One of the nice things about coming back from vacation is going through my e-mail. (Which is part of the reason I don't check it on the road.)

Yesterday, amidst hundreds of press releases, I found a couple warm messages from readers and one note from a Texan requesting that I stay out of his state. (My column about improving national monuments - including the Alamo - was apparently picked up by a Texas paper.)

There were messages from friends in India, Arizona (Tom telling me that he had recently been honored as "Un Huesped Ilustre," or An Illustrious Guest, in Quito, Ecuador), California (two fellow travel editors hearing of layoffs and hoping I was OK), as well as this one from Margaret in Galicia, Spain:

I brought my 600 rebate check from USA, money borrowed from China, to stimulate the US economy...brought the cash with me, to the bank here in Spain where no one wants a dollar, exchanged my stimulus packet for 300 some odd euros, to stimulate the economy of Spain where a pack of ORBIT gum, imported, costs the same as a bottle of Rioja wine. Something is wrong with this whole picture!

I am at Casa do Patin, a mill turned home owned by a very interesting person of the old guard of Santiago. Adventures have been admiring the bar here, inoperative, where a movie was filmed last year, looking at her incredible garden and antiques, endless stories.

I have been here for 9 days, feeding the 6 and a half ducks who live in the pond which is fed by the river which flows through here and used to run under the house to move the mill. The wheels from the old mill are now table bottoms in the yard.

There is an oak tree so damn old and this morning while I was out having coffee, I saw for the first time - and I have been here many times - the date 1747 over the door. Am making a rubbing of it today on a piece of fabric; there is old lace and beautiful linen as she ran her own store of fine embroidery for years, and the remnants of that are everywhere.

Her goal is to turn this into a sort of club or association as it had one time been a rural bar meson type of thing, but the land where she has lived forever as did her parents and grandparents, has been expropriated by the government for extension of the university (although that is a long time away).

In the meantime the grass grows tall, the ducks hang out, and this phenomenal place sits and waits, while my friend Sofia continues to build her dreams, buy antiques, sew and store the most beautiful table linens, collect dishes from everywhere, hang them on the endless rock walls, while I move around in her world in a state of hallucination wishing I had more than the $600 given to me by the Dept. of Treasury or whoever it was so that I could help her out in her fight for preservation, at the same time recognizing that the future is here, although she refuses to see it.

> Discuss this entry