Chicken Shortage

This spring, hatcheries all across the United States have run out of inventory, and baby chicks are rarer than hens’ teeth. When I heard this news on a rainy afternoon two days ago it brought tears to my eyes. I wasn’t missing the sun, or the company of my fellow humans, or life as it used to be. I was missing my hens.

For years, they were the hub of my backyard ecology. Thanks to them, nothing ever went to waste. “Give it to the hens!” we said about everything from burned toast to apple cores, carrot tops, and curdled milk. And, magnanimously, persistently, the hens turned our refuse into eggs.

But they didn’t just give us eggs. Their nitrogen-rich droppings transformed the spoiled hay that I used for their bedding into the most exquisite of composts, which they turned and chopped and aerated all winter long as they scratched looking for seeds. In the spring, all I had to do was dump the stuff on the garden and (pretty much) watch the veggies grow.

Those hens were my friends. They were Buff Orpingtons--big, cream-colored birds with a placid disposition. They didn’t lay as abundantly as some of the more flighty breeds, but on the other hand they didn’t let Vermont winters get to them. They would rush to greet me when I entered their yard, peering up at me first with one eye and then the other, in that inimitable chicken way. And in the evening, when I went to collect the eggs and close the coop against the fox, the fisher, and the weasel, they would purr sleepily on their roosts. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the handle of the egg basket in my fingers, and hear the cluckings and feather fluffings as the girls settled for the night.

What impelled me, a city child, to keep hens and grow vegetables? I used to think that it had started with the 1974 oil embargo, when the price of everything, from gas to groceries, shot up overnight and it dawned on me that my loved ones and I were at the mercy of world events. I, who had never so much as watered a houseplant, bought a packet of tomato seeds and pushed them one by one into the packed dirt at the side of the house, right under the eaves where, at the first rainstorm, the few seedlings that had sprouted promptly drowned.

I went back to buying tomatoes in the supermarket, oblivious to the fact that the seeds of self-sufficiency had been planted in my head long before, by my mother’s stories.

“During the war [the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39],” she used to tell me, “before your father and I met, he and his family lived in Barcelona and almost died of starvation, because they couldn’t get food in the city. But we, [meaning she and her parents and siblings, who lived in one of those now-rare diversified farms] we  always had food. Even though we were near the front, and there were bombardments and many dangers from retreating soldiers, the chickens kept laying and the rabbits kept having litters. We even had a pig that we slaughtered in the fall. And the garden gave us cabbages and kale in the winter, and melons, eggplants, and tomatoes in the summer. And the trees made olives and almonds, and after a rain we children would go out to hunt for snails….”

This is the lesson I retained: depend on the supermarket for your groceries, and if something really bad happens you’ll go hungry. Grow your own food, and you’ll be o.k. During most of my adult life, therefore, whenever zoning regulations allowed it, I kept chickens.

So I understand where today’s would-be chicken keepers are coming from, but I hope they know what they’re getting into: hens need a coop to shelter in, and a securely-fenced yard in which to sun themselves, and they won’t produce if they’re fed on grass and kitchen waste alone. (Despite my self-sufficiency aspirations, I used to have to supplement my hens’ diet with commercial feed.) What hens don’t need in order to lay eggs is a rooster. In fact, given the male chicken’s libido, if he has fewer than at least fifteen wives to share the burden, he will stress them out with his amorous assaults.

If kept safe and satisfied, a hen will lay eggs for as long as five years, but she will eventually go through menopause. Do these new chick buyers have an exit plan for their aged birds? And when they first bring home those cheeping balls of fluff, do they realize that, absent a mother hen, day-old chicks need a heat lamp to keep them alive and lively? That you have to teach them to drink by dipping their beaks in water? And that they will dive in and promptly drown if that water is more than an inch deep?

If you are one of the lucky souls able to get chickens to cheer you and feed you in this depressing time, I applaud your impulse toward self-sufficiency. I wish you happy birds, overflowing egg baskets, and the illusion of security afforded by the knowledge that, if worst comes to worst, you can always make an omelette. May you and your flock rejoice in each other for years to come. And if you want any advice on poultry, I’ll be glad to oblige.

Cloistered

Here is what I think about these days when I feel isolated and frustrated:

1936. A turn-of-the-century apartment in Barcelona: living room, dining room, four bedrooms. A pared-down kitchen, no ice-box. One bathroom. No hot water or central heat. In this apartment live my father, his parents, his two younger sisters, and his older brother with his wife and two baby boys. And the maid, an orphan whom my grandparents took in many years ago. She sleeps on a cot in the kitchen.

