Spanish views from a small town

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 ...

I've had an internet problem these days. Fiber remains elusive, though another company tells me they're working on getting Movistar to install the damned connection box. I won't be holding my breath. My wifi router, after two weeks since its billing period began, reached the maximum of the gigas it offers me, and my connection slowed to a snail's crawl. I shopped around, found a mobile package with unlimited calls and 100 gigas, that works with the antenna of the only provider that has coverage around here. I contracted it, inserted the SIM card in an old phone, and now use it as a hotspot. The fine print said the company allows tethering, so there should be no problem. Why else would they offer so many gigas? Still, I'll wait a month or two, paying for both services, until I finally get rid of the old one, which only offers 40 gigas a month.  This week we have finally gotten summery weather. It's warm, and I'm not complaining. Yesterday, it reached around 3...

A few days ago, I saw on a Facebook page about Boston, that they were asking where readers would go if they had twenty-four hours in Boston. Is it possible to choose? I would go to my old haunts in Jamaica Plain. The triple decker where we used to live. I've seen pictures of it on Google Earth, and the cherry tree is gone. They've re-done the front porches, and the bushes and roses are gone. It looks tattered now. Or it did, when Google sent its car around.  There are trees lining the street, now, to protect some of the houses from the afternoon glare. I would go down the street to the old Seaver School, where I attended kindergarten. It's long been converted to condominiums. I still remember the class I was in, with books lining one wall, desks and small chairs, an emergency exit door with glass panes, where the play kitchen was set up. I envied the play kitchen, but a group of friends had a monopoly on it, and would only sometimes let me, the outsider, play, if I asked ni...

If this had been a regular year, the Son Do Camiño festival would probably have taken place back in June at the Monte do Gozo venue, an open air amphitheater outside Santiago. Since this is a Jacobean Holy Year, big names would have come to the bash, which would have had record crowds. However, these are not regular times, even though it is Holy Year. The big names will have to wait for next year.  Instead of a solid four day crush of concerts, they have been strung out into various weekends from July to August, with a maximum of two groups each Saturday evening. There is no tent city, no food trucks, no stages to choose from, no crush of people. Last night, Loquillo was on stage. We bought tickets for his concert, warily, not completely sure that in these times we should crowd into an amphitheater, even with our vaccinations complete.  Loquillo is an old rocker from Spain's glorious movida years, those 1980's of explosion of youth and music, the first generation to grow into...

This past weekend, in the Tokyo Olympics, two Spanish atletes won a silver and a bronze medal, each. Before them, a Spanish tennis player beat out Djokovic to win a bronze, and two sharp shooters won gold. (Since then, there have been more.) Congratulations were in order, and many politicians celebrated their achievements.  Except those of these two athletes, who did not receive congratulations from everyone. The athletes are Ana Peleteiro, from nearby Ribeira, who won bronze in the high jump, and Ray Zapata, from the Canary Islands, who won silver in floor gymnastics (I'm not sure if those are the actual names of the sports they participated in; I don't follow the Olympics.). The only difference between them and the others is their skin.  Ray moved to the Canary Islands with his mother and siblings from the Dominican Republic when he was nine years old. He has been a Spanish citizen for years. Ana was born in Ribeira to a single mother; her father was from an African country ...

The new electric rates are wreaking havoc with my daily habits.  I now use the washing machine in the shoulder hours of the afternoon, since I don't get up early enough for a load to finish by ten in the morning. On the nice days we have, that doesn't matter too much. The days are still long, and the second load, if there is one before the shoulder rates end at six in the evening, still has time to mostly dry before the sun sets; it's simply strung out again the following morning.  In the winter, that means either hanging the clothes outside the next day, when we have sun, or draping it permanently every night around the wood-burning stove (No, we don't have a dryer, and with the electric rates going steadily in an upward direction, we don't need another major electric appliance.).  Another habit is trying to wash my hair before ten in the morning. Not so much because of the electric pump that is bringing up water from the well, which uses little electricity, but be...

This being summer, despite the weather, festivals are going on all over the place. Or, they would be, if it weren't for Covid. Today is the feast day of the Virxe dos Milagros , or the Virgin of Miracles over in the next parish of O Araño, my father's parish and where cousins of mine live. It's also the pilgrimage of the Vikings across the Ulla River in Catoira. The Virgin of Miracles is another manifestation of the Virgin Mary. There are a few places that celebrate that aspect of her, the biggest in our region being the festival at the Sanctuary in Baños de Molgas, Ourense, at the beginning of September. The name, Virxe dos Milagros , can refer to different aspects of the Virgin. One is because she's simply who she is, the Mother of God, another is the aspect of the Virgin of Guadalupe, with the miracle of her statue being found, or the appearance of her image on the cape of an Indian in Mexico. Another has the feast day at the end of November, and refers to the miracu...