Letter from Espargal: 28 of 2008

Jones has gone to the States for the wedding of her nephew, Bevan. Cathy may very well be accustomed to the unwelcome business trips of her husband, Rolf; and Ann for years bore with Kevin’s equally frequent travels. But for the last ten years Jones and I have seldom been apart. (A blog reader challenges this assertion, pointing to my several visits to Canada to see my mother; I can only respond that it's not the same thing.) Her absence sure changes the house dynamics. It feels quite strange not to find her tending a plant in the garden. I’ve been finding out for myself, with the daily watering list, two-daily list and half-weekly list, just how many plants there are to tend.

That’s not to mention feeding and caring for the two official cats, the one semi-official cat and the tree cat (so called because its food gets placed in the fork of a tree). Ditto the dogs, while keeping Ono (who remains painfully jealous) from attacking Raymond and Raymond from teasing the cats, attention they don’t appreciate. We compromised by allowing him to tear apart Jones' old (ex Anita) shoes, a task he performed with relish.

If it’s not work, it feels quite a lot like work and I’ve been glad to have the occasional assistance of (our neighbour’s adopted grandchildren) Robbie and Kayleigh.
The latter have continued to put in a couple of hours of carob-picking a day, which greatly pleases our Portuguese neighbours. It also pleases Robbie and Kayleigh, or at least the cokes and icecream sequel to the picking does, along with the pocket money their labours bring. These earnings, having initially been blown on holiday treats and gifts, are now being saved towards a visit to Aqualand, entrance to which (they inform me) is expensive.

Let me add that after loading the tractor with sacks of carobs, the kids hop on board themselves to help me deliver the goods to the neighbours and to bring back any produce. (We go slowly and carefully, as befits sober citizens.) They take directors’ chairs with them in which to ride back home again.

Jones, returning to my theme, didn’t much fancy travelling alone, complaining that she’s getting too old. In other circumstances I would gladly have joined her but in these I preferred to stay at home. She was booked on a red-eye out of Faro, with a four-hour wait in Lisbon before flying on to New York. We set the alarms to wake at four. As always happens on these occasions, we woke several times in the night with that uneasy awareness of an imminent event. For once, I took her a wake-up cup of coffee.

Before setting out, Jones carefully folded her last items of clothing into her suitcase, disturbing a still-resting Ono as little as possible. Jones is fussy about her clothes, by which I mean particular. She didn’t want them creased any more than necessary. Unlike me, she doesn’t sleep well on flights. Our thoughts went out to Bevan’s parents, who were making an 18-hour trip from South Africa with a stay-on-the-plane refuelling stop in West Africa. No thank you.

I subsequently gathered from Jones that she had been met by all the family at Newark airport. She was overjoyed to see them. One of life’s special joys is being met at an airport rather than having to thread one’s way through its daunting complexities.

After the wedding in Princeton this weekend, the family will be spending several days at a lake-side retreat near Killington in Vermont.
KILLINGTON LODGINGS
Bevan sent us the website address. The place looks lovely. As it happens, the travel page in the last edition of the weekly Portugal English-language newspaper had a write-up on Killington, a part of the world that we’d never heard of before. Talk about coincidences!

In Jones’s absence I have been kindly tended by my neighbours. Marie brought along a lamb dinner for me and bones for the dogs, who fell upon them like the desert Hebrews on manna from heaven. (I hope that’s a politically-correct simile.) For my part, I have been pleased to help Marie’s husband, Olly, bring up from Fintan’s fields several loads of large rocks, which he is using in his garden. My part was to drive the tractor, Olly’s to load and unload the rocks. Several were far too big even for Olly to carry. They had to be manhandled out of the tractor box with care, for fear of rolling down the steep gully beside his house and carrying on down the hill.

It’s now Friday afternoon. I’ve turned off the premiere of a squeaky new work commissioned for the Proms (inevitably, it sounds like the first-timers’ violin lesson) and put on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony for inspiration instead. I’ve also complained for the umpteenth time to Telepac because my line continues to go down with frustrating irregularity. Telepac say they will try to get the line upgraded. I’m not holding my breath.

Ironically, I ran into the same problem while visiting an insurance agent on the outskirts of Benafim yesterday, to take out insurance for my new tractor. The fellow was trying to fill in a form online. He was saying bad things under his breath as his link failed time and again. Eventually, he swapped desks with his assistant and was able to complete the process. He said the problem was chronic. Most of my neighbours have the same complaint. It’s just one of those things – better no doubt that being shot up by the Russians in Georgia – but still very irritating.

Today is the Feast of the Assumption. It was the big annual feast of the Marist Brothers with whom I spent 12 years of my life. Ironically the Assumption (of Mary, the mother of Jesus, into heaven) is an article of faith of the Roman Catholic Church that caused me a great deal of unease in those days. In Portugal, it’s a national holiday as well as the start of the hunting season. The warfare began at dawn - one empathises with the Georgians – and has continued most of the day. I don’t like it but I am reconciled to it. I don’t think it’s possible to successfully migrate urban mores to the countryside. When in Rome…