People I’ve Known: The Abuela
A second story of the extraordinary ordinariness of everyday acquaintances.
She was remarkable — even more so for a grandmother.
She lived in a house on the edges of a quiet Asturian village, in the rural heart of northern Spain. Fringed by snow-capped hills, the village — scarcely more than a small assembly of houses and shops — flanked two sides of a narrow river. It had a school. It even had a prehistory museum, filled with neanderthal mannequins and iron-age spearheads.
Quite out of place in this modest community, Abuela's house was grand and stately, like the New World merchants’ houses that fill port-towns all along Spain’s northern coast, or like a foreign embassy, with three flag-poles rising tree-like behind its main gate — the deep blue of the EU flag, the sky-blue and gold of Asturias and, finally, the red-and-yellow of Spain.
Abuela is Spanish for “grandma”, which she was, literally-speaking. In fact, she was one of the grandmas of the Spanish friend who had invited several of us to stay with her family for a couple of weeks.
But Abuela was also a proud matriarch. She kept her family close; her three sons lived close-by with their own families, and would frequently come around for dinner at their mother’s house, sitting timidly…
