mountain folk

The coast here in the south of Spain is impresionante. 5 minutes from my front door. Beckoning.

But what I crave here on the coast, what makes my soul hungry, is the thought of getting lost up winding mountain roads...to breathe the air that rises from the valley, fresh and nurturing.

This past weekend we rented a car and drove north up the mountain highways, through tiny pueblos blancos (white towns) and nature reserves. Just an hour south of Sevilla, we stayed the night in a tiny town called La Roda de Andalucia with our friend Bianca. We sipped on rum y cola and enjoyed the small town life that I now feel so nostalgic for. And what does one do in a small town? Cook good food, drink good wine, and once all the shops have closed (being the nerds we all are) work on a giant puzzle. Small town life is the same in any language.

In the heartland of Andalucia, we drove south through the olive groves to the town of Antequera for the typical mountain bread of the region, mollete, served traditional Spanish style with the best damn olive oil in the world.  Paired with a coffee, buenisimo!

From Antequera we continued south along an old mountain highway about 45 minutes until we reached the little town of Ronda, nestled in between the mountains. Before I came to Spain, I read about this place, dreamed about standing there at the Puente Nuevo completely lost in the utter shock of it all.

I was not disappointed.

As we drove into town, I soaked up the charming feel of small town mountain life. While Ronda's legacy is widespread, the town itself has a small population (if you don't count the numerous tourists who flock here as if they were on some religious pilgrimage).

My creativity is bubbling over here...with so much time to ponder and so much of the world unearthed and raw to me.  I feel particularly drawn to this place as a (novice) writer. Hemingway, after all, wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in this very city.

To sum up my experience, here's an excerpt from my journal (and a little poem to capture the day):

November 6, 2010

Sitting in La Blas Infant in Ronda overlooking El Tajo (the gorge). A man plays the Spanish guitar and seems to mesmerize all who listen.

 

Some people chat near the overlook, others listen in a meditative state, as if the music were lifting them into a spiritual levitation, as if they were weightless and perpetually dreaming.

the strings swell
with a thousand notes
each one played for the ghosts
of Ronda
echoes in the gorge until they become
whispers, on the mountain

it is a deep
      Roman cry
      an Islamic prayer
knotted into a musical mosaic
one that demands a quiet reverance
and buries all these modern souls 
into photographs

fossilized

brush off our bones to hear
the skeletal orchestra
the mountain music
that plays on 
    in the Hemingway hue of dying day

the bell tolls
the bell tolls
      the mountain bows

Oh, Spain, you're stealing my heart.

fall fever

I never realized how much I love the change of seasons before. Sandwiched here between the Mediterranean and the Bay, I go to the beach to watch the tide roll in and out, I absorb the afternoon sunlight and I enjoy the soft wind that the ocean brings to the inner city at night. I am lucky. I know this.

But I catch myself peaking up toward the trees, as if I could catch a leaf turning colors, as if the climate here would suddenly surrender to my desire and set the landscape on fire with dying foliage. There is something strange and quiet about that slip into winter slumber...the spring is only so beautiful because winter welcomes it, after all.

And so today, as I craved the fall of my childhood, I walked by the local mercado and saw what looked like the love child of a pumpkin and a butternut squash. Perfect timing. Autumn has been calling my name out west for some time now, and a pumpkin (or some strange cousin of the pumpkin) definitely sounded like the right prescription to ail my southern fall blues.

Being kind of broke in Spain, ahem, "modestly paid" that is to say, has given me a new sense of awareness. Before coming here, I was already ridiculously thrifty. Now, I have a piggy bank in my room that I throw all of my change into at the end of the day. That frugality finds its way into my kitchen cabinets and challenges me to create with what I have.

So pumpkin and random ingredients in Meg's cupboard = Pumpkin and Lentil soup with goat cheese.

Here goes!

Ingredients
1/2 of a pumpkin
2/3 cup lentils
goat cheese
ground adobo pepper
olive oil
salt
pepper
cayenne pepper
Spanish paprika
cumin

Let's just start this recipe out with this: carving a pumpkin can be a bitch. Ok, it is a bitch. BUT, you reap what you sew, and the outcome is so sweet you'll forget about all the patience you had to muster in the beginning.

