Spanning three generations, 'Share The Moon' is the family saga of one girl, one moon and three lives; one Spanish, one English and one Finnish. Blended together into a captivating life journey and infused with tenderness and humor, each post can be read as an individual stand-alone piece. To read the complete adventure start from the very first post, 'Share The Moon', and simply work your way upwards. Welcome to my journey on the first Sunday of every month!

Sunday 22 September 2019

Autopista With Vista





It’s still early morning in San Juan, and Zara and I have just finished our breakfast as a new day dawns at home and in Tenerife. I have finally overcome my fear of driving on the Island’s ubiquitous serpentine roads and am now a confident Woman with Wheels (see post Woman With Wheels).  


Mama says that she may as well make good use of her daughter's new status as family chauffeur and asks that I take her to the Lidl store in the nearby village of Puerto Santiago, it's just too cumbersome by bus. I happily promise but it will have to be tomorrow, because today is Exploration Day. My English niece still has another free day before she returns to her job as receptionist at the Blue Lagoon Hotel, and we accordingly make the most of this liberty by planning a day crammed with activity: We will drive northwards towards the capital city of Santa Cruz, and upon our return back towards San Juan we will drive along the coastline towards the enormous adjacent tourist resorts of Los Cristianos and Playa de las Americas. The resorts are only a thirty minute drive away from our breakfast table, but compared to the sleepy Canarian village that we have just awoken in, it may as well be on another planet.  Zara tells me that she wants to take me to her favourite beach in the Las Americas resort called, La Playa del Duque. And of course I happily oblige. It's not everyday that aunt and neice have the opportunity of spending a quality day together driving around a beautiful island paradise that we both call home.




But, before we can begin our exploration adventure there is the little business of driving to the Magistrates in Los Cristianos, El Juzgado to obtain for Zara some documentation required by the HR department at the Blue Lagoon hotel. I have never driven there before and am therefore cluelessZara in turn has only the vaguest of ideas, so is unable to illuminate me further. Now, I am renting a car on this Island for the first time in my life, so I have already achieved an enormous goal. Learning to use a navigator to help get me where I want with my vehicle will be my second goal, but today I do not quite feel up to the challenge, so I decide to ask Mama. She will know, she always does. And I am not disappointed. She is still in the kitchen finishing breakfast, and after I approach her with my request for precise directions she proceeds to rattle off a series of verbal instructions which perplex me even more. So I ask Mama to simply draw me a map, and this is what we she presents me with:




Zara and I look at Mama's detailed driving instructions with astonishment. Who needs Google maps when you have a woman with this set of awesome map drawing skills? Mama tells us not to lose the map. She can share with one of her girlfriends from the Beach Club if one them need instructions on how to get to the same place. We promise to take great care of this precious document and look at one another and smile. And we gather our bags and phones, kiss Mama on either cheek Spanish style and we are on our way.  The journey to the magistrates is successfully navigated using this amazing piece of encrypted technology which we carefully put away for possible future reference as Mama requested, and after our visit is concluded we are free to begin our new day of exploration as Women With Wheels.




Tenerife is a mountainous island with the Teide Volcano rising majestically from its centre to an altitude of 3.7 kilometres above sea level and so making it the second highest peak in Europe after Mont Blanc in France. The Island's motorways skirt along the coastline and in doing so avoid this colossall giant. Our drive northwards is captivatingly beautiful with stunning scenery at every turn. Zara calls it an autopista with vista, a motorway with a view, which indeed it is. If we look right we are met with the deep blue Atlantic waters and if we look left, we have brightly coloured Canarian homes dotted along the mountainous landscape.  Life is good and we women are happy. I tell Zara that this is indeed food for the soul. How can you not feel happiness surrounded by such immense beauty, and my mind begins to explore this intriguing state of emotion. Happiness really is an abstract concept; it means different things to different people and is near impossible to quantify in any absolute or concrete manner. The greatest happiness comes not from material, but rather from immaterial things, such as the feeling created by a good moment with a person or a place. A moment such as now.