The Spanish Civil War has broken out. My grandfather is an accountant in a cement company, but construction in all of Spain has come to a halt, so there isn’t much work for him. My grandmother sends the maid out to the shops every day, and makes do with what she brings back: bread and garlic and maybe a bit of hake or cod.

The older son used to have a job, but now has lymphoma and grows weaker by the day. Doctors and nurses are at the front, stitching wounds and amputating limbs, so he is cared for by his wife and his mother. His wife is a Mexican citizen. Like the Israelites smearing blood on their doors so the angel would spare their firstborns, the family has nailed a Mexican flag on the door of the apartment to deter the anarchist gangs that roam the city.

My father’s sisters are fifteen and twelve, and have to be kept mostly indoors because the streets are rife with soldiers. My father is twenty-two. Ever since his mother sat him on her lap and placed his fingers on the keyboard of the upright piano, music has been his life. A violinist, he is starting to make his way professionally.

Of all the family, he is the most endangered, more than the dying brother or the pubescent girls. Catalonia is in the grip of leftist furor. Centuries of deprivation have stoked hatred among the poor towards everyone and everything that smacks even remotely of privilege: the wealthy and the middle class, the great landowners and the farmers with a single field and a mule, and the church—priests good and bad, monks, nuns, former altar boys, and members of a Catholic organizations such as the Children of Mary.

In high-school my father belonged to the Children of Mary, along with the rest of his class. This now makes him subject to summary arrest and execution. One night his best friend, hiding in his own parents’ apartment, is dragged out from under the sofa and put on a truck headed for Montjuich, the hill overlooking the city where dozens are shot every day at dawn. But my father’s friend is charming, and on the way he strikes a conversation with the guard, who lowers the tailgate and lets him jump off.

As in every civil war, one is at the mercy of disaffected neighbors, disappointed rivals, the spiteful, the petty, and the just plain evil, any one of whom may take it into his or her head to nod in the direction of one’s hiding place. So my father has to stay in the apartment 24/7. Not only can he not go outdoors, he can’t stand on the balcony or close to a window. Not only may he not play the violin--that would give him away immediately--he has to speak softly and tread lightly, lest the downstairs tenants hear a man’s voice and footsteps while my grandfather and the elder son are out of the house.

What do they do, the ten of them, day after day in that apartment? There is a piano on which the girls practice their scales. There is a radio, but reception is poor. Otherwise there is nothing:  no TV, no wi-fi, no working telephone, no books or magazines other than those already on the shelves. There are frequent blackouts.

There is always prayer, and they all say the rosary together every evening. And for my father there are buttons to paint, for a little income. It is fashionable at the time for women to wear large painted buttons made of tagua, an ivory-like plant material. So my young father sits by the window (but not too close) with a slender brush and some paints, and invents tiny bucolic scenes for women to wear on their chests. What, at twenty-two, does he make of women, now that the only ones he sees are his mother, the maid, his sisters, and his brother’s young wife in the bedroom next to his?

Food is the great issue. How to get it, how to apportion it. The decisions are in my grandmother’s hands. My grandfather needs nourishment so he can continue to work, as does the maid. The girls are still growing. The daughter-in-law is pregnant or nursing. Now that his cancer is progressing, the older son doesn’t want to eat much, but he must be encouraged nevertheless. And my father—how to satisfy the hunger of a twenty-two-year-old man? Fortunately, he doesn’t get any exercise, so that helps.

At night the family gathers around the table, a candle flickering in the center because the electricity has been cut off.

“Here, take this bread. I’m not feeling very hungry.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s yours. Please eat it…”

They go to bed early to keep warm, but before retiring they file into the kitchen, one by one, and down several glasses of water. This is to give their stomachs the illusion of fullness, so they can fall asleep.

The war lasts three years.

My father, aged 21, the year before the war

The Cassandra Lineage

Whenever my uncle led the aged, utterly mellow cart horse out of the barn to be harnessed, my mother’s mother would come out of the kitchen and stand watching, her hands on her hips.

“This horse,” she would say, shaking her head, “is going to kill somebody one of these days.”

Like my grandmother, my mother worried constantly about potential catastrophes. “When your father and I married, and then you were born,” she confided to me years later, “I was happier than I’d ever thought possible. But even in the middle of so much happiness, I always felt that God was somewhere up in the clouds, with a big stick in his hand, waiting to hit me on the head.”

More years have passed, and now that I am my grandmother’s age I too spend way too much time looking out for murderous cart horses and wincing in anticipation of the next blow to rain down from heaven.

