During our first winter in Ronda, I signed up for a furniture restauración course at the ancient Collegio de San Francisco. The course was scheduled to start on January 10th at 10 am, and foolishly keen and Norwegian that I am, I showed up early. I came to a closed door. Actually, that’s not true. I came to a cemented close door. The college is obviously not as busy as it was in the old days…
Still keen to start my new course, I checked a metal door to my left, also bolted closed. I knocked anyhow and then walked around the building. At a side-door, hidden by six months' worth of fallen leaves, there was a note saying that all classes had been moved to another collegio due to renovations and would start January 23. Thankfully, I had been in Spain long enough now to know that such notices may refer to years past, so I returned to the front of the building, waiting. And waiting.
Quarter after ten and there was still nobody there, so I hurried home to call the Casa de Cultura to inquire about the changed location or cancelled course. “No!”, they told me. “Por supuesto!” Of course the course is on! Just go back, and I would see them all there, the person said. And sure enough, just half an hour late, the first students started to trickle in, renovation projects in hand. The last student arrived half an hour before our class is over, keen as can be and of course without any excuse.
Our teacher, named and doubly blessed, Maria Jesus, was a spirited woman with a constant flow of words, wearing stylish brown riding boots and a white lab coat. (Turned out that we all need the latter) The class consisted of a dozen Spanish women between the ages of 50 and 80, some married, some widowed, all with time and money to spare and all loving things that were old, decrepit and with patina. I felt right in my element as they excitedly showed off their planned spring projects. Most had brought old tables, frames and trunks from their well-equipped homes, while others had found treasures on the street, literally while going dumpster diving! Unbelievably, these Spanish ladies with their perfect hair-does, their golden jewelry and neat little twin-sets under their checkered working-frocks told me which days to go to find the best treasures in the bins – on Wednesday nights before the city picks up the garbage on Thursday mornings. So here I was, a freshly accepted member of the Ladies of Ronda Dumpster Diving Society…
As a retiree exercise class sprung to life with Latin beats in the plaza outside the collegio, our group started the restoration work. Having moved here with 3 suitcases and not a stick of furniture, they let me inherit a lovely, curvatious, worm-infested skeleton of a chair, of which nobody could remember the rightful owner. Maria Jesus went through the list of items I needed for the course, including syringes to insert poison to kill the wood-bugs. Otherwise, I needed brushes and sandpaper and scrapers and all the stuff we had given away in Canada merely weeks before. "And bring some old T-shirts as rags", she told me. I had to admit that I didn’t even own an old T-shirt. Kind as they were, the group descended upon me with tools to borrow and extra stuff they let me use, so I could start stripping ‘my’ chair.
And on the next Wednesday night, I was out there with the ladies of Ronda, plundering the city’s garbage bins for restorable treasures!