Sunday 24 August 2008

Home Alone


At long last, after a 9-hour drive north from Malaga, we are back at The Peaceable Kingdom in Moratinos.

We have no guests staying with us. There are no (cute! see Sam pic) grandchildren, nor children, nor relations nor friends nor family about. Nobody is speaking English, even.
There are no pilgrims at the gate, and no one to pick up at the train station.
There are no big plans for the coming days: no fiestas, parties, weddings, nor funerals. There´s not even a long drive, unless you count the trip to Leon to take my long-anticipated Driving Theory exam at the police station.

Tomorrow we shall go to Sahagun to buy lettuce, leeks, and a supplement to add to chicken feed so The Hen Girls will lay normal eggs again. (They´ve gone a bit Dali-esque lately, a condition the neighbors say is due to a calcium shortage, but I put down to the Spanish/Catalan Surrealist influence...or maybe the chemical stuff they sprayed on the fields last week that made everybody high.) While in Sahagun we will pay our annual property tax bill of 61 Euros, and our annual trash collection bill of 24 Euros. (We will do this gladly, with smiles on our faces, having paid in the past property tax bills literally 20 times these amounts, for the privilege of living in near-ghetto conditions.)

By my best estimate, it´s been a full month since Paddy and I have been alone together at The Peaceable.
Except for the inevitable animal sounds, it is very quiet. It may even border on boring.

And it is absolutely delicious.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Welcome home - enjoy the peace. Thank you for taking us with you to the other planet - you sound happy to be back where it is quiet and boring. In less than a month I will be far away from my home in Oregon and traveling through your part of Spain - you have helped me anticipate it with great hope for a time of peace and real-ness that is missing from my every day life.

Deirdre said...

I'm sitting here in my kitchen in Connecticut terribly missing Spain! And it has been less than 48 hours since I left it! Enjoy your well deserved quiet time - I've finally been able to catch up with the blog. I'll have some photos to send in a couple of days...meanwhile thanks again for ...well, everything! Good luck on the driving test!

Anonymous said...

Yes, good luck on the driving test :-)
Thank you for helping me taste the quiet. My mind is in your part of the country, a place 16 ks from Sahagun. Can't remember the name.
This time, it will be at your place :-)