Throughout all my travels, there are moments, little pieces of time where you block out all your thoughts and merely focus on the details immediately around you. The bull’s blood-red color of the wall, the black oriental vase lamp, the 20-year-old vintage port, the latte macchiato, she shine of black marble table top. Where I am is not important, but rather what I surround myself with. In my hands is the yearly farm life forecast journal Borda D’Água, through which family has guided its crops and harvests for a large number of year. The sweet and sour after taste of the sour cherry ice cream, eaten moments ago lingers in my taste buds.
I am in Lisbon, a guest of the Four Seasons Ritz, with a luxury room on the top floor, still dazzled by the exquisite Michelin star worthy meal cooked by Chef Pascal Meynard himself, but this paper in my hand… the thoughts of summers spent playing in the corn and flower fields, eating cherries from the trees and carefully listening to my grandfather as he taught me how to prune a peach tree simply flood my emotions.
Looking up the shy yellow setting sun so characteristic of winter in southern Europe, I think that this is one of those defining moments that no mater where I am, or where I go, I will always be a farm boy…
Photo credits to Maria Braga from Grão a Grão.
