Moratinos is lookin´good these days. Everyone is painting, pulling weeds, and pounding nails. It´s looking downright spic & span around here.
Because Estabanito is mayor, we now have Hugo, a part-time maintenance guy who keeps the trash picked up and the weeds cut back. Mornings you sometimes see Milagros, Estebanito´s mom, out on the plaza telling Hugo what to do today. He´s a smiling kind of fellow, and hard-working, too, and I don´t think he takes Milagros too seriously. There´s really not a lot of complicated work to do in a town with two streets and a plaza.
On the plaza, at a right angle to the Milagros-Leandra homestead, carpenter Segundino´s extended family is doing heavy labor on their old family home. I think it has to do with their grandad, who died last December over in San Nicolas -- the old man was born in that corner house, and it´s been left to ruin for about 30 years. This summer, a great gang of look-alike relations have been tearing down and building up the big two-story place over many 14-hour days. The roof is going on right now. So nice to see a house being reclaimed, rather than left to gravity and rain... the houses hereabouts are adobe, and they go right back to earth in a decade or two if they´re not maintained. Maybe grandad left them some money to fix it up. Or maybe they´re going to sell the place and split the dosh. Vamos a ver! (seeing as we´re the local lunatics who will pay incredible sums for ruins, we are usually the first people approached when property hits the market ´round here.)
Likewise, the house right next door to ours is getting a spankin´new coat of white paint, thanks to the sons of the very old man who lives there now and then in the summer. (The old guy lives now in San Sebastian or Vittoria, but he was born and raised in the house. He´s grandfather to about half the people between here and Terradillos.) Evidently not everyone has to die first in order to get his place done up.
Our house is probably the most worked-on edifice in Moratinos, but no one´s touched it for a couple of weeks... still no bozo action here. While we wait, Paddy and I are working on improving the lifestyle of our six ambitious hens. In other words, the pair of us are putting a new roof on the Chik-N-Hut.
It sounds easy. The Chik-N-Hut is in the far corner of our back yard, part of a lineup of decaying adobe animal stalls. It´s probably the most neglected part of the property. The roof was made of heavy, rigid corrugated asbestos that has cracked and sagged over many years of hard winters. The water that came in the cracks soaked into the wooden roof beams, which then began to rot. Woodworms feasted. And last spring, when I crawled up onto the outer walls to repair the tilework, I put my foot right through the stable roof. The beam should´ve held me. It had long ago turned to mush. I was lucky.
We got the chickens in May, and erected a real Mickey-Mouse/redneck/jerry-rigged enclosure for them back there in the corner stall. These are redneck chickens, apparently (the rest of them is red, too), because they don´t seem to care about their accommodations, long as there´s straw in the nesting box and feed in the feeder thingy. We kicked them out of the corner, set up the bozos´floor jacks, and fired up the new chainsaw. Zim Zam, the roof was gone. It only took about four hours of labor worthy of a Roman slave contingent the clear out the place.
We have 16 tons of salvaged lumber here from the house demolition. Some of the wood that held up our floors, roof, and ceilings was worm-eaten right down to dust -- quite similar to what once held up the Chik-N-Hut. Other of the beams are beautiful, worthy of much more than we can offer them. They´re huge, solid tree trunks, some still with bark on them, studded with ancient iron nails and chains and staples. We chose four of them, and wrestled them up into the slots in the adobe walls, lurching and swearing all the while.
Patrick thinks we are insane to do these things, that they are dangerous and beyond our technical ability. I think they are fundamentally no-brainer jobs that just require us to lay aside our books for a few afternoons. I do wonder if maybe I am working him too hard. He is a hypertensive 66-year-old man... While the Spanish die BEFORE their houses are done up, we guiris think about dying DURING, perhaps. I hope to God not.
The problem is, I need to stay occupied. I´ve gotta keep some kind of visible progress going here, or I will give up hope.
We can´t install plumbing, heating, or electricity. But we can haul beams and chop to measure with a chainsaw, and drive nails (sometimes.) So that is what I do. Paddy does, too, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
So the pile of salvage lumber mountain is shrinking a bit, and the Chik-N-Hut has fresh roof timbers now, and a little bit of concrete masonry repair work done. I wish we´d finished it. Summer is winding down for me now, and I´m not sure when will get back to the Hut project. (The chickens, oblivious, are happily cranking out eggs in the stall next door.)
Tomorrow at noon I am off for a week with the Benedictina nuns in Sahagún. I´m going to be the ´hospitalera´ at their little pilgrim hostel until next Friday, signing in the pilgs, locking the door at 10 p.m. (with an iron bar AND a padlock!), rousting out everyone by 8 a.m. and then cleaning up everything for the next go-round. I don´t get to leave the place very often. I´ve never taken part in the life of a cloistered 15th century convent before, so it should be interesting. Unless it´s not. I am bringing books to read, and hopefully I can slip away to the Bar Zentral early next week and blog it to ya!
Soon as I finish there, there´s just one weekend before I ship over to León for my big three-week Spanish Intensivo course. Maybe the convent will be good practice for the university life... All Spanish All the Time, living in a tiny cell, isolated from family and other English-speaking influences. God I hope this course breaks through my mental block -- I have lived here a year now, I can read and write Spanish passably well and can understand just about everything people say to me, unless they are Galicians. But speaking... OMG. The things I do to verbs would just make you weep. Speaking clearly is so very HARD, and I don´t know why.
So now I will shut up.
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