THE JOURNAL

Drab Brown Birds

25 December Sunday

We set off to walk up in the Knockmealdowns. On the way, we saw heavy cloud cover settling over the mountains and felt some light drizzle. The walk plan quickly changed.  It became a different walk.  The new walk took us along a side of one hill. Every walk has a name. We call this walk The Des Dillon as it starts on the road out of the village and it passes his cottage before the rough track gets rougher and before it becomes a rocky muddy riverbed. We met one farmer who was off up the hill to tend to his animals.  He shook Simon’s hand and wished him a Happy Christmas.  I received a salute, from a distance.

26 December Monday

A bull has been in Joe’s front field for a few weeks now.  Twice in the time that he has been there I have seen people standing beside their parked vehicles out on the road looking at the bull. I assume they are admiring him.   As bulls go I do not think he is the biggest I have ever seen but he is large and black and strong and he does command attention. I have no idea how to judge a bull.  I just look at him.  I say hello whenever I pass if he is near enough to the track to hear me. He seems interested and he seems to respond to my voice.  I do not think it is me.  I think any voice would cause his head to turn.  In the last few days, he has mostly been in a narrow little finger of the field which seemed silly as it was the smallest place he could be.  He is sort of crammed into the space.  There does not look like enough space for him to turn around.  His face is coated in mud. Then I realized that his attention is directed across at the cows in the lower field. He is either longing for the company of the cows or he is longing for some kale. This little space is probably the only spot from which he can view the herd.

The cows are in what I call their winter Cow Kale Field. They eat the specially planted kale in a long line as they eat their way downhill. They eat together one cow beside another in a long line. There is nothing to see but the backs of the cows. Their bottoms and their legs and their tails. It will take many days maybe weeks for them to reach the bottom of the field. It is a big field. It is four or six acres. Joe once told me how big it is but I have forgotten. Each day Joe moves the little white string and the metal posts. The string stops the cows. I have never really known if this white string has a little electric charge in it or if it just looks like wire which might be electrified and that is enough to convince the cows to go no further. I do not know if a visual deterrent is enough. I do not know how visually alert cows are. However it works, I marvel that a herd of cows can be stopped by one fragile string when the other side of the string is full of things they want to eat and the side they are on holds nothing but trampled mud and stalks. Each day they eat the allotted amount of kale and then they wander off to find some grass in the next field.  The bull is watching closely from across the track. There is a stone wall and a ditch and a strong fence between him and the kale eating cows.  I do not think a white string would be sufficient to stop him if he wanted to get out.

27 December Tuesday

Twice now I have walked up the Mass Path and past the house of the Killer Dog. Twice he has not rushed out onto the road. He is no longer on the loose. I have been nervous about taking that route.  Each time he is not out I feel better but I wonder if I shall ever be completely relaxed about that stretch of road again.

28 December Wednesday

She studied the card carefully.  Her eyes are poor so she held it right up close to her face. The card had a bright red cardinal on it.  The cardinal looked extra bright against a background of snow. She looked carefully at the card and she kept repeating that the cardinal looked like a lovely bird.  She might have been sad but instead she sounded angry. She said It is a pity we have no cardinals here.  We have nothing but drab brown birds. 

29 December Thursday

The seasonal closing of the world goes on and on. Some places are open sometimes.  Today and tomorrow the post office is open. The post men are delivering the post.  After Friday the post office will stop again until next Wednesday.  I went to the shop and the postman was parked out front. He was standing near his van and handing out letters to people in front of the shop.  If someone stepped toward their car, he shouted Don’t Go!  I have something for you!   It was not our postman John. A different man does the village route. I do not know his name. Since it was not our postman I felt a little left out. I knew I would not be shouted at and summoned over.

31 December Saturday

There was a wedding in the village.  There is always a wedding at this time of year. Actually there are often quite a few weddings because there are a lot of people home From Away.  The McCarra family have gathered together from London and South Africa and California and Australia, as well as from other parts of Ireland. It is a good idea for them to do all of the celebrating that might need doing while they are Home since they have come from so far away.  There is no question that these same sons and daughters and babies will travel back in a few months when the weather might be better simply for a wedding.

The idea of Home is always at the forefront of everything. Christmas is the most important time for Home. Everyone must go Home for Christmas.  We spoke with Rob and Geraldine about their plans.  They were going to Waterford.  Geraldine was going to stay at her mother’s house with the twins.  Rob was going to stay with his parents.  On Christmas morning he would join her and the boys at her mothers house and then he would return and have his Christmas dinner with his parents.  He would stay on with his parents for several days.  She was planning to remain with her mother for at least a week, maybe longer.  Going Home from Newcastle to Waterford is not the same as returning from somewhere like Australia. It is only a 50 minute drive away.  Going Home is the thing.

1 January 2017

We have been saying Happy New Year to people since the day after Christmas. We shall continue to say Happy New Year for at least two more weeks. Every year I feel it goes on and on and every year I am determined to note the day when everyone stops saying it. It is probably not a single day but still I would like to recognize when we stop saying it.  Saying Happy New Year is a politeness, like The Salute.  It is polite to say it and rude not to say it so it is best to keep on saying it until you have said it to every single person you meet. The light is getter brighter and longer each day. Saying Happy New Year several times each day is a cheerful thing.

Ear Tag

3 January Tuesday

I have had a plastic ear tag in my jacket pocket for a few years now.  I cannot remember when I picked it up.  I cannot remember exactly where I picked it up.  I think it must have been while walking up Joe’s track toward his barns.  That is where the cows walk so one of them must have lost it.  I know that I dug it out of the mud because the bright yellow plastic caught my eye.  It showed up so vividly against the mud and muck.  At the time of finding it, I thought maybe I should tell Joe that I had found it and I should see if it was important for him to have it back.  Then I must have forgotten about it because there are always other things to think about on a walk.  Each time my hand located the tag in my pocket I probably had the same thought but I never had the thought when I was speaking with Joe.  Now I think it has been a very long time.  The cow who had that number and that tag might not even be around any more.  The cows each have two of these ear tags. One for each ear. There is a bit that goes through a hole in the ear and clips into the back part of the tag. The two parts of my tag are very tight. I cannot separate them so I think this tag must have torn a part of the cow’s ear in order to have ended up in the mud.  Farmers must get allotted numbers or maybe they apply for numbers when a calf is born.   Each calf gets a number and then they can be kept track of.  It is a form of registration.  I assume that any movement of a cow can be traced back to this number and this tag.  If each cow has two ear tags, one can be lost and the animal can still be identified. I love my ear tag. I love finding it in my pocket again and again.  A few months ago, I considered sending it to my friend who was recovering from heart surgery. I knew she would love it as much as I do.  Selfishly, I just did not want to let it go.

4 January Wednesday

The winter sun was low but very bright as it came through the window.  I thought the bathroom light had been left on.

5 January Thursday

We all enjoy spotting the Whooping Swans in various fields at this time of year. They arrive in enormous numbers with a big group wing flapping noise.  I do not go searching for them but I enjoy their surprise appearances. They choose a field and return to that field day after day. Each year they choose different fields. At various times of the day they move to a different field where they were the day before at that same time.  We heard one farmer complaining that they were eating everything in sight. This year Breda has become obsessed with the Whooping Swans.  She is keeping track of their stopping places all around the area.  She has been getting up in the dark and going to one particular field to be there when they arrive. She loves the silvery quality of their bellies as they settle down out of the darkness.  This morning someone she knows but not someone she knows very well came along while she was standing beside a gate before dawn waiting for the field to fill up with birds. I saw her in the afternoon and she was still feeling embarrassed at having had to explain herself.

