When you tend a garden or you have a project of a house in your hands, your world opens up (and brings back memories).

This article isn’t about tips on how to live abroad, fantasizing about quitting one’s reality, and hence contributing to the popular escapism content that idealizes life in some perfect village where one apparently doesn’t face any friction, despite landing there from the other side of the Atlantic.

However, such guides and articles are an entire genre in places such as Substack. On the contrary, I’ll start with the current bad weather in North America and other musings, to descend later into the promised little European village of one’s dreams.

Something tells me that the little spike in fantasizing about geographical arbitrage “exits” has to do with doomscrolling and reality exhaustion. It’s more affordable and probably healthier just to stop doomscrolling cold turkey. As for the weather, the polar vortex is bad, but it can only get better.

Below freezing

Let’s start by saying that I’ve seen recent images of some Detroit streets suffering flooding after a water main broke, and then freezing: picture a street where the water has reached the upper level of the wheels of parked cars, only a sudden Arctic cold wave froze the place right away, with no time for the water to soak into the soil, becoming a frozen flood zone.

It’s a cruel way to remind us of different states of the same element, water, at a big scale and in real time, just when Microsoft announces to have created a new state of matter to power quantum computing.

Those are images of streets, but how about a massive body of water? There are also images of the Polar Vortex bringing Arctic air to turn most of the interior of North America suddenly colder than Greenland, if only momentarily, bringing freezing areas in the Great Lakes to normal historical levels for this time of the year.

When seeing ice-coated Lake Michigan, it’s difficult to remember how different the same place feels a mere weeks away. But there’s no appreciation for the regeneration of spring without undergoing a rigorous winter, all very Augustinian (there’s no light without darkness).

A hint of spring

In his book of aphorisms The Gay Science, Nietzsche frequently uses the change of seasons to express the force of renewal and vitality of nature. The message is clear, reminding us that under the frosty soil of winter mornings, there’s the promise of spring. The frozen flood will soon be an unimportant event left behind, forgotten among many other similar ones.

Meanwhile, encouraged by the same urge after days of rain in Northern California and a sense of turmoil in the public sphere, I embarked on the humble task of planting a few tree saplings.

I placed two of them on the sidewalk planter we share with the contiguous property, a little contribution to the commons. I’m still deciding where to place a Japanese maple sapling, which could go on the sidewalk next to the others. We’ll see what the sapling tells me to do.

I’m glad that the neighbor was on board with the idea, as he may be as aware as me of the clichés of time and community according to tree growth: any place may get a chance to grow closer when people plant trees that others will hopefully benefit from—decades in the future. If the best time to plant was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is now, there’s no losing in the process.

It’s easy to forget how soothing it is to get one’s hands dirty by digging a few deep holes, placing trees on them, and mulching the area before the rain starts again. Non-tangible thinking and working, which we mostly perform in contemporary societies, becomes secondary—at least for a moment. Before one realizes it, any rumination turns into introspection.

Tending a garden

Few things are as soothing as surrounding oneself with concrete tasks regarding a little garden, whether planned or just volunteer. Whether we think about it or not, a little garden connects us to life’s complexities and systems’ interdependence.

Like Nietzsche, many others have associated the seasonal changes around them and the caring of their little gardens, dormant in wintertime, as an exterior extension of the task of personal renewal. Michael Pollan’s first book (1991), arranges a few musings by the author around his experience in the garden, arranged by seasons, and how this work connects with the ways the author sees the cultivation of his spirit:

“This book is the story of my education in the garden. The garden in question is actually two, one more or less imaginary, the other insistently real. The first is the garden of books and memories, that dreamed-of outdoor utopia, gnat-free. and ever in bloom, where nature answers to our wishes and we imagine feeling perfectly at home. The second garden is an actual place, consisting of the five acres of rocky, intractable hillside in the town of Cornwall, Connecticut, that I have been struggling to cultivate for the past seven years. Much separates these two gardens, though every year I bring them a little more closely into alignment.

