Spanish views from a small town

Tonight is Walpurgis Eve. It is the eve of Beltane. Tonight, all witches roam and hold sway. To keep them away from our homes, our animals, and our means of transport, broom must be hung on doors, gates, and cars.  It is an ancient custom Christianized by Saint Walpurga, whose intercession was also requested for protection against witches, just because she had been an abbess in what was later to become Germany, and had converted the locals to Christianity. (This is because pagan beliefs were once thought to be a form of Devil worshipping, so, if she converted people, she fought against the Devil.) Making her saint day on the first of May is one form of Christianizing the pagan festival of Beltane. The other is to hang the broom to sweep away the witches (pagans) who might roam the night.  Broom, the plant, has long connotations in magic. It is a plant sacred to the gods, and was used even in ancient Rome to sweep away negative magic from a house where a baby had been born, by the midwi

Yesterday, I went for one of my walks that turned into a three hour hike. I went in search of the chapel of San Pedro, above the village of Vilas, in my parish. I had assumed it would be about two hours going and coming, but it turned into a much longer walk. The next time I go there, I should go on a weekend morning, when the timing of lunch isn't as important. When I finally arrived at the chapel, it was deserted. It sits in the woods, on a small rise. Once upon a time, there used to be an oak grove surrounding it. After dozens of forest fires, and the dedication of woodland to growing money-making eucalyptus, the only oaks are those in front of the chapel. The last time I was there, well over twenty years ago, those oaks were the only trees, there having been a forest fire about a year earlier. The carving on the stone says that the Torrado family ordered the chapel built in the 1600's. But there's another, illegible carving on a stone beneath that, that looks much olde

It was a Monday afternoon in April. It had been market day, and many people from surrounding villages were in town, some buying, others selling. The animal market was doing good business, with cattle, sheep, and smaller animals being traded. New potatoes were for sale, along with plantlings for kitchen gardens. Around four thirty, the market had been wrapping up, people dispersing, when the church bells began to ring.  People looked up, wondering if there was a fire. From the west, the sound of motors could be heard, and the first planes appeared. With the dull, ripping sound of the first bomb falling, people began screaming, pushing, and running for the nearest air shelters they could find, some of those still under construction, and without ventilation systems. Others started running for the roads out of town, as the bombs cris-crossed the town of Gernika, over and over again. As the fires from the incendiary bombs raged, those that could, ran for the hills outside town. As some plan

So much has been said and discussed in this past year of lockdowns about education. That online classes are good, that they're bad, that they're safer. What I'm pretty sure of is that they most likely helped save lives by cutting down contagion from school age children within the families. What I do know is that people have short memories. I was surprised this week when, perusing Facebook, I came across a post that mentioned radio classes during a polio epidemic in the United States. That there were epidemics before the polio vaccine was created, in which children were recommended to stay home during the summer, I do know, but polio is a disease that tended to be passed around in summer, rather than during winter and the school months.  In August of 1937, the epidemic of polio was so bad in the Chicago area, that the school committee and the city hall decided to postpone the opening of school. However, so as not to cut much into vacations and weekends during the coming mont

Yesterday was Earth Day, and today is World Book Day. Most bookstores today give a small discount on physical purchases, though books still remain expensive, especially in comparison to most salaries.  I have always been a reader. I convinced my parents to buy me a few books when I was a child, but they were always more interested in that I read instructive books, such as my school textbooks. They were suspicious of novel-reading, like most Spaniards of their age, brought up to beware the printed word. Then, a friend of my father's, who had a couple of girls a few years older than me, would lend me his girls' Nancy Drews or Little House books from time to time. When I was about seven or eight, another co-worker of my father's, when he heard I liked to read, gave me boxes of books that had belonged to his children, adults already in the 1970's. Many of them were textbooks, especially high school and some college books. Another good amount were children's and young ad

The parking fine fiasco is not yet ended. In February, 2018, I was fined €80 for parking overlong in a space with limited time in my town, and without a special sign saying what time I had parked the car. I paid the fine, within the discount time, and long before the time limit to pay was up. Luckily, I kept the receipts. About a couple of years later, I get a letter from the provincial tax office, telling me I need to pay the fine because it's overdue. Great, someone is not doing their job. I call the office, and they tell me that I should take my receipts to the tax office of my town hall. I do, and they tell me I should take them to the main office, and fill out a reclamation form. I cross the square and do so. There, they tell me it's out of their hands, and that I should send everything to the provincial tax office. I call and get the email, and send scanned copies.  At the beginning of this year, I get another letter, telling me I still need to pay the fine. After yelling