6 January Friday. Little Christmas. Epiphany.

Traditionally, Little Christmas is the final day of the Twelve Days of Christmas.  Traditionally, this is the day when the women of Ireland go out together for drinks or dinner or tea, and the men stay at home and take care of all the things which the women usually, traditionally, do.  Traditionally, this is a well deserved respite from the whole holiday palaver of endless food and feeding and family and washing up and taking care of every little thing.  The day has evolved and is now called Women’s Little Christmas.  One day does not seem like much, as rewards go.  Little Christmas is also the day when the decorations and the tree, if you have one, and the cards and the wreaths and all manner of decorations get put away or thrown away.  The last day of Christmas is the last day of Christmas and after today things are schedualed to return to normal.  As well as clearing out the decorations, it is the time for clearing out the refrigerator and eating up all of your last scraps of holiday food.  If the scraps have already been taken care of, then it is the day to eat something completely different from what has been eaten over the holiday. I guess that is where the going out to a restaurant comes in.  I am not sure how the women get to accomplish all this clearing and cleaning and then still consider it a day off.   Traditionally, the idea is to put Christmas and all it entails behind you.

Since we barely celebrate, I have not got much to get rid of as far as seasonal stuff goes.  I was pleased to notice an old evergreen wreath from three years ago hanging on the outside wall of the sauna.  I moved it to a nail on the front of the round-topped shed and I felt it looked fine.  It is dead and brown.  The needles are falling off.  But from a distance it looks like a cheerful wreath.  I may leave it where it is for another week.  Then I will return it to where it was.  Maybe it will still have some needles left for next year.

Snowdrops. Sheep.

7 January Saturday

It is not everyday someone brings you a tea cosy. It is a very special day indeed when someone brings you a tea cosy.  I have never had anyone arrive with a tea cosy.  Niamh not only brought the tea cosy but she knit it herself. This tea cosy is the first tea cosy I have ever owned. I am especially pleased with the little turn-up at the bottom.  The tea in the pot stays warmer and I am sure it tastes better.

9 January Monday

The woman is a strange and timid woman.  If she sees us walking towards her she sometimes tries to change direction with her two dogs.  One of her dogs is a Jack Russell and the other is a sheep dog. She holds them tight on their leads and never lets them run loose even in the big open fields.  I think she is shy.  She is skittish. I see her often. We are not strangers. If I say good morning or hello she rarely responds.  She looks at the ground.  This woman is not old.  But she acts and moves like an old woman.  Today we were walking up the track approaching the big shed.  The shed is made of corrugated metal.  The shed is huge and high.  It is maybe three stories high.  It has three closed sides. One long side is open to the weather.  The shed is stacked to the top with bales of hay. As we approached we could hear the dogs barking like mad.  Even with all of the hay which might have muffled the sound, the metal walls and ceiling amplified the noise.  The metal made the wild barking much louder and much wilder.  As we reached the open side of the shed we saw the woman crouched down low far back between the hay bales.  She was squeezed into a narrow space with the two dogs held close to her.  They were barking like crazy. She was looking down and holding tight on the leads. We did not say hello. We just walked past as though we had not noticed her and her dogs. I think that is what she wanted.

10 January Tuesday

Few is the word used to define a quantity.  It there are a crowd of people or animals or things they will be described as A Good Few.  Or A Fair Few.  No one ever says A Lot when they could say A Fair Few. And if someone sneaks something by without anyone seeing or knowing about it the comment will be “….and few would be any the wiser.”

11 January Wednesday

Oscar joins us if we walk the road near his house. He hears our voices or our footfalls and he comes rushing down his drive and out around the corner.  He walks along the short length of road until we get to the turnoff for the boreen.  Most times he continues with us and walks all the way to the house. Lately, he has taken to turning around and  returning to his house when we leave the road.  It might be that he is getting old or it might be that he is just getting lazy. He is a bit fat in that way that labradors often get fat. When he walks in the road Oscar does not pay much attention to the cars.  He does not chase them but he does little to move out of their way. Today a car slowed right to stop while I attempted to convince Oscar to move out of the way. The motorist opened his window and shouted at me to get my dog under control.  I told him that this was not my dog.  He went on for a while about hitting a dog and the damage it might do to his car.  I told him that this was not my dog.  He said money was tight enough in January without replacing car parts.  I told him that this was not my dog.  He sputtered on a bit longer about this and that and then he apologized.  He said “I failed to wish you a Happy New Year.  That was rude of me.” I answered, “And Many Happy Returns.”  He rolled up his window and drove away. I have never seen this man before.

12 January Thursday

Snowdrops have been pushing up daily.  In the last few days they have been appearing all over the place. They seem to be everywhere and many are in places where I do not remember snowdrops.  They have multiplied and they are  forming a blanket over the lawn and through the beds.  Not one snowdrop has blossomed yet.  They are just getting themselves ready. It has been a gloomy and bitterly cold day. A little rain has fallen.  The sun has been out and bright but only for brief moments. The wind has been strong and noisy all day. Some snow blew around for a short time but it was never enough to settle on anything. An all weather day.  On a day like today, the snowdrops make me feel hopeful.  I have made each trip up and down to the barn as quickly as possible.  As I leave the house or go back down to the barn I rush across the wet grass with my shoulders hunched and a wool hat pulled down low.  I took off for another rapid journey after lunch and stopped short when I saw sheep in the grass between me and the barn.  The sheep were surprised to see me. I was surprised to see them. I counted six.  They ran to get under the fence into Joe’s field to distance themselves from me.  Joe does not keep any sheep.  Neither does the other Joe. I made inquiries by phone.  They are not sheep belonging to Donal.  Donal no longer keeps sheep.  Maybe they belong to Paul.  I went to the village with the post and bumped into Tommie.  I told him about the sheep and he was as confused as I was.  He knows for a fact that all the farmers with fields around us are cattle farmers.  He immediately asked what colour faces the sheep had. I told him that there were two with black faces, and two with white faces. I told him I had not really paid attention and I did not know what colour the other two were.  He was disgusted with my lack of attention to detail. The two with black faces had horns.  I was pleased to be able to tell him that. Tommie was certain that whoever owned those sheep would come looking for them once he knew they were missing.  When I got back home the sheep were still in Joe’s field.  They had moved far up the hill near to Scully’s wood. They were almost out of sight.  They had not returned to this side of the fence. I inspected my snowdrops and was glad to see that the sheep had neither eaten them nor trampled them too much. If it had been cows there would have been a terrible mess but even fat sheep are quite light on their feet.

Leper’s Squint

14 January Saturday

Jessie is a lucky dog.  She was rescued by Mick who met a man who was about to move to London.  The man had the dog with him and Mick admired the dog.  The man said “She is Giddy and Lively but she’d swim the English Channel for you.”  The man found it annoying that the dog would jump into any water even if that water was in a bucket.  She simply could not stay out of water.  He also found it annoying that she was supposed to be a gun dog but she was skittish around guns. When Mick asked if the man was taking his dog along to London with him the man said he was not. He said that if she had not been so skittish he might have sold her. The man said he was just that minute taking her over to a local farm and the farmer was going to shoot her.  He said it was too expensive to go to the vet to have her put down. Mick offered to take the dog even though he had no room for her himself.  He delivered her to the animal sanctuary and she was given a foster home for one week.  She has never left that home.  Not only is she Giddy and Lively and A Water Loving Dog, but she is a Lucky Dog.

15 January Sunday

We went off walking in the late morning because Simon had cut his thumb and it kept bleeding on the pages he was folding.  We thought if he walked he would not be using his thumb and it would be better. Which it was.  We went over to Goatenbridge and walked through the forestry where the mosses were bright and glowing green.  Eventually we circled back along the road which was lovely because we were tucked right under the mountains. from inside the forest we could not see the mountains but from the road the mountains were completely present. There were many fields and houses to look at along the road and even a little bridge I had never looked at closely. You do see more on foot.  We walked and walked for much longer than we had planned to walk. It was a beautiful cold day. The sun was bright all the time.  We met several people that we knew and so we exchanged Happy New Year greetings.  One of the people wanted to talk and talk and talk.  He wanted to talk our ears off so he did.

