Spanish views from a small town

I am a year older today. I feel both young and old. I am past the half century mark, but I am still twenty-five. I suppose this happens to all of us; we don't feel we've aged as persons, only our physical body. Mentally, we're all teenagers.  Though not everyone, of course. Some people either don't remember what it was like to be young, or they don't want to remember. I remember. I still remember how I felt in those years, and how big the world seemed. When I danced and had fun, everything seemed so right, so perfect. This moment was the best, and life stretched out with more moments like this awaiting. Now, I remember that feeling, but it's a little different. That feeling of years and years ahead of me is gone. It's one of the most heady feelings of existence, knowing that most of your life is still ahead of you. I still enjoy those raucous moments, but with the knowledge that I won't have that many in my future. It's made me more cautious, which i...

I went for my long walk this morning. It took longer than I expected, but I made ten kilometers. No marathon for me, but at least I'll move my body and bring my weight down to a more acceptable level. My daughter went part of the way with me, and I showed her the abandoned house in the wood, right next to the highway. On Saturday, when I had passed by, there was an older man in the open field next to it, burning refuse from cleaning out underbrush, in small piles. I asked him if he knew anything about the house. He told me that when the woodlands that stretched out behind him were fields, neighbors from the village of Isorna would bring up the oxen and stable them in there. The people would come and go during the week it would take to sow the fields in the spring. This way, they let the oxen rest, instead of making them walk both ways and pull the plow. According to him, this was in his grandfather's time, so it was probably a stable about a hundred years ago. Today, my nimble...

First afternoon of vacation and I don't know what to do, already. Maybe I'll write. Maybe I'll try to remember what it's like to create art. Maybe I'll re-read a book. Maybe I'll go for a ride. Maybe I'll just vegetate. I'm not helped by the fact that rain is creeping up on us from the south, because, of course, there can't be an entire Holy Week without rain of some kind. The good thing is that it's warm, though not as warm as forecast. Still, it's a short-sleeve and slip-on shoe warmth, even if it doesn't get to shorts weather. And everybody wants to take advantage of it, as we could see yesterday afternoon on a drive we took around here. There were droves of people walking along the seaside and sitting at terraces. People want to think winter is behind us. But it'll return; this is still March. There were even people on the beach yesterday. Now, it was nice, but 23ºC isn't beach weather for me. And, from the looks of things, th...

Once upon a time, there was a man who had been destined for the priesthood by his father, though he would have liked to be a soldier. He never became a soldier of Christ, but his brother made him king, twice. Though royalty was not to be, and he settled down in the new republic of the United States, eventually ending up spending his last days in Florence, where he died.  Apparently, he was abstemious and conscientious. He loved managing his estate, reading, and gardening. He never felt himself destined to greatness, though he admired his younger brother, and helped him as well as he could. The man was Joseph Bonapart. Joseph was caught up in the intrigues and machinations of his younger brother Napoleon's attempts to create a French empire in Europe. His first attempt, placing Joseph as King of Naples, was rather successful. Joseph was popular with the people of the Kingdom, and he initiated changes that made life easier for many. But it wasn't to last. In 1808, during the conf...

Of late, it seems that I am writing every other day. I've been walking most of my mornings, then rushing around at lunch time, and finally giving my classes. By the time I finish at eight, I just want to leave the study and be with my family. If my little laptop worked, I would write in the kitchen, but it doesn't, and I hate writing lengthy pieces on my phone.  This morning, we have had some rain showers. From the radar, it seems that more are just offshore and heading in, so I won't run the risk of getting caught in the rain with no shelter around. I'll go walking again tomorrow. The last two times I went, I took just over two hours, and trekked over eight and a half kilometers. A month ago that would not have been possible for me, so things are getting better.  The container ship that is blocking the Suez canal might create more than a petroleum shortage. Already, the price of a barrel of crude has risen on the markets, which will in turn lead to a rise in prices at ...

