Morning view of San Salvador
February 2019. A moment in time.
I was coming home the other day just before sunset, everything was bathed in that beautiful golden evening light that artists are so attracted to in Mallorca. I turned off the main Felanitx to Cas Concos road, onto the dirt track that leads to our house. It’s a very rough track, ravaged by the winter rains, occasionally the council come and fill in the holes, but, until that happens, you have to be careful not to damage the bottom of your car. I don’t mind having such a bumpy track, it discourages incursions by tourists and casual sightseers, in any case, I find it old worldly romantic. The track first winds its way between an old señorial stone farmhouse ‘Son Bennassar’ on one side and a stone windmill on the other. The gap between these two archaic buildings presents a backdrop of the fourteenth-century monastery of San Salvador, some two kilometres in the distance rising to 500 meters above the valley floor. The old farmhouse has seen better days, but the windmill is in good condition even though its six wind-sails and conical straw roof have long been removed. The scene is almost devoid of modernity and strangely evocative of old Spain. On hot summer days, it’s easy to conjure a picture of the chivalrous knight Don Quixote proudly mounted on Rocinante, lance held vertical on the stirrup rest, accompanied by his faithful companion Sancho Panza on a donkey. The pair slowly making their way between the two buildings with puffs of dust rising from the weary hooves of their plodding mounts.
I drove between the building unmolested by historical ghosts to where the lane dips away to the right and then curves left around a small plantation of bamboo with a large vineyard on the right. Around this bend there came first a little boy on a bicycle followed by a little girl, and then a young woman pushing a baby-buggy containing a small child; in the fading evening light it presented a delightful tranquil image. I was some distance off, and it wasn’t until I had approached a little closer that I recognised these four characters. I stopped the car when I got to them and wound down the window. Two little heads, Connor and Danna, peered through the window and in accented voices said. ‘Hello, Granddad’, ‘Hello Granddad’, and peeping from the baby-buggy was the little smiling face of Alishia the youngest addition to our family who was being pushed by her mother, the lovely Sylvia my son’s partner. After a short conversation, I continued on to our home ‘The Wild Olive’ where we all live together, leaving the four of them to wander on back in their own time. On the way home I had an emotional moment, first appreciating just how fortunate I was to live on such a beautiful island with all my family and to have three of my grandchildren living with me and the other two, Oscar and Hector, living only a short distance away near Palma. It also made me wonder where the years had gone. Four of us started on this journey in 1986, a two-year experiment after which we could return to the UK if things didn’t work out. That was thirty-three years ago, now there are eleven of us in the immediate family, with a much larger extended family of Mallorcan inlaws and relatives. In those early days, when Sandy and I were trying to find our way, we could never imagine that it would turn out like this. Our family is now irrevocably part of Mallorca. It would be nice to see how this all unfolds, but our time is short; therefore, I will continue to write these little anecdotes so that the future generations will have some idea of their mongrel roots. Life is indeed an adventure.