Hilary Fannin: When I visit my sister I am hit by the realisation that she is happy there despite her battles

“Every cucumber you’ve ever eaten came from underneath one of those,” my brother-in-law said, dropping me to the airport at the end of my visit.

“Really?” I asked, thinking, possibly for the first time, about cucumbers (where they come from, what their hopes and dreams are). I wondered whether, like bananas, they grew upside down in bunches.

There wasn’t time to ask. I waved goodbye at the small airport, waited on the hot concourse for my delayed flight.

Kilometre after kilometre of plastic canopies stretch over the dusty earth. From my sister’s home in a small Andalusian village high above the coast, they unfold like a huge bedsheet for an incontinent giant

The toss-up in the region, southwest of Almería in southern Spain, where I’d been visiting my sister, seems to have been between high-rise tourist development along the coast or an inland terrain covered in agricultural greenhouse plastics. The plastic canopies won, and now thousands of hectares of them stretch over the dusty earth, yielding many millions of tonnes of market-garden produce.

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Kilometre after kilometre of sheathed landscape is visible, from mountains to sea. From my sister’s home in a small Andalusian village high above the undeveloped coast, it unfolds like a huge bedsheet for an incontinent giant.

Some of the emigres in my sister’s village dislike the plastics, mainly for aesthetic or environmental reasons. I read, though, that much of the water used to irrigate the crops is seawater, engineered to remove the salt. I learned also that the plastics crack under the intense sun and will need to be replaced unless a more sustainable alternative can be found.

There is a humanitarian issue, too, with many immigrant greenhouse workers said to face difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions.

This small, friendly yet oddly unknowable town is a place to live slowly, methodically, to buy bread from the bread van and fish from the fish van, both of which drive up the corkscrew hill in the mornings and park on the square

Sitting in the town’s only bar, under the false pepper tree, most of the emigres’ talk is not of regional economic infrastructure but of more quotidian matters, the day-to-day realities of life in a two-horse, two-foal town. It’s a place where, every morning, two big handsome guard dogs lead the faltering foals and their mares on to the plaza to drink from the old stone trough, before guiding them back to the campo.

The small expat cohort, like the rest of the community, live lives dwarfed by the scale of the landscape, by the weight of white heat on narrow streets, by the black bark of the perfectly spaced olive trees, by the burnt-brown mountains and the vast purple shadows that fall over them as the sun sets.

My sister has been ill; I’d come to see her after a long, Covid-induced separation. Following three years of phone calls and unsatisfactory Zoom connections, I was hit by the dead heat but also by the certain realisation that she was quite happy in this place despite the personal battles she has been fighting.

This small, friendly yet oddly unknowable town is a place to live slowly, methodically, to buy bread from the bread van and fish from the fish van, both of which drive up the corkscrew hill in the mornings and park on the square. It is a place to sit and watch the unsteady foals dip their heads into cold well water, to drink a coffee in companionable silence, to feel the powerful earth bubbling away beneath your flimsy flip-flops. I wondered, sitting in the welcome shade, if I could live like this permanently.

I got my passport out, queued up at the desk, thought about the delicate foals tottering across the town square to dip their heads in the cool, fresh water, and girded myself for a return to the city

My flight eventually materialised, rose above the polythene and the china-blue sea, and landed a few hours later in a deluge that washed the runway at Dublin Airport clean.

Extruded from the aircraft in a long, weary line to scuttle across the dark tarmac, we budget passengers looked tired. Almost everyone had too many bags; some had roaring infants. Families bickered over hard-shelled suitcases. People with sunglasses on their heads rushed for the bathrooms.

I watched a woman of about my age totter through the limbo of corridors that unfurled like a dirty ribbon between the gate and baggage reclaim. She was travelling alone, umbilically attached to an oversized tote, wearing achingly tight jeans and shiny nude high heels. Bringing up the rear, I could see where the treacherous shoes were digging into her, creating raw, blistered patches on her heels.

I wondered why she put herself through such discomfort, what vision of herself she was holding on to. What fantasy of arrival was playing out in her imagination that made the journey worth the pain? I hoped that someone was waiting to whip her off her damaged feet.

I got my passport out, queued up at the desk, thought about the delicate foals tottering across the town square to dip their heads in the cool, fresh water, and girded myself for a return to the city.