My grandmother’s and my mother’s persistent intimations of disaster were rooted in their experience of the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939. My grandmother was in her late thirties then, and my mother in her teens. Since they lived on a farm, they did not starve. But my grandfather, the village vet, sometimes had to hide from the bands of anarchists wreaking havoc in the countryside, and the family would frequently leave their beds in the middle of the night and crouch in a ditch to escape from bombardments.

“We all wore a little stick tied to a string around our neck, so that when the bombs came we could bite down on it and the shock waves would not burst our eardrums,” my mother remembered. The terror of the anarchist raids; the nights spent cowering in the ditch to escape the bombings; and, at the end of the war, the fear of the retreating soldiers left a mark on her psyche that lasted the rest of her life.

It’s not hard to see how those three years of living in constant fear would lead to my mother and her mother’s hyper-vigilance; their feeling that, if they let down their guard for a single moment, disaster would strike; and their bone-deep conviction that life was, at bottom, a tragic affair, and that passing moments of happiness were simply accidental flashes in the enveloping darkness, and not to be relied on.

My first decade passed against a chorus of cautions and warnings.

“This child isn’t eating enough.”

“Look! She has a fever again!”

“She’s pale. She should spend more time outdoors.”

“Don’t let her out of the house in the middle of the day. She’ll get sunstroke!”

“Quick! Shut that window. She’s standing in a draft.”

“Take that book away from her. She’ll get indigestion if she reads after lunch.”

While my mother was alive, I put a lot of energy into countering her apprehensions. When I was a teenager and she had her second child, I watched her live in fear that my vigorous little sister would waste away, and I tried to convince her of the basic sturdiness of babies. When my own children were born and she warned me against germs and other potential threats, I showed off my casual trust in their aptitude for survival. When she tried to talk me out of moving to a rural part of Vermont where hospitals are few and far between, I ignored her and did just that.

But now that both my grandmother and my mother are gone, my ability to put on that tough-woman act has deserted me, and I often shudder at the prospect of imminent doom. I envision endless tragic scenarios, ranging from a flat tire on a deserted dirt road to civil strife, fires, floods, and the extinction of honeybees. It is as if the rose-colored glasses that we all need to wear in order to function in the world have been suddenly ripped off my face, and life appears in all its meaningless gloom.

Just as, when passing in front of a mirror I sometimes think I’m catching a glimpse of my mother, I find myself reenacting the Cassandra role that she and her mother played so faithfully. But why? I didn’t live through the war. I didn’t have to cower in ditches in the middle of the night, or hide from anarchists, like my mother and her family. I didn’t starve, like my father and his family.

How, then, did I become infected with the Cassandra virus?

For years I assumed that my predisposition to see the dark side of things was something I had inherited from my mother and her mother, like my brown eyes and curly hair. But studies of the descendants of survivors of the Holocaust and other traumatic events such as the American Civil War point to a different explanation.

Though still controversial, these studies suggest that the trauma undergone by individuals of one generation can change the way their genes are passed on and expressed in their offspring, even if the parents do not discuss their own traumatic experiences and the children lead normal lives. The most common manifestations of this trans-generational trauma are anxiety, depression, and lack of resilience.

I don’t remember my parents and grandparents discussing the war in front of me. There were passing references to my father having to stay hidden for three years to avoid execution, but he never talked about what it felt like as a twenty-two-year-old not to be able to go outside, or play the violin, or have enough to eat. Likewise, other than the story of the little sticks on a string, my mother did not say much about that time.

But whether unconsciously, through her own anxiety about my welfare, or through epigenetic transmission, she passed on to me Cassandra’s gift of foreseeing disaster, and I often tremble in anticipation of whatever blow the universe is about to deliver next.

There are many depictions of Cassandra in ancient Greek vases, and she is always shown with brown eyes and dark, curly hair.

Health Fashions

When I was born, the midwife laid me in the bassinet, on my back. "This is how the child must sleep," she informed my mother. "Or she will die."

When my children were born, I was told to always lay them on their stomachs. Or they would die.

By the time my grandchildren arrived, pediatricians were sure that the only way to ward off SIDS was to never let a baby sleep on its stomach.

My father, a heavy smoker, died in his early fifties of lung cancer.That premature death convinced me of the fragility of the supposedly strong sex, and I devoted myself to preventing my healthy young husband from suddenly expiring. In the 1970s, I did this mostly by eliminating salt from our diet. For years I fed my family broccoli, green beans, and tuna casserole without even a soupçon of salt.