Preheat the oven to 375. Or, if you're like me and you live in a crazy place that seems to have no faith in ovens, push all the buttons on your ancient toaster oven until it starts to get hot and looks promising. Start by scooping out the seeds and pulp. Wash and set the seeds aside for a tasty, toasty, after-dinner treat. Cube the pumpkin...or use butternut squash if you prefer (I bet that's pretty damn delicious too).

Coat the pumpkin cubes with olive oil and add a few pinches of salt. Toss in cracked black pepper, adobo pepper, cumin, cayenne pepper and Spanish paprika and pop in the oven for 45 minutes (or until tender).

After the pumpkin has been cooking for 25 minutes, start cooking the lentils. Red lentils tend to cook faster and have a softer texture (this is what I used for this recipe) but black or green lentils could also be used! Make sure the lentils are covered just enough with water and keep an eye on them...they'll soak up the water in no time. I added salt, pepper and a few pinches of cumin to the lentils, which don't need many spices because they have a natural smokey flavor that pairs well with the paprika and pepper on the pumpkin.

Once the pumpkin is done, fold it in with the lentils, and make sure to get all of that extra olive oil that has fallen off of the pumpkin! Give yourself a hearty scoop and be subtle (or greedy) with the goat cheese. Whatever your heart desires.

Delicious. Simple. And most importantly, no food is going to waste tonight.  Not even the seeds.
Honey roasted and warming my belly. Provecho!

disconnect

I sit on the kitchen terrace and stare across this strange town, the rooftops chipped and aged, the endless sea of laundry hanging up to dry in the horizon. It's almost November now, but the palm trees in front of my apartment, and the mountains of Morocco in the distance remind me that the cold I'm so accustomed to waiting for will never come here.

I'm a nomad. I guess I've always been at the core. I try to root myself...but the wind always picks me up and blows me elsewhere. So here I am with a suitcase from my life back home, using things that don't belong to me, sleeping in a bed that isn't mine. And on the weekends, I leave my little town to seek more adventures. I guess I never really did listen when momma told me to sit still.

But who can argue with this view?

Still, with the world wide open and my bags already packed, I hear Arkansas and its people calling me home from time to time. Perhaps its asking me not to forget. (But no te preocupes, that could never happen).

 (photo taken by my lovely sister, back home in Arkansas)

With all of this time to reflect, after a month of reading Vonnegut, Borges, Extebarria, and soothing my mind with the only medicine that calms me, poetry, I started thinking about Sylvia Plath and the Bell Jar.

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.  From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.  One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.  I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.  I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

 So here I am, Sylvia, sitting under your fig tree, a thousand branches above me and all of the possibilities coming to fruition. Which will you have me choose?

a day for healing

Before I left for Spain, a few people told me that I might get sick adjusting to the new climate, food, spices, etc. I thought they were crazy. ME? Nah...the baby who could tear open a crawdad at two? the girl who eats whole peppers without water and asks for more? And furthermore, I'd be in Spain, not a third world country.

I thought I was invincible, I guess. Or, at the very least, so eager to travel my whole life that my body had instinctively adjusted during my 22 years of anticipation.

Man, was I wrong. We were all wrong.

It all started Friday when Hillary noticed a couple of red bumps on her arm...which quickly spread to her chest, then legs, then feet. By Sunday, she looked like one giant hive with bumps from her toes to her eyelids. It became so intense that we had to go to the emergency room, but thank god for socialized medicine, we got in quickly, Hill got a quick shot in the ass, and we were on our way. Turns out she was allergic to the laundry detergent. No problem. So Monday I spent the entire day washing all of her sheets, blankets, whatever clothes had touched her blankets. And the hives healed.

So the storm was over, the clouds had parted, the hives had cleared...all was well in La Linea. Or so we thought. After a weekend of taking care of Hill, washing her clothes, making her tea, concocting different anti-itch remedies with my essential oils...I woke up Tuesday with a terrible sensation in my stomach.

Was it a spice I ate? A sick child blowing her nose and then hugging me goodbye? A little bug that flew from the winds of Africa up my nose and right into my stomach? We will never know. All I can say is that I was in so much pain that I couldn't sleep, I was nauseous, my stomach turned all day. I was certain I would die, right there in my bed, victim of some new disease that would be reported on in the following months. I would be the girl in the headlines: American dies after less than a month of being in Spain...the first victim of the newest MRSA pork flu.

And then once the nausea stopped, I started running a fever. But like my Mom always taught me, that's a good thing. So Hill made me a cold rag that I kept on my forehead, I refused any medicine (because the body needs to heat up in order to kill the virus) and by Wednesday afternoon I could finally eat again.