Place names successively pass us by in a blur as I press the accelerator and Zara immerses herself in a map of the Island she has brought alongTo me, it is crammed with familiar towns and villages from my childhood, but staring out at Zara from the sheet of paper is a cascade of unintelligible names; Guimar, Tacoronte, Chio, Tegueste, Tamaimo. They don’t sound very Spanish, she points out looking up from the map. That’s because they are not, I reply. They are names derived from the ancient language spoken by the indigenous population, the Guanches, way before the arrival and conquest of the Canary Islands by the Spanish in the fifteenth-century. Who are the Guanches, Zara asks. And just as Uncle Fernando did with me when we drove up the winding mountain road to the cemetery to locate Papa’s grave (see post Columbus And The Missing Gravestone), I proceed to momentarily take my eyes of the road ahead of me, turn to Zara and pause to say, My dear, do you really not know who the Guanches are? Through your Grandma and my Mama, their blood flows in both our veins, so you really need to plug this critical knowledge gap. And before I realise it, a history class opens up for  Zara as we drive along this beautiful autopista with vista, motorway with a view.





Located on approximately latitude twenty-eight, the seven islands that make up the Canaries (Lanzarote, Fuerteventure, El Hierro, La Gomera, La Palma, Gran Canaria and Tenerife) bathe in the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean and only sixty miles or ninety kilometres separate them from nearby Morocco. The conquest of the Islands by the Spanish crown, not an easy task considering the fierce resistance of the local aboriginal populationtook place between the years 1402 and 1496 beginning with the Island of Lanzarote and ending with the Island of Tenerife, finally conquered after much bloodshed between the years 1494-1496. By the time of Tenerife's capitulation, four years had elapsed since Christopher Columbus's historical voyage from the neighbouring Island of La Gomera to new lands that would eventually be christened America. When the Spaniards arrived on the Islands in the early fourteen hundreds to begin their slow and steady conquest, they stumbled upon an aboriginal stone-aged people living a seemingly primitive life based on shepherding, fruit gathering, and very limited agriculture. They spoke an unfathomable language, lived in caves hewn out of the soft volcanic rock and worshipped heathen Gods. These people are today known as The Guanches.

To be continued....

Next post 6th October:  A Place Called Chinet

Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some additions from private family archives.

Sunday 8 September 2019

Dark Side Of The Moon




Zara is thrilled that her Aunt has wheels and we are off and away. I am finally the proud owner of my very first rental vehicle (see post Woman With Wheels) and it feels wonderfully liberating. Our days of waiting for the bus to arrive are officially over. The weather is searing and we are both clad in the standard Island clothing; micro-shorts. I have taken on Mama’s advice and am now wearing my mini shorts matching those of my niece thirty years younger, who has chosen to ignore the pleas of her Grandmother and is still wearing hers (see post Columbus And The Missing Gravestone and Gravestone Mystery Resolved).  Zara tells me that Nanny may be an expert fashionista when it comes to shorts and middle-aged women like myself, but that she still has a lot to learn about the younger generation; Only the other day, she was asked to be more careful when out walking and try to avoid this seemingly continuous stumbling and falling over; Nanny was getting fed up with having to wash jeans covered with rips just about everywhere. Zara does not have the heart to tell her that they are purchased with the rips strategically already in place. Nanny will never understand.





We drive past Playa San Juan, towards Playa Alcala, and then up the serpentine cliff roads to Los Gigantes with its massive cliff face dropping down to the Atlantic Ocean. Without realising, we have both relaxed and The Journey of Death has lost its grip on us and we are as carefree as the other drivers that we pass on our journey. Now we are like locals. At the Los Gigantes viewing-point we pull over, park the car and immortalize our new-found moment of freedom Thelma and Louise style with a photograph. Who are Thelma and Louise, Zara asks. I had momentarily forgotten that some thirty years separate us and tell her that it was the ultimate philosophical chick movie of the nineties about two thirty-something girlfriends who discover themselves on a long car journey across America with devastating consequences. And just like us, they capture the pivotal moments of their adventure in pictures. Go watch the movie I tell her, better still let's watch it together one evening. 






We return to our vehicle and continue with the drive downwards towards the base of the Los Gigantes cliffs, passing by countless ubiquitous curves, and  taking us along the coastline to the next village called Puerto Santiago. The drive is captivatingly beautiful, and I feel at once insignificant and yet at peace to be surrounded by such immense monuments to nature, for The Giants cliffs rising out from the deep blue sea deservingly merit their name. I tell Zara that we will now drive back to our village of San Juan, and on the return journey stop by the nearby village of Alcalá where both her Mother and I spent the first few years of our life before we moved to England. I also want to show her the houses where each of us were born. Once in the village, I park on the nearby street and we begin our walk down Memory Lane.