I figured out a way to bake salt-free bread (ordinarily salt is needed for the dough to rise) and published an article about it in some now-defunct magazine. I hope that nobody took my recipe seriously, and I apologize to any readers who did. Maybe they will take comfort in the knowledge that years later I developed a condition that requires me to consume plenty of salt to keep from keeling over.

The salt-free seventies were succeeded by the fat-free eighties. You could eat all the carbs--and yes, all the sugar--you wanted as long as you didn't go near a molecule of fat. My mother was appalled. "This is not right!" she cried. "In Spain after the Civil War people got terribly sick because nobody had harvested the olives and they hadn't had any oil, let alone animal fats, for three years. They had skin problems and bone problems, and some even went blind. Don't believe these doctors who say that fats are bad." Then she would hold up her index finger and proclaim, "Moderation in all things!"

The fat-free diet was supposed to be good for our figure as well as our health, so we drank skimmed milk, gave up butter, and put that dietary oxymoron, "fat-free cream," in our coffee. Fat-free milk products remained popular until a couple of years ago, when studies showed that people who ate full-fat dairy were slimmer than those who ate the fat-free versions. Likewise, people who consume real sugar weigh less than those who use artificial sweeteners.

Remember that early panacea, vitamin C? It was succeeded in our medicine cabinets by the B vitamins. They were in turn replaced by vitamin D, which most of us are now deficient in as a result of following dermatologists' advice never to expose our skin to the sun (remember when sunshine was good for you?).

For a while coffee was supposed to be bad, but later was rehabilitated. Ditto for eggs, and potatoes. On the other hand, liver was once force-fed to children because of its nutritional excellence, but now is to be avoided.

Remember leeches? I don't, and neither do you, but after two centuries of being reviled they're now FDA-approved and back at work relieving a variety of circulatory problems.

If there was one dictum likely to stand unchallenged, however, it was the health benefits of dog ownership. Walking a dog, studies showed, was good for the heart, the lungs, the bones, and the soul. Dog owners lived longer, happier lives than the rest of the population. But I just heard on the radio that orthopedic surgeons are concerned about an outbreak of bone fractures among elderly dog walkers. What's next, an FDA recommendation against dog ownership after age 65?

Given how quickly certain principles of the health sciences are demolished, and others erected in their place, the sanest response is to embrace my mother's mantra: moderation in all things. And while it may feel discouraging that nothing in life is certain, especially where medicine is concerned, we can take comfort in one thing that doesn't look like changing soon: immortality is still out of reach.

My Final Farm

Never more than a dozen hens for eggs, and two does for milk. A vegetable patch big enough for everything except potatoes and corn. Some apple trees, a plum, a pear, and half a dozen blueberry bushes. Given what else I was dealing with, my forays into micro-farming were insane, but at least I kept one principle firmly in mind: small is beautiful.

My adult life is marked by three separate ventures into self-sufficiency, all of them harking back to the  farm that kept my teenage mother and her family alive and fed during the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. When she wasn't plunging into creeks in the middle of the night to escape from bombardments, my teenage mother drank goat's milk and ate home-grown rabbits and pigeons and chickens and eggs and grapes and almonds and olives and cabbages and kale. Meanwhile, in their elegant Barcelona apartment my father's family quietly starved for the three years the war lasted, filling their stomachs with water from the faucet every night so they could sleep.

I was born five years after the end of the bombs and the hunger, carrying in my DNA the conviction that when times got bad you could grow your own food and survive, or live an urban life and starve.

My husband and I bought our first house from an older Austrian woman who had probably had some of the same fear-and-hunger experiences as my parents, and had filled her acre and a half with an ambitious vegetable garden, 25 fruit trees, a berry patch, a chicken house. I, who had never grown so much as a tomato in my life, plunged into self-sufficiency like a nun into her vows. That was farm #1.

It was succeeded by #2, after I had to give up my career following a diagnosis of CFS. I was in survival mode and thought, well, everything is going to hell in a hand basket, the least I can do is try to grow some food.

Farm #3, my best-loved, was in Vermont, where we moved when my husband retired. Besides the usual goats and chickens and vegetable beds and apple trees  there were for-real woods where I could gather ramps in spring, and fields where the nearby farmer harvested for-real hay. I used to stand in the front field watching my goats gobble dandelions and think, am I really here? Is this really mine?

But farming even on a micro scale and CFS don't age well together, and one day I threw my hands up and declared that it was time to be realistic and responsible and move to a retirement community on the shores of Lake Champlain. Still in Vermont, still beautiful, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, a farm.

I now live in a small cottage with all mod cons and never have to worry about dinner, which is served in the community center up the hill. But this hasn't extinguished my farming drive. My tiny enclosed porch has become farm #4, my final farm.

