morning, a book

This morning I fished out this copy of Blue Portugal, tucked away in my suitcase as a gift for someone in Granada next week, and I thought, How strange, to have written a book that is not about Portugal but somehow fits in: its longings, its love of blue, of skies and rivers, fish and seaweed. So I gave it a moment, by the windows over the garden with its blue pool and lemon tree, the cats skulking on the red roof, birdsong.

And who knows, maybe one day I’ll write a book that is truly about Portugal (right now I feel I could live here, on one of the little farms we passed on the train yesterday, orange trees alight, wild flowers in bloom). I’d write about the market filled with beauty, the church bells, custard tarts, the little bowls painted with fish inside, even the man who tried to pick me up yesterday (me, an old granny) on the Rua Santa Catarina and who said, when I resisted his attempt, The shit is coming to Portugal.

In the meantime, coffee, strawberries from the Alentejo, maybe the marionette museum later with my grandsons, everything conspiring to a kind of wistful saudade, and a memory of a man playing his guitar near the river, notes sweet as lemon blossom, as morning.