Yesterday, I learned of yet another type of influencer on the web. One of my students was telling me how she yet had to film the unpacking of a box of clothes she had ordered, so as to put her own haul video on TikTok. Her pronunciation at first made me think she was going to howl, which is how she was pronouncing the word. But then she wrote it down for me. I understood the concept; to make a haul from the stores is buying cheaply and largely. She then went on to show me a few samples. All of them featured women as fat as a twig, either opening boxes ordered online, or pulling clothes out of a shopping bag. All of them were promoting one store or another.  I later checked and found them on Instagram, as well. I assume they're all over the place. Now, I know that young people like to change their wardrobe often because they get tired of the same clothes, and don't want to be caught dead wearing last year's fashions. And here come these other, well-off young people and encou...

Yesterday was World Poetry Day. When I heard it, it was in the evening of a lazy day, so I didn't feel much like writing. It was one of those days in which I want to be where I am, but also somewhere else, only I don't know where. In the end, we went for a drive up in the hills. We discovered my husband's car can get through rocky paths more proper for tractors. The fact that today there is a brush fire near where we drove has nothing to do with us. I've always liked poetry. Short, concise ideas and emotions, read at a fell swoop that contain the entire truth of the world in a few syllables. Yet, poetry is falling more and more out of favor with the general reading public. How many have bought a book of poetry in the last year? How many even consider poetry true literature? It is merely skimmed over in most school curriculums. I dimly recall learning the different types of poems in primary school. By secondary, we were more into reading and understanding the message the...

Last Thursday, on one of my hikes in the hills behind our house, I found myself facing a steep and rocky descent normally used by trail bikers. I'm not trusting Google Maps again. Since I hated the idea of turning back, I tackled it with the help of my walking stick. A couple of times I thought I would fall and eventually be found at the bottom by a biker the next day. But, I made it down safely and hobbled home. I hobbled because the muscles of my legs were aching at the unusual effort.  Yesterday, we ate lunch early and went out at midday for a drive nearby. So did everyone else, it seems. We went first to the Monte Curota, at the lower end of the peninsula of Barbanza, facing the estuary, Ría de Arousa. It was very windy, and the temperature had gone down since earlier in the week, but the air was sharply clear, and the views sensational. We left the car and climbed up to the lookout at the top. Going up, my legs bothered me, but not too much. When we came down, they were scream...

The European agency in charge of the vaccines has declared that the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe to use. That means that next week people will continue to be called up to receive it. Yes, the recent cases of thromboses were probably related to the vaccine. But the number that occurred, compared to the number of vaccines administered, is not worrying. Every vaccine, every medication, has some possible side effects, some very serious. It's a question of monitoring oneself, knowing when to go to the doctor, and just living. The probabilities of dying or suffering disabilities are much higher from Covid than from the vaccine. Everything we do in life has risk; the vaccine is less risky than the illness. This holiday weekend (today is St. Joseph's Day - a holiday and Father's Day), and on Holy Week, we will be able to wander around our own region, but not between regions. So, in Galicia, we can go on holiday to Ourense, but not to Ponferrada, just over the border in Castilla-León...

Genealogy has always been something I've been interested in. I guess I acquired that interest when I was growing up in Boston. Many Americans, since it is a country of immigrants, don't know who their ancestors were beyond grandparents or great-grandparents. They get to that first person to enter through Ellis Island, or another checkpoint, and they don't know any more except what country they came from. Sometimes, not even that.  I do know. I know who my great-great grandparents were, because the Registro Civil that was set up in Spain in the 1870's, has a long record of birth certificates upon which were annotated the child's parents and all four grandparents, including their places of origin. With that, when there is time, I can go to the Archdiocese of Santiago, and look up in their records the baptismal certificates. That last is a bit more chaotic than the bureaucratic side, as my daughter found one day, but still doable.  Even so, it's the direct line tha...

This morning, I went walking again.  For serious hikers, doing seven and a half kilometers in just over two hours isn't much, if anything. For me, serious potato couch, it's a lot. Right now, my legs hurt from the exertion, even though I did stop and contemplate and discover things along the way. Two years ago, in the spring, I would walk around eight kilometers in an hour and a half most mornings. I had a set route, toward the middle of the village, through it, back up our road, down to the church, and along the asphalted back lanes until I hit the road again and headed home. That routine helped me to get down to twelve kilos less than I weigh now, and I felt good. Then came winter and the pandemic, and I never got into that rhythm again. I did do part of the circuit last summer and fall, but then another winter came, with its corresponding rain and freezing cold mornings. In February, during my mini Carnival vacation, I felt curious about what was in the woods behind our hous...