“Both of these gardens have had a lot to teach me, and not only, as it turned out, about gardening. For I soon came to the realization that I would not learn to garden very well before I’d also learned about a few other things: about my proper place in nature (was I within my rights to murder the woodchuck that had been sacking my vegetable garden all spring?); about the somewhat peculiar attitudes toward the land that an American is born with (why is it the neighbors have taken such a keen interest in the state of my lawn?); about the troubled borders between nature and culture; and about the experience of place, the moral implications of landscape design, and several other questions that the wish to harvest a few decent tomatoes had not prepared me for. It may be my nature to complicate matters unduly, to search for large meanings in small things, but it did seem that there was a lot more going on in the garden than I’d expected to find.”

Fixing a house

If the imminent arrival of spring feels like an opportunity for personal awakening, no matter the situation at a macro scale and the surrounding harshness of winter, the prospects of embarking on a project like fixing a dilapidated house, or building one from scratch, bring the same feelings, especially in middle age: the promise of renewal, the need to use patience to deal with setbacks and accepting imperfection, and coming to terms with time.

So, in a way, Pollan’s A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder, where he builds a writer’s shed with little early knowledge of the task, is a continuation of his first book; only the garden has been substituted by a little writer’s house.

I’m not sure we had this in our minds when, in the winter of 2018, we decided to move and buy a dilapidated country home in a small hamlet in the wine region of Penedès, which is one hour south of Barcelona. We liked the little village where the dwelling was located, as well as the placement of the house itself, with its southern facade perching unobstructed over an old water reservoir that looks like a lake.

However, the building had suffered neglect and unfortunate renovations over the years, so we knew we would need to find a compromise if we wanted to turn the dark, affordable fixer-upper into our home for future family reunions, a process that I now see as the tree saplings I just planted: one goes ahead and hopes for the better in the future. If, twenty years from now, our children (still at home) want to use the place to enjoy a part of their culture and see each other (hopefully us included), the project will have accomplished its full promise.

It turns out that the process of finding a dilapidated country house to fix once we find stability as adults is a very common and predictable path, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense to give it a try. Even if we leave aside the potential gains of turning an abandoned property into an enchanting place to visit—something we can use, share, rent, sell—, finding a challenging project to work on is a very tangible, personally rewarding way of challenging conventional wisdom: why not embrace difficulty and help transform something neglected into something valuable one can use and share?

What makes a place?

At least to me, there’s another reason I thought an old, unassuming country house located in a small, sleepy hamlet with only a few streets, all of them walkable and closed to traffic: to me, it’s a way to revive the childhood summers, when I’d spend the summer in the two sleepy Spanish villages where each of my parents grew up.

In four weeks during summer, my siblings and I would trade the constraints and structure of the city for the unscheduled, never-ending days of summer, with our bikes as transportation means, a little creek with natural pools to refresh ourselves, the cool portal of the old church to play cards when the sun was blasting at noon, and plenty of fruit trees, blackberries and madrone berries to avoid getting back home until dusk, or when we were starving.

Verano Azul, a TV series from that era depicting a group of kids from the city spending the summer in a coastal town, creating never-ending adventures as they bond together, is an archetypical situation of the free-range summers that many of us had in Spain in the late eighties. The series opening is a testimony to it.

Nothing comes to mind as infant memories of adventures “à bicyclete,” like the classic French song by Yves Montand states, and food foraging.

At least that’s what I thought about when, as I was recently skimming through Euell Gibbons‘ classic Stalking the Wild Asparagus, I read at the end of the chapter carrying the same title:

“The edible tips and spears, in which we are chiefly interested, appear long before the asparagus puts on its summer finery, and they must be located by that drab, old, last-year’s stalk. My neighbors often smile at me when they see me by the roadside with my asparagus knife and pail. They think it is much simpler to merely buy the asparagus one wants at the supermarket. But I have a secret they don’t know about. When I am out along the hedgerows and waysides gathering wild asparagus, I am twelve years old again, and all the world is new and wonderful as the spring sun quickens the green things into life after a winter’s dormancy. Now, do you know why I like wild asparagus?”

