When the poet Lorca fled to Granada, he thought he would be safe there, but he was betrayed by friends and murdered by fascists. While I guess it's not different than any of the histories I live alongside, it seems like every historical site or exhibit in Spain ends something like that. Don't you love to see the white lime cave home that line the cliffside? This is the spring, this is where they grew herbs, this is where the animals lived in a cave adjacent to the living quarters so that they helped to keep the cave complex warm in the mountain winters. And then, invariably, the last exhibit is how the people were rounded up and shot in the early 20th century. Spain has a dark history, like everyone else, but maybe with so much of it being recent, it all feels much fresher.

I found Granada to be a beautiful city: a city of fog, tea shops, and night-blooming jasmine. I bought jewel green harem pants in the street. I covered my shoulders and tattoos and paid coins to light candles in the cathedral. I climbed up inside the Alhambra and dreamed castle city dreams afterward. The bars were very good. They have "authentic" tapas culture there - allegedly the last place in the world to do so. You order a drink; they bring you a little unique snack. Another drink, a different snack. And the bars compete to have a different or better style, and therefore encourage patrons to linger specifically at their particular bar. There was a lot of odd prawn potato salads, little elaborate sliders with lamb, little meatballs, slices of ham and cheese... The wine was good and very cheap. Thick, dark-dark reds. 

Flying is one of those unpleasant surprises of things that get harder as you get older. I've never really particularly liked it, but now I seem to have the extra new side effect of it making me violently ill afterward. I suppose it's motion sickness. Always interesting to land in a new place, disoriented and jet lagged, and then spend the next six hours puking my brains out. It's a dismaying development since all I really want to do with the rest of my life is wander around and look at the world. 

Well, I stumble, barfily, out of the desert of the Sierra Nevada and emerge back here in the mountains of Virginia into the most incandescently beautiful fall.