The season's first real winter weather settled in here during the last week, nighttime temperatures in Madrid dropping to near freezing, plenty of snow falling in the mountains to the north. A slight jolt to the system, but a good one. Brisk, fresh. Cold enough that if I'm out for a long walk my hands begin aching, my face begins to get a bit stiff (so that my mouth has to work harder to produce clear speech, sometimes transforming my Spanish into a stream of embarrassingly comical sounds).
Darkness has begun falling early, or as early as it gets here, the last traces of daylight disappearing not long after 6 p.m., Christmas lights softening the loss of sunshine. And maybe in part because of that last bit, the shortening of the days here hardly affects me at all. I'll be curious to see what it feels like being back in a part of the world where the lights need to go on at 4 or so. In fact, I'll be curious to be back there and see how things feel in general. This'll be the first time in a while I'll be in the States for the holidays. Here the biggest source of ongoing conflict seems to be the customary attack attitude of el Partido Popular toward the Socialist government. If the little bit of online chatter/news I've seen is accurate, one of the current major sources of conflict stateside -- apart from, er, everything having to do with Iraq, Bush, etc. -- is related to holiday season greetings/terminology. I can only shrug my shoulders at that. If folks want to look for reasons to be upset or outraged, they'll find them, and given the holiday season's importance and the current strange stateside atmosphere re: religious matters, it's logical that this season would be fertile ground for what the Spaniards call crispación.
On the other hand, I can't think of anyone I know stateside who gives a rat's patoot whether we say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays, or would be bothered by a hearty greeting of "Happy Hannukah!" or "Groovy Kwanzaa!", or who cares whether the big green thing in the corner of the living room is called a Christmas tree or a holiday shrub. Could be the instances of conflict are negligible compared to the overall seasonal okayness.
I like this time of the year, and I'm not going to concern myself with sectarian goofiness, no matter which part of the ideological spectrum it's rooted in. Even if that means I have to live in my own adorable holiday fantasyland.
But you don't want to hear about fantasylands and holiday vegetation. Neither do I, because today life tossed me a yuletide curve ball.
It seems that the rehab work going on in this building [see, for example, entries of November 16, 18 and 25] has taken a sudden left-hand turn, the laborers discovering as they tore more and more of it apart that more and more of it needed to be torn apart. Work that began as a simple converting the piso across the hall from one living space into two, sprouted complications, followed by more complications, until that flat and its upstairs and downstairs neighbors had been gutted down to and including the beams/rafters. The ripping out of the neighboring flat's old kitchen this last week led them to rip apart that outside wall, then continue on up onto the roof, where they began ripping apart the structure above my kitchen ceiling.
A knock on the door this afternoon turned out to be a couple of the workers stopping by to warn me that it's looking like the destructo-derby is now, unexpectedly, set to dig down through the roof into this flat, with the kitchen getting ripped out, possibly extending on into the space from there.
Meaning if I hadn't arranged my life to return to the States a couple of weeks from now, I would have had to pack up my existence here and live in temporary quarters for an indeterminate period of time.
Meanwhile, rain began coming down, and on waltzing into the kitchen, I stepped into a growing puddle of water, leading to the discovery that the work done outside the kitchen window in recent days has opened up yet more leakage.
Add to the that the fact that once all this structural work is finished, they're going to cover the front of the building with scaffolding and spend weeks rehabbing it. (No sunlight! Frenzied workers right outside the windows! Dust! Noise! Yee-ha!)
Add all this together and I'm thinking seriously that this may be my last month living in this piso. Which may mean the end of my time in Madrid. At least for now.
Time will tell.
Madrid, te quiero.
rws 5:22 AM [+]
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