Places and time

Nobody associated such experiences yet with Mediterranean lifestyles, blue zones, or walkability, and most adults living in them would have traded it on the spot for the opportunity to go live in a second-rate apartment in the city attached to an alienating industrial job.

But we kids knew we were getting the deal of our lives, back when parents didn’t micromanage their children and kids of all ages played for hours on end, for there were no personal screens. We swam in the natural ponds, played Spanish cards and table games when it was too hot, or improvised a soccer match once the afternoon advanced, getting cooler. If we were thirsty, we’d run to the fountain.

In those long days, dogs were always sleepy, too divested from reality to cheer our energy, and stayed by the side of old men and ladies sat on a chair outside or under a tree, talking or playing cards or dominoes, and the sound of the Tour de France or the Vuelta a España arrived from some house.

Going back to these places makes me wonder about our utilitarian perception of property, which doesn’t account for what makes places unique. If you visit as an adult a place you roamed freely as a little kid, beware: the events you lived through didn’t freeze in time, and the old people who cheered and teased you, trying to know who you are only by your looks, won’t be there anymore to make you feel welcome and a part of the experience, including, unfortunately, your own grandparents.

The end of a little village

There’s a little book by Julio Llamazares that came to my mind. Llamazares is one unassuming writer from León, a region in central Spain that was once a kingdom with its own language, which sounds as it should, given the place’s location: a crossroads between Castilian dialects and Galician-Portuguese, which is spoken to the west.

It’s a heavily Romanized area, precious to the vanished Mediterranean empire two millennia ago. There was so much gold that the Romans transformed the landscape of Las Médulas, destroying entire mountains in the process by using the mining technique they called ruina montium, melting a mountain by excavating narrow cavities and filling them with water.

The long-gone process transformed the landscape, and people from El Bierzo forgot whether something had happened at all in the area to get such a composition of crumbled boulders. Pliny the Elder, a procurator for the Empire in the region, described it as follows:

“What happens is far beyond the work of giants. The mountains are bored with corridors and galleries made by lamplight with a duration that is used to measure the shifts. For months, the miners cannot see the sunlight, and many of them die inside the tunnels. This type of mine has been given the name of ruina montium. The cracks made in the entrails of the stone are so dangerous that it would be easier to find purpurine or pearls at the bottom of the sea than make scars in the rock. How dangerous we have made the Earth!”

I’m not surprised that somebody from such a place could write such a delightful and sad little book as La lluvia amarilla, a monologue that he locates in a different part of the depopulated rural Spain, which many call the “forgotten” or “emptied” part of the country, contrasting it with the more dynamic, wealthier regions around Madrid and the coast.

Published in 1988, it’s a haunting novel describing the vanishing of an entire reality in a village, when the last person living there dies. Andrés, the last surviving inhabitant of Ainielle, one among many abandoned villages in the Aragonese Pyrenees, explains his final days as he watches his home and memories disintegrate around him, just like the fallen leaves of trees surrounding the hamlet (the “yellow rain” referenced in the title).

The possibility of regeneration

Anyway, I remember reading the little book (in Spanish) and thinking it was a delight, despite being quite young—probably still at college—when I did so. It reminded me of the decaying little villages I visited every summer since I had any memories to recall.

The novel is filled with powerful imagery of decay: houses crumbling, nature reclaiming the little streets that were once human territory where kids had clustered to plot a prank against the priest or the owner of the only store. It reads like a song dedicated to a place that is vanishing.

I also remember thinking, as I finished it, that the little book gave little room for hope. It depicted the end of a world, almost as a symbol of the end of everything. I was probably hoping for a window to a more positive introspection. Which is why books like A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler or Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun became my favorites years after, for they also explain beginnings: regeneration is possible, if only when there’s determination and hard work.