16 January Monday

Snowdrops are fully in blossom now.  They are everywhere.  There are even more than I thought there were when they were first appearing in bud.  Em’s little stone has a lovely cluster of snowdrops all around it. The sheep did not destroy them.  I never heard any more about those sheep after they disappeared up over the hill.  Either the man who owned the sheep came looking for them and led them off home or else enough people spoke of them around the area and eventually the sheep which were missing and which maybe had not even been noticed as missing were claimed and recovered.  Maybe they just found their own way home, eating as they went.  No one seemed worried so there was no need for me to worry.

17 January Tuesday

Our address remains a problem for a lot of people.  The Dutch post office continues to be outraged about it.  They have refused to deliver things to us as there are no numbers in the address.  We have always made up codes for them and also for the Germans, as well as for any internet ordering.  The made up numbers amuse John the Post. Most times we write our address one word per line. My mother says it looks like a shopping list. Often I have to explain it to people from away.

Ballybeg is the townland.  A townland suggests a small area of land which is locally recognizable. A narrow stream at the bottom of the meadow is the beg. Bally, from the Irish for little town, is the immediate settled area. In this case it is just our one house.  Further down the fields and on the exact same stream there is another townland of Ballybeg, but that is in the village of Newcastle.  Ballybeg is an extremely common name in Ireland.  There are hundreds of Ballybegs. Or if not hundreds, there are at least dozens. The playwright Brian Friel set his plays in a fictional place called Ballybeg.  Ballybeg is so much a work of his fiction now that sometimes people are surprised that we really live in an actual Ballybeg. I am not sure if a townland and a parish are the same thing.  Maybe I should not be beginning this description of place without some research.

Grange is the village.  Grange is another common name. There are lots of Granges. The village center has Frank’s shop, a church, a graveyard, and an elementary school.  After that there are miles of farmland in all dirctions.  We are at one far end of Grange.  We are nearly Newcastle.  If we were to be more specific we could say we are just  below Knockeen or up from Ballynamuddagh or down from Tullameghlan.  These are three other surrounding townlands. There is no sign anywhere with these names on them. Townlands are not identified by signposts. People just know townlands because that is how we all know where we are.

Clonmel is the biggest town nearby. It might be the largest town in the county. I am not certain about that.  It is not a city because it does not have a cathedral.  It has a population of about 16,000.  Laurence Sterne was born there.  The word Clonmel means Meadow of Honey and it is indeed a very fertile area, known especially for apples and a healthy bee population.  It is about 8-10 miles from us, depending how you go.

Tipperary is the county. Tipperary is the largest county in Ireland.  On our license plates we used to have TS or TN to denote Tipperary North or Tipperary South. Now the newer cars just have a T.  Our bit of the county borders closely onto County Waterford.  There is a town with the name Tipperary too.  Any address there would read Tipperary Tipperary.  Sort of like a stutter.

Ireland should be written as the Republic of Ireland, or Eire, to differentiate from Northern Ireland which is still legally part of the United Kingdom.  We live in a separate and free republic which is not ruled by a monarchy.

So, from the bottom up, everything gets more specific and closer to our exact location. To aid in locating places we were assigned post codes last year.  The government was so tentative when they sent out our new codes to us that they told us we did not have to use them if we did not want to.  I am not sure what good they are if no one uses them.

19 January Thursday

There is one traffic light in Ardfinnan.  It was installed last year.  The stone bridge over the river is a worry.  It cannot take the weight anymore.  If the bridge is closed, life is not possible. There is only the one bridge. Many people in each direction will be cut off from one another and from the places where they need to go.  The traffic light now allows a single line of cars and trucks and tractors over the bridge.  The wait is not long.  There are never more than five or six vehicles waiting at any one time.  The short wait takes a lot of stress off the bridge.  If the bridge collapses no one knows how long it will be needed to build a replacement. No one wants to think about a future without the bridge.

Greg was waiting at the traffic light in Ardfinnan today when a swan crashed into the bridge and tumbled  onto the road. He got out of his car and carried the swan across the bridge and down to the green. He lowered it into the water.  It swam away.  He felt that it swam away happily.  No one else crossing the bridge showed the slightest bit of interest. They were not interested in the swan nor were they interested in him. He said when he picked up the swan it’s heart was pounding.  He said that the nearer he and the swan got to the water the more calm the swan’s heartbeat became. Greg felt himself getting calmer too.

22 January Sunday

All of the plants in their large heavy flower pots were carried into the barn for the winter.  I cut the plants back and tried to give each one sufficient window space to get light through the winter months.  I watered the plants over several weeks before I had to accept that not a single one of the plants was alive.  The early heavy frosts killed everything well before I got around to moving them inside. I can still walk out and into the garden and find fresh leaves of mint, thyme, sage and rosemary.  No amount of frost affects their growth in the ground all through the winter. I am now avoiding the job of carrying all of the heavy pots back outside but I will have to do it.  It is depressing to be working at the big table surrounded by dead plants.

24 January Tuesday

Three narrow slits in the front of the Augustinian Abbey down at Molough were purposely included in the building so that lepers could watch a mass without entering the church and infecting everyone else with leprosy. I am not sure how much could be heard through the slits.  These slits were called Leper’s Squints.  I assume the word squint was because anyone looking through could only use one eye.

Lumpy Fields

8 March Wednesday

Dawn lives downhill from a dairy farm. She rents her house from the farmer. Water in the house is at the mercy of the farmer and the needs of his cows.  The water supply for the house and the water supply for the cows both come from the same well. During morning and evening milking times there is no water in Dawn’s house because the farmer must wash the milking parlour and flush out the milking equipment. The farmer calls this Cow Time. His cows have priority over his tenants.  If his cows are grazing in one of the fields which is lower than the house, water gets pumped down to them for drinking.  Then there is not enough pressure for it to go back uphill to the rented house. Keeping water stored in 5 litre bottles is an all year round job at Dawn’s house.  The filled-up bottles of water are kept in the shed so that there is always water even when there is no water.

9 March Thursday

Breda and I walked over the small unevenly shaped fields behind Jimmie and Esther’s farm.  They no longer keep cows themselves so they rent out the fields to another farmer. He grazes his cows there in the months of good weather. In the winter Breda is free to walk out with the dogs with no worry about electric fences or climbing over gates or meeting cows or bulls. There are a lot of fields. I lost track of how many there were.  Some of them are deep with wet. They are boggy after all the rain.  None of the fields are large.  They are not the kind of fields where the ditches have been torn out to make large expanses easy for big modern equipment to get in and move around. There is no ploughing nor planting in these fields.  Perhaps they are fertilized a bit with a small tractor just to make sure that the grass keeps growing.  Cattle move from field to field to eat and eat all the grass until they eat everything and then they get moved to another field. These fields are never flattened by heavy equipment rolling over them so they are uneven with cow hoof prints and the pushing up of gnarly tree roots. Walking though these lumpy fields in the sunshine was a pleasure even while it was hard work. There were no cows. We saw a buzzard, a fox, and a pheasant.

10 March Friday

The path up to Johnnie’s has been cleared.  There are no longer horizontal trees to duck underneath.  There are no more fallen branches to crawl under.  The brambles are trimmed way back. There is still a muddy uphill climb over slippery mossy rocks, but now I can stretch my arms straight out from side to side before I touch anything.  It is now a big airy tunnel rather than a narrow tunnel.  It will get overgrown again soon but for now it feels like a whole new place to walk.

11 March Saturday

I bought the first rhubarb of the year from Keith and Jim at the Farmers Market. I was looking forward to preparing it and eating it.  I poked through the ginger in the supermarket.  There were only a few scruffy pieces and they were shriveled. I was picking through to find the best one I could find.  The young man whose father ran the supermarket for many years saw me.  He has taken over the running of the market from his father and he is eager to be helpful.  He loves his work. He showed me that there were some packages of organic ginger.  The organic ginger looked fresh and firm but it was expensive and there was an awful lot of it in one packet. I told him that I only wanted one piece today.  I told him that I just wanted some ginger to cook with the first rhubarb. I said I would keep sorting through the loose bits.  He came over to help me in the looking. We found a few small pieces which met my approval.  He put them into a little bag and then he threw in a few more.  He said, Now put those right into your pocket.  There will be no charge.  This is between me and yourself. 

