Travels in Spain

From March 11-27 I was in Spain, staying in a small village called Acequias, about half an hour south of Granada. Our friends Dusty and David Haller have the use of a wonderful three-story house in the village, and invited me and my husband and Karen Thomsen and Harold Ryan (old friends from Denmark) to stay with them there for a few weeks. As Karen said, "we're all old friends from the 70's, and now we're almost IN our 70's!"

In exchange, we did some work in the house, which was really great. I like participating in the life of the places where I travel. Here's a shot of me putting cement plaster on the wall out near the street.

One of my primary objectives during this trip was to go back to the small village, Otívar, where my mother had lived for about a year, in 1980, when she was a bit younger than I am. I had visited Spain with her about 12 years ago, and we went together to Otívar for a few hours. My mother died a year ago, on March 29, and I wasn't sure if I could find the people she was connected to. My husband, R.D. Eno, and two of our friends drove with me there, and I took with me a photograph I have from the time my mother lived in the village there (the photo on the left below).

I met a woman coming out of a bar and showed my photograph and said I was looking for anybody who had known my mother when she was in the village. Amazingly, she went next door and brought down Ana and Jose Perez. He was the son of the man in the photograph. They very generously brought me up to their living room and gave me wine and tapas, and we talked about the time my mother had lived there. Later R.D. took a photo of us in the same place (actually a bit to the left of it, as there were cars parked in front of the other window).