"Portugal? Where is Portugal?" is the most frequently asked question when people hear that I moved there from Arkansas. Easy to answer: Portugal is a narrow rectangle of land that lies between Spain and the Atlantic Ocean. I lived in the southern portion of Portugal, in a district or state called the Algarve, for several years.
The second question is, invariably, "Why Portugal?" There are several answers to that question. I had visited France and had lived briefly in London, so I knew I enjoyed life in Europe. Still, I probably would have confined myself to vacations there if I hadn't met Richard. Richard had spent a few days in Portugal as a young man and had always hoped to retire there.
One of the things that drew us together was our mutual appreciation of the vagaries and uncertainties of life: he had survived a bout with cancer; I had come to grips with widowhood. With "this isn't a dress rehearsal for life; this is the only chance we get" in mind, we applied for visas, put some things in storage and gave others away, packed two suitcases apiece and flew to Portugal.
Our first days were frustrating. We knew no Portuguese. We had arrived in January when the weather is in the 50's and rainy. I was cold. We couldn't find a place to live. The one thing that held us there was the beauty of the place. Before frustration turned to despair, we found an apartment, met some interesting people, and discovered that most people in Lagos, the small city we had chosen, spoke English.
I discovered the truth of Richard's youthful evaluation: the people are both gentle and kind. I also fell in love, as he had, with bluffs that dropped three hundred feet to rocks beaten by booming waves and quiet, tiny beaches nestled in the middle. Adventures and memories threaded themselves together like pearls. We interspersed life there with trips back to the States to see our children but always hurried back to our refuge in Portugal.
With the help of a new friend Jose, we found a tiny farmhouse in the country to replace the apartment in town. Even more adventures awaited us there: our neighbors spoke no English. The town nearby was tiny; the people there less apt to know English, less apt to be impressed by foreigners. Language and cultural differences offered us a challenge. Additionally, it set us apart. We had more time and less to do than in our old lives. The solitude gave me more time for writing.
Richard had encouraged me to write from the beginning of our relationship, and I turned from fiction writing to essay writing as I began to share our adventures first with his sister Mercedes and later with readers of my hometown newspaper, the Ozark Spectator. Adding to tales about Portugal, I began to put in written form some of the stories from my childhood in Franklin County, Arkansas and adventures in other places too. The essays that follow are the result of all those adventures and observations.
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