In it, on sunny afternoons, I sit with my dog Bisou and the cat Telemann. In a Japanese-style tub beside me Yin and Yang, the goldfish, lead seemingly contented lives, protected from Telemann by an electrified scat-mat. Pots of houseplants, the successors to my vegetable gardens, surround me: geraniums prompted into bloom by the light reflected off the snow, an ancient jade plant almost too heavy for me to lift, a Christmas cactus that my cat loves to chew. And, because I haven't given up on my dreams of self-sufficiency, a Meyer lemon tree and a Calamondin orange that gives enough fruit to make marmalade in case of an emergency.

Just outside the window are my substitute chickens.  Nuthatches, titmice, chickadees, finches gold-, purple-, and house-, and woodpeckers large and small eat the seeds and suet and drink at the four-season bird bath. Beneath the feeders, obese squirrels squabble over spilled seeds, and at sacred moments clever Reynard, my red fox, trots past on his slender black-stockinged feet.

Of Flags and Feelings

We Catalans have always been a hairy people, so it's not surprising that we owe our flag (la senyera) to a 9th-century count of Barcelona named Wilfred the Hairy (Wilfred el Pilós). The story is lost in the mists of time, and historians love to poke holes in it, but we Catalans love to tell it.

It seems that Wilfred was helping the king of France, Charles the Bald--or perhaps his son, Louis the Stammerer--in a battle against the Visigoths (or perhaps the Moors). With Wilfred's help, Charles (or Louis) won the battle, but Wilfred was wounded.

The King wanted to show his gratitude, and Wilfred asked him to put a mark on his coat of arms, which was plain gold. With a sense of the grand gesture, Charles (or Louis), dipped four fingers in the blood of Wilfred and dragged them from top to bottom of the coat of arms. And that is how la senyera, also known as the four bars of blood (les quatre barres de sang) came about.

If you have watched Catalans marching and voting for independence in recent weeks, you may have noticed, in the ocean of waving senyeres, people holding up their hands with four fingers extended. They are duplicating the gesture, thirteen centuries old, of Charles the Bald (or maybe Louis the Stammerer) on the coat of arms of Wilfred el Pilós.

Most news reports attribute Catalans' desire for independence to financial matters. And it is true that Catalans pay the highest taxes in Europe and get precious little of that money back from the central government in Madrid. But it is much more than that. The secessionist impulse is based on a deep sense of separate identity, an identity whose clearest emblem is the Catalan language.

No one understood this better than Franco, and after winning the Spanish Civil War in 1939 he immediately forbade the use of Catalan in public fora. My generation was not taught to read and write Catalan in school; we did not see it in newspapers or street signs, or hear it in church or the radio or anywhere outside of home and the corner market. Franco imported the dreaded Guardia Civil from other parts of Spain to keep order in Catalonia. The guardias did not speak Catalan, and when addressed in the language would bark, "hablad cristiano!" (speak "Christian").

When Franco finally died in 1975 and Catalonia was granted a certain degree of autonomy, there was an explosion of feeling for all things Catalan, but especially the language. I have never known a population so obsessed with their native tongue. In a vegetable market in Barcelona in the early 1980s I overheard two old ladies, their net bags overflowing with the day's shopping, arguing about the proper Catalan term for "carrot," whether it was pastanaga, or safranòria.

So the Catalan desire for independence is not just about money, but also about history, tradition, language...and something else. It's an attachment to that fertile triangle tucked between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean and coveted in turn by Greece, Rome, the Arab caliphate, and France, not to mention Spain. It's about the human towers wobbling against the sky, the geese in the cloister of the Barcelona cathedral, the sardana (as different from flamenco as a dance could be) danced by young and old on the city square. And through it all flows the sound of the language, long forbidden and reviled and all the more loved for that.

I heard a young Catalan on the radio today. "Why are you for independence?" the interviewer asked. "It's not the money," he answered. "It's more than that. I don't know. It's just a...a...It's a feeling!" he concluded, triumphantly. Many listeners probably found him inarticulate, but I know just what he meant.

My Mother Says...Continued

After her story of the Spanish Civil War, my mother begins to tell how she met my father.  She might never have come across him if my grandmother had been more traditionally minded and kept her in the village, or if the war had not happened, or if my mother had not taken it into her head to learn to play the violin. 