12 March Sunday

The moon is full.  It popped up and sat right on the edge of the hill for a long time before it rose any higher. Now it is full and bright and high in the sky.  Tonight will never be all the way dark.

13 March Monday

There are daffodils in bud and daffodils in blossom. Daffodils are everywhere. There is the promise of more daffodils to come even while enjoying the early ones. Gorse. Forsythia. Lesser Celandine. Primroses are beginning to bloom down the boreen.  Every blossom is a yellow blossom. Things are burgeoning.  Nests are being built.  The mornings are noisy with birdsong.

There can only be one Front.

14 March Tuesday

It has been four years now since her father died. She was mad at him when he died and she remains mad. She goes to his grave nearly every day to tell him how angry she is. She also tells him how much she misses him and she tells him how much work there is for her to do all because he is not there to do it. Her mother died last year. She is not angry with her mother. She saves all her rage for the father.

15 March Wednesday

One bit of Joe’s field hovers high above the ditch. A cow standing up there makes the height confusing. It is not like the cow is merely looking over the ditch with its head visible.

16 March Thursday

Taking To The Bed is what people do when they are poorly. They might be feeling sad and depressed or they might be ill with a cold or a flu.  When someone is said to be Taking To The Bed, it is best not to ask too many questions.

17 March Friday

An elderly dog lives just down the road from Frank’s shop. The dog is deaf and his eyes are not good. He makes a visit to Frank’s shop every morning. A white line is painted on the road. It starts just at the point where the old dog lives.   The line goes right down the middle of the road. Not many of these roads have a painted line. The old dog is fortunate that there is a line because with his poor eyes, he needs the line to get to the shop. He walks right along the white line with his head down keeping his full attention on it. The white line takes him to the shop and the white line takes him home again. When he gets to the shop he wanders around outside for a little while. He smells things and he pees on things. Then he sits down on the step. When Frank sees the dog he comes out and gives him a piece of yesterday’s cake or a bun. After the snack, the old dog takes a nap and when he wakes up he goes to the center of the road and walks along the white line until he arrives back home. We all know this dog and his scheduale. He cannot hear a car coming up behind him so it is up to us to be aware and to be careful if we are driving that bit of road mid-morning.

18 March Saturday

There is a particular way for houses to be built of concrete blocks and then for the front of the house to be clad in stone so that from head on it looks as if it is a stone cottage. It is easy to see that the building is not completely made of stone as the sides remain concrete walls. No one seems bothered that the building has two different finishes. The stone clad front is an attempt for the house to look fancier and better presented to the world. And as Mick declared when admiring a newly built house, “There can only be one Front.”

19 March Sunday

Breda and I walked the lumpy fields again today. We love these fields. We were discussing the fields and how they join up. We know that each one must have a name because how else would anyone be able to say where they were going or where they were putting the cows if they could not put a name to the place. One of the fields has a clash in it. A clash is a kind of saucer-like indent in the land. It looks like it could be full of water but it is not. That is the easiest field for us to give a name to. One is shaped kind of like a corner piece. We decided to attempt a Field Count but we were talking as we were walking and we kept losing our count. We think that we ended up with nine but there are several fields we did not even walk into so we still do not have a total. And anyway I think we might have lost count somewhere between eight and nine.

20 March Monday

The walls that contained the compost heap have been collapsing for a long time. Instead of another make-do repair, the bin has now been completely rebuilt by Andrzej. He built it in the way that he decided it should be built and not at all the way it had been before. The only thing about it is that is the same is that the structure has been built with the re-used wood of a pallet. The pallet he found to use was a painted pallet. It was bright blue. Suddenly the compost bin is colourful and exciting. And it has a hinged cover.

Inside in the water

21 March Tuesday

There are two Oscars to meet on each walk up the path and around. The first Oscar is a young sheepdog with chestnut brown coloring. He is always desperate with desire for a tummy rub. He rushes out from the yard running low to the ground. He has rolled over and is waiting for a rub well before I reach him. After that first rub he stands up and hops about with pleasure. He hops with all four feet off the ground at the same time. Then he rolls over for more. If there is more than one person on a walk, we have to do a minimum of two good tummy rubs each before we can continue on our way. The second Oscar is the older dog. He is a big black Labrador. He rushes out from any number of locations, all in close proximity to his house. He greets anyone passing on foot with enthusiasm but he does not seek any rubbing, scratching, patting or touching. This Oscar has little interest in affection. Just being together is enough for him. He wants a person to walk with. I am always happy to have him walk me home. And since he is getting a bit fat in his older age he needs as many walks as he can find walkers to go along with in a day. Living where he lives he is often without any walk at all as there are few people passing by.

23 March Thursday

We woke up to snow yesterday. About 4 inches of fat heavy wet snow. It looked beautiful and it covered everything thickly. It was a complete freak.  We have entire winters, year after year after year, with no snow at all. Now, in late March, we get this lovely surprise snowfall. I am certain not everyone felt it was lovely. It could not be called a storm. It was a quiet gentle falling and all the time that the snow was falling the birds continued to sing as if it were another spring morning. The snow stopped by mid-morning and in the afternoon a soft rain began. By nightfall most of the snow had been washed away. Today the daffodils are popping back up again as if they had not been completely flattened to the ground by the weight of the snow. A very few of them have had their stems bent and their blossoms are hanging down. The bent daffodils will not recover but most of the others have shown amazing resilience. They are up and blowing in the breeze as if there had never been snow on top of them. The hills and the mountains remain white.

24 March Friday

I stepped out of the barn to feel the warm sun. It is hard to believe that we had snow on the ground just two days ago. There is a sharp wind but in any sheltered spot the sun is hot. I sat down on the bench just outside the door and turned my face up to the sun. I lasted about three minutes in this pleasant position. Sticks and straw and leaves and little puffs of insulation material fell down onto my face and my shoulders. The starlings have been nest building in their normal spot up under the eaves. The ground is covered with the mess of construction. I was foolish to choose that bench for sitting.

25 March Saturday

Two baby jackdaws fell down the chimney. They were young. They had no feathers yet. They were naked except for a tiny bit of fluff. No one was near the chimney when they fell. Gavin found them because he and another lad were in and out of the bar painting the loos. It was early in the day and there was no one else around. He showed the birds to Rose. The babies were still alive so she put them into an open cardboard box with an old tea towel. The Inspection Woman made a surprise visit. She came in shortly after the birds got settled into their box. Rose quickly put the box out in the small room that people walk through to go to the outdoor smoking area. She assumed the Inspection Woman would not go that far. The woman was busy looking everywhere for any breaches in Health and Safety. She reprimanded Rose for having an old and barely visible sticker for Silk Cut cigarettes on the underneath of the hinged bar hatch. No one ever sees the Silk Cut sticker except when Rose opens the hatch to go in or out from behind the bar to clear a table. The sticker has been coated over with varnish and old smoke for years and years now. It is barely visible. It is impossible to see where the sticker ends and where the wood it is stuck onto begins. The Inspection woman said that the sticker violates a law about openly advertising cigarettes. She made notes about a few other things and then she walked out the back door to go out to the smoking area. She squealed when she saw the two little jackdaws in the box. She asked no questions. She just said Get Them Out of Here! in a loud and imperative voice. She continued on with her examination. The birds were not mentioned again and Rose wonders if they will be noted in the letter with its inevitable list which the woman will be sending out later in the week.

26 March Sunday

Inside is another word which gets regularly used with undue emphasis. When Inside is used along with In, I think it just says the same thing twice.  I cannot get used to this doubling up of prepositions: Margaret is inside in the hospital. Teddy is inside in the shed. Gussie is inside in Clonmel. The dog is inside in the water. A dog can be in the water. But I do not understand a dog being inside the water.  And inside in the water is a step towards complete confusion.

