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I woke in Caminha, at the Ambassador’s house, with the window opened to the misty cool air of the sea and hydrangeas and ginger crowding in the open window. I had a nightmare. A man with a long sword had chopped off my mother’s feet and I ran to attack him, and flung my mother over my shoulder and looked for her bloody feet. She had been dancing in the streets with the peasants, drinking and hiking up her skirt. I had her body over my shoulder and ran through the crowd yelling CALL AN AMBULANCE when Tatjana woke me and held me in her arms and said, it’s only a dream.

Tatjana rolled over and went back to sleep and I lay there in the groggy haze of dawn and thought to myself, I might be done with my blog because what am I writing now anyway? The denouement of my mother’s life? And when we get a baby, or if we get a baby, will I write about the baby growing up and all the joy and travails s/he brings? I can’t be completely open about my fears and insecurities and angers when it comes to friends, old loves, my job. How many ways could I write about what it means to know New Orleans? And now with the first flush of young love moving towards love love is there anything that is not boring to a reader about the pleasure of having morning tea with Tatjana while we plan our day, or that my favorite thing is to lay next to her at night and feel loved and safe and saved?

What purpose is there to share any of the mechanics and rituals of a woman’s life? Why am I writing at all?

Pilgrims everywhere with backpacks, having just arrived at their destination – Santiago de Campostela. I’m sitting in a store looking at the image of Saint James and thinking about how I’ve been flogging myself since I left New Orleans about how harsh a judge I’ve been to my mother. Always there with my arms folded when she misbehaved. I remember the Mercedes she bought and was so proud of just when Steve and I were trying to buy her a Toyota Camry. Instead the Mercedes worked for a few months and then after spending more than she paid for it, it sat in her driveway until it was hauled away. Her leaving Dad in the middle of the night to join her girls in New Orleans when my sister and I had both moved back here in our early twenties. We were then and now, her only friends. I remember saying to my sister, “What is she is going to do?” when she arrived at our doorstep.

The question continues – then and now – what is she going to do?

In Santiago, standing in the shadow of that beautiful church, in that lovely square, I shrugged. She will do what she wants to do. It’s time I accept that.

No matter who I spoke with or met, they all asked about Obama. One woman in Spain said to me, “America is number one. This is my country, but what America does is always first. What do you think about Obama?” I asked her later in the conversation what year Franco had died. She didn’t know. But she really loved Obama.

In a shop window of an antique store that makes Portuguese tiles, there were twenty little tiles all with “YES WE CAN” written on them.

At a trendy, hip clothes store, a large sign appeared in the window, in Portuguese that basically translates as “FUCK THE CRISIS, IF OBAMA CAN WIN, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.”

I remember when I was young, 20 years old, I was dating the first big love of my life, who was 36 years old. We went to eat with friends, his friends and their girlfriends, and I came out of the bathroom stall to see the other women in front of the bathroom mirror reapplying lipstick and I noticed the jiggle in their upper arms. Ha!

Then when I was 30 and wanting to go to Paris but we had no money, I remember I was in a bookstore on Filmore Street in San Francisco and was thumbing through a large book on Italy and wistfully thinking about travel. An elderly gentleman was standing next to me and he said, “Beautiful,” as I turned the page to a gorgeous lake. I said, “Yeah, I’m dreaming of going to Paris, but lusting over picture books is all I have right now.” He said in a different more familiar tone, “Don’t wait. Go. I wanted to travel my whole life and waited till I retired and now I’m half crippled. Don’t wait.” We went to Paris on our credit cards and went on the austerity plan for a year and a half to pay it off when we came back.

I went to the bathroom in Lisbon at a restaurant. It was tiny, like all European bathrooms are, especially those in restaurants. It was hot because there is no a/c in Europe particularly in tiny bathrooms in warm restaurants. The entire bathroom was nothing more than a stall with a toilet but inside it was completely mirrored. I looked up and noticed how my skin just drapes, it drapes down my arms (forget about jiggle, this is drape), it drapes down my thighs. Like old lead glass windows it hangs in waves and ripples. I must say I prefer to look at old glass.

The stall was so hot because of my hot flashes but I tried to just think passed the moment. I’m wondering why women suffer with all this stuff all the time. Years of a period, now years of hot flashes. Blood and sweat. It’s what we’re made of.

I looked at my face, flushed from the heat, the lack of hormones, the crow’s feet deep from dehydration of traveling, the crepe like skin, hanging, and I just sort of laughed. Every year I see a photograph of myself from the previous year and I’m astonished at how young I look in the photograph. Who is that person? I say to myself.

That person we are in a photograph no longer exists. It’s quite amazing when you think of it.

I discovered Pessoa while in Portugal even though he has been around for ages.

Eu sei que nao sou nada e que talvez nunca tenha tudo. Parte isso, eu tenho em mim todo os sonhes do mondo.

“I know I am nothing and that perhaps I never had anything. Aside from that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.”

When I left for Spain two weeks ago, my mind was a jumble, my heart was heavy, my soul was saturated. I went to new places and explored place, food, port, wine, museum, streets, cafes, new beds, other people, two languages, trains, planes and automobiles. I came home yesterday with all of the stuff that was making me a nut replaced and refreshed with very pleasant memories.

I saw on garden outside a lovely little bookstore in the Alfama area of Lisbon, a quaint garden with little flags that had sayings on them. One said, “Happiness is not an action, it is a memory.”

The thing that has struck me the most about my mom being in the hospital is the inability to pick up the phone and call her which is my daily habit. I remember when my grandmother died my mother said she wanted to be able to call her. Americans can’t live in extended families the way other cultures do, but we are still tied to the umbilical chord via the telephone. Traveling all over, I wanted so much to reach out and call and say I love you.

I didn’t know that Onasis left Callas for Jackie O? But I watched the one night we turned on the TV in our room in Lisbon a documentary on Callas and I wondered how Onasis could have left this gorgeous, talented woman. She never recovered. Did he?

Living with an architect for sixteen years was like an ongoing adult education class in architecture. Part of our trip involved checking out some of the architecture of Siza, Koolas, Nouvel and Moneo as well as the old and antique. I don’t know if it is my sensibility or what I learned those 16 years but modern architecture is where my eye rests, but I do love it folded into the vocabulary of the old – best. The Reina Sofia by Jean Nouvel, the Atocha train station by Moneo, Casa de Musica by Koolhas, and a handful of Siza.

An architect owes it to his craft to travel the world so that s/he can come back inspired by the old and the new.

Siza’s apartment block in Lisbon:

Nouvel’s hotel in Madrid

Nouvel’s Reina Sofia in Madrid

Moneo’s Atocha Station in Madrid

Sometimes one has to travel a long way in order to arrive at what is near. I read that somewhere so it’s not original. But it’s true. I woke this morning after 30 hours of traveling home and one quarter of a sleeping pill and walked Loca to the park. It is 80 degrees because we’re having a cool front. The park is amazingly the same – beautiful. The bayou was such a sight for sore eyes, I could have cried when the taxi pulled onto Moss Street off of City Park Avenue last night.

There was a new moon in the pitch black sky.