Connections  ......for Ben and Mia, the never ending story from the brain cells of Bubba and memories added by Nana. 

I am saddened that I did not ask my mother more questions on her deathbed.  She was a writer, but why did she write?  Now that my grand kids are double digit in age, I realize that they have time to ask questions but likely don’t know what to ask.  They are twins, Ben and Mia, miethos in Spansh.  From the same womb of Sara Anne, but very different. 

I was born in 1954 in Singapore to an American Mother and British father.  I was a libran in the dawning Age of Aquarius.  My wife Vaughn was born in Detroit in 1955.  Our lives were connected by our mothers who both worked with clays of the earth and shared a passion for studying the stars.  I was infused with an understanding of religion, reincarnation and astrology.

My mother was an interesting woman, born in Matoon, Illinois, 1921.  She was the only child to Charles H Fletcher, a man who served his country through two world wars and lived to be 97.  Charlene learned her Spanish while studying in Mexico City, furthering her character in Guatemala and Columbia.  At this point she transferred to Burma with the American Consulate.

My Father was part of the Imperial British Empire, born in Hope in 1916, the actual date subect to astrological interpretations.  He was the youngest of 7 children that came from the mother in his family.  We don’t know how many step syblings he had but records show he fathered three children with three different women in the same house in the same year.  Some children from the Peak District are said to have the Quince nose.

Following his apprenticeships, Colin headed off to join his brother Ron in India, ultimately transferring to Burma to help fight the Japanese for the Royal Military Engineers.  It was there he met Charlene and married, later moving to Singapore and starting our Family.  He had had a prior wife but that was kept a dark family secret until nearly the end of his life.  We believe he had a child from that union but have not been able to complete that connection.

His first child in our family was born in Costa Mesa, California and the last in Toronto, Canada.  The middle two were born in Singapore.  They were all boys who would separate across countries and continents.  Why Michael would be born in California was always a puzzle to me.  But my mother spent a long time alone in the USA before going back to to Singapore.

Michael

John

Jim

Brian

Singapore

Toronto

Falls Church

JFK

Russell Woods

Colorblindness

Xabia

Waterloo

Dad brings home the Hash

Flin Flon

Ottawa

Elmira and CF Borden

John Cherry .... Continental Drift and Contaminant Hydrogeology

Copper Harbor

Twins for Fallas

The Badger, then and now.

September 27, 2018. The Xativa Connections

Yesterday i was in the bottom of a well.  Well, actually it was a two million liter (half million gallon) cistern carved out of a dolomite mountain about 900 years ago.  This huge vault was lined with bricks and rendered with cement.  It gets cleaned every 50 years or so and graffiti can be found scratched on it’s wet walls from a cleaning in 1830. 

We, Vaughn and I, had taken a trip up to  Xativa/jativa for my 64th birthday and at check in the receptionist, a woman from Cuba, told us that if we wanted to see the old cistern, she would be opening it at 1930.  It was worth the look and very special.  You see, we didn’t know much as this was really a spur of the moment trip and I had used Hotels.com to find us accommodation.  This hotel was highly rated with some good reviews and would do for the night.  I am now writing on the floor of my room, number 2 enlightened!

A few days earlier I was reading a weekly magazine article about Jativa written by my mother in 1986.  It’s cover looks like a turret from Guadalest Castle and cost 175 pesetas.  The Costa Blanca Times, October 1986, Volume 7.....”Focus on Spanish Living”.   Her article on the Jativa Castle inspired me to go see it and here I am today waking up at’s foot and planning to explore the monument today.

The Mont Sant hotel has proven to be one of those very special places for us.  We have been comparing it to the Cardinal in Toledo.  There we could run our hands down walls built a thousand years ago and sit in the spot where the Cardinal would catch the sun in the winter, his subjects viewing him from down below.  This has that same flow, that spirituality.

So after a walk around the perimeter of the compound, the first for Vaughn and the second for me, we were milling around reception waiting for our tour guide.  She came out with two business men and their bags and said we should follow along as she showed them to their rooms”.  She spoke to them in Spanish explaining why we were invited and what we were going to see.  She bubbles with enthusiasm for this Cistern and asks us to wait.

