The force with which Heidi throws herself between me and the counter rattles me for a moment. One hand against my chest and one hand on the counter, she shouts at the two waiters, hunched over their phones next to the espresso machine: “Caballeros, darle su café como lo quiere es una opción real giving him his coffee the way he wants it is a real option y antes de que llega la Guardia Civil este café es una ruina and before the Guardia Civil arrives this café will be a ruin!”

Montelobado, west of Salamanca, just off the Portuguese border, is still asleep as I walk to the fountain in the center of the village square to fetch water for tea and coffee. The fresh air bites my lungs. Boris the tiny terrier, proudly trotting beside me, bites my sweatpants’ legs. Old houses, traditionally built of rough stone, wherever I look. Similarly built, hip-high walls surround horticultural plots, huertos, between the houses as larger plots for livestock, still in

Two police officers stroll past us. I hold my breath, avoid eye contact, and know that Heidi is doing the same for as far as the eye contact is concerned. Between us, on the steps of a small pavilion, under a kettle of water, our gas stove is snoring. Too often, police officers take offense at that snoring gas stove.

For the first time in my life, I've handled something wisely, and eh... that doesn’t feel bad. Montelobado! A small Spanish village on the border with Portugal, at the latitude of Salamanca, where the locals bravely resist progress. Heidi, Boris the terrier, and I recently moved there from Andalusia after a brief visit to Montelobado on the first of May this year. It may have been an unwise move, but so far, we don’t regret it. We keep that to ourselves because we do regret o

From next to the rectangular, polished block of stone on which I am sitting, Boris the terrier—smaller than a soccer ball—dashes across the square in front of me toward the exit of the skyscraper that houses the Dutch embassy in Madrid. Heidi, my wife, who leaves the skyscraper too soon after entering it, laughs when Boris leaps up at her, which relaxes me. Man, compared to the ease with which we renewed our passports in Berlin ten years ago—we lived in Germany back then—rene

R.I.P. Charlie Casually, one of the three mountain bikers I pass tosses the wrapper of the bar he's eating onto the ground. In their brightly colored outfits, the three are sitting on the edge of a stone trough where spring water flows in and out, and where, in the not-too-distant past, farmers herded their goats and cows for a drink. The mountain bikers drink from their water bottles and eat their bars, and whoever thinks I'm a loser for just cycling past is right. But I'm n

The twelve hundred olive trees on the plot of land on which I once lived near the Andalusian village of Coín were about a hundred and thirty years old, planted after phylloxera had destroyed the grapevines that grew there until 1860. To properly grow and bear fruit, each olive tree had twelve meters of space in every direction, and whether rain was abundant or scarce, the harvest was substantial every year. And every year, for a hundred thousand pesetas—about nine hundred dol

“Son tan importantes, músculos grandes?” our girl next door asks from her doorway as I pass, bike in hand. Twenty-five, twenty-six years old. Every morning, half past nine, she leaves on her electric scooter, helmet on her head. Every evening, she comes home just after eight. Fifteen minutes later, sure as sunset, there is the sound of the pizza delivery guy’s moped coming and going. Two days a week, our girl next door is at home. She eh… she is not playing volleyball on the

Peeking past the rock in front of me, I see Heidi, far below me, hiking back to our Berlingo. When I look up, I see vultures circling above a mountain goat that’s staring down at me. Yesterday, fiddling with Google Maps on my computer—for a moment unable to concentrate on my work—I came across a symbol near our cave house in the Spanish town of Antequera. Next to that symbol, I read the words via ferrata, Italian for klettersteig, which, loosely translated, is German for fun

Tumult last night. I flew out of bed, crossed the living room in two steps, flew down the steps to the kitchen, and through the window next to the front door of our cave house, I saw beams of light on the patio. I didn't understand what was going on, but how something could be going on was obvious. The steel door that gives access to our patio jams when the sun shines on it. It sometimes happens that Heidi and I start working early, lose track of time, and can't open the pati