This morning, I went walking after a hiatus of almost a week. Between errands, laziness, and rain, I had been putting off walking. Partially, also because I thought I had found most of the interesting spots within ten kilometers.  So, I strode off in another direction, which involved crossing a busy road, something I have tried to avoid until now. In the end, it was over a seven kilometer round trip, and worth the exertion.  I decided to visit a hill top that was supposed to have the remains of an Iron Age hill fort. The entire area of the Castro de Bexo had been consumed in the atrocious fires of March of 2019, and loggers had been cutting and removing all the eucalyptus. When I got to where the lane upwards begins, I gulped. It looked like something had taken huge bites of earth, chewed them, and spit them out on the lane, again. The tires of the tractors on the wet ground had gouged out long lines in the earth, rising and dipping again. It wasn't the easiest lane to follow, but

Outside of Spain or Latin America, perhaps the singer Miguel Bosé is not that well known. He is the son of Italian actress Lucía Bosé, and Spanish bullfighter Luís Dominguín. Bosé helped define the years of the movida , the throbbing Madrid night scene of the eighties, when Spanish youth de-corseted themselves from the past forty years of greyness and imposition. To my generation he is, along with Alaska, Tino Casal, Mecano, and Los Secretos, one of the music idols that defined our youth. That was the past. In the intervening years, along with good music, also came drugs, scandals, illness, loss of voice, and now, perhaps as a result of all that, conspiracy theorizing. He was interviewed the last two weeks by Jordi Évole, a reporter that is known for flashy journalism. Last night was the second half of the interview, which I have been watching online.  Just over ten minutes into the interview, Bosé begins flying into Bill Gates, and the foundations he and Melinda set up to help fight a

Yesterday, the wood chopper was all ours, as we tackled the mountain of logs in front of our house. The mountain has now gone down on one side, to rise on the other, this last being the chopped wood that will dry out before we stack it away for next winter.  My husband and brother-in-law were the ones doing the heavy work of pushing the cut-up logs through the chopper. My daughter controlled the chopper, though I took over for a while before doing the shopping. It becomes hypnotic: push, pull back, adjust for length, push, pull back, adjust for length, etc. From time to time, when the engine threatens to quit because the log is too dense, it's a question of pulling back a fraction to push forward another fraction. That continues until the chopper is through. We haven't finished, though, and at some further point we will have to rent the chopper again. This week, divers harvesting sea urchins found three cannons underwater off the coast of Corrubedo, straight west of here. A res

This morning I took a walk down some lanes that I hadn't visited since last month, when the leaves were beginning to make an appearance. Today, the trees are almost all showing their spring exuberance, deeply, lusciously green. From this month to the end of July is the best time of the year. From doing nothing in the mornings, I've gone to having something to do almost every day. Yesterday, I went on an errand for my husband that took until well after lunch time. This morning, my daughter ran my errands for me. Tomorrow, we will be making firewood all day.  We rent out a gasoline powered chopper almost every year. We drag it out to the pile of wood, then, while my daughter, my mother-in-law, or I wield the ax head, my husband and my brother-in-law place the logs in the chopper and then clear out the smaller pieces. We generally do it in July or August, and the chopped wood then finishes drying out in the hot summer sun. This year, they'll have longer to dry out. At least, t

I just heard that our region of Galicia will change the curfew hour from 10PM to 11PM, come Friday. We will, however, remain closed for the rest of the country. And several townships have had their status updated to medium and high alert, with three at maximum alert, and thereby closed off. At the moment, we remain in the basic range, but the number of contagion overall is going up, though slowly. The state of alarm is destined to end on May 9th, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez does not see that it will be continued after that. That will mean, that unless individual regions close themselves off, everyone is free to go anywhere. Dear God, no. Call me phobic, but I prefer not having other people come here, even if it means I can't go there.  At the rate vaccination is going, the lifting of the state of alarm practically guarantees another strong wave of contagion, especially in Madrid. Life will probably start to get interesting, again, practically at the beginning of summer. As for

