The Ducks Of Las Rozas
UNITED STATES—Off we went, five people piled in a car, to the round restaurant in the planned community of Las Rozas. Around the table were our host, a rock musician self named Dave America, to whom we owed this trip, his girlfriend Miriam, and the poet, Oscar Noviembre. I had translated a selection of his poems for our bilingual...
Cooking Made Easy
UNITED STATES—Let’s be frank, most Americans cannot stand the idea of preparing a meal in the kitchen. It’s never easy to craft a dish in the kitchen, but preparation is the key word. The more you prep the easier it is to craft the dish that you want to cook. I recently heard someone talk about meal prepping for...
Ferns Are Delightful Without Bloom
UNITED STATES—Many of the most popular plants are expected to bloom to add color and fragrance to the garden. Many others are grown to produce fruit or vegetables. Some are appreciated for their foliar color in autumn. Big trees are grown for shade. Turf grasses are grown as lawn. Evergreen shrubbery makes hedges. It seems that all plants perform...
Gaming To Make Money
UNITED STATES—There are people who play videogames and there are those people who are hardcore gamers. How would I define a gamer? A gamer is someone who just has a natural skill when it comes to playing video games. They know how to utilize tricks and tactics to make finishing a game easier. I would consider myself a gamer....
Fruit From Non Fruit Trees
UNITED STATES—Those of us who grew up with the old fashioned stone fruit orchards or vineyards might remember some of the traditional methods for protecting the ripening fruit from birds. Mulberry trees were grown on the corners of some orchards to keep birds well fed and less hungry for the ripe orchard fruit. Mulberry cultivars were selected to ripen...
First Forays
UNITED STATES—So here we were, after two days in the country. We took a depopulated bus. Hey, it was a Sunday and we would learn that Madrid is in summer mode. People leave the city. The siesta is religiously observed, in the land where the siesta was invented, due to the torrid climate. The banks close at 2 p.m....
Summer Dormancy Is No Mystery
UNITED STATES—California buckeye, Aesculus californica, is an enigma. How does it survive while defoliated for so much of the year? Not all are so mysterious. Those that live in sheltered or forested situations behave like normal deciduous trees, by defoliating in autumn, and refoliating in spring, after a brief winter dormancy. Those that are more exposed in warm and...
Arrival In Madrid
UNITED STATES—Finally, just after nine in the hot clear morning, the bus curled around the overpass to the housing development 50 kilometers north of Madrid, where I'd spent two wondrous days. It left Fernando free to go back to his chores and Carmen and I were off to the city, passing through a number of smaller cities and developments....
Vegetables Change With The Seasons
UNITED STATES—Right smack in the middle of the warm part of summer, it is already time to be getting ready for autumn gardening. This involves more than just ordering our autumn planted spring bulbs while the selection is still optimal. Most of us purchase bulbs from what is available in nurseries when they are in season anyway. Seed that...
A Poetic Journey
UNITED STATES—Since being on the airplane to Madrid, I'd reencountered poetry. I grabbed a few scraps from the shelf above my desk because we were going to read at a literary bar on Tuesday night. Already on the airplane, I took a few poems and did something to them I had not done in a long time, if at...