Spanish views from a small town

Monday was another one of those days I chose to wander. Unfortunately, late March can be tricky. Other years there would have been much more green. This year, however, green is starting to show its face along the warmer coast. Where I wandered, in the interior amidst the mountains, the green is still waiting for the white to melt. This prompted me to keep driving, and I didn't enjoy the trip as much, except for the moments of glee when I saw the highest peaks wearing their snowy hats. My trip, this time, wound through the Xurés mountains, into Portugal, and back into the province of Ourense, through the Couto Mixto. I began the visit in Bande, and finished in Bande. After leaving the motorways, I stopped at the reservoir in Porta Quintela, Bande. That is where the remains of a very large Roman camp lie, Aquis Querquennis (water of the Quercenni, a local tribe, probably oak worshippers of some kind). Unfortunately, Franco's love of creating reservoirs swamped it underwater. On

The alarm goes off. Something's wrong. Why is the clock radio already chirping away when it's not quite light yet? At eight thirty the light is already supposed to be pouring into the room through the cracks in the blinds. Through my foggy brain comes the memory of changing the hour on the clock before going to sleep. That's right. Daylight savings begins today. This travesty we are obliged to participate in every year becomes more and more difficult to swallow. We should be on the same hour as Portugal just to the south, or Great Britain and Ireland straight to the north. Yet, this change every spring takes us even further away from the sun, into an artificial dependency on our clocks. It makes it more difficult to get up early for me. My eyes tend to drift open with the sun, which is why I leave the blinds up a bit during the winter. But, with this change in the hour, the only time of the year I even feel comfortable getting up earlier is around the summer solstice, whe

As the umpteenth storm wends its way to us across the Atlantic, and has become strong enough to be named Hugo, a warm front ahead of it has returned the grey drizzle to these shores. After a couple of sunny, if not warm, days, we are back to normal. How many synonyms are there for drizzle in English? Officially, none come to mind, though in some areas where it tends to rain a lot there are probably local words for it. But they are so local that outside the area, no one understands what they mean. In Galician, which is a minority language, and therefore treats most local words as part of its official vocabulary, there are many. It's a testament to our rainy landscape. There's the usual poalla or poalleira, babuxa, boralla, orballo, chuvisca , or my favorite, mollaparvos . This last one literally means "wet the dumb." If one thinks that one won't get wet going out and about in a thin drizzle without protection, then that person is dumb.  Later today, the wind

Error 404: Spring not found. I was on a shopping trip for my husband to a sports store yesterday. He had bought a balaclava last fall, but misplaced it, and his head in the early morning cold slowly freezes before midday. I went to buy another one. There weren't any. In the end I found a hunting cap with flaps that folded over in front and were held closed with velcro. It was more expensive, but I took one of the last two on the shelf.  There was nothing from winter left, except a few items on final discount. Everything was for spring, including some cool shorts already out on the rack for summer. And then, when I want to buy a pair in May, they'll be all gone. Needless to say, few people were buying clothes of any kind.  It may have been the first day of spring, but the weather forecast was for late January. Here on the coast, daytime temperatures don't go much lower than the upper forties in the winter, and generally stay in the lower fifties (50º/10º). That's t

The generation of youth that ran from Franco's police in the 60's and 70's are now grown up. Looking back, they were the ones that ran the illegal printing presses on which they tried to speak the truth about the regime. They were the ones who protested in the streets in the spring of '68. They were the ones who spent grey years in Franco's jails for speaking their minds. They were the ones that believed that another Spain was possible.  Now, in the twilight of their years, they see that the Spain they envisioned and made possible, is gradually slinking back into the frozen hug of the postwar iron-fisted fear. Even worse, they see that their savings are disappearing as they try to help their children and grandchildren weather this latest economic downturn, and that their pensions are not enough to pay the most basic bills. Some of those who are now seniors worked since their adolescence, paying into the system for over forty years before they retired, and now the

