ox heart tomatoes

i am lying in my bed in Porto, drinking coffee, listening to an orange feral cat yell on the roof beyond the open shutters. Yesterday 7 cats were sunning themselves on the flat red roof but this morning only a couple are there, swaggering for territory. A few birds swoop in the garden. Yesterday the little boys and I swam in the pool. The sun was warm but the water wasn’t. You couldn’t have kept us out. We plunged and laughed and it was wonderful.

Some things remind me of home. Huge lumpy tomatoes, ox’s heart I think, at the market filled me with a kind of urgency to plant the seeds I sorted before we went to London a week ago. But there will be time, time to plant them, to find room in the greenhouse to harden off the seedlings, to lie with the cat and my coffee there and remember this. On a tree you can’t see in the photograph of the garden there are lemons ripe enough to pick. At home my lemon tree is heavy with fruit, ripening in the sunroom with windows framed by the same blue as the kitchen here, the wardrobe where my suitcase is stashed.

Today we’re going by train to a village south of Porto, on the sea, to eat fish for lunch, watch birds in the palms. I finished reading Tom Lake earlier, with my coffee, and am filled with the sense that stories never end. When my grandson told me about the immortal jellyfish, I answered that I thought humans were sort of immortal too. Because we remember our parents’ stories, and theirs, and theirs. A tray of tomato seedlings, a few cats on the roof, a swim in a cold pool in a lovely Portuguese garden. The weight of a child leaning against me, wrapped in a grey towel, a tree filled with ripe lemons behind us.