A Cave Story

My husband's sister lives with her new husband on a hillside farm in Mallorca called a finca. A rocky cliff rises steeply behind their property and is covered with a thin canopy of pines and acorn trees along its top edge. There are dark nooks at the base of the rock face that look distinctly like caves, called cuevas in Spanish. Julian has been inspecting them from afar since we arrived last week. I didn't even know he knew the Spanish word for cave until he was pointing them out to me today.

"Mom? Mom? Mom?"

I was listening the whole time. Yes?

"Up there are cuevas. Do you see them? Do you see them, Mom? Yes or no?"

"Oh? Cuevas?" I turn to my sister-in-law and ask her what the heck a cueva is. Once informed, I turn back to Julian. "Who lives in the cuevas?"

Julian looks at me pensively and considers my question. As I watch him, I can tell it hadn't occurred to him that somebody could actually be living in the cuevas.

"Mom? I think the wolf and the sheep are living in the cuevas. I have that story in my school. The wolf and the sheep." Julian is shivering with delight at the connection his little classroom has with this towering formation of earth on an island thousands of miles from home. His story continues. "No, actually, no. That's not how the story goes. This is the story: the wolf lives in the cueva but he doesn't want the sheep to come into his cueva. He pushed the sheep out and shut the door and now only he lives there."

"But what about the sheep? Aren't they lonely?" I ask.

Julian looks from the cuevas to me, completely taken aback by the new predicament of the sheep. Loneliness. As if suddenly a word existed to explain an experience he had struggled with since his first hour of life. His large eyes roll towards me like orbs and he speaks slowly. "Yes, Mom. Yes, the sheep are lonely now."

"But Juli, maybe somebody could go get them and bring them down from the cueva so they won't be lonely. Could you go get them?"

His mood lifts as he giggles and shakes his head. Of course he can't. What a question.

"But Juli, why can't you get them?"

"Oh, Mom. Because I'm not in the story!"

Green Acres

Ian has taken to Mallorcan farm life like he was meant for it. After four days visiting his aunt and uncle's self-sustaining family farm, he can tell you what their dog can and can't eat, where the plums are ripest, which lettuce can be picked and how to water each row of vegetables.

This morning over breakfast on the terrace, I get an earful about the hens.

"Mom, you have to be careful with gallinas because they can scratch you with their nails."

"Oh, OK, that's good to know. Thanks."

Ian hoists his foot up to the level of the table to demonstrate to me. "See, the gallinas don't have this thumb," he says, pointing to his big toe. "But they have these other fingers and at the ends they have really sharp nails."

"You mean claws? They have four toes with claws at the ends?"

"Yeah, except they don't have four toes, they only have three actually." He attempts to bend back his thumb and second toe to demonstrate a foot with only three toes. Exasperated after a moment, he puts his foot down. "You see, Mom? You have to be careful."

I nod.

"Oh, and you have to get their eggs every day or they might break if they stay there. You have to pick them up and be careful with them." I nod again. "Oh, and you have to make sure the gate is shut and locked or Bruxia will eat the gallinas." (Bruxia is their playful, blonde Labrador. Her name roughly translates to mean "witch".)

I nod again, sipping my coffee. Ian is scanning the mountainous horizon around the country inn where we are staying, estimating what needs to be attended to at his aunt and uncle's farm today.

"Oh, and Mom?" I nod again. "We have to bring something for Bruxia to eat so she won't eat the gallinas. Does she like Colacao?" (This is an excellent chocolate drink you mix in milk, like Nestle Quik, that the kids love here.)

"She might, Ian, you can try it."

Ian leans back, drinking, satisfied. He feels in charge. And as I watch him, I realize there is nothing more enjoyable for a four-year-old than that.

Wherever You Go, There You Are

When you're three years old, there are just some things that can't be explained to you. For Julian, the country of Spain is comprised entirely of a five-bedroom apartment where his grandparents live in the city of Zaragoza. Spain is nothing else but that.

So you can imagine his anguish when we finish an eight hour flight and then announce to him that we are in Spain and he looks around and does not see the apartment he is expecting to see. Just palm trees. Just a beach. Some picturesque mountain ranges in the distance. Just a charming country hotel with lovely gardens and farm animals. The stunning, rugged island of Mallorca. He wasn't going to have any of it.

As we're unloading our things onto the hotel's gravel driveway, he twists into a ball and throws himself down.

"NOOOOOOO! I want to go to ESSSSSSPPPAAAAÑÑA!"

I'm jet-lagged and hungry so I can only manage to come up with the obvious answer. I should know by now that the obvious answer is bound to be the wrong one.

"But Julian, you are in España. You are."

"NOOOOOO! This isn't ESSSSSSPPPPAÑÑAAA! NOOOOOOO!" Julian is going full blast, screaming, tears bursting forth, writhing on the ground. We're starting to attract attention from other guests who are relaxing on the terrace with an afternoon beer. I wave. Don't worry. It's not child abuse, I want to say, if I knew how to say it in Spanish.

OK, next tactic. I get down to his level. "Juli. Calm down. Calm down." (He's not hearing me so I say this so many times I feel like it's time to fly home by the time I'm done.) "Listen, you are in España, you are -"

There she goes again! Lying to me! My continued, but unchanging, explanation has only launched him into an even more energetic hysteria. My husband puts down our overweight suitcases and kneels next to Julian with me, starting to make a map with his fingers. Julian is mildly intrigued by this.

"Juli, look. This is España, the peninsula (Iberia - also known as Agustin's left hand), and this is Mallorca over here (his right hand) which is also part of España. It's an island. It's in the Mediterranean. It's also España too, see?" Agustin holds his left and right hands up in front of Julian's face and wags Iberia and Mallorca in front of him to emphasize how they go together.

Julian thinks he is even more crazy than I am.

"NO NO NO NO NO!" he wails. He is totally distraught and I'm about there myself.

The next 24 hours were a continuous rant from him about how he was not, no way, not possibly in and couldn't be anywhere near España. We stopped trying to convince him, and anyway Agustin had run to the end of his pre-school geography curriculum.

Not until the owners of "España" (known to the rest of us idiots as the apartment in Zaragoza) arrived, and Julian asked them where he was and they looked incredulously at him and said "you're with us!" was he ever happy.

And that's why God invented grandparents.