Thinking about Holy Week ahead has got me into thinking about where I want to go. Of course, it is very likely we're going nowhere, because the probability is high they'll lock us in our townships during that week. I understand, but frustration is building within me. The last time I went out and about to a special place was last June, when I went to Puebla de Sanabria, in Zamora. Since then, I really haven't travelled except around here, and to the Costa da Morte in September, with my husband.  Even if we're not locked into our townships, we will be locked into our region, so I won't be able to leave Galicia. Perhaps I would go down to the farthest point of Ourense, or the easternmost point of Lugo, or just wander about at a whim. If these had been normal times, I would probably go down to Portugal; I haven't been since April of 2019, at least. Or maybe Asturias or I would return to the province of Zamora. Perhaps, I would go down to Ponferrada, and O Bierzo. It...

I went walking again this morning, since weather and circumstances allowed. Again, I went into the woods, and along tracks parallel to the highway behind our village. I went in search of the Mámoas do Campiño . I found them, and it wasn't such a hard hike, at all. There are about six, though I only easily saw four. One looked like a bulldozer had mauled it, another looked like an open pit. Only two still had stones forming the funeral chamber. One of those was missing some stones, the other had most of them, including the small stones forming the entrance, facing east.  Mámoas , or tumuli, are Neolithic burial mounds. A hole is dug, stones quarried and set in place to create the burial chamber, and the entrance tunnel. Then, a large stone is placed on top, creating a dolmen. At the end, earth and stones are mounded over the dolmen. Archeologists estimate that the tumuli in our township date from between 6000 BC to 2000 BC.  Along my walk, I found myself with about four cyclis...

It's been a year. A year since the first state of alarm that locked us inside our homes.  I remember the growing anxiety over the spreading contagion last March, but still couldn't believe one of my students when he said he had heard school would be closed within a week. There were few people in our region who had contracted Covid. Yet, the weekend after we had marched in the Women's Day protest in Santiago, we were all shut up inside our private enclosures. Those who lived in flats couldn't even go out on communal patios or roof terraces.  To prepare for the lockdown, people went shopping. And emptied supermarket aisles. Anyone seen with the last packet of toilet paper in the entire supermarket, was set upon, in good, WWE fashion. People who usually went shopping every other day, suddenly had two or three carts in the queue. Some, experts after having watched zombie movies and movies about the siege of Leningrad and Stalingrad enough times, knew to head for the canned ...

There has been a hullabaloo on all the media about the interview given by Prince Henry and Meghan Markle to Oprah Winfrey. Charges of racism, ostracizing, and plain nastiness shown to an American who dared to marry into the very British family. How much is true, how much is hype, can only be known by the people in question. That it is all a very public way of airing family laundry, is obvious to all. Yes, they are public personages, but even people who are public have a certain right to intimacy. Perhaps the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk wanted to tell what they consider their side of the story, perhaps they were simply out for the money and a bit of vengeance. Each person can believe what they will. During all this family fiasco, I was reminded of another American who joined the Royal Family, Wallis Simpson. Edward VIII, Elizabeth II's uncle, had to renounce the throne to finally marry her. It was a love story that surmounted all the odds. And Wallis was a woman who was also misunde...

Today is a typical March day, sunny, blustery, and cool. Still, it's nice to be out in the sun, especially since as of tomorrow evening, the rain is coming back. I've not been walking yet, but my back is getting better.  Except for a few cities, like Barcelona, most marches celebrating Women's Day were small, with participants widely separated. But they were out there, reminding everyone that, though we've come a long way, there's still a ways to go to true equality. I'm reminded of an ad for Virginia Slims, a brand of tobacco directed at women, back in the 1980's. It showed a modern woman, stepping hard, smoking a cigarette. "You've come a long way, baby." I suppose that we had, at that moment, since it was no longer taboo to see a woman smoke her way to death.  The good news we've received in our region is that the 50 - 55 age group will begin with the Astra-Zeneca vaccinations this week. Yay! I'm waiting to see when we'll get the...