The Month of June

4/06/2019

 

The month of June
Doesn’t wait for me anymore
Because it comes and goes
And everyday is a different day on the June calendar
But I don’t mind it at all

Aldo Kraas

 

On 31^st May we celebrated the purchase of our house, which is now close to being completely renovated, roof to floor. We have found ourselves in June, the beginning of summer, our second in Galicia. Our focus is shifting now, from house to garden; landscaping, grass cutting, the building of the raised beds that will produce much of our food, we hope, in future years. The chicken run and coop are still blue-prints; the goats, tethered in the orchard, wearing their tinkling brass bells, are just a soft-focus pastoral fantasy.

But a retaining wall has been built and painted, and a new car-park with surrounding fence completed. The wobbly, weed and snake infested rockery that fringed the garden is gone. The snakes have not: a two-metre Montpelier appeared under a rose bush on the terrace a few nights ago. Raphael alerted me to it, instinctively growling from a safe distance, on point like a hunting dog! Another skittered across the road in front of the car on our way to Monforte, on one of last week’s long, hot afternoons.

Our first guests, Scottish friends, arrive on the 5^th July, more family the third week, and two paying guests the last week. We will then declare Casa Girasol officially open.

I quietly wonder to myself how we have arrived at this point, momentarily forgetting the planning and project management that it took to achieve this much; the coordination of tradesmen, their schedules and delivery of materials, the revision and re-writing of the ideas that have been transformed into solid forms of wood, tile, iron and stone.