barely any air pollution. Living away from the big cities of Madrid and ...

This past week most of Europe has entered a deep freeze. Temperatures have gone down to -30ºC in much of eastern Europe, -20ºC in central Europe, and snow in such impossible places as the Greek islands and Sicily. Northern Spain has also taken a hit, and there are places in the foothills of the Pyrenees where more than a meter of snow has accumulated, as well as cities shivering with cold at -5ºC. This week a trough of air straight from Siberia is supposed to inundate most of Spain with temperatures that will dive to -15ºC in the more mountainous areas.  But it's expected to be a dry wind in most of Spain, which means if there is any precipitation it will be on the lee side of the Pyrenees. It will be a case of open skies and feeble sun that won't warm the skin of a lizard. Thirty years ago the forecast was the same, but the outcome on our western coast was different.  Historia de Rianxo That January, a tongue of frigid air descended from the nether regions above Siber...

Food. There are so many different combinations an d ways o f eating it . Some are internationally accepted. Others are local and outsiders look on with a strange look on their face. Still others were once common in many places, yet have fallen so far out of favor, that now th ey are considered strange. I'm making one of tho se meals today. Tri pe was once considered a sta ple in Boston, and in most of the northeastern United States. But that was long before I was born. My mother never had any trouble finding it, though only at the b utchers' shops in the Italian North End. I never remembered seeing it at Stop 'n ' Shop, or Star Market, or Purity Supreme. (Do these superma rkets even still exist?) The traditional recipe with tripe in Spain is callos . It has tripe, chick peas, onion, paprika, and cow and pig's feet, along with good sp ices, though the final ingredients depend on the region . Some places also add chou rizo . Contrary to what one might think, it...

When one thinks of Galicia in the winter, images of rain soaked grass come up. Dark clouds scudding in the sky, and drizzle working its way into every crevasse it finds. Our weather is much like that on other western shores. Western Ireland and the Pacific Northwest have similar weather. My husband says that the rain would appear at the beginning of fall and last until late spring. Depressing, but that's what gives Galicia its verdure and temperate climate.  For the past few years, though, things have been changing. We have had dry winters and wet summers. Months when not a drop of rain has fallen. Our well has almost run dry a few times, and springs that were never known to not have at least a trickle of water have dried out. This past summer was extremely dry. There were no immediate alarms until towards the end, because it followed upon an abnormally wet spring. But now the dry weather has continued for too long. A dry summer led into a dry autumn, and now a dry winter has b...