I've known about these near-misses for years, but my cousin in Barcelona recently told me something that her mother, my mother's youngest sister, had revealed.  It seems that in the middle of the war, while my mother was falling in love with communist soldiers on their way to the front and my father was starving in Barcelona, a lieutenant colonel in Franco's army saw her and decided to marry her.  Secretly, he wrote a letter to the priest of my mother's parish asking for information about the family--their political views, religious practices, financial status, and so on.

According to my aunt, my mother was so enraged when she heard that he had written to ask about the family without first consulting her that she never spoke to him again. Whew!  If it hadn't been for my mother's sense of what was her due, I could have been the daughter of a fascist officer.

After the war, my mother says, I went to Barcelona to study Greek and Latin so I could teach high school.  I had become disillusioned with the law, which I had imagined to be about saving innocent people accused of terrible crimes, like in the movies, but which turned out to be extremely dull instead.

There was so little food in Barcelona!  Luckily my mother sent baskets of food from the farm, and Evita Peron sent ships loaded with wheat from Argentina.  (I remember as a toddler being fed pasta that had been sent by "that kind lady in Argentina."  You can read about my grandmother's food baskets here) The bread that my mother sent used to go hard and stale, and little worms would grow in it.  I was always careful to shake them out before I ate.  What? my mother says, seeing our horrified faces, it wasn't as bad as it sounds....

As a teenager, I  had bought a violin because it seemed exotic and exciting, but I had never learned to play.  The people with whom I was boarding in Barcelona recommended a music academy, and I went to meet the teacher.  I was expecting an old man, bald and bent over.  Instead I found a young man with thick black hair and a mustache.

I started taking lessons from him, but for two years we barely spoke, other than about bowing and intonation  (I wasn't a very good student).   Then one day he invited my parents to attend a concert that he was going to give near their village.  Next, his parents invited me and my sisters and brother, who were also studying in Barcelona, to have coffee at their apartment.  And then he started walking me home after the violin lessons.  I was the first woman he ever kissed.

We were married in 1943, in the village church.  His entire family came from Barcelona in a rented bus.  During the Mass, I was kneeling in front of the altar with my long veil spread out on the floor behind me when suddenly I felt a sharp pull:  the altar boy had accidentally stepped on the veil with his boot and torn a huge hole in it.  After the Mass we went back to my parents' farm, had a big meal and drank lots of champagne.

That night, we tied the mattress and the sewing machine that my parents had given us to the roof of the bus, and rode back to Barcelona with all the relatives.

My Mother Says...continued

The three years of the Spanish Civil War, my mother says, were the worst of our lives.  But they were nothing compared to what your father, whom I didn't meet until after the war, went through.  He was twenty-two when the war began, and he was already earning a living as a violinist.  He loved music more than anything else in the world.

When the war broke out, he was living with his parents in their apartment in Barcelona--it was normal for grown-up children to stay with their parents until they married.  Also living in that apartment were his two younger sisters, and his older brother and his wife, who was from Mexico.  Also the maid, whom the family had taken in long ago as a young orphan.  And sometime during those years the older brother and his wife had two baby boys, so there were ten people living together.

Your father had gone to a Catholic school and had belonged to a Catholic youth organization.  This was enough to make him a target of the anarchists, the Reds, and anybody who wanted revenge for the abuses committed by the Church, the bourgeoisie, and so on.  People betrayed each other all the time, from principle, envy, or resentment.  

For example, one night the militias came to the house of one of his school friends.  He hid under the sofa but they dragged him out and put him on a truck and carried him away to be shot.  But he was a very charming man, and he managed to make friends with the guard--offered him a cigarette and chatted with him--and the guard let him jump off the back of the truck and make his way back home in the dark.

Your father's brother was safe because he was married to a Mexican woman, and Mexico was on the side of the Republican government.  But there is no question that your father would have been killed if people had known where he was, so for three years he had to hide in the apartment.  At one point the owner of the building, afraid for his own life if it became known that he was sheltering someone, asked the family to leave.  So they moved to a different apartment, and that was the only time, from 1936 to 1939, that your father went outside.

Not only did he have to stay indoors and keep away from the windows, but he couldn't play the violin, or even speak in a normal tone of voice.  He had to walk as quietly as he could.  He was healthy and young and full of energy, and he could do nothing to defend himself or to help his family except to turn himself into a ghost--and paint buttons.  At that time, women's dresses were decorated with large buttons made of tagua, a plant material that looks like ivory.  So your father, who had always been good at drawing, earned a few pesetas painting tiny scenes on buttons.

For three years, crammed together in that apartment, the family starved.  We, on the other hand, my mother says, shifting to her own family, were never really hungry, since we lived on a farm.  We could grow vegetables--even in the winter there were always cabbages--and my mother kept rabbits and chickens, although the soldiers on the way to the front would often take them.  They didn't take the pigeons, however, so we ate a lot of pigeon, which nobody liked.