As for the landscapes they depict (the Austrian Alps in A Whole Life, and Northern Norway in Growth of the Soil), I was as mesmerized as with La Lluvia Amarilla.

All of this played a bit in my subconscious when we were fixing the country house in the small Catalan hamlet with a castle on top, just like a fairy tale. I wanted to bring life back into that house and that particular corner of the village.

However, reality has settled, and the house is at this moment our second residence, though instead of one hour away, it’s a 13-hour plane (plus car and jet lag) away. Perhaps one day.

An old man and an owl

This article came to be the other day, as I woke up and remembered for an instant what I had been dreaming about. I went ahead and annotated it: I was somewhere rural, and an old figure, which I identified with my grandfather on my mother’s side, to whom I was very connected as I lived with my grandparents for a few months before turning two.

This figure showed me a fluffy bird, an owl with big eyes, which flew away.

The dream made me think of our memories, but also of the moment I’m living. Perhaps it’s a call to look into the inner wisdom that I’ve inherited from the place of my ancestors, which is the Mediterranean as a whole and the Iberian Peninsula in particular.

I’m not a great fan of psychoanalytic philosophy, though the dream made me think of a little passage I read some time ago about how Carl Jung‘s philosophy came to distinguish itself from that of Sigmund Freud, which arose from a dream he had when crossing the Atlantic on a transatlantic cruiser as a young assistant of Freud (appointed in 1909 to give a series of lectures at Clark University and introduce psychoanalysis to the American audience).

Jung’s dream is basically a big allegory representing a house with different floors as an archetype to represent our psyche: at the beginning of the dream, young Carl Jung walks across the second floor, with a Rococo salon (an image of normal consciousness); but, as he descends down to the first floor, then to the basement, and finally to a cavernous space beneath it, he’s going deeper into what means to be human, turning introspection into a tool to recognize what we all share in our collective unconscious.

A dream of a multi-storied house

Anyway, it’s somehow amusing that Jung’s description of the house relates perfectly to the country house we fixed in Penedès: the second floor is the most modern and inviting, with wooden floors and a brand-new roof. The first floor includes the kitchen, basic services, and the dining area; it’s somehow older and colder than the second floor, for we kept many of the original furnishings of previous renovations (including the most unfortunate ones, going back to the kitsch seventies).

But, like in Jung’s dream, our house has a “primitive” basement area with an old barn space where they kept animals generations ago and also a place to keep carriages and, later, a car. This whole floor has earth plaster on its walls and bare floors, reminding us of the colors and textures of the work of a local artist, now deceased.

I find it amusing how the mind works. And how the places we inhabit, and those we decide to restore and regenerate, can be metaphors of our own mind.

Home as a metaphor for the mind

Here’s Carl Jung’s dream on the many layers of the human psyche, narrated by him:

I was in a house I did not know which had two storeys. It was “my” house. I found myself in the upper storey where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in rococo style. On the walls hung a number of precious old paintings. I wondered that this should be my house and thought “not bad”. But then it occurred to me that I did not know what the lower floor looked like. Descending the stairs I reached the ground floor. There everything was much older, and I realized that this part of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The furnishings were medieval, the floors were of red brick. Everywhere it was rather dark. I went from one room to another thinking “now I really must explore the whole house”. I came upon a heavy door and opened it. Beyond it I discovered a stone stairway that led down into the cellar. Descending again I found myself in a beautiful vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient. Examining the walls I discovered layers of brick among the ordinary stone blocks and chips of brick in the mortar. As soon as I saw this I knew that the walls dated from Roman times. My interest by now was now intense. I looked more closely at the floor. It was of stone slabs and in one of these I discovered a ring. When I pulled it the stone slab lifted and again I saw a staircase of narrow stone steps leading into the depths. These too I descended and entered a low cave cut into the rock. Thick dust lay on the floor, and in the dust were scattered bones and broken bits of pottery, like the remains of a primitive culture. I discovered two human skulls, obviously very old and half disintegrated. Then I awoke.