The petit typo on ma nouvelle pancarte that I got pissed at Per for trying to point out when I was already done with the laborious markering for a fourth time turns out to have been a missing N.
After I had been shown my room — so beautiful with those beams crossing the ceiling and an ensuite toilet-sink-shower room tiled tinily in cobalt, the only room on the ground floor — to let me be closest to guests’ dinner dishes and other needs, I guess — and called Ura, the Basque word for water — Alberta Clara brought me to the upstairs kitchen and gave me to prepare us all a lunchtime salad of tomato, cucumber, carrot and lettuce from the garden, tinned tuna, and a packaged beet that I watched her cut the mold from but later tasted had been deeply penetrated by the flavor of funk. She did other things in the kitchen and the surrounding rooms in which their family lives and kept up an instructive monologue in a mix of French and English on the difference between desayuno, almuerzo, cena, and comida, between cocina abajo or arriba. Very helpful, but amid the multitask she missed that I was leaving the peel on the cucumber until it was too late to correct to her preference, and we were both embarrassed.
I forgot to shut in the chickens last night, and this morning I woke up to the crowing of cock. Are the two related? I can’t remember whether yesterday, cooped up, he did. I jumped up and went out, all worried about being caught in negligence so early in this exchange of work for keep — whoops — and cajoled them, all enthusiasm and wet feathers about being out all night in the rain, back into their enclosure using unscheduled bonanza feed. Then I chopsticked egregious chicken shit from the patio stones, thinking about any other tells I could try to erase and get away with it, just this once, I promise. I hope it’s okay, that no chickens are found lost today to coyotes or whatever apex fowl predator prowls these chilly Spanish hills.
