Wool Factory, Lacilbula, Espana

He wrote a simple letter to Melody living at The Future.

Truer sentences were never written in their loving relationship. Neither of them were on the net and the map was not the territory.

She’d sold the house after 40 years and moved to a retirement complex where she lived in peace and quiet. Her long term creature comforts were guaranteed for $2400 a month.

He sent her a thick white wool scarf and green hounds-tooth shawl for Christmas. He worked under the table with Spanish elves doing their end of the year labor.

It was produced in Lacilbula, an old Roman pueblo in the Sierras. The 18th century woolen factory originally ran on water power from a mill. People who controlled the land controlled the water. The mill went under.

Thirteen obsolete mills in the valley were sold to locals or European investors and renovated for guest houses. The weekend get-a-way plan at $500 a week allowed guests to furnish their own towels.

In this part of Andalucia they said, “rich land, poor people.”

This was a lie. It was poor rocky land. Suitable for olive groves and grazing sheep and pigs.

Village men spent their lives laboring over small isolated plots of land or stood around the plaza studying their shoes, talking with fellow unemployed men waiting for their pension checks. Some worked in the village tearing down old homes and renovating them.

Many homes were in a bad state, with no insulation or central heating. Tight local architectural regulations restricted the amount of interior light. Village people preferred living in dark cramped spaces where sin and guilt multiplied, fostering acceptance and mellowed with regret.

The wool factory in Lacilbula was two long whitewashed buildings on a hill at the west end of the pueblo. Part of one building had a small sales area.

Old obsolete weaving machines collected dust. They had big iron wheels and treadles on rails for rolling back and forth. Industrial revolution memories. Large brown and red functionally finished rusting machines. They’d done their job after people made them and used them.

The factory still produced shawls, horse blankets, ponchos, scarfs, blankets, capes and serapes on two remaining machines.

A woman working under a solitary light bulb at her table sewed a factory tag in the corner of blue wool scarves. After running the needle up, down and around tag corners she lifted it and severed threads with her scissors. She adjusted her thread, a new tag, scarf, and got the needle moving again.

A man loaded wet wool blankets into a wooden machine, released two long metal handles to start two iron wheels turning. He picked up a slab of wood and wedged it between the metal bars to keep them tight and running. The wheels rotated two giant wooden hammers on an axle spinning up and down smashing brown and white blankets against the wood. Pounding water out.

He grabbed an old earthen vase off a wall, took a long cool drink of water, resealed the container and joined another man outside where they attached fresh cleaned wool blankets to long porous supports to dry in the wind. The smell of wool was thick and delicious.

Local people didn’t wear these wool products. Women walking to the Tuesday morning vegetable, clothing and plant market, small shops, or talking with their neighbors in cold January air wore somber black crocheted shawls. The wool from the factory was sold in local tourist shops and exported to Mexico and South America.