Since God Was A Child

28 March Tuesday

The well cleared path which was so wide open is already closing in again. There are two fallen trees. One pretty much blocks anyone getting past it. I made it through this morning but with difficulty. I was only able to do it because I crawled underneath on my hands and knees. This tree needs a small saw and about thirty minutes of work to clear a walking way through it. The other place is not really a fallen tree. It is just ivy covered branches which toppled because of the weight of the ivy tugging on the dead wood. It only blocks a portion of the path. A narrow space around the right of the the ivy clump allows enough room to pass. Cow parsley and the Alexanders are growing fast.  They seem to be getting taller by the minute. I think they will be waist high within a week.

29 March Wednesday

This house is difficult for me. It has always been too big. It is not a large house but I am small. Many things are out of reach. I spend a lot of time unable to get to things. I can only turn on the light over the kitchen counter by using a long wooden spoon to press the on/off switch up on the plug socket. A short wooden spoon will not do the job. There is a second light above the stove. To turn that one on I have to get out the step stool and climb up on the counter. Once on the counter I balance on one knee while I plug the light into its socket. I have to do the same thing in order to turn it off. It is a precarious bit of balancing. I keep meaning to find an easier solution or at least to find a different light.

31 March Friday

The cows had been milked and they were on the way to a field somewhere further down the road. I waited as they ambled along. I did not see anyone driving them from behind so I kept the car rolling slowly. If any of the cows stopped or turned too far left or right, the proximity of my vehicle convinced them to keep walking. After a few minutes someone appeared on a quad bike. He slipped in front of me and zig-zagged along the road. The lad was young. He was wearing a bright red wooly hat pulled down low on his head and he was standing up on the quad as he held the handlebar in one hand and he texted onto his phone with the other hand. Every so often he shouted to a cow who wandered to the ditch on the roadside. He whooshed back and forth from left to right with the quad and he texted and he shouted and he never stopped doing any of these things. The cows did not stop either or if they stopped it was not for long. They did not walk any faster but they did not go slower either. After a while they all turned left into a field and I continued on my way alone.

2 April Sunday

We were having a cup of tea together. Pam asked each of us what was our favourite kind of potato crisps. She was happy to agree with everyone’s choice. She said she loves every kind of crisp that has ever been made. She especially likes the ones with chili flavouring. What she really likes is to eat crisps in bed when the lights are out. She loves the sound of crunching in the dark and she loves the salt on her lips. I asked if she did not worry about scratchy crumbs in her bed later in the night. She said she has been eating crisps in bed for longer than she can remember. She rarely drops one in the bedclothes. She said that at 93 years of age, she feels certain that she has perfected her method.

3 April Monday

A soft boiled egg is called a Guggy Egg. The word Guggy means the yolk of the egg will be runny.  The man in the barber shop talked about making Shepherd’s Pie and serving it with a poached egg on the top. He said that when the egg and the pie are cut into the Gugginess comes running down into the pie. He said that this is a wonderful thing. He announced firmly that anyone who eats Shepherd’s Pie this way will never again eat Shepherd’s Pie without a Guggy Egg on top of it.

7 April Friday

When someone says something has been the way it is “Since God was a Child” you can be sure that there is no chance of it changing now.

Wild Garlic

8 April Saturday

Things are dry. There has been no rain. Or there has been a bit of rain here and there but it is never a soaking rain. It has not been the kind of rain to water the crops. The dirt tracks across Joe’s fields are dry. There is mud up the path even though no where else is wet. A little spring half way up the hill feeds into the mass path so it is always muddy and mossy. Walking up makes me look down. I have to keep track of the slippery stones and the squishy muddy places. I have to watch where I put my feet. At this time of year it is good to be looking down anyway because there are so many new things to see. Each day new plants come up. There are primroses, wild garlic, violets lots of violets, several kinds of ferns, wild irises and many broken birds eggs. The eggs are open and the small birds are gone. I want to gather up the different shades of blue halves but unlike lichen or horse chestnuts, I know the shells will smash in my pocket before I get home. Instead I scoop up big handfuls of wild garlic on each trip. The white blossoms are starting to open so a handful of garlic leaves now looks more than ever like a lovely bouquet. If I meet someone out on the road, I am asked what it is.   I explain and describe its many pleasurable uses. No one looks enthused or interested. Without exception, I offer them the wild garlic. When I offer my handful to anyone, they accept it but I do not think they want it. A mistrust of food found free in nature is ongoing. People are accepting it to be polite to me. They might not even put it into water when they get home. They probably drop it on the side of the road as soon as I am out of sight.

9 April Sunday

More and more often I find Old Oscar lying across the road. When he hears or sees a car or a tractor he gets up slowly and carefully.  He is older than Young Oscar but he is not an old dog.  He is not stiff and slow.  He can run as well as any dog. He gets up slowly to show that he does not like being interrupted.  He wants others to wait. His deliberate careful movements give me time to think about his way of being in charge.

10 April Monday

There is a curtain at the kitchen door. During the day it is pulled over to the left side. It is tied out of the way with a wrinkled blue ribbon which I always intend to replace but I never do. At night I close the curtain because the stable door is a homemade door. It was once a regular door but Simon cut it in half and made it into a double opening door. It is draughty. That is not the fault of the top and bottom parts of the door fitting. They are pretty snug. The sides are a little less tight fitting than is normal. In the winter and on any cold windy day there is a breeze coming through the cracks. The full length curtain pulled across the door at night keeps a lot of wind out. Perhaps it keeps the heat in. I made the curtain. It has long loops of fabric sewn onto the top edge. The idea of the loops was that they be generous so they would be easy to slide across the wooden dowel which I used as a curtain rod.   But it is not easy to slide the fabric across the wood. Maybe metal would have been better. It might have been more slippery. I have to use both hands to tug the curtain open in the morning. I have to use both hands while I stand on tip-toes. Sometimes it is just too hard to get the loops sliding across and I am not able to stretch myself tall. I think rubbing a waxy candle along the wood might make for easier sliding. I think of it and I always mean to do it later. It is quicker to drag out the little two step ladder. The curtain was supposed to be a simple thing. Instead it takes two hands and a big stretch. Tip-toes. Step ladder. Open in the morning and close at night. Some people have doors that fit tight and do not let in the wind. But I do not.  This is where I live.  I live here and nothing is easy.

11 April Tuesday

Jer informed me that it is common knowledge that a pregnant woman never enters a graveyard. It may be common knowledge but it is new to me. Even if a woman’s own father has died she will not enter the graveyard for his burial. She will be at the funeral but not at the burial. It is something to do with not letting Death and Life touch. But a tiny baby can be taken into a graveyard for a burial with no worries. Once there, the baby will have a tiny clump of the soil for the burial plot put on him or her, just above the heart and underneath the bib. For a baby this is good protection.

12 April Wednesday

Michael was rung by the hospital. A woman informed him that he was still on the waiting list for an electro-cardiogram. He was asked if he was happy to still be on the waiting list. He said he was happy to wait. He then spent two days fussing about the phone call and the question. Of course he would rather not be waiting. Of course he would rather the electro-cardiogram be done and over with. He worried out loud and he worried by himself. Finally he rang back and he spoke to the same woman. He said, “Maybe I did not really understand your question.” He said, “If I am not happy to be on the waiting list, what is the alternative?” She said, “There isn’t one.”

13 April Thursday

It cannot be very long since the first swallow arrived but I cannot remember seeing it.  Already the swallows seem to be back with such a lot of busy swooping that I cannot remember them not being here. Some people mark the first swallow on their calendar so that they can check this years arrival with last years arrival and maybe with the last four or five years of arrivals but even though I do not usually mark the day I do tend to remember the first one I saw in a year.