It's been a long time since I've been sick. I would have preferred to pass the pandemic without getting a stick up my nose, but I might just get one. This morning I woke up fine, but at mid-morning I started to notice how my legs hurt. After a while the muscular aches went to my lower back. I then started to get chills, though the day is not exactly cold, and I am wearing an undervest with a warm polar fleece over it. I checked and I didn't have a fever. A little while later I checked again, since the shivering wasn't going away, and I had just a tenth of a degree over 37. I've had this before, and it's always proven to be a simple spring cold, more than not, caused by temperature changes and exposure. And these days we've had a rollercoaster, along with my walking yesterday morning that got me hot and made me peel sleeves, in a stiff northeasterly wind. But my daughter started pestering me to call the doctor and forego any classes today. In ordinary times,

There are people who don't seem to understand anything without thinking of it in monetary terms. People who think that if something is worth having, it's because it's very expensive. People who, seeing what the neighbor has, wants something better and bigger, because if what they have is more expensive, they are better than the neighbor. That is what has ruined the world, not capitalism per se. Too many people think in terms of worth, making monetary worth the most important aspect of their lives. Perhaps it comes from Calvin's ideas that wealth was a sign of God's grace bestowed on a person, and evidence of the person's predestination to be saved. With the extension of ideas and commerce from northern Europe, the idea of wealth being a sign of grace became rooted in Catholic southern Europe, with the results we see now. There is a person we know, like many others, that is obsessed with making money. The more that comes into the household, the better. This perso

Our television is second hand, and about seven or ten years old. That means it has no connection to internet, even though it is HD, and has a pretty good picture. About a year ago, something happened to its software. Every few times we turned it on, we then had to tune the television, waiting until it found every available channel. After a while, it got worse, and now we have to tune it every time we turn it on. That means there is no picture automatically, but we have to wait maybe five minutes or more for it to run through all the channels. This problem did help to show that we now have more channels than we did previously. However, in the years since we had lost them, the contents have become pure telegarbage, so, in the end, it doesn't matter if we can get those channels or not. To tune it, we have to choose language and country. Normally, we choose English, and Spain. But, yesterday our daughter made a mistake and chose Serbia. I found it strange that the hour was off, so I st

Last Friday, we went on our trip to O Courel, in the province of Lugo. Chance led us up to the forgotten village of Pacios da Serra, and its road to Vilarbacú, abandoned now to trucks going from one quarry to another. Almost at the end, we passed right above one of the slate quarries. The road looked like it had been scooped out of the earth recently by the two bulldozers that were resting for the weekend. One was on the inside shoulder of the road itself, the other on another road above that had the same raw look as the one we were on. But we were through easily enough, and even stopped to take a photo of the excavators and the trucks below. At the end, just before the village of Vilarbacú, we stopped at a ruined house with other remains behind it. It turned out to be what was left of an antimony mine in the area. After the middle of the last century, it became much more profitable to quarry slate. I assume the road between Pacios and Vilarbacú was once in another spot, but the exigen

Snap regional elections are going to be held in May in Madrid. President Ayuso, of the conservative Partido Popular, convoked them, more than anything, for political reasons. Another political party she was in coalition with, Ciudadanos, committed political hara-kiri, so she wanted to finish pushing in the hilt, and wind up with a majority, and no need of alliances.  Not so fast. It seems she may still need an alliance to govern, because polls are not giving her a majority. One of the parties with a similar political bent, is Vox. She has been trying to present herself as radical as they are, to win over votes that would have gone to them. She ends up sounding like a parody of herself. One of her slogans is "Communism or liberty." Another thing she said is, "When they call you fascist, you know you're doing things right." She continued on, saying that meant she was "on the right side of history." Either she's been taking lessons in ambiguity and la

Yesterday, I took my free day of this holiday week, and went about on my own. Since we can't leave the region, I wandered where my car took me. I stopped in Pontevedra, where I was surprised that it was a local holiday. Easter Monday is a holiday in some regions of Spain, and apparently also in some townships of regions where it's not. I think I also noticed in other towns I passed through that everything was closed.  I bought my lunch there and then drove down to the beach at Cesantes, where I parked, and ate, looking out at the Illa de San Simón, a sanatorium turned Francoist prison, and now a place where they hold cultural events in summer. There were lots of people about, thanks to the lovely day.  From there, I drove down to Tui, but not into town, this time. I drove up to Monte Aloia, where I hadn't been before. Monte Aloia was once a bald hill. But then, some forestry engineers decided to plant it with different species of trees and shrubs. It became the first declar