There are days now when the garden comes second.
That still surprises me.
When we first arrived, the terraces filled most of my thinking. I organised mornings around them. Coffee could wait. Messages could wait. I walked the steps from top to bottom checking leaves, touching soil, noticing everything.
Lately, life has started pushing in from the sides.
Elena’s voice note lands before I’ve even opened the shutters, something about Leti and a disagreement over compost ratios that has grown far more dramatic than it deserves to be. Mercedes has already suggested a Wednesday wine evening that somehow turns into a plant swap. By the time I’ve answered them both, the morning light has shifted and I realise I haven’t stepped outside yet. A year ago I wrote about this shift in New Faces, New Flowers: Expanding My Circle in Spain, not quite realising how much space those faces would take up.
I used to feel guilty about that.
Last week the garden club trip ran longer than expected. Miguel found a specimen he insisted none of us could name properly and we stood in a loose circle arguing gently about it while Max wound himself around my legs. I came home dusty and hungry and didn’t check the lower terrace until nearly sunset.
Nothing had collapsed.
The citrus were steady. The rosemary had done what rosemary always does. Even the small herb near the stone edge that I tend to fuss over looked indifferent to my absence.
There was a time when missing a morning would have unsettled me. I would have imagined silent damage. A plant leaning too far toward dryness. A patch of soil compacting without my notice.
Instead, I find myself arriving back through the gate mid-afternoon after coffee near the market square with Maria, talking about her stubborn rose that refuses to bloom properly, and the garden feels like it has been holding its own place quite calmly.
I don’t mean I’ve stopped caring. I still notice the slope of the upper terrace and how the lower beds hold on to moisture longer than they appear to from the steps. I still see when wind has caught a lighter pot and nudged it slightly off centre.
But I don’t rush to correct everything.
Sometimes I stand there longer than necessary, half thinking about the pottery class Elena wants me to try, half listening to the faint noise from the road below, and the garden simply exists beside those thoughts.
I said once that the garden had become my structure here. That might have been true at the beginning. It gave shape to days that otherwise felt open and slightly untethered.
Now there are other shapes forming.
The WhatsApp group arguing over soil mixes. The Wednesday lunches that stretch into late afternoons. The small habit of walking Max before breakfast and only later remembering to check whether the upper terrace has dried more quickly than I expected.
It’s quieter in my head about the garden than it used to be.
The terraces haven’t changed dramatically. The rain still comes in bursts. The stone edges still gather water where the slope eases off. But the centre of the day has shifted.
I’m not neglecting it. I just don’t think about it all the time like I used to.
And so far, it seems content with that.