But if you live in a city and there is a war, you are helpless.  Food was almost impossible to find in Barcelona.  Before going to bed at night your father would drink lots of water at the kitchen spigot, so that his empty stomach wouldn't keep him awake.

The war finally ended with Franco's "liberation" of Barcelona.  There was a big parade and your father went to see it with his sister.  It was the first time he'd been outdoors in three years.  I guess he was dazed by the sun and the noise, but when Franco's car drove past he forgot to raise his hand in the fascist salute.  He was immediately picked up and led away to be interrogated.  Thousands of suspected Communist sympathizers were being executed by Franco's forces in the days after the war, and he would have been too, except that the family mobilized everyone they knew, including one influential Catholic industrialist, to vouch for him, and he was released.

One day soon after that, your father and his brother were out looking for food, which was still very hard to get, and they found (or they may have stolen) a big sack of beans.  They were so weak that between the two of them they barely managed to drag it back to the apartment.  All the Benejams ate beans for months, which is why, my mother says, smiling, after he and I married we never ate beans again.  Or pigeon.

(To be continued.)

My Mother Says...continued

Last fall I began retelling here my mother's memories of growing up in a Catalan village in the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War.  You can catch up on those posts here:
http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-mother-says_2.html
http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-mother-says-continued.html
http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-mother-sayscontinued.html

When the story resumes, it is 1936, and my mother is forced to abandon her law studies at the University of Valencia because of the start of the Civil War.  I cannot even begin here to summarize the social, political and economic forces that led to that bloody three-year conflict, widely regarded by historians as a rehearsal for the Second World War.  Suffice it to say that purges, reprisals, summary executions, betrayals, wholesale destruction of centuries of art and architecture, and unspeakable atrocities were committed by both sides--the insurgents led by General Franco, and the communist-backed, democratically-elected Republican government.  If you are interested, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia offers an in-depth, first-hand account of the early months of the war.

I was studying law at the University of Valencia, my mother says.  I was the first girl from my village to leave home to be educated, and I still cannot believe that my mother let me go.  Of course, I was carefully watched.  I stayed in a convent, and every morning one of the nuns walked me to my classes and then back to the convent.

I studied Roman law, canon law, political economy, civil law...but then the war began and the convent was burned and I had to go home.  I was eighteen years old.

The beginning of the war was a time of terror.  As a landowner, my mother continues, my father was at risk of being dragged out at night by anarchists and shot in a ditch, as many were.  But because he had always had liberal ideas, and because as a vet he had often cared without charge for the donkeys and mules of farmers who were too poor to pay, he was always warned when a purge was coming, and he would hide in the fields while my mother stayed in the house to keep it from being burned.  (My mother doesn't explain how my grandmother's presence in the house would cause it to be spared, but perhaps even the most rabid anarchists had a taboo against burning a house with a woman in it.)

I was afraid every minute of the three years the war lasted.  Summer and winter, night and day, when the planes flew over on the way to the front, we ran to hide in a ditch near the house.  We wore a small stick tied to a string around our necks, and we bit on it when the bombs fell close by, to keep the blast from bursting our eardrums.  My parents, my two younger sisters, and my little brother and I sat in the ditch in a fetal position, so that if we were hit we would be killed instead of maimed...The constant noise from the airplanes and the bombs and the anti-aircraft guns made me feel that I was losing my mind. I would gladly have committed myself to a life of poverty if that could have brought about peace.

I learned very early that all nations are capable of cruelty.  I also learned that human kindness is not defined by political allegiance.  As prosperous, middle class landowners, we were in danger from the communist troops on their way to the front, which was close to our village.  They did take our car, and they demanded wine and chickens.  Their espadrilles were soaked in fascist blood.   But those same soldiers shared their bread with us, and on the eve of what was expected to be an especially fierce battle they helped us to dig a shelter out in the field and camouflage it with branches, so we would not be killed by the retreating communists.  We slept in that shelter for a whole week, in December.

You know what was the saddest thing?  Towards the end of the war, the Republican government was running out of men, so they started drafting fifteen and sixteen-year-old boys who barely knew how to fire a gun, and sending them to the front.  People called them la quinta del biberon, the baby-bottle draftees.

All this time, I kept falling in love with Republican soldiers (not that they ever knew it), even though I knew that they would probably soon be killed in battle.  Of course, my mother reassures me, I had not met your father yet.  He was in Barcelona, and for him the war was even worse than it was for me.

