Spanish views from a small town

Yesterday evening I was feeling like a round meatball, with that tired feeling that comes when you've been eating all afternoon. More than anything, what you want to do is stretch out on a flat surface and vegetate until that fullness slowly disappears. We went to a First Communion yesterday. My husband's nephew received the host yesterday, and it was followed up by a celebration at a restaurant nearby. Thanks to the devil virus, the total number people in the dining room was twenty, including the children. While it still seems a lot of people to me, I think most of us had not have been in a situation in which they might have been infected.  The day started out at midday. We went down to the church and, while we waited outside under the trees, slowly, people started showing up. It turned out there were two First Communions at the same Mass, and family and guests showed up for both, as well as the usual Sunday Mass participants. In the end, the church was a little crowded. E...

The season isn't quite over. In August we tend to have the last celebrations. The first (and more numerous) are in June. No, not weddings, communions. Though they're almost like weddings here. The crisis has stopped some families from going overboard, but it's still too much. I remember my First Communion in Boston. It was in the month of May, and since the church had a school attached, very numerous. All the second-graders who attended the school, and practicing Catholics who didn't, made their communion en masse. No exceptions. I remember we occupied almost half the pews. After private pictures in front of the church, and a short stint at a photographer's studio, we went home, where my mother cooked for us and our guests, ten people total. There were two children invited with whom I played. Though it was May it was cold and we stayed indoors. (Around that date we had a late snowstorm.) That was a typical communion in Boston in those days. In these days here a ...