14 April Friday

Today is Good Friday. There have been all the usual discussions on the radio, in the papers and over the counter. It seems certain that this will be the last year when the Good Friday Alcohol Ban is in effect. After ninety years, the government is passing something soon and apparently without much resistance to say that none of it matters any more. Bars and restaurants and shops will be able to sell and to serve alcohol. People are already bemoaning the passing of this outdated law and it has not yet come up for a vote. For years the Thursday night before Good Friday has seen packed pubs and shops selling loads of drink. The idea seemed to be that if people were told they could not drink they would do everyhting they could to make sure that they did drink. A bit of it was about defying authority and a bit was about the joy of the forbidden. It was well known that people could drink in hotel bars if they were registered guests or if they knew the bartender. And with a ticket to travel the bars in railway stations or airports were another possible drinking place. I just learned that the Dublin Dog Show, formerly held over Easter weekend, was another place where drink was served but only to people who had dogs in the competitions. It became the norm to borrow a dog for the day if you did not own one and to take it along with you just to have a place to sit and drink. Boring and a bit confusing for the dogs. Normal access to alcohol will make the country a little bit more like everywhere else but no doubt the stories of outwitting the ban will continue for a good many years. Poor Rose.  Christmas Day and Good Friday have been the only two days of the year when she could sleep late.

15 April Saturday

She is a very shaky elderly woman.  I do not know her name but she comes to the market every Saturday. She has been getting more fragile in the last few years.  Today Jim mentioned the lack of rain and she launched into a long tirade about the problems of the dry land. She quickly worked herself into a rage.  The grass was not growing and the cows were not making enough milk and once their bodies got into the habit of making less milk they would not easily return to making the amount of milk that their bodies should be making.  The variations of this problem went on for twenty minutes and then she stopped talking abruptly and she walked away.

There is some sort of big Easter family event being set up for Easter Sunday and Monday. Right at the edge of the farmers market there are suddenly toilets set up for the public. Two for women and two for men.  Each cubicle has a little sink included. They will not be there by next week.

17 April Monday

It is still dry.  Nights are cold and mornings are chilly.  Some days get warm but mostly the wind keeps things from warming up. I walked through Joe’s fields carefully trying to step around the lumpy mashed down hoofprints of the cows and in between the cow pats.  Under the fence and through another field. Under another fence and through another field.  I went through four fields and then got onto the dirt track which is just for tractors and cows.  It is rocky. Between the hoof indents and the stone it is all rough walking. The only place where it was wet was right down in the hollow where there is no where else for water to go. I think the water and mud there just came from a leaky water pipe leading to a drinking tough. Everywhere things look green and lush. Nothing looks dry but all conversations keep coming back to the lack of rain.

Rainlessness

19 April Wednesday

I took a short cut down a street in Clonmel.  At the corner a plastic sleeve folder was wired to the hedge.  Inside the sleeve was a sign which read WALL GREASED DO NOT SIT.  The wall beneath the hedge was about as high as my thigh.  It had been daubed with globs of some kind of grease.  Maybe it was axle grease. It was not dry. It would probably never be dry.  It will make a terrible mess of a person’s clothes if someone sits down on it. There is a school across the street.  Perhaps the resident of that house is weary of school children sitting on the wall.  But what about an elderly person who might need a rest on the way home from the shops? Both the wall and the hedge and the grease continued right around the corner where there was a second sign, exactly the same as the first one.

20 April Thursday

As always, it is slippery and wet going up the Mass Path. It is the only place that is wet. I was walking carefully through the mud when I was pushed hard from behind.  I knew I was alone so the hefty nudge startled me. It was the big yellow labrador who appears every few weeks. He wanted to walk in front of me not behind me. I have no idea who he is nor where he lives. We walked together as far as the tar road and then he turned and went off into a field. I have not seen him since.

21 April Friday

The man on the radio was giving advice about calling in to visit elderly people just as a way to make certain that they are all right and that they know someone is keeping track of them. He said that this is important in the country where houses are far apart but it is important in the city too where the neighbours are not who they used to be and the person still living there might not know anyone around any more even if once they knew everyone on the street. He said that calling in did not have to mean going in. He kept repeating that there is no need to go into the house. Just a brief hello and A Standing Up Tall on the step was enough.  He said, “You don’t have to go and live in the house.”

22 April Saturday

There is a squished thing in the road.  It has been there for months now.  Maybe it has been there for a year.  It was the kind of long narrow tube that is used for squeezing silicon or adhesive or bitumin or some other building stuff. The tube gets fitted into a sort of gun and then whatever is inside gets squeezed out through the nozzle.  From the first time I noticed it flattened on the tarmacadam it was already too late to know what it had held.  It had been run over several times and the printed information which described its contents was already faded to an all over grey. There was nothing to identify what had been inside.  The nozzle is unbroken. Whatever it was that was inside was tough stuff. It has survived in its flattened condition for a long time with tractors and lorries and cars rolling over it. It has not broken down at all. It is well stuck to the road.  In the midst of my spring time walking and my noting of each new kind of flower as it arrives, I check to see that the squished tube is still in place. Speedwell. Vetch. Apple Blossom. Bluebells. Garlic flowers. Primroses. Stitchwort. Cow Parsley. Flattened tube.

23 April Sunday

The field across the meadow is very steep.  It is so steep and so straight up and down that when Paul’s cows are walking along the top edge of the field in a long drawn out single line, they look like they could tumble off the field. The field looks like it is vertical and flat.

24 April Monday

It rained for six minutes today.  A tentative little drizzle that barely started before it stopped again.  Everyone speaks of the lack of rain. It is an endless topic of discussion.  The fields seem to be growing with barley and corn and various crops but nothing is growing as quickly as it should be growing. The cows are eating grass faster than it is coming up. Most days are cool, overcast and grey.  It looks like it should rain. It feels like it should rain. We wish it would rain or we wish the sun would come out.

Cuckoo

25 April Tuesday

I stopped in the middle of the shop as I tried to remember what I had had on my list because I had left my list at home.  A woman came near to me and then she stopped.  I guess she was waiting for me to move but I just stood still.  After a few seconds she asked “Can I cross you?” I was confused so I said yes.  She passed in front of me and around the corner to continue with her shopping.

26 April Wednesday

There was the shape of a car in the field near Moloughstown.  Was it a ghost limestone dust car or maybe a tarpaulin-covered car in the field?  Was the shape formed in the back of a tipper truck and dumped?  Was it strange nitrogen granules for the next crop of oil-seed rape to be grown later in that place?  A few days later, I walked past that field and the ghostly car shape was gone.  No trace of the grey dust remained.  I have no idea what it was.

27 April Thursday

Michael corrected me.  He said that we live BEHIND the O’Byrnes not BELOW the O’Byrnes.  We have always said BELOW because we are down the hill from the O’Byrnes. We speak of them as being ABOVE at the farm, so if they are Above we are Below. He said that they are closer to the road so they are in Front and therefore we are Behind.

28 April Friday

I have a fair number of photographs of things made with tyres. Mostly the uses are utilitarian like holding down a huge sheet of black plastic on a slurry heap, or stopping vehicles bumping into a cement wall but there are a lot of floral and planting arrangements in tyres. Usually the tyres are painted.  Each spring they get a fresh coat of paint before being replanted. Two swans made out of tyres have been in place in front of Mr. Bumbles in town for several years.  They never seem to get repainted and the painted surface looks no worse for it.  A reddish beak is painted onto the white tyre.  In the body of the swan is planted a brown spiky plant. They are safely behind a little fence so that no one can steal them. This year a box of pansies has been placed between the two swans.

29 April Saturday

Already it is sad not to see young Oscar at his house.  He has moved to Goatenbridge with his people. They had only been renting the house up the track for a year and have now decided to buy a house and to settle in the area.  After years of working on water projects in Tanzania and other parts of Africa, they now feel the need to stay in one place for the children and their schooling. The toys and the trampoline are gone.  I shall miss Oscar and his rolling over for tummy rubs. I miss him already.

