By Encarnación Arcos Areosa

READ THE SPANISH VERSION HERE: Don Quijote el gran caballero andante, Sancho, y yo

A post in response to a conversation between Selma and Encarni about the town of Consuegra, Don Quixote, and Cervantes:

Like Don Quixote, I too was born in a town in La Mancha, and your words take me back several decades when I was living and working in Castilla la Mancha. Among the places I worked, was a town called Consuegra in the province of Toledo.

Great memories of this town come to my mind, especially when at the end of a work day when I was tired and sometimes burdened with problems.  In those moments, I enjoyed going to meet the windmills at the top of the hill to sit at the feet of “those giants with blades” feeling that all my problems could be ground down in the wheels of the mill and thrown to the wind that would take them far from me into the infinite space of that endless Castilian plain.

Free of stress, opening my eyes, I could contemplate the clean, luminous sky and the total absence of people that allowed me to just “be” in the prevailing silence, feeling small, tiny, abandoned in the middle of nowhere under the protection of the windmills. This silence and emptiness was sometimes interrupted by the tinkling of cowbells ringing in the distance and slowly fading away as the herd of sheep moved on.

I imagined Sancho telling the  miller interesting stories and narrating impossible romances with all kinds of jokes and sayings holding in his hands a glass of Manchego wine and a piece of cheese, while his master debated whether they were mills or giants.

Thank you Cervantes, wherever you are, for all that we have inherited from your wisdom and for helping us understand and know these people and these lands that I love so much.

✤✤✤

I am a person who enjoys the small pleasures of life, interested in discovering new places and customs of different people. This is why I continue to study English so I can communicate with people from other countries.

I am curious by nature that is why I have a wide range of hobbies, not only intellectual, such as reading, but also physical and manual. This winter I have been trying new cooking recipes, sewing and knitting. Everything that comes my way, I consider a new opportunity to grow.

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