To Spain

spain, you are white and blue paint and white and blue skies and thick walls and breezy curtains. you are full of nutty sweet cheese and eggplant and apple jam and tomato jam and carrot and orange jam — zanahoria, zanahoria, zanahoria, i keep needing matthew to say it for me.

in the fancy place, you are a braised lamb cheek in apple salsa and a breathtaking dessert — pomegranite seeds, mint sorbet, and fresh tangerine juice poured over to join it into one taste.

sometimes, well always, there are flies, moscas, and a spider got smushed into the fibers of my sweater. we are far less concerned about these things than we would be at home.

and hello, spanish chickens in the yard, with a few turkeys also in the coop.

I am confused and challenged and delighted by your choppy country landscape and refreshed by the interplay of antiquities and modern art.

nice natural palette, spain: warms and cools at once, could you help us with our living room?

spain, we simply cannot seem to get on your time but with no restaurants opening til 9pm, that doesn’t seem to matter to you, and if we sleep ’til noon, or til, you know, 1:30pm, the people serving us breakfast at the inn, those kind people who suggested that we arrive between 9 and 11am to eat, are very relaxed and cheerful, and then they cook use fresh eggs with orange yolks running, and anise bread, and dark red ham cut from a leg with a foot that we can see from where we sit.

your pork smells more like animals than the meat i am used to, spain, and now i am suspecting that the meat i buy in the us has been dipped in bleach. still, my pregnant nose is on high alert.

i am wholly flummoxed by your language, lots of x’s and slurred words. to my own disgrace, I don’t even know “typical” spanish from the subway signs or from living in texas. linguistically, i feel less grounded in you than i did even in turkey, because my expectation was to be lost in turkey, and my expectation was to figure out some spanish pretty quickly, but that does not work for catalan.

so for matthew you are an intellectual exercise. for me, you are an exercise in passivity.