30 April Sunday

Last night there was wild gusting wind and lashing rain all night long.  The blustery noise was so erratic and demanding that I had to close the window which is something I rarely do. Each time I relaxed into sleep another huge crashing gust would sort of whack into the house. This morning things were blown all around the place.  Nothing was where it had been left and the few garments which had been hanging on the washing line were either wrapped tightly around the line or lying wet and bedraggled on the grass. A few things had flown out into Joe’s field.  The rain was welcome and this morning the land is saturated. Everything glows green and bright with the big amount of water.

1 May Bank Holiday

The month of May arrives with a lot of superstitions. I think there might be more for May than for any other month but maybe I only hear more. The weather is better and people are more willing to slow down for a chat.  I am not sure if the superstitions are all pisogues. I know that a pisogue is a local superstition, but I am not certain that all superstitions are pisogues.  One thing I have learned is that it is imperative to walk out in the dew on a morning in May. It does not matter which morning. Any morning is fine as long as it falls within the month. If you do not do this you will have bad luck and if you do do it you will have good luck. Another superstition is that you must hear the Cuckoo during the month of May.  If you do not hear the Cuckoo, you will die. The minute the person saying this is finished saying it, he or she quickly reassures the listener by saying that of course you will die at some point anyway so maybe not necessarily in May, and maybe not this May, but still it is best if you do hear the Cuckoo during the month. Kathleen told me that you should not dust the house in May.

2 May Tuesday

The sun has arrived after the big rain and after so many days or weeks of grey heavy skies. Already I cannot remember anything but this brightness.  It is clear. Everything looks cheerful. The sun did not set until nine last night. When the days are grey it is hard to know when it is going down. Now the days just get longer and longer and longer. Plants are growing by the minute.  The path is more and more overgrown.  Some of the cow parsley is already up and over my head.  The stickyback climbing stuff is on everything and acts like a trap I must struggle though in the overgrown places. I just learned that it is called Robin-Run-The-Hedge.  A much nicer name than Sticky Back.  The nettles are all tangled up with the stickiness. A sting from the youngest of the nettles is the worst.  This morning I got stung in the face while swatting a bunch of cow parsley. This sting will be with me all day.

Last bluebells. High banking. Knockmealdowns.

8 May Monday

John the Post has been in hospital. We have been worried about him.  We are glad to hear that he is back at home now but he is not yet ready to return to work. A new substitute postman came this morning.  We know the three other postmen who have been substitutes but this was a new man. He brought a package to the door and he said that it was registered and that it must be signed for.  He asked Simon if he was Simon.  Simon said yes, so the postman said Okay. Good. I will sign your name for you. He signed Simon’s name for him with a signature that looked nothing like Simon’s signature while Simon stood there and watched him do it.

9 May Tuesday

The man in the waiting room pulled his chair out from the row of seats which were lined up against the wall. He sat himself right in the middle of the waiting room beside the elderly woman he had rolled into the room in a wheelchair. There was no room for her chair to go against a wall so he moved himself out to be next to her. He spoke in a loud and clear voice so that she could hear him. He spoke almost without taking a breath. She nodded sometimes but mostly she just listened or perhaps she did not listen. Her head was bent down well into her chest.  It was impossible to know if she was paying attention.  He never stopped talking. None of us could read whatever we had been reading because his central spot and his loud delivery took over the room. He told her about a group coupon project on the internet and about a three bedroom holiday house she could rent in Sligo for two nights for a song. He asked her about some family photographs and he told her she could get them framed. He said he had seen some nice wooden frames in Aldi’s. They were real wood not just some plastic that looked like wood and he said there was a good dark wood available or some nice light wood too and if she were to decide to frame the photographs he would go and get the frames she needed. He said he had gone there to buy a picnic basket but once in the store he decided that he did not need a picnic basket. He decided that all he really needed was two lunch boxes. He said A picnic is a different thing today. He said You no longer need to replicate the dinner table at home.  He said, Indeed you can just buy a box of salad and call it a picnic.

10 May Wednesday

The cows were in Joe’s field all night. I could hear them tearing grass and moaning softly from my bed.  I did not hear the tractor coming this morning to lead them away. They were just gone when I woke up.  I thought they might return after milking but they must have gone to graze another field. All day dozens of crows have been swarming over the ground. The very dry earth is completely churned up from where the cows moved about all day yesterday.  The crows are taking advantage of the disturbed soil to feast on worms.

11 May Thursday

I am fond of the place names made of three complete words squished together with no spaces in between the words. No doubt they are a form of translation from the Irish, but when I look them up I can never tell if the translation is literal or if it is something else altogether. There is one place with the name Twomilebridge and another called Two Mile Bridge. I do not know why one is crammed together into one word while the other is three separate words. Twopothouse. Fourmilewater. Fivemiletown. Sixmilebridge. Ninemilehouse.

We used to drive through Watergrasshill as we traveled home from Cork. After the motorway was built, we no longer drove through it. Watergrasshill is now just an exit. Watergrasshill is a village I have no reason to visit. It is not a special place. It is just a place. I love the name Watergrasshill. It feels more and more utopian with each visit I do not make. It has become a place to hope for, never a place to visit.

12 May Friday

Two women were discussing a man.  I did not know the women and I did not know the man they were speaking about. One of the women said, “He’s been single for a while now so he has. There is no reason for it, as he’s good enough to look at.”

The Coptic Pope

14 May Sunday

I was surprised to realize that my cow book (I Always Have An Audience For My Work) is now out of print. The Butter Museum had had  ten copies of it.  I wrote to ask Peter if he had any copies left. He said “I think I still have some copies of the cow book.  I was reluctant to sell them as they are so wonderful.” Since the purpose of him having the books was to sell the books, I am not sure what was accomplished by them being too wonderful to sell.

15 May Monday

The path is completely closed in with cow parsley. It is impossible to see the path.  There is just the sense of knowing where it goes and where it usually goes so I walk and assume I am in the right places but sometimes I am not and I stagger and stumble into the tangle. This morning I fell down and startled a pheasant who was running from me in the undergrowth and I think he thought I could not see him and indeed I would not have seen him except that I dropped down to his level. Not only is the undergrowth thick but it is wet. Today I got soaked and slapped with all of the blossoms and branches.  I wore full waterproofs for the rainy drizzle which was falling and against the rainy drizzle which had already fallen. I ended up soaked anyway because my rain jacket is old and now un-waterproof and because the water off the plants went down my neck and the water went through the hole in my boots. I could have been wetter when I reached home but not much wetter.

18 May Thursday

A sanctuary up in Kildare rescued the chickens. They had been resident in a battery farm. After 18 months the chickens are no longer considered reliable as good egg layers. The next step for them is death and a future in a goujon or curry or some other fast food. There was an announcement on Facebook saying that a truckload of the rescued chickens were being driven down to Clonmel. People were waiting in a car park for the truck. Some people took a lot of the chickens. Some took a few. I met four of the confused birds this morning. They were walking about tentatively. They kept returning to the darkness of their new house which is made of stone. I think so much space both indoors and out and all of the new and never before tasted  greenery to eat makes them nervous. They looked terrible. The bone structure of their wings was completely exposed. The bones should have been covered with feathers. There is no chance that these chickens can fly as they are now. I wonder if the feathers will grow back after exposure to sunlight and space and fresh green things to eat. Even the red of their wattles was a pale unhealthy looking pink.

19 May Friday

Every car is covered with bird droppings. Every house is covered with bird droppings. Windows are covered. Outside tables and outside chairs are covered with bird droppings. There are long huge white splashes. There are lashings of excrement. The excrement is thick as well as white.  Where it is on the windows it is not possible to see through it, which can make driving difficult. It is a seasonal problem but every year it is a surprise.  We had hoped the rain would clean it off or at least in a few places but I fear it is hardened on and really will need scrubbing.