My daughter, ever up-to-date and informed, just messaged to ask me if there was a storm forecast for today. Since it was only being talked about ever since the last one came by early last Sunday, I replied, yes. She then answered, that's why the weather is like this today. Her powers of observation at least led her to look out the window and see the wind is ravaging the trees, and the rain is whipping everything.  They're too busy in the student apartment to keep up to date on much more than what they're interested in. Their television doesn't work well, my daughter's laptop has died and she only goes online on her phone, and they're studying, whenever they aren't getting together with friends some Thursday nights for improvised chatting and roaming the old town's bars. I keep telling her, war can break out and they'll find out when the bombs rain down.  While some ignorance of the world is necessary for sanity of mind, ignorance of the weather c

Some weeks ago, we found out that the Ministry of Defense paid €23,000 since 2003 to repatriate the bodies of twenty-nine Spanish soldiers of the División Azul , that were killed in World War II in the then Soviet Union. Apparently, the families of those soldiers get in touch, through the Ministry, with an association in Germany that has permission to find and exhume the remains of those soldiers, most of which died in Leningrad, Novgorod, and Krasny Bor. The remains are then repatriated to Spain for their families to inter, the cost being paid by the Ministry of Defense. Fine, but it turns out that the División Azul was a contingent of 46,000 volunteers that Franco rounded up and sent to Russia to fight with the German troops as payment to Hitler for helping win the Civil War with bombardments of cities such as Guernika. Many who signed up did so because they were promised food and money for themselves, and money and privileges for their families, or as a way to "expiate"

The day was rainy and ugly. The choice was opening an umbrella, having to hold it up high to avoid hitting the people around me, or getting wet. It didn't much matter. With the umbrella open, I was also getting wet. I hadn't expected so many people to appear. But I wasn't going to leave, either. 8 March. International Women's Day. I went with my mother-in-law to my daughter's student apartment, from which the three of us went to the concentration at noon in Santiago's Praza Roxa. It's a largish area, with a one-lane street running through the middle. We were there before noon. I took my umbrella and my purple scarf, but not my rain repellant coat because it wasn't cold. We walked down to the square, where there were already quite a few people standing. There, we stood under a tall structure that protected us a bit from the incessant drizzle that threatened to become full fledged rain. But noon came and went, and people were still arriving. If there was

There are days my memory seems fluid as water. That old saw about walking into a room and immediately forgetting what I was going there for, describes me perfectly some weeks. My head is talking to itself, rehashing ideas and opinions, stray words and images weaving their way through, reminding me of some things, making me forget others. If James Joyce had been able to see my stream of consciousness, he would never have written Ulysses. Too chaotic. Best stick to a regular plot line, stream of consciousness aside. I had left a pastel painting for framing last week. On Friday they called and said it was ready. I decided to go pick it up Monday morning. Monday morning I woke up and thought about what I had to do that morning. Nothing stood out. I thought I had made plans, but I had no idea what they were. So I spent the morning at home. That evening, something reminded me I should have gone pick up the framed painting. So I went on Tuesday. This week I promised my daughter that as so

It's been fifty years, and it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The youth of 1968 protested much the same things as the youth of 2018 protest, although today's youth is lacking the same passion. The Occupy movement promised much, yet delivered little, mostly because the younger people did not take up the banner. And, like back then, the young are told to shut up and obey the rules their elders have made. It is part of the human condition that the young see the world in shades of black and white. Those that have learned to think see the injustices and want to correct them - now. Those that teach them want the young to learn that an order has been established and that they must learn to fit into that order. Both are, roughly, right. Injustices need to be corrected as soon as possible, yet there must be some sort of social order, otherwise the world would be in even more chaos than it already is.  Sometimes, student protest is at the heart of soci

The inventor of fake news must have thought up the idea after visiting his grandma in her small village. There, I'm sure he must have heard some juicy tidbit about a neighbor that everyone assured him was true. Only it wasn't. But it could have been possible. Light bulb goes on. How to manipulate world opinion, Chapter One, is written. This past week, I ordered a tractor load of wood. Normally, my husband goes out and brings in fallen trees; last year his mother told him to cut trees on her property. The resulting firewood, an enormous pile, was for both houses. But last year was last year. He also had more time, being unemployed in the late winter and spring, and the weather was drier. This year, he still hadn't been able to go scope the surrounding woods. Hence, the order. The tractor brought some trunks that are as wide as a table for ten. When my husband saw those he threw his hand to his forehead trying to think of how he can possibly chop them up into firewood. Th