Please sir, may we have our chickens back?

Communication. It’s one of those things I take for granted until I travel. Turns out that most of the words my Spanish teacher imparted all those decades ago are completely useless. I’ve been in Spain for a month now, and not one person has asked about the pen of my uncle or the ball of my brother. Take last week when my dog started trying to projectile-eject every fluid internal drop from every available external orifice. I’m fairly sure that not one single word related to this situation had ever come up in Spanish class, no matter how creatively I tried to apply pens and balls (the dog is female).

A local acquaintance explained that in rural Spain, people don’t really have pets. The numerous feral cats just kind of hang out and dogs are pretty much on the payroll. So we…