[continued from entry of February 20]
I drifted beneath the darkening sky for a while, hypercontent, thinking about nothing, senses on full input. At some point, I remembered G&S, floated back in their direction, slithered over the wall into the hot tub/jacuzzi thingy to say hello. A brief return, it turned out -- they suggested a turn in the pool almost immediately, the words were no sooner out of their mouths than my body did the dive/slither thing, taking me once again into more open water. They followed, did a lap, suggested a few minutes in the sauna. Moments later, I found myself seated in a small wooden room, baking, G&S stretched out nearby. Irish folks came and went -- married couples, parents talking about kids and family stuff, one 40ish male speaking with exactly the accent of my friend Dermot, the same music, the same turns of phrase.
After that: back to the flat to change. Heading out into cold darkness for a ride down the strip to a glorified convenience store (both sides of one aisle stocked with nothing but bottles of wine: French, Italian, American boutique vineyard product -- not a bottle of Gallo or Mogen David to be seen, and, now that I think about it, not a single bottle of Spanish wine. pendejos), then a restaurant for a dinner of 'Mediterranean'-style chow, vaguely Italian and all that. (Good bread; good salad, overflowing with hot, sweet peppers; good chicken packed with goat cheese on a bed of linguine. Took leftovers home, had chicken/pasta breakfast next morning. Not as excellent as cold breakfast pizza, but not bad.) A brief return to the hotel to drop off G&S, then a long ride home along winding two-lanes, a misty, high-hanging moon keeping pace.
I'd warned G&S that the liars in the local weather biz (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) were warning of wild weather the next day, when unseasonably warm conditions collided with an approaching cold front. Next morning here, excessively mild temperatures gave way to scarily dark skies, howling wind, wild downpours, clearing away around midday for a couple of hours before more overcast, the mercury plunging forty or so degrees, dipping below zero well before 5 p.m. I drove into Montpelier to do the manly gym thing, returned via back roads littered with downed branches and the occasional fallen tree. The radio said that central and western parts of the state fared far worse, widespread power outages leading to the opening of emergency shelters in many towns, temperatures expected to swing far below 0° fahrenheit that night.
I spoke with G&S a couple of days later, found out that the hotel had lost power on that stormy morning. The facility -- huge, grand, luxurious, packed with happy vacationers -- had no back-up generator, meaning everything came to a halt on the Friday morning before President's Day weekend, exactly when the place would likely be inundated with many more guests showing up for wholesome midwinter fun. Bet management and housecleaning had a ball that day.
When G&S went out to pack their car, they found one of its windows completely smashed, the other spiderwebbed with cracks. A construction cone lay wedged under one side of the vehicle, possibly blown into the windows before dropping to the ground and attempting to crawl guiltily out of sight. Plastic sheeting and loads of duct tape made the car roadworthy, they made the ride home during the calm after the morning's display of weather wackiness.
Life here since then: cold, cold, cold, slowly easing up within the last day or two.
This morning, the world outside lay beneath an inch or two of fresh snow, the kind that glitters in sunlight as if covered with tiny diamonds. At 8 a.m., the temperature hovered around 10, by 11:30 it had pulled itself up to around 40, a quick walk outside providing a hint of a distant, slowly-approaching spring. Just a hint -- good enough for now. Sunlight poured down, flooding through west-facing windows, I stood in the kitchen with a glass of water in hand, the space around me feeling light and airy in a way it hadn't in a while. Therapeutic, all of it, for a body longing for spring, or at least the Madrid version of late February.
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In an entranceway along State Street, Montpelier, Vermont:
España, te echo de menos.
rws 4:37 PM [+]
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