Spanish views from a small town

Today marks the moment I have done another trip around our tired sun.  I have been thinking lately about the times I have been plunked in. There are moments I wish I had been born earlier, to avoid this apparent prelude to the destruction of our environment and our civilization. Yet, past moments were not wonderful, either. They seem simpler in retrospect, but nothing is quite as simple as it seems. There is a show on one of our public channels, where they show music clips of songs popular in this country in times gone by. Watching some of them, remembering when some of the songs came out, seeing people wearing clothes and hairstyles soooo popular in my youth, I felt an anguish of wishing myself back. It seems so simple, life in the seventies and eighties. No worries over the rising temperatures, no worries over whether Putin will push the nuclear button, no worries over living. But there were other worries. At the same time I wished myself back, I remembered that there were worrie...

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...

Twenty-one years ago this morning, my husband and I went to Santiago on a foggy morning. I remember a car accident that occurred because of lack of visibility on our way, in Milladoiro, just outside Santiago. But the sun was trying to break through, and it did, later. We went to the Sanatorium La Esperanza, where I had an appointment. My pregnancy had been programmed to be brought to a conclusion that day, because my due date had come and gone, and the baby was very comfy. So, on October 21, 1996, the doctors decided it was time for that baby to see the world that awaited it. When I was brought upstairs, still groggy from the anesthesia of the caesarian, I couldn't connect the tinny cries with a daughter, yet there she was, waiting for me. That day my world changed completely. I acquired a daughter and became a mother. At first, it was strange and time consuming; this child required feeding almost continuously, including during the sacred night. But she learned to sleep at night,...

Another birthday has rolled by. Another day in which my age is exactly so many years, and not x years, x months, and x days. Each day is really a new anniversary of our being.  In Spain birthdays weren't celebrated as much as saints' days were. It used to be once, that everyone was named for a saint or someone in the Bible. Scratch the old calendars deep enough, and you'll probably even find a Saint Ezekiel or Saint Sarah. People used to celebrate their name days. During the fifties and sixties it became the norm that almost every girl had Maria woven into their name and almost every boy had José. So the saint's day of most men was Saint Joseph's day, March 19th. And the women's was the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, August 15th. Those whose name didn't happen to have a saint attached to it, (the least) celebrated their name day on All Saint's Day. Those that had compound names had two or more days of celebration (me).  But then the dictators...