Tree hugging cooks and a tractor

At some point in each of the decades of our lives we evaluate who on earth we think we are. For some I am sure this remains fairly constant in some shape or form. But for others, the answers we come up with vary with the seasons. River and I are now well into our thirties and have made a variety of decisions that have led us here into the heart of the Portuguese interior to forge out a brand new rural existence that inevitably is taking us down a path far less ordinary, fabulously more romantic and unimaginably abundant.

This week we are contemplating our life as tree hugging cooks.

We are restoring old stone houses into homes with huge hearths, cultivating a terraced mountainside and preparing to plant a whole new forest, tree by beautiful tree, that will one day become a fittingly grand setting for the life of 2 old romantic, tree hugging, flower loving, yoga practising, fruit and veggie planting, butter and cream using cooks.

It's all imaginary really. All of it. Surely it's our imaginations that power the direction of our lives. To dream. To explore the possibilities. To pursue it all with love and kindness. Right now we are living in the midst of an enormous sprawling Pine and Eucalyptus forest. One day, probably when we are in our 70s, we will be living in the heart of a fairytale wood in the middle of that forest. Hugging trees. Wandering through herb scented woodland paths. Picking home cultivated nuts, berries, fruits and an assortment of harvests. Then cooking to music, dining under grape vines, washing it down with glasses of our own precious wine. Gazing at stars. Thanking the Lord for all of it, with every breath we make.

But we are not there yet. We are here. Yet here is still a pretty lovely place.

Take a look.

Grape Harvest and Autumn Rains

Howdi all.

It's a Tuesday morning and a delicious drizzly mist hangs over the valleys heralding in the new season of Autumn. The air is fresh and clean and every plant and tree across the landscape is savouring the dousing it received last night in the downpour.

Yesterday evening, the final nail went in the last beam on the roof of the kids’ house as the heavens opened. Nice timing Boss. Appreciated.

We’re not working on the houses today. And for that we are, in a way, most grateful. The last 3 weeks have really flown by with an energy that’s been inspiring and a result that often makes us want to cry. After waiting such a long time to start renovating our houses at the top, we have raised (with help from our neighbours and in the last fortnight, professionals) all the walls in stone and clay and have 2 beautifully hand built wooden roofs on top of them. At times, especially when we drive back home from somewhere, observing what now exists that never did before, is truly an emotional experience. We're building our home. Not just for us, but for our grandchildren to come.

The next sunny day will be spent carrying thousands of tiles down the hill and carefully placing them one by one on top of each other and the houses will have their hats. That will be time, hopefully this week, to break open a bottle of bubbly with some friends and the people who have helped us on the road so far.

Meanwhile, Vonnie has been tirelessly hammering in hundreds of little pieces of blue slate, white quartz, hard black stone and soft yellow stone into the spaces between the bigger stones in the walls built in August. It’s a work of patience, artistry and above all, love. The effect is awesome. We now have one complete wall of “jewels” as she says, and over the next few months we will have a entire house of them. It’s becoming a fairy tale house in a forest waiting to be discovered by wandering children in search of adventure, riches and sweets.

We’ve not stopped at the weekends either. The last 2 we have helped our neighbours, Laurinda from the café in Abitureira and Jose & Eugenia, harvest their grapes to make hundreds of litres of wine that we, and those of you who come to visit us, will enjoy drinking with them over the next year. Again a real honour to be shown the country ropes. I'm looking forward to making our own wine next year. No time or space or energy to do so this year, but as we like to say these days, there’s more to come.

All this has been happening while I have started teaching English in the local primary schools again. So you can imagine, it’s a bit full on. Loving it though.

Ian and Merle also arrived from England, with a boat in tow, and have taken the kids up and down the river a few times. This time they are staying for 3 months so their lovely 13 year old daughter Evie is starting school here tomorrow, as a kind of educational experience for the winter term. They return to the UK at Christmas but we are already really enjoying having them here just over the mountain at Eira do Miguel.

Enjoy the videos. We’ll post up some more soon.

Sunday Roof Chat with River and Memphis...

And the rain came tumbling down...

Last thing to mention is that the sunsets and the harvest moons at the moment are breathtakingly gorgeous. At the end of hard day's work, we sit and watch the colour of the sky change through its rainbow spectrum illuminating the clouds as the sun dips beyond the far mountains. After dinner there's another spectacle as the moon rises over the top of the hills behind us radiating her soft reflective light all around like a romantic scene from a play. TV? No chance. This stuff is the best show on earth

Houses built of flour

So here's an interesting thing. Close on a hundred years ago, a young man called Senhor Farinha, built a beautiful house out of stone and clay and wood, on a piece of land called Moses in the meandering valleys of central Portugal below a wee village called Amieira. He raised his family, grew all kinds of veggies and flowers and trees on terraces hand sculpted out of the mountain side. Sixty odd years ago he built another house, just above his first house, for guests and friends, we think with his brother, another Sr Farinha.

