“You can’t have the light without the shade.”– Stephen Fabes After a long, cold winter here in Portugal, I was quite excited when the days started to warm up and the landscape around me was transformed in froth of white flowers breaking over the slope of the neighbour’s land like a giant wave. Spanish broom […]
“Walking is falling forward. Each step we take is an arrested plunge, a collapse averted, a disaster braked. In this way, to walk becomes an act of faith.” – Paul Salopek For the first two days of my four-day stay in Lisbon, between my appointment at immigration, and picking Michael and the cats up from […]
“. . . how we eat is a reflection of how we live.”– from: Bread, Wine, Chocolate – The slow loss of foods we love by Simran Sethi One of the things I’ve dreamed of since we’ve bought the land was a vegetable garden. I’ve dabbled with growing vegetables before, but there was either not […]
“Food is a very conservative aspect of culture but the erosion on the use and knowledge about wild food plants is higher than that of allotment food plants. The decline in wild food gathering appears to be due to negative connotations, i.e., association with times of scarcity, especially during and after the Civil War (1936–1939).” – […]
“. . . a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in . . .”– from A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit Relationships are an essential part of what it means to be human, and as Michael and I are learning how to live apart physically, we are […]
“Thinking will not overcome fear but action will.” – W. Clement Stone Two years ago Frank the Digger did some land clearing for us, burning some of the brambles and broom he cleared, but a couple of piles were left. With my recent spree of clearing patches of brambles along our access road, we had […]
At this very moment, as I click “Publish”, Michael and our two cats are on the final stretch of their flight from Dubai to Lisbon. Michael for a short 12 day visit, and the cats to permanently come live with me. To say that I am super-excited would be an understatement. How Midnight and Lily […]
“A silence where you interact with your thoughts is also a sacred act, a way of owning your interior being. Sometimes you need to wade through your thoughts in order to let them settle.” – Heather McRae-Woolf Brambles, producing delicate flowers in spring and juicy fruit in summer, are mostly a web of thorns growing […]
“Some places are for going through, others are for going to – and Monsanto is definitely one of the latter.”– José Saramago In his book Journey Through Portugal, José Saramago explains that he went to Monsanto expecting to find slate roofs, but instead found red Mediterranean tiles, and ‘imagined narrow, winding dark streets that would […]
When the name is mentioned, it is often quoted as the most Portuguese Village in Portugal, yet this title is almost never explained. Even a New York Times article on 14 June 1998 described it as Portugal’s “most typical village”. It is a misnomer, as Monsanto is not exactly what most people will term typical […]
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