Over the hills, under the moon - and off the beaten path

We have been in Alfama for six weeks, which is longer than we planned, and we are leaving tomorrow. The bags are out. The apartment looks like it belongs to someone else again, which is always the strange part of leaving a rented place. How quickly it stops being yours. Six weeks is long enough to stop being a tourist in a neighborhood and start being something slightly more difficult to define. The woman at the corner café stopped asking what we wanted after the third day. The cat on the steps of the miradouro learned that Rita would stop to acknowledge it and I would not. The steep alleys, which nearly finished us in the first week, became something we navigated without thinking. Alfama is not an easy place to live in. The streets were not designed for anyone in a hurry, which is either a feature or a problem depending on your relationship with being in a hurry. The cobblestones are polished to a degree that makes them genuinely dangerous when it rains, and it rained several times...

The splendid city of Lisbon presents countless wonders to uncover, but there is one exploration that has risen to the top of my agenda: Finding a specific tree, and below that tree - a place that belonged to my mother's youth! Many years ago she visited Lisbon with some friends. It was during the heat of summer, and she often told about how one of those friends persuaded the group to climb a steep hill to sit in the shadow of a grand tree.  Not once, but several times during their weeklong stay.  As the years went by, my mother kept the many visits as a fond memory, but I never heard the reason why they had to climb that hill.  Now - years after her death - I have the time in Lisbon to finally find this tree. And perhaps discover  why they returned, again and again, to sit and reflect in its shadow? The internet can be a good solver of life's puzzles - and I did find an answer in one of its far corners: When the fabled P...