Spanish views from a small town

The Spanish justice system has shown its ugly chauvinistic head again. The woman may have been guilty of kidnapping her own children across international borders, which was the charge brought against her by her ex-husband, but not all information was taken into account, and her sentence was unusually harsh. Her own charge against him of abuse seems to have been lost on a desk somewhere in the Italian justice system and forgotten. Once upon a time, in 2004, a woman from the province of Granada, met and married an Italian, Francesco Aucuri. In 2009, the husband is accused and found guilty of physically abusing the wife, and is sentenced to three months in jail. However, his wife forgives him and they move to Italy. But not everything is peace and love between them, and in 2016 the wife decides to visit her family in Granada and brings the children, 12 and 4, with her. Once in Spain, she says she's not going back, and files a charge against him of physical abuse. Apparently, forgivi...

It's summer. It's the tourist season. That means finding myself behind cars that suddenly hit the brakes, make right or left turns on a dime without signalling, and that crawl along so slowly you wish an agent would be around to fine them for driving too slowly (yes, that's possible). That also means driving around a block five times to find a spot to park in when all I want to do is pick up one thing from the supermarket, and I'm in a hurry to make lunch.  One way to open up parking space in our town, is indulging in the practice of leira parking . Generally, that is a private parking option run by the owners of said leira (field), and who are paid a fixed amount by each driver upon ingress. Since that is considered competencia desleal (disloyal competence; in other words, that you are a self-styled entrepreneur without having paid the corresponding taxes, etc.), and is actually illegal, our township rents the leiras from the owners, paying them a fixed amount, no...

Technology is wreaking havoc with our daily lives. Now, everything is on internet. Whatever we want to find out, we can click a few keys, and the information shows up on a screen. Even on our phones, if we so desire. The only obstruction is paywalls. There are some pages, especially newspapers, that allow only so many free articles a month. After that, pay up, same as if you received it physically at home. Even worse are those newspapers that now can't be seen in Europe because of the new privacy laws. Instead of adapting, they simply shut out the Continent. I take it they assume Europeans don't deserve a variety of information just because we don't want every Tom, Dick, and Harry to knock on our doors or look through our windows. Our most read regional newspapers are still free online, though. We even have an app installed on our phones of one of them. Now, instead of heading down to the newsstand to buy a paper if we wish to read it, we pull it up on our phone. The resu...

On this, another lazy day of this strange summer, I ran across an article on repair cafés. Apparently, a movement began in Holland, and has reached other countries, of setting up establishments where people can get their old things repaired, and learn to do it themselves. It's a push-back against the all-consuming consumer society. I have been very frustrated by the "throw away" mentality that seems to permeate every level of life, particularly the commercial. Phones are designed to only last two years at the most, cars around five years, washing machines another five, coffee makers from a few months to a year, computers two years, etc. I try to fight back as much as possible, but sometimes the challenge is insurmountable.  I bought a new phone this January because the last one, which lasted just over four years, ran out of memory to do just about anything. It didn't matter that I had an SD card inserted, there were things I couldn't move to it. When some of t...

Old is a state of mind. However, it is very much a fact physically, as I am discovering to my dismay. That doesn't mean, though, that I am about to retire to a rocking chair and knit. To begin, I don't have a rocker, and to continue, I don't know how to knit. So, I'll ignore the physical as much as possible. When we heard last November that Scorpions was going to come to the Galician rock festival, Resurrection Fest, I convinced my husband we should go see them. We like their music, they aren't getting younger (My daughter saw AC/DC just in time; she saw them on their last tour together.), and it promised to be an adventure. The festival lasts three or four days, and it is customary to camp. While camping out was not on our minds, and we weren't about to spend the three entire days there, it seemed a good idea just for that night, because the concert would surely end late, and it's over a two hour drive to Viveiro, where it's held. So, Friday evening...

Heredity tends to catch up with one. No matter how long you can stave it off, eventually it shows up and says, "I'm here!" It has now caught up with me. I seem to have inherited more from my mother than from my father. I've inherited her sense of humor, her weight, and, now, her high blood pressure. She had had it for many years when I was a child, only we never knew until the summer I was ten, and she fifty-one. I still remember the day, a Saturday. My father had gone to work on an extra job, and we were at home, waiting to go shopping when he returned later in the afternoon. My mother was talking on the phone with someone we knew well, and she was getting upset. The person on the other end was apparently telling her her version of what others had said about my mother and us. The person was a gossip monger who like to twist things. My mother was almost crying when she hung up the phone. Right after that, she lay on my bed, in my room next to the hallway where the...

When a postman first starts out delivering mail in the villages, they might not know exactly where everybody lives. They have a small map of each village, with the house numbers. They have to match the mail to each of those numbers. Sometimes, a letter might be mis-addressed, and the postman is told that So-and-so López Sánchez doesn't live here, though the number corresponds. Then, they have to go asking around on their deliveries if anyone knows where that person lives. If they happen to come upon a close relative of that person, they're in luck. Otherwise, almost no one will recognize the name. Because that person is known as So-and-so, the Bird. I don't know the surnames of most of the neighbors. I do know the family knicknames; most of them, at least. My disadvantage is that I didn't grow up here, so some knicknames and faces escape me, and the surnames might belong to an Asturian village for all I know them. But everyone has a knick, either something they inheri...

Concentration camps. Prison guards. Structured time. With those words it is easy to think of a Nazi concentration camp, or a Soviet gulag. But they can also describe the imprisonment of people who were simply different anywhere in the world. The United States is guilty of such an inhumanity, not once, but twice, and to people we don't tend to think of as "enemy aliens" in our wildest dreams. People like Joe DiMaggio's father. Yes, the famous ball player. The relocation during World War II of the Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast has long been known and considered the lowest point of modern America. But, though they were the largest group so mistreated (around 120,000 displaced and imprisoned), others were also rounded up or had restrictions placed on them because of their ancestry. German-Americans and Italian-Americans were considered "enemy aliens" as well. Around 11,000 Germans and 2,000 Italians were also interned in different camps. Others h...

To burn or not to burn, that is the question. Or, to be warm or to not be warm. No, I'm not talking about summer temperatures, but of winter comfort. When one's acquisitive possibilities are limited, and no way are you about to install a heating system where you have to spend two months' worth of salary just to keep the house minimally warm during nine months, then you have to do some physical work.  Generally, that physical work falls to my husband. He's the one who takes the tractor and the chainsaw, and brings home the logs. We almost celebrate a windstorm here, because that means work has been simplified by nature downing the dry and diseased trees. This not being the pioneer west, however, and my husband not being the Ingalls' Pa, not every tree is an available tree, downed or not. Generally, my mother-in-law tells us to go cut on her land, since I just have one small lot for firewood. Or, we have to buy some logs.  The logs then have to be cut into smaller...