We finish Mira’s homemade pizza. She’s cooked a perfect pie, complete with a savory crust that holds the cheese, pepper, onions and marinara sauce without breaking apart. With dinner done, she opens spotify and finds Amalia Rodrigues, Portugal’s most famous woman Fado singer.

Her melodic, reviberating and intense crescendos fill the kitchen, move us out of our seat to spontaneously dance, and fill us to the brim. While I swoon to her lyrics, which I can’t understand, Mira reads aloud a wiki about her. Some of Portugal’s greatest poets wrote some of her lyrics.

We dance to another, surprisingly upbeat Fado song of hers, before we bid Adieu to Portugal’s answer to Ella Fitzgerald and Lady Day!

last cadence

last massage of her shoulders

as the music ends