20 May Saturday

The Coptic Pope was to arrive in Cahir today at 1.15. It was planned that he was to perform a Mass and do other pope-like things for the order of Egyptian Coptics who now reside in the former Catholic school and convent. As early as 10 am, there were two Garda and one man in a reflective vest directing any cars away from the convent which I am not certain the Egyptian Coptics still call the convent but everyone else calls the convent because that is what the building has always been and that is what the building has always been called. Apparently there had been a threat on the life of the Coptic Pope recently which explained the police presence. We left town before he arrived and I have not heard of any trouble so I guess it all went well. I sort of wish I had stayed to see what he looked like and what the congregation who greeted him was like.  It is difficult to imagine how and why this Egyptian order ended up in County Tipperary.  John Joe said they first came here because they got jobs in the slaughterhouse.

21 May Sunday

Do not sweep around a chair with an unmarried woman sitting in it.  If you do, she will never marry.  She should move before you start sweeping.

22 May Monday

There is a fine straight line marked into a field where cows have been grazing. They stick their heads under the fence and reach out as far as they can to get at every single bit of fresh long grass that they can.  The resulting line is always a surprise. It is as straight and even as if it has been drawn. From afar it looks like there might be a different crop being grown in one field exactly beside another.  It is all grass and it is all the same grass but one batch has been eaten as low as the cows can get it before the herd are moved to another field.

23 May Tuesday

The young man was shouting over the road at someone who was walking away from him. He cursed and swore. His language got more and more obscene the further the first man went from him. A woman who came out of the shop in the middle of his rant announced. “Now there’s a lad who wants manners put on him.”

A Small Hospital

24 May Wednesday

Dellie told me her method for rescuing the birds that careen into windows at speed and knock themselves out. She keeps a large pot of mint growing near to the house. She does not keep the mint in a pot to stop the mint from growing rampantly all over her garden. She thinks of her pot of mint as a small hospital. If a bird is found unconscious, it gets rested right in the middle of the pot so that it is surrounded by mint. She is certain that the smell works to revive and give strength to the stunned bird. She says it is a rare day when the bird is still laid out among the mint when she returns for a look. If a bird has not moved the bird is dead. She says the mint always revives those who can be revived.

Dellie is short for Adele. The sounds are in there. It is a nickname which is understandable. Dellie has a friend named Betty. Betty is short for Gwendolyn. That makes less sense .

25 May Thursday

I was admiring the copious number of enormous three-leaf clovers growing in the middle of the track as I walked the Long Field. I had to remind myself that the hugeness of the clover leaves and of the purple and white flowers is not natural.  The large size is a result of nitrogen sprayed on the fields.  There are so many bad things that are easy to forget.  It is never possible to forget the terrible weed killer that the farmers spray along verges and the edges of fields and in front of gates.  The weed killer turns things a horrible brown. It then goes to gold and then to gold red and then to dead brown.  We have to look at the aftereffects of this poison for a long time, so we never forget it and we never like it.

26 May Friday

First thing this morning the nurse took my bloods and then she printed out some labels from her computer. When the printing was finished the machine made a little pinging noise. She said “Ah, how perfect to hear that! It is exactly the note that has been giving me trouble in choir practice. With it repeating on my printer,  I’ll be after singing all day.”

27 May Saturday

The rain was torrential and wild. All night it lashed down. It rained from all directions. We were reminded yet again about the leak in the bathroom.  Roads were flooded as we drove to Cahir. The farmers market looked bedraggled. There were hardly any customers and only six  stalls.  The few sellers were all squeezed up against the wall trying to be out of the wind and trying to keep their wares dry or at least to keep things from blowing away. They were brave to be there at all. By afternoon the sun came out. Everywhere the fields turned a garish unreal kind of bright green.  This was the rain we had waited for. Everything was soggy and squishy underfoot but everything was glowing.

29 May Monday

Sign on tree:

PHOTOS OF

BIRDS OF PREY

5 EUROS EACH

Schooling Your Features

1 June Thursday

When you are required to speak with someone with whom you would prefer not to be speaking but you are making an effort, that is the time when you are in the mode of Schooling Your Features. Schooling Your Features is something that everyone does sometimes. This just a new way to say it.

2 June Friday

I saw Tommie twice this week.  We had a chat in the hardware shop. He sat himself on a big bucket of paint while we talked.  He told me he cannot be away from the house for long as Margaret cannot be left alone. He says the indoor life does not suit him.  He said I am better in Open Spaces.  Catherine joined us for a few minutes.  She was pleased to see Tommie relaxing in conversation on the paint bucket. She reminded him of how he had once rescued her when she was a little girl.  She had been trapped underneath a pony named Tom.  They both laughed about Tommie rescuing her from Tom.  He was happy to be the hero of her story. Yesterday I delivered some fresh scones for him and Margaret. Tommie answered the door looking fragile and old.  His clothes are disheveled.  He is thinner than I have ever known him to be.  I think he is digging out old work clothes from years ago.  His belt is pulled tight but the trousers are still too large at the waist. Everything hangs off him. I have been worrying about Margaret who cannot see and can barely stand. Now it seems that Tommie himself is suffering.  Both physically and mentally there is a kind of visible defeat.  It is hard to be the one looking after someone else.  It is hard being the one who has to keep going no matter what.

7 June Wednesday

The bees are walking.  I am not certain what kind of bees these bees are.  They are not bumblebees and they are not wasps. They are not yellow jackets. They are furry and more brown than yellow. They appear every day in the heat up in the corners in the ceiling of the high room.  I do not know if they are coming in or if they have a nest somewhere up there in the roof and they just crawl out into the room because of the heat.  Either way it is too high for me to try to find out.  They buzz around and smash into the windows.  Sometimes they go right out the windows but mostly they seem to be walking.  They come down to the floor and they waddle around.  I am nervous to walk without shoes.  The bees make no buzzing noises when they are walking. They just scurry along like some kind of beetle.  It is a quick walk for something that small. They could fly much faster.

28 June Wednesday

The word EVENING can still mix me up.  Breda texted today to ask if I wanted to go for a walk this evening. I said yes and I looked forward to an evening walk.  I imagined a quiet walk in the hour or so before sunset.  The sun does not begin to go down until ten o’clock so I did not expect the walk to be mid-afternoon.  The word evening to me still means the time between afternoon and night.  Around here the word evening is anytime after lunch. I should know this by now.

29 June Thursday

The Yield sign at the corner gets more and more battered but it never gets replaced. There should be a stop sign there not just a vague suggestion to look out three metres before the crossing road. I say the words Géill Slí out loud when I pass it but never when anyone else is with me.  I do not know how to say the words correctly in Irish even though I have been told many times.

I Call It Lunch.

1 July Saturday

Ferns are flapping all along the boreen. As the seasons go along sometimes it is the cow parsley that takes over and sometimes it is long grass and later it will be blackberries and honeysuckle. I have never seen so many ferns. The boreen is wildly overgrown and it looks like nothing but ferns are growing. I can walk down the grass in the middle without anything touching me but if I walk in either of the tyre tracks the ferns are flapping and slapping my face all the way. They are soft.  It is not unpleasant to be flapped at by ferns. I think of ferns as something growing more in damp and shady places. It has been hot and rain-less for ages now. The heavy high arching of the ferns is making its own shade

2 July Sunday

I call it lunch but everyone else calls it dinner. She goes to the garden centre for her dinner most days. It is a popular destination as they do a big roast with two kinds of potatoes and loads of vegetables and gravy and thick slices of buttered bread. There is plenty of parking available. Everyone says that the garden centre dinner is Value For Money. She goes there because lots of other older people go there. She is looking for a man. Her husband died three or four or maybe five years ago and after all her training as a nurse she would rather have someone to live with and to take care of than to live alone and worry about things. When she goes to the garden centre for her dinner, she always dresses up tidy and she wears her wig. She looks perky as she sits and eats and she smiles as she looks around at everyone else eating their own roast dinner. Her theory is that if you have someone at home to cook a good dinner for you then you do not need to come out to the garden centre to eat. She assumes that most of the men eating are either single or widowed. She does not count the two priests who are there most days. She is convinced that at least one of the men who is eating his dinner would rather not be living alone. She just has to locate that one man.

3 July Monday