(To be continued)

My Mother Says...

After so many years, the boundaries start to blur.  Mothers, granddaughters, daughters, grandmothers--the skein of talk and memory passes from one to the other and grows more tangled with each pass, so that in the end you can hardly tell the threads apart.

I am listening to some recordings that my daughter S made of my mother back when my mother was the age I am now and my daughter had just finished college.  She taped these sessions during one of my mother's visits, and in the background you can hear dishes being rinsed, a dishwasher being loaded.

My mother speaks, and periodically someone interrupts with a question or a remark, and often I can't tell whether that voice is my daughter's, or mine.  There's no mistaking my mother's voice, which  sounds young, like she could be thirty instead of seventy.  Prompted by my daughter, she begins to tell about her own mother and to bring to life a world that no longer exists:  the world of a Catalan village in the 1920s and 30s.  My mother's world as it was "before the war," meaning the civil war that sundered life in Spain into two separate eras:  before 1936 and after 1939.

Before the war, my mother says, life in my village was almost medieval.  The farmers plowed with Roman plows and a pair of mules. Middle class girls weren't allowed to do much besides attend daily Mass and, on Sundays, morning Mass and Rosary in the afternoon.  And visit relatives, of course, and the sick.  The married women all wore black.

At the harvest festival every year a band would come and there was a dance.  But I could never dance because I had to sit with my family in a box high up in the stands, and no boy dared make the trip up all those steps, in view of the entire village, to ask me to dance and risk being turned down.

But the poor people, they were out all night on the dance floor, and they could dance with whomever they pleased.  And they could go to the movies--even the women!--and see things like Mary Pickford and Buffalo Bill.  The poor people had all the fun.  How I envied them!

And you couldn't go to the movies?  my daughter (or is it me?) asks.

Of course not!  my mother says.  But my mother was different...

(to be continued)

Vets

Fresh out of reading matter, I've been rereading James Herriot for probably the fourth time. And like every time before, I'm amazed at how he does it: the cold nights attending cows in labor in the byres, the crusty farmers, the patient beasts, his own foibles. How did this lively voice emerge unscathed from decades of large-animal practice?

And I've been thinking about my maternal grandfather, also a vet, whose career overlapped Herriot's (my grandfather was probably fifteen years his senior) in Spain rather than Yorkshire. Like Herriot, by the time my grandfather retired in the 1960's his work had changed from healing mules, donkeys and horses to overseeing sanitation and medication practices for industrial chicken farms and piggeries.

As veterinarian, he had been one of the quartet of professional men reigning over the village, the others being the doctor, the mayor, and the priest. But my grandfather was different from them: he did not go to church—a gesture far bolder than, say, being a tattooed transsexual in the middle of Kansas in this day and age. He also, in the early decades of the 20th century, scandalized everyone by insisting that my grandmother accompany him to the movies, the only man in the village to do so.

Another one of his traits, and one that drove my grandmother to distraction, was his reluctance to demand payment for services. People didn't have to ask for credit—he offered it voluntarily. “Did you see how those children were dressed?” he would respond as my grandmother complained about yet another unremunerated visit. “I couldn't possibly stand there and ask for money. Do you want those people to starve?” It didn't matter how much a client owed. If a mule fell into a ditch or a cow came down with mastitis, my grandfather would put on his cap, hop on his bicycle, and get to work.

That was in the days when I knew him, in the long summers that my parents and I spent at my grandparents' farm. But years before I was born, before the Spanish Civil War changed everything, my grandfather used to drive to his visits in his own car. But with the war, the car was requisitioned by the Republican forces, food became scarce, and my grandfather and his family knew the terror of rushing out of bed in the middle of the night and cowering in a nearby ditch to escape bombardments.

They also knew the terror of civil strife, where old grudges were settled by a false accusation, a knock on the door at dawn, and execution in the field behind the house. The middle class, the well-to-do were special targets of the rage of the disaffected poor.

And here is where my grandfather's reluctance to exact payment from his peasant clients saved the entire family. In the anarchy of the war, when certain villages were marked for certain raids, my grandfather would secretly be given advance warning, told to keep his head low and disappear for a few days.

I don't remember much about his work as a vet. It either took place away from the house or, when an animal was brought to him, I was kept indoors, well out of the way. But I must have seen something, because one of my favorite games was to “disinfect” my toy horse's leg by rubbing it briskly with a rag, fling the rag to the ground as I'd seen my grandfather do with used cotton swabs, administer a shot by means of a discarded nail, then pick up the rag, disinfect, and start all over again....I think about that, every time I give one of my goats a shot.