I Wish I Was the Moon Tonight
serendipeaty
The lemon tree on the property to the left of us is so laden with ripe golden orbs it would be a shame not to pick them. Last week, our downstairs neighbors discovered that the fields past the turkey houses down the road to the right have a bounty of peas that are being ignored, so just before sunset we walked over and picked some. Senhor M has been busy clearing and planting our garden every day. Last year at around this time, we were gifted a bag of sweet tangy plums from his trees. Hope springs eternal in a garden, with the promise of new beginnings.
This is our fourth May in Portugal and sometimes I am amazed at how far we’ve come.
There was our first trip of discovery in May 2022, drinking a lot of sangria and traveling the country from top to bottom and several places in between, to our let’s try living in one place for one month and see how we like it adventure of May 2023, when we discovered how mesmerizing the sun setting over the Atlantic Ocean can be and I encountered my first chicken with the head still on it and the feet tucked into its cavity.
That’s when we found the place we now call home, where we made friends, J learned to wing foil, and we could imagine living a life here, not just being on vacation. We returned to this place between cancer treatments in May 2024, me tired and short-haired, but fiercely determined. J found us Senhor M’s property with the bountiful garden and the stunning views to rent. During the long wait to finish treatment, get our visas, and finally move here, I would think about the sweet taste of those plums.
My new hairdresser gets it. She spent much of her adult life in New Jersey and has the warm, down-to-earth demeanor, way with words, and distinctive accent of the Jersey women I remember from my youth. They called you “hon,” fed you, and would give you the shirt off their backs if they thought it would help.
After checking with her doctor friend to make sure the chemicals wouldn’t hurt me this soon after completing cancer treatment, she put blonde streaks in my hair and said, “You are starting a new chapter of your life. You’re back!” The hon was implicit.
Shout-out here to , who nails the Jersey ethos, especially in this post about the Trump/Springsteen fight.
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We first saw the Blue House on that 2024 trip and I thought of it, along with Senhor M’s plums, often. If all goes as planned, in a few months we will be leaving Senhor M’s bucolic paradise and moving to the Blue House.
That, my friends, is bittersweet.
But we can’t be everywhere all at once, can we?
I ate Joshua McFadden’s English pea toast in Seattle and shared the recipe with you last year. After we picked those country peas, I ate it again the other night with our wonderful neighbors, with whom I watched the Eurovision Song Contest.
I intended to shell and cook the rest of the peas the next night, but we had to make an unexpected trip up north to Bragança, to try to sort out J’s long-awaited residency permit for a trip he was planning back to the US. By the time we got there, there was a phone call. Come back as soon as you can.
There was a beautiful golden half moon illuminating the road, as we set out at 3 am from Bragança for the four-hour drive home so J could pack, drive for another hour, and take a flight to the US from Lisbon.
We knew the downside of moving to this place for happiness and adventure was being farther away from loved ones.
Such a bittersweet choice, but life is full of them and I believe that is how we grow.
The sun sets over the Atlantic and the Pacific and the moon is everywhere all at once.
I want to dedicate this post and the recipes that follow to RS. Our lives contain a finite number of beginnings. May you savor the sweet peas, the sunsets, and the warm glow of the moon and the people who love you in perpetuity.
The Best Thing I Cooked This Week
If I hadn’t already shared Joshua McFadden’s English Pea Toast from his wonderful book, Six Seasons, I would be featuring it in this post (recipe is linked above and can also be found on my recipe page).
Instead, I present you the solitary dinner I had last night and tonight, with the rest of the peas: Joshua McFadden’s Pasta Carbonara with English Peas, also from Six Seasons.
And here is the beautiful
song we listened to on that moonlit drive home, which I have been listening to on repeat, with J and our loved ones so far away from me.
The circumstances of your sudden moon-lit drive and solitary dining sound concerning. But this was a lovely meditation on the things that matter, both large and small.
I hope everything is ok back in the US. In the meantime, OMG, thank you for the link to JoJo from Jersey. I spent time as a kid near Philadelphia (no slouch in the sarcasm department) and was always in awe of our smart-mouthed New Jersey neighbors. She’s a refreshing blast.