Room with a View

Hello all. A few pictures of where I´ve settled for the next two weeks or so. After taxi, plane, train, subway, metro, bus, taxi, with a stop to buy groceries, 4am til 9pm at night from Cambridge to 7 hours north of Barcelona. I am enveloped at 6000 feet in a slate roofed house, or set of houses, really, with a view across the valley to the unleafed trees, and down to the west to the Pyrenees and an open vista. It´s like Nepal (terraced fields, donkeys, horses running amuk in the road, dialects, sound of water everywhere, but the mountains are just a little shorter.


Hoses sticking out of the ground on the side of the mountains testify to the miracles of irrigation that they´ve performed here. Our hosts, Cesca and Lluís, came here in the 80´s, Spain´s decade for ´back to the land´. They raised two beautiful boys, who are now in their twenties and back for the winter, and rebuilt the ruins of a stone house for themselves, herding sheep in a cooperative before realizing that one herd does not a 8 person coop feed, and turned eventually to renovation of the nearby school, old house and barn for Farrera, Centre d´Art i Natura, which is now a modern, Ikea beauty on the inside, and a traditional, clinging to the side of a mountain, slate house on the outside. I am snug at night under down, and the sun beams in at 6am through the enormous windows.


I´ve been on two walks the first day, one to the hermitage that one of their sons is rebuilding using traditional stonework, which lies across the valley in another town with even fewer inhabitants (we´re talking, perhaps 15 people, as opposed to Farrera, which has 30), and the second down, or up, the road that leads, by four wheel drive, to Andorra. I met a Guardia Civil coming the other direction, or the Andorran equivalent, so even coming up here isn´t completely getting away from it all. I´ll be sure to find a car and try to pass him on a turn, just to make things more interesting. The first spring flowers that come up in Finnerty Gardens are here everywhere--shade loving, green-tinged flowers with hand shaped leaves. I wish I could remember what they were called. Those and early blue violets carpet the snow-flattened grass. One almond tree, which sends its scent everywhere. The rest, poplar and maple, cherry, some beech. None even close to leafing out yet. A sun and wind swept, overwhelming beauty to it. Tomorrow, to work on Perception and such.