                                 

        

The first house that we arrive at is the older of the two, and a white-washed coloured. This was Grandma Filomena’s home and where on a late Autumn day in 1963, after a long day of work in the nearby tomato fields, Mama went into labour. Acting as midwife to her own twenty-year-old daughter, Grandma Filomena helped bring her fifth grandchild into the world at 2am on September 26th. To be precise, I was delivered in the room to the right of the front door where I am now standing with Zara and which also happened to be Grandma’s own bedroom. Back in the 1960's there was no drive to the maternity hospital as is done today. This hospital was located in the capital city of Santa Cruz and to get here would have entailed an arduous journey of many hours along windy mountain roads, by which time the baby would have been born. Generations of Sanz babies were delivered at home and brought into the world by women who had learned the art of midwifing from the generation that went before them. In these rural villages, doctors were as inaccessible as the maternity hospitals in which they worked, and an expectant mother could consider herself indeed fortunate to have one medical consultation before her birth. Mama did not fall into this category, for as she gave birth to me during the early hours on that late September day she did so with no medical intervention along any part of her journey to motherhood, and the firm conviction that everything would turn out well as it had done years earlier for her own Mother and her Grandmother before her.





From Grandma Filomena’s home, I lead Zara across over to other side of the road and point out the place where Grandma’s animal shed with chicken and goats was located. Nowadays the site has on it a pretty Canarian home. Back in the 1960’s it was a piece of the countryside and I would walk there in the mornings with Grandma Filomena, clutching my little basket ready to collect the precious treasure trove of freshly-laid eggs with their creamy, golden coloured yolks, still warm from their benefactor. This was also where I would witness baby goats coming into the world still immersed in a sticky bubble, and then watch with fascination as the Mama goat proceeded to slowly lick away every last morsel of the placenta as if it were some delicious meal. After the bubble had been consumed, the baby goat would try to stand up on its wobbly legs before inevitably falling down and seeking the comfort and proximity of the Mama goat, just as I would do some mornings with my own Mama as I climbed into bed besides her. The birth of baby goats heralded a time of great excitement for us children, as we knew that for a short but intense period following the birth of the kids, we would be rewarded with the most delicious thick and creamy goats milk which would be greedily consumed knowing full well that it would not last for long. 




These goats were our only source of milk, and as long as they continued to supply us with our needs, they were safe from the casserole pot. Once they had outlived this useful purpose their days were numbered. Every morning Grandma Filomena would sit on her worn stool, gather her skirts around her, and then proceed to milk the goats. I loved to watch her, and if she was in no hurry, I would be allowed another futile attempt at milking, which would result in frustration on my behalf and peals of laughter from Grandma Filomena. It must be hard for Zara to imagine all that I am describing, all that she sees in front of her is a pavement with neat rows of brightly-coloured Canarian houses tidily stacked next to one another. Back then it was a piece of the countryside and a place of utmost magic for an impressionable three-year-old.





Our journey continues, and we now follow the bend of the road. Left up to the hill and across to the other side of the road. Now we are standing in front of the house where Zara’s own Mama was born five years after my own arrival (see post Share The Moon
and formed the starting point of my memoirs saga. Nowadays it has been painted green and purple, but back in the late nineteen-sixties, it was clad in the customary white of the Canarian villages around us. It was in this house on the ground floor and the room to the right of the door, that Sis came into the world as I scoured the sky for storks. This was the house where the women gathered around the childbed in terror as the placenta would not stubbornly leave Mama's womb alongside the new-born baby that had just been expelled. Everyone in the room knew fully well, that if the placenta was not expelled soon and intact, Mama would die. But little did they know that there was a far worse scenario lurking invisibly in the background placing Mama in equal mortal danger. 




For now, blissful ignorance reigns around this child-bed as the placenta is finally expelled and the women in the room rejoice at the arrival of a second child for the apparently healthy and robust twenty-five-year-old mother, and yet another grandchild for the proud grandmother. It will take another thirty-nine-years and an exploratory ultrasound to reveal the true perils that each of Mama’s pregnancies and births placed her in, and a calamity so disturbing that its mere recollection years later still brings with it fresh waves of incandescent rage. Once again I comprehend that knowledge can bring with it terrible pain and decide that, for the moment, this revelation can wait (see post Watching The English Part III). For today, I still want Zara and her Aunt to be blissfully innocent Women with Wheels and together we walk back to the car and begin our drive back to the comfort and warmth of Mama's home in nearby San Juan. For the moment, I only wish to recall the happy moments within those two homes that witnessed the birth of the next generation of Sanz women. The time for examining the dark side of humanity will be on another day called Tomorrow.






To be continued...

Next post 22nd September : Autopista With Vista

Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn from a combination of Pixabay with additions from private family archives.