Sitting on the old cart in Grandmother's back yard on this warm April afternoon the 83 degrees make if feel more like a June afternoon. Barney, the orange cat, is curled up beside me. Every now and then he raises his head and looks sadly into my eyes, meowing. He is very needy today. He has cut his paw and is feeling a bit depressed on account of it. At the moment he's snoozing peacefully, but the tip of his tail is twitching - ever on guard. There is a yellow smudge of pollen on Barney's chin which spoils his normally dignified look.
A gust of wind buffets us and it smells like plowed earth, grasses, clover, and whatever other mysterious ingredients might be responsible for the delicious smell of Spring. New life triumphing from the death-grip of winter. It's a wild, sweet, fragrant, alluring wind. It takes me back, in spirit, to those enchanted places in the hills and mountains of Aragón of my growing-up years.
My brothers and sisters and I used to go wading in the creek at Belsué, where our parents took us on innumerable picnics. Meandering slowly upstream we would stop to admire the tadpoles and the minnows and to try to catch them. Tadpoles we caught, but minnows we did not; although we made desperate efforts to do so, with shouting and effusive splashing in the process. We zig-zagged our way across what we called "stepping stones", which sometimes meant leaping dangerously from a boulder onto a very wobbly rock, and gloried in seeing one another miss and end up on the seat of their pants in middle of the creek, completely soaked.
At another of our picnic spots by the Río Gállego, my sister and I shared a Secret Meadow. We would sneak off when the boys weren't looking and slip through the bushes and tall grasses into a sweeping meadow of myriads of wildflowers. At the edge, we could sit under one of the old oak trees and listen to the wind rush through it's branches while we looked out across that sea of color, taking in the rich fragrance and the glory of it. The hills in the distance seemed to fence the meadow. On those hills, though you could not see them from that distance, you could hear the music of the sheep's bells. It was our slice of fairyland.
Barney brings me out of my reveries as he pulls himself up and stands on my lap, staring into my face. He meows adamantly as if to remind me that I am here for the sole purpose of comforting him, and to emphasize his point, he lies down across my keyboard. I have to peel him off and convince him that beside me is a perfectly good place to be.
Something deep inside me is stirred... restless... it's a kind of Spring fever, tinted with nostaglia and homesickness.