One of his daughters married the boy next door (he's actually the guy in the middle of the photo of the 3 paunches), where they still live to this day. After her father passed away 20 years ago, that daughter eventually decided to sell the family home and 2 years ago a young English family from London came and saw and fell in love with the house and the land and the people and moved into the village to start a new life.

After a year and half of dreaming and imagining and planning, this little English family began the process of lovingly restoring what Sr Farinha had first created. They had no idea what they were doing really but were convinced that in the process they would learn. With some help from their neighbour João and his sons Filipe and George, they raised the walls in stone and clay, cut down a few trees and made an old time wooden structure for a roof. Just 2 weeks ago a young man also called João, came to help restore the guest house. He was a professional with a team of lovely stone masons. And by coincidence his name, and that of his brother Paulo also on the team, is Farinha.

Yesterday, a mountain of gorgeous wooden pine beams and floorboards for the roofs arrived from a sawmill in the nearby town of Sertã, cut to size and delivered by another lovely young man who, oddly enough is also called João Farinha.

Farinha in Portuguese means Flour. Our houses here in the land of Moses were built, are being restored and probably will be added to some more, with the help of a lot of flour.

Well I thought it was an interesting story.

Bought a new video camera this week. Better quality than the last few months, although better quality means bigger file size, so might need to wait a wee longer for them to load up. Hope it's worth it.

The Bathroom Roof Goes On

What a week this was! For two and a half months River and I have been removing an enormous quantity of stuff from the 3 houses at Moses. Walls, stones, wood, windows, lintels, tiles. It’s been quite a destructive phase where everything feels a little chaotic, with piles of the stuff taken out of the houses neatly laid around clearly demarking the place as a building site. But before this week we hadn’t really done any building, any construction. Last week we began with learning to mix mud and setting slates with it on top of the bathroom walls. This week however, was a very different story. Proper construction. Just River and I. And I tell you, it feels fantastic to have finally finished the roof, our first task on the 14 week plan to restore Moses before Christmas.

We had a few hurdles to overcome. First was finding a good supplier of wood and fixing it to the eucalyptus beams. Second, finding roof felt and fixing it to the wooden ceiling. And third buying all the tools we need to do so now and for the next few months ahead. At the weekend we found a great lumber yard on the road to Serta who delivered some tongue and groove pine, which we lumbered all the way to the bottom of the land in readiness to put on on Monday. However it was the wrong type, too slim, and wouldn’t have been strong enough for the tiles on top. So we lumbered it all back up the hill and returned to the sawmill to ensure they delivered the right type, which they did, the same day. Of course we then had to carry the new, heavier wood, on our shoulders, down the hill one more time. This work is definitely growing muscles we didn’t know we had.

What a pair of roofers we are....



Michelle told us about a local place in Estreito that sold a type of roofing felt called Underline. A bit more pricey than the ordinary stuff but the ease of using it with its ‘simple to lay tiles on top’ ridges is definitely worth it. Reusing the original old tiles that Von had carefully removed while my parents were here at the beginning of September, was a most satisfying job. They now no longer make tiles the way they used to. These old clay ones, are all unique. Each one has a slightly different pattern of moss grown over the years but more interestingly has a different curve and shape too. This is cos they were formed around people’s thighs before being kilned. Some are wide and short (made by the thighs of smaller fatter Portuguese) and some are narrow and long (taller skinnier ones). Quite incredible really and it kind of connects you, handling and laying each tile, to another time, another way of living, another world. As a result, the finished roof has so much more innate character than one we could have built with sparkly new uniform tiles. It’s old, it’s gorgeous and we absolutely love it.

Yesterday, we started rendering the bathroom walls too. We tried a mix suggested in the Building Green book, which is 3 parts sand, to one part hydraulic lime, to half part straw. The straw is shredded by sucking it back through an ordinary garden leaf blower and is soaked in water before adding to the mix, so that the lime can extract the water from the straw helping to prevent cracking when it sets on the wall. We’ll see how it turns out but it was a lot of fun plastering our first wall together beneath the beautiful pine boarded, eucalyptus beamed roof we’d just put on.

So today, with a new roof and 2 walls half rendered with just one coat of natural plaster, I feel that everything is possible. To be honest at the beginning of the week I was emotionally fluctuating between a deep contentment in what is already here now and a blind overwhelming panic at the immensity of all the work in front of us. Yeah the journey is more important than the destination and all that, but sometimes the distance to the destination can affect the way you feel about the journey. But you can only do what is in front of you to do. One step at a time. Yes we have many steps to take, but it is still possible to see each one, individually, as splendid in its own right. That’s how it is today with our first roof built with mud, slate, trees, straw and tiles from the land and a little sand, lime, felt and wood bought from round the corner.

On the road to Oleiros last night for a celebratory meal, we stopped the car, got out and took a moment to enjoy this exquisite sunset over the surrounding mountains and valleys. What a life this is. We only get one shot at it, and we’re making the very most of it. Yeah baby.