Holiday in Portugal
By Sally Armour Wotton
First published in We The Storytellers bys Wipf and Stock, 2013
First published in We The Storytellers bys Wipf and Stock, 2013

One summer my husband Ernest found, in a copy of Engineering Digest, a farmhouse for rent. It was in Sa, a tiny village in northern Portugal just south of Porto. It sounded perfect for our summer holiday. The number to call was in England and the man who answered the phone was a friend of the farmhouse owner. He said, “If you’re looking for discos don’t come”. We immediately booked the house for three weeks in August.
The twelve village farmhouses, of Sa, were crafted of local stone by their owners and were clustered close together, surrounded by the farmlands, mostly vineyards. The terrain was hilly and the views, overlooking the Douro valley, appeared like distant landscape paintings in shades of mauve and green dotted with earth tones.
Our house had modern plumbing and all the kitchen amenities, but it also had the charm of the original stone bread oven and magnificent, oak furniture hand carved by the owner’s grandfather. The living quarters were one flight up with a long balcony the length of the house. We knew that half of the ground floor was a wine cellar, as basic a room in northern Portugal as a kitchen is to us, but the other half of the ground floor was a mystery.
As we began to settle in we heard muffled sounds and movement beneath us.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Ernest. ”I know wine must breathe but I don’t think it gets up and moves around”.
“Not unless it’s in someone’s hands”, replied Ernest. “The owners will be a hundred miles from here by now; they left to go home over an hour ago”.
“They didn’t strike me as people who would be holding hostages under the farmhouse” I said. “They were so charming”.
“Are you sure? Just because he kissed your hand and doffed his hat to me? They spoke only Portuguese; they could have been saying anything, like I hope they’ve caught the serial killer who’s lose in these parts”.
The sounds persisted, so whoever was below us was still alive. Gathering our courage, armed only with lethal umbrellas, we crept down the outside staircase. When we reached the ground we found that the far door was unbolted so we gently opened it and stood back. From the rear of this pitch-dark room seven pairs of eyes attached to seven sheep looked as startled as we felt. We apologized for disturbing them and for maligning their good names.
Later that week we sat on our balcony, sipping wine, and watching Manuel, a spry, wiry haired little man, assisted by his dog Bobby, shear those sheep. Manuel put a sheet of plastic on the ground and laying one animal at a time on the plastic, he tied the back legs and began, with just a pair of scissors, to sheer with amazing speed. Meanwhile Bobby dashed around the plastic on his short terrier legs barking directions to the sheep. At times it was difficult to tell Manuel and Bobby apart. When the shearing was done, Manuel hung the wool over the fence to dry. A few days later a large woman in a flowered, wrap-around skirt seemed to appear from nowhere to fetch the wool to make blankets. Meanwhile, somewhere in Canada, blankets were being woven digitally, untouched by human hands!
The village had narrow stone paths that were both sidewalk and motorway – scaled for the motorbikes that families piled onto. They carried their big, colorful hand-woven baskets as they made their way to the main road and on to the market. The paths were just wide enough to allow the oxen to pull their carts with the enormous wooden wheels down to the fields and back. Sa also possessed the white clapboard chapel that served the surrounding villages. It had battery-powered bells that rang on the quarter hour, twenty-four hours a day. This allowed the men and older children working in the fields to know when it was time for meals but took some getting used to through the night.
Sa was a true community and we wanted to get to know the people and feel a part of it, but the lack of a common language was keeping us just tourists.
The heart of Sa was the village shop; the one-room ground floor of a house, which sold vegetables from the owner’s garden. It had fresh fish and big round loaves of luscious rye bread delivered to it daily, provided the only phone in the village and was the central gathering place for all. On our first day in Sa, we stood looking into the shop bending our 6’8” and 6’2” frames under the doorway and we sensed a crowd gathering behind us. We glanced around and I felt like I was on stage and hadn’t learned my lines. But “bom dia” was all that was necessary as they, being small in stature, were just fascinated by our heights. They smiled their welcome to us reminding us that language is more than words.