The hotel has quite a history shadowed by the castle to the south.  It should be one of the Paradores, places we love.  The first signs of urban habitation in what is now the town of Xàtiva date from the Bronze Age (800-700 BC).  Once again we find we are walking on history.

Xàtiva was a major town of Al-Ándalus during the Moorish period (800-1300 AD). Large parts of the surviving town walls date from this time. As the Caliphate was coming to an end, the Montsant Hotel was then a complex of buildings and gardens that served as the town’s centre of political power.

When King James I of Aragon conquered Xàtiva in the 13th century, the Montsant became the town’s royal palace, both for James himself and for his successors Peter II, Alphonse II and James II. It also served for several years as the palatine residence of the exiled Princess Eudoxia Laskarina of Byzantium. The large Aljibe reservoir, which was built during this first Christian period, is the vault we are waiting to see.

We are in a small courtyard decorated with some antique agricultural tools and ringed with odd citrus trees in plastic pots.  They obviously await their place on the grounds but I have never seen them before.  I scratch their skins and sniff...lemons shaped like a large potato?  .... nisporos?, but no, they are lime quats!  ..... a citrus that looks like brain coral.... all very interesting.  We find tags with names hard to read but know they are not your normal citrus.

As we wait, I notice a rectangular plate of steel nearby and pointing to it laugh to Vaughn that that’s where the cistern is.  She dismisses my joke.

James II founded the Cistercian Convent of Montsant early in the 14th century.The church was built, along with the cloister, the chapter room and various secondary structures.The 16th century saw a series of major additions in the Renaissance style.The nuns were expelled after the Council of Trent, and the convent was occupied by monks from the nearby Cistercian Monastery of Valldigna.

The late-mediaeval period from 1400 onwards was the golden age of the Kingdom of Valencia with commercial, artistic, literary and also ecclesiastical terms, as members of a Xàtiva family named Borja – subsequently immortalised as the Borgias – occupied the papacy on two occasions in the shape ofCallixtus III and Alexander VI.  Alexander purchased the Duchy of Gandía from the Crown for his children, of a family that was soon to produce a third major historical figure: Saint Francis Borgia, also known as San Francisco de Borja.

When Charles II of Spain died in 1700 without an heir, the Kingdom of Valencia became involved in what was to become known as the War of the Spanish Succession; a conflict that was to draw in various European powers. Aragon, England, the Dutch Republic, Austria and Portugal supported the claim of Charles of Austria,while Castile and France sided with Philip of Anjou. The Battle of Almansa in 1707 marked the defeat of Charles in Valencia. As a punishment, Xàtiva was besieged, attacked, sacked and burnt down by troops of Philip V, who would go on to rename the town “New Colony of Saint Philip”. The Kingdom of Valencia was also deprived of its parliament, its laws, its coinage and the official use of its language.

The official portrait of Philip V that once graced the main room of the town hall is now displayed upside down in the municipal museum.It has hung there since the 1950s in symbolic revenge for the burning of the town.

The Monastery of Montsant was occupied by military forces in both the War of the Spanish Succession and the Napoleonic wars. The Spanish state partially requisitioned the building in 1820, and a minister named Mendizábal made the transfer of title permanent in 1835. The monastery then became a widows’ asylum and poorhouse, before being sold in 1855 to a private buyer, who demolished the church and the cloister

After the “Mendizábal confiscation”, Montsant became a private residence. The monastery was demolished to provide construction materials, and the outside walls were incorporated into a new country house. The house continued to be a private residence for more than a century, under the ownership of the grandfather of Alcoy-born author Juan Gil-Albert, who spent his childhood summers at the house. The current layout of the gardens dates from this time.

The Montsant Hotel first opened its doors in 1994. It was acquired in 2009 by INELCOM S.A., a Xátiva-based business dedicated to the design and manufacture of electronic equipment and energy-efficiency devices.