Spanish views from a small town

I have reverted to pre-pandemic times, and abandoned my writing for a bit. I simply feel tired and withdrawn. With the new season, I have hibernated into myself, simply accepting the darkness and the death of the year. I am also weary of the world. We have stopped watching the nightly news, partly because the television reception is so bad, partly because we catch the headlines on various online newspapers. Even so, I can't stand the hypocritical politics that have taken over the national and international scene. Democracy is dying and too few people care about defending it. We are reliving history and don't seem to give a damn as long as we can get the newest gadgets and toys. The pandemic is returning because people don't care and think everything is over. Masks are mandatory everywhere inside, but not outside. Outside, they are recommended if distances of a meter and a half can't be kept. But people obviate the "recommended" part, and just see the "not...

I've really been remiss about writing recently. There have been days I vowed to stay home in the morning, write a post, continue editing my story, and simply lose myself on the keyboard, but life snuck in and upended my plans. Life continues submerged in much the same chaos, and the pandemic numbers are slowly ticking upward, and all I care about is the beauty of the days I am living. Apart from errands that seem never-ending, I have been going for my walks in the woods. Yesterday, taking advantage of the fact that our daughter was home, I went to half of a talk about the tumuli on the other side of the highway that runs beneath the hill behind our house. The talk began down in the parish cultural center of Leiro, but it seemed too long to walk for me yesterday, so I walked to the tumuli, and waited for the appearance of the group around twelve, which was their scheduled time of arrival. I got there early, and sat on a stone, waiting for them in the warm sun, with a cool morning br...

Of late, I either haven't had much time to write, or much motivation. My classes began this month, and now my afternoons are all occupied. Once I finish at eight, I don't really want to be in my study much longer. In the mornings, I don't have much time because I've been running erands or walking, getting home with just enough time for a shower and to start making lunch. Covid cases have been going down, though they are now edging up, again. The pandemic has become part of normality by now. It's there, it will be there for a while, and we just have to be cautious and make sure we have all the necessary shots, so that, if we catch it, it won't land us in the hospital. We have been hearing horror stories about how our trees will be nude this Christmas, because of shipping problems. Personally, I don't care. I even welcome it. The delays in shipping are mainly due to Covid, and people who have gone big on online ordering. China has a zero Covid policy, which me...

This past week has gone by rather quickly. And late summer is back again, after the rains of the previous week. Though the nights are chilly, I've been wearing shorts these days. But you can tell we're not really in August because of the way the mornings take a while to warm up, and by how the light has changed. Afternoons are nicely warm, but only after twelve or so, and until five thirty, when the light starts to advise a waning of the day, even though sunset is still around eight in the evening. That will will move back an hour when we return to standard hour at the end of the month.  I have had errands most of these past mornings, and gone walking only one of them last week. Afternoons were occupied by my classes. So far, the afternoons have not dawdled, and I have reached eight o'clock a bit surprised on some days. The littlest kids and the oldest kids are the best ones. The littlest ones seem well-behaved and eager to learn. The eldest are also well-behaved, eager to ...

I haven't walked at all this summer. Partially, because I didn't feel like getting up at seven in the morning to walk and be ready for my classes by ten. And partially because I became a little lazy. Then, the month of September came with things to do and places to go, and the weather started to frown a little bit, so I stayed put until this week. When I returned to my old paths, I realized I should have taken a scythe with me. Back at the beginning of June, the exuberance of late spring was beginning to create monsters of broom and twining brambles along most of the paths. I was the only one using them, it seemed, since the loggers had come through to clear the wood from the fire of 2019. So, the paths had mostly been abandoned for a year, more or less. Still, they were pretty much passable, just not in shorts, which was another reason I didn't go walking this summer. It gets too hot too soon walking in long pants.  So, when I went along my usual paths to get to the princi...

I am falling back into the old ways of writing every few days rather than every day. In part, it's because the newness of the pandemic, and the necessity of recording its ever-changing nature has disappeared. We have become more or less inured to the illness and the numbers that we are still barraged with every day. Those numbers are now going down, though certainly not through our actions. The beginning of the new school year has brought thousands of students together in university towns and cities. In Santiago, thousands have had to be hounded off the streets by riot police where they were binge drinking and keeping the neighbors awake with their revelry. In Barcelona in recent days, forty thousand were rousted from the largest plaza in the city. With these enormous get-togethers, with the flux of tourism this summer, and with our complacency, the numbers should have gone up. But vaccination is a wondrous thing. Over seventy percent of the total population in Spain is completely ...

That there are people who deny the pandemic, is only to be expected. Viruses are invisible, and the illness is a bit hit or miss; some people get very sick and die, while others seem to have a mild flu and go about their lives.  Then, last winter when the storm Filomena walloped Madrid with unprecedented snow, there appeared the snow deniers. They crunched up a snowball, tried to melt it with a lighter, and got a blackened snowball. That the snow was cold in their hands didn't mean anything. The deniers immediately claimed the snow was a plastic fake. Never mind. From there we jump to those who claim birds don't exist, that they were all killed to be replaced with robots that watch our every move. Tin foil is not enough for some.  Now come the deniers that missed out on entire classes of earth science in elementary school. Last Saturday, a volcano erupted on the Canary island of La Palma, just where vulcanologists had suspected it would, along the side of a volcano that had al...