The young children gathered around the steps of the shop daily to play. The women congregated there to shop and socialize. They gestured an invitation for us to join them and two women introduced us, through mime, to the meal-in-itself rye bread that sustained us thereafter. During our stay a woman’s husband died and the grieving, comforting and funeral planning were carried out there. If we were to really get involved with the people of the village it would be on the steps of that shop.
We sometimes strolled to the market town five miles away. On those walks we saw laundry drying on lines along the roadside and sunken tiled “sinks” just off the road in the wooded areas where the women in our village did their laundry. There were empty plastic laundry bottles strewn around and these bottles gave me an idea.
The daughter of the shop family, Rosa - a lovely, slim, outgoing young woman, was in high school and just beginning to learn English. The children would often pull Rosa out of the store to play with them which she did happily. Ernest and I were getting to know the women and children of the village through ever increasing mimed “conversations” but we thought, with Rosa’s help, we might deepen our new friendships by holding a puppet workshop for the village children.
I invented instant puppets from found objects years ago which I demonstrate at workshops in Toronto. So for materials we used the discarded laundry bottles, as large sculpted heads, and other found objects such as egg cartons, plastic bags, pieces of string and toilet paper roles as various puppet body parts. There, on the shop steps, the children and we created puppet creatures of all kinds with Rosa as our interpreter and resident artist. One little boy squealed with delight when Rosa announced the project. He chose a large orange detergent bottle for a head with the handle forming a prominent nose. He encouraged the others to embellish their puppets with chicken feathers - which until then the unfortunate chickens were still using.
Rosa led them in a musical performance with their puppets to a Portuguese song they all knew and the audience / community of mothers, chickens, sheep and oxen enjoyed the show enormously. From then on the children carried their creations with them and whenever they saw us, their puppets sang and danced a greeting. Before we left, Rosa made a traditional, multi-colored cloth doll for me which is still featured prominently in our living room.
We attended Eucharist in the little chapel on the Sundays and though the language was Portuguese we could follow along through the familiar rhythm of the liturgy. But our fondest memories and our most moving Communion was with the community on the steps of the village shop.
The twelve village farmhouses, of Sa, were crafted of local stone by their owners and were clustered close together, surrounded by the farmlands, mostly vineyards. The terrain was hilly and the views, overlooking the Douro valley, appeared like distant landscape paintings in shades of mauve and green dotted with earth tones.
Our house had modern plumbing and all the kitchen amenities, but it also had the charm of the original stone bread oven and magnificent, oak furniture hand carved by the owner’s grandfather. The living quarters were one flight up with a long balcony the length of the house. We knew that half of the ground floor was a wine cellar, as basic a room in northern Portugal as a kitchen is to us, but the other half of the ground floor was a mystery.
As we began to settle in we heard muffled sounds and movement beneath us.
“Did you hear that?” I asked Ernest. ”I know wine must breathe but I don’t think it gets up and moves around”.
“Not unless it’s in someone’s hands”, replied Ernest. “The owners will be a hundred miles from here by now; they left to go home over an hour ago”.
“They didn’t strike me as people who would be holding hostages under the farmhouse” I said. “They were so charming”.
“Are you sure? Just because he kissed your hand and doffed his hat to me? They spoke only Portuguese; they could have been saying anything, like I hope they’ve caught the serial killer who’s lose in these parts”.
The sounds persisted, so whoever was below us was still alive. Gathering our courage, armed only with lethal umbrellas, we crept down the outside staircase. When we reached the ground we found that the far door was unbolted so we gently opened it and stood back. From the rear of this pitch-dark room seven pairs of eyes attached to seven sheep looked as startled as we felt. We apologized for disturbing them and for maligning their good names.
