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...

The weather has slightly cooled here along the coast. Inland, it's another story, as well as the rest of the peninsula. There are forest fires, including one in the Xurés Mountains on the border with Portugal, where a fire fighting plane went down, with one crew member dead. It's August, and things are pretty much normal in that sense. But in the rest of the news, the first story is the virus, just like it's been since the end of January. Then, it's the ex-king and his odyssey from one friend's house to another. Now, he's supposed to be in Abu Dhabi. After that, some clips from Beirut and the enormous explosion that happened, thanks to a negligence that seems so common to Mediterranean countries, Spain included. That is followed by whatever is judged next in importance, depending on the channel and the owner's political viewpoint. Personally, this doesn't seem like any old August, however. Some mornings I wake up and it still seems like May, or June, at ...

We are into the month of May, one of the prettiest, most gracious months of the year. It's warmer, the days are longer, everything has flowered or is flowering, the trees are kelly green. But I'm not in May. My head is still somewhere in April. It still seems like yesterday we went to the Women's Day march with our daughter in Santiago. It still seems like a strange Easter was last week, and that vacation still hasn't ended. It still seems like summer is such a long time away from now. This week my routine has changed a little bit. Now, I go walking every morning that it doesn't rain. That means I didn't go on Tuesday. I come home, shower, and do something. Depending on the day, I might have some video classes. My busiest is Wednesday, with one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Compare that with my usual five hours in the afternoon previous to this quarantine.  Then, I make lunch, laze about, do something more in the afternoon. Or, force myself to g...

Fifty years may not sound like much, especially not when containing the span of a lifetime. But, when the present is compared to fifty years ago, the difference is sometimes abysmal. This past Saturday was the fiftieth anniversary of man's first trip to the moon. What a difference fifty years make. I don't remember the moon landing at all. The fact that I was almost four months old would explain that. I don't remember if my parents watched it or not. I think I asked my mother a long time ago, but I don't remember her answer. At the time of the landing, we were living in an apartment in East Boston, our first pied-à-terre in the United States. We were there the first six months. Afterward, we moved to 9 Hanover Avenue in Boston's North End, a tiny apartment consisting of two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a fire escape. I do remember a television set there. It was a large cabinet television, with a small curved screen exclusively in black and white. My parents d...

The United States has changed a lot in fifty years. However, Spain has changed in leaps and bounds, especially the villages. While small towns and villages in the United States probably had a good standard of life in the 1960's, with central heating in most homes, fresh milk and bread delivered daily or available at the local supermarket, fresh fruit even in winter, running water in most homes, that wasn't the case in Spain. The other day, talking with my hostess at the pension in Santa Colomba de Somoza, she showed me the house (a typical Maragato farmhouse, restored and adapted), and she explained how they lived fifty years ago. She showed me what had been the original kitchen. The uneven stone floor was the original, including the hearth. The floor stone was slate, but the hearth consisted of a round stone resistant to heat, raised less than a hands breadth, where there were ashes from the last fire lit there. That was where meals were originally cooked. There was a beehiv...

Time. It's just not there. When I wake up in the morning I think I will have time to do everything I propose to do before making lunch. In my dreams, maybe. In reality, no.  I wake up and I want to sleep in. I promise myself I will go to bed earlier tonight. Like I promise myself every morning. Not that I will actually do what I promise myself. I can't sleep in. I have to get up.  Get up, wash, get dressed. Make breakfast. Think of what I want to accomplish this morning. Look at the clock. Already? Check internet. Get caught up in interesting articles. Look at the clock. No way!  Finish breakfast. Do chores. Go back to the computer from time to time to check on things and think about what to write. Open up the story I'm trying to fix, hoping to get to it today. Finally close that window before going to bed without having touched it.  Go out on an errand. It will only take a half hour. Cruise around town five times before finding a parking space. Buy what I n...

Waiting. We are all waiting for something. Waiting for the bus. Waiting for the elevator. Waiting for the rain to stop. Waiting for someone to come home. Waiting for the hour to go home. Waiting for the evening. Waiting for the sun to rise. Waiting for our favorite show to come on. Waiting for payday. Waiting for death. In between all this waiting, do we actually live and savor each moment as if it were a rough cut diamond? Or do we let the minutes escape, thinking that once we achieve what we are waiting for, we will finally stop and contemplate the daisies by the wayside? But once what we are waiting for arrives, we start to wait for something else. It happens to all of us. We wait to go home, thinking that moment is our refuge, that that is the culmination of our day. And when we arrive home we start to wait again, for dinner, for the news, for someone else to come home. And when we have finished waiting for all that, we wait to go to bed, to sleep and wait for another day. I s...