And that's when Zach started sneezing.

And so that was our week, swollen with hives, nauseous with some foreign bug, and sneezing repetitively on the couch.

Today, was indeed, a day of healing. We drank our tea...

experimented with some new food together...

...and explored the beaches of La Linea.

So, there you go, Spain! We survived your test...we're here to stay, at least for a year.

 ...and we'll climb any mountain you dare us to.

Making a home away from home

We hopped a train to the south of Spain with a years worth of luggage and life tucked away in the overhead compartments.

My entire life I've dreamed of this type of foreign adventure...where my former identity would become a bit blurred and I would have to find myself all over again in a new country. The feeling of not knowing where you will sleep, where you will eat, what the city you'll call home for a year will be like is both terrifying and liberating. And I've never been the type of person to just sit at the edge of the cliff and stare. So I did what I've always done...I jumped.

On the way to La Linea de la Concepcion, we stopped in Cadiz for an hour or two, which is the oldest city in Europe built in the 8th century B.C. by the Phoenicians. That's before the Roman Empire folks, which translates to mean: pretty damn old. We tasted traditional foods, marveled at the architecture and danced like children in the streets.

After months of waiting to explore the streets of the town I'd be teaching in, we finally arrived to La Linea de la Concepcion, a little town of about 30,000 people that sits on the border of Gibraltar. From the center of town, the Bay is to your right, the Mediterranean to your left, and Morocco straight ahead.

The race was on to find an apartment as soon as we arrived. We had five days at the hotel, and then, we were completely on our own. After a few stressful days of searching we finally had some promising leads...one in the center of town in the Calle del Sol, and the other in the Plaza Cruz Herrera. After comparing all of the apartments, the answer was clear. The apartment in the Plaza was hands-down perfect, in a safe area, AND it came with an adorable landlady named Loreto who is grandmotherly and kind. We spent the first few days cleaning and scrubbing. I heard my mother's voice the whole time saying, "don't forget to wash the couch covers...and the sheets...oh and all of the dishes too, you don't know who's been eating out of them!"

And finally, after searching and worrying and then scrubbing and cleaning...I lit a vanilla candle and a cinnamon candle to remind me of home. A home away from home (although it could never compare to the real thing).

Un viento fuerte de cambio

I left my life in Arkansas to follow the winds of change that blow in all of us.  I didn't want to be one of those people who realize in some mid-life crisis that they never did the things they said they would.

So here I am, lost and unfamiliar. Awkward with my blue eyes and funny accent. 

I've been living out of my suitcase for two weeks now. Homeless and anxious.  I spent a week in Sevilla falling in love with every Spanish person I came across.  For the first time, I feel part of a culture that pays attention to every small moment. We meander through the streets here, sipping cafecitos with friends. No starbucks coffee-9 o'clock meeting-sucking down a java for fuel and stability. No. Stability here comes from each step, each breath, each moment that is never overshadowed by work or stress. I can see why people come here and never look back.

As

I came to Spain a vegetarian. With that said, the giant pieces of ham that hang in all of the restaurants has definitely been shocking and eye opening.  But it's good to be shocked, and wowed. And mesmerized completely by the patience that this culture embraces. Like the quiet moment a father takes with his children right before the afternoon siesta. (This last picture made me think of my sister).

We went to the Alcazar where I felt myself sucked into those old college textbooks on Spanish civilizations.  The nostalgia was powerful...I remembered the feeling of lingering over the pictures and promising myself that I'd go there someday.  These structures all came to life for me...the 10th century mudejar artwork, the gothic Christian details added in later centuries. I stood right where a princess was married hundreds of years before. 

 Sevilla was absolutely incredible...little shops spilling colors out onto the cobblestone streets, bars that smelled of fried fish tapas and roquefort, cafes that swelled with people. A father sharing ice cream with his children, a couple holding each other, bodies pressed against a building older than the memories of ancestors, three men drinking cruzcampo and fighting over the bill. Each street gave me a different feeling, each corner a new scent, and each minute the reassurance (that I didn't need) convincing me that I've done the right thing by moving here.

Salud! To new friends and old friends, settling down in La Linea, my future students that I will meet this Friday and to finding an adorable little piso that I will soon call home. Un abrazo y besitos desde Espana.