And life swishes on by. This week is supposed to be the week of our town's festival, the Virxe de Guadalupe. Once upon a time (over a hundred years ago) it lasted three days, from Saturday to Monday. For the last half of the twentieth century, it lasted from Saturday to the following Wednesday. In this century, the festival has been amplified from Friday to the following Friday, with the last day a local holiday to make a three day weekend. The highlight of the festival is the last night, with three bands. At two in the morning, the lights of the plaza turn off, everyone who was fortunate to get sparklers lights them, and, one after the other, the three bands sing the Rianxeira, with everyone joining in. It's not a good idea to wear one's best clothes this evening, because not everyone keeps their sparker high in the air.  Ondiñas veñen, ondiñas veñen, Ondiñas veñen e van. Non te vaias, Rianxeira,  Que te vas a marear!   This song, A Rianxeira , was written back in ...

On Monday, I took one of my days of being out from morning till night. I had really wanted to visit Porto again, but, even though contagion is going down, the idea of being in the midst of a lot of people, having to wear a mask, was off-putting. So, I decided to visit a corner of Galicia I had never been to, Peña Trevinca. Peña Trevinca is the name of the highest mountain in Galicia, at 2127 meters (The highest mountain in Spain is in the Pyrenees, Pico Aneto, at 3404 meters.). It's right on the border between the provinces of Ourense and Zamora, which means it's also on the border of the two autonomous regions of Galicia and Castilla-León. It's really part of a group of mountains, in a protected area, though it's not yet a national park. It has trails all through it, visiting both the summits, and the myriad of glacial lakes.  My intention was to try to find a short trail to at least one of the lakes. That was my intention. In reality, I spent most of the morning and e...

I am now on vacation. It's an unpaid one, but I get to have my days all to myself. This, however, doesn't mean I can forget all about my classes. This is the time of year I start pulling my hair out by the roots. Mothers (almost always mothers, as if the fathers had nothing to do with their kids' education) start calling me to set up their kids' English classes. I have little room, so I can't take more than three, or, stretching it, four kids an hour, preferably all of the same or similar ages. Here's the problem. There are five hours of classes in each day, but it seems some children have more than ten hours of busy time each afternoon. "Tuesday's a bad day because Johnny has football practice and then he goes to kayaking. After that, he has a swimming class. Thursdays he has trombone practice, and theater, followed by some more football. Have you got anything for him on Fridays?" "Not for his age group. I do have an hour on Wednesdays he can...

A young woman is walking along the road, humming quietly to herself a song her mother used to sing to her as a baby. Her green cloak is still new, and she decided to wear it because of the chill in the air, despite the fact that her mother had warned her not to. Times had changed. The war had ended, and the men of religion had won. They had begun to impose their laws, and a green cloak was not appropriate any more.  "Woman!" a shout breaks her reverie. She looks around. A man of the law is standing behind her. "There is to be no singing! You are to be clad only in black! Hie ye home and strip that ungodly color off your back!" The girl turns and rushes home, her green cloak flowing like a wind-blown leaf. Her mother had been right. It was a good thing he hadn't asked her who her parents were, and where she lived. There would be a record of how the religious men had entered their house and taken the food cooking over the fire on the last Wednesday of the previous...

August is winding down to a close, with just a week left. The days are now nicely warm and summery, just as summer is about to end. There are blackberries in the sun-speckled areas of the woods, and I've eaten some, already. The days are now losing their light, as the sun heads away from us, with sunrise at around eight in the morning, and sunset at about nine in the evening. There's less than a month to go to the fall equinox, and then the darkness of winter descends upon us.  As school comes closer (9 September for primary, and 15 September for secondary), parents are caught up in buying clothes, though books and supplies will wait for the lists to come home on the first day. This year, back to school also means getting a shot, and the age group getting their Covid vaccines are now from 12 - 16. I don't know if the European medical agencies will recommend the vaccine for younger children; perhaps they will wait for further research, but I suspect primary schoolers will so...

It's been lazy August days, this week, neither too hot nor too cool. Earlier in the week, it was windy, which is why someone probably chose to start a small fire in the woods last Tuesday evening.  That afternoon, a cloud of smoke from a largish fire in the township of Rois had already covered part of the sky that we can see out our front windows. Gradually, as it was being put out, the cloud diminished. But, close to eight in the evening, with about a good hour and a half of daylight left, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye while sitting in the study. I turn to look out the window, and notice a cloud of smoke. I start wondering if the fire in Rois hadn't perked up, thought it seemed strange that it should have done so. I go to the window, and see that the cloud is coming from a clump of trees behind our neighbor's house.  I start to yell that there's fire. My husband and daughter run to the front door, then put on their wellingtons and go to the path that ...

So, what will be the next move in this elaborate game of chess that no one will win?  Back in the eighteenth century, Afghanistan appeared as a nation separate from Persia. Not much longer after that, the British appeared. They wanted to keep Afghanistan as a "friendly" nation to them, to act as a buffer state between Russia, which was expanding its power among the Central Asian countries, and its protectorate of India. (In modern times, much like Eastern Europe was kept as buffer states between Western Europe and the Soviet Union.) The British went through three wars in the nineteenth century, only to see Afghanistan be one of the first countries to formally recognize the newly formed Soviet Union.  The twentieth century was a complicated one for Afghanistan, still a monarchy and impoverished. After the Partition, and the creation of Pakistan, the Durand line still held, and was a source of bad feelings between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Durand line was an arbitrary line ...