Later that week we sat on our balcony, sipping wine, and watching Manuel, a spry, wiry haired little man, assisted by his dog Bobby, shear those sheep. Manuel put a sheet of plastic on the ground and laying one animal at a time on the plastic, he tied the back legs and began, with just a pair of scissors, to sheer with amazing speed. Meanwhile Bobby dashed around the plastic on his short terrier legs barking directions to the sheep. At times it was difficult to tell Manuel and Bobby apart. When the shearing was done, Manuel hung the wool over the fence to dry. A few days later a large woman in a flowered, wrap-around skirt seemed to appear from nowhere to fetch the wool to make blankets. Meanwhile, somewhere in Canada, blankets were being woven digitally, untouched by human hands!
The village had narrow stone paths that were both sidewalk and motorway – scaled for the motorbikes that families piled onto. They carried their big, colorful hand-woven baskets as they made their way to the main road and on to the market. The paths were just wide enough to allow the oxen to pull their carts with the enormous wooden wheels down to the fields and back. Sa also possessed the white clapboard chapel that served the surrounding villages. It had battery-powered bells that rang on the quarter hour, twenty-four hours a day. This allowed the men and older children working in the fields to know when it was time for meals but took some getting used to through the night.
Sa was a true community and we wanted to get to know the people and feel a part of it, but the lack of a common language was keeping us just tourists.
The heart of Sa was the village shop; the one-room ground floor of a house, which sold vegetables from the owner’s garden. It had fresh fish and big round loaves of luscious rye bread delivered to it daily, provided the only phone in the village and was the central gathering place for all. On our first day in Sa, we stood looking into the shop bending our 6’8” and 6’2” frames under the doorway and we sensed a crowd gathering behind us. We glanced around and I felt like I was on stage and hadn’t learned my lines. But “bom dia” was all that was necessary as they, being small in stature, were just fascinated by our heights. They smiled their welcome to us reminding us that language is more than words.
The young children gathered around the steps of the shop daily to play. The women congregated there to shop and socialize. They gestured an invitation for us to join them and two women introduced us, through mime, to the meal-in-itself rye bread that sustained us thereafter. During our stay a woman’s husband died and the grieving, comforting and funeral planning were carried out there. If we were to really get involved with the people of the village it would be on the steps of that shop.
We sometimes strolled to the market town five miles away. On those walks we saw laundry drying on lines along the roadside and sunken tiled “sinks” just off the road in the wooded areas where the women in our village did their laundry. There were empty plastic laundry bottles strewn around and these bottles gave me an idea.
The daughter of the shop family, Rosa - a lovely, slim, outgoing young woman, was in high school and just beginning to learn English. The children would often pull Rosa out of the store to play with them which she did happily. Ernest and I were getting to know the women and children of the village through ever increasing mimed “conversations” but we thought, with Rosa’s help, we might deepen our new friendships by holding a puppet workshop for the village children.
I invented instant puppets from found objects years ago which I demonstrate at workshops in Toronto. So for materials we used the discarded laundry bottles, as large sculpted heads, and other found objects such as egg cartons, plastic bags, pieces of string and toilet paper roles as various puppet body parts. There, on the shop steps, the children and we created puppet creatures of all kinds with Rosa as our interpreter and resident artist. One little boy squealed with delight when Rosa announced the project. He chose a large orange detergent bottle for a head with the handle forming a prominent nose. He encouraged the others to embellish their puppets with chicken feathers - which until then the unfortunate chickens were still using.
Rosa led them in a musical performance with their puppets to a Portuguese song they all knew and the audience / community of mothers, chickens, sheep and oxen enjoyed the show enormously. From then on the children carried their creations with them and whenever they saw us, their puppets sang and danced a greeting. Before we left, Rosa made a traditional, multi-colored cloth doll for me which is still featured prominently in our living room.
We attended Eucharist in the little chapel on the Sundays and though the language was Portuguese we could follow along through the familiar rhythm of the liturgy. But our fondest memories and our most moving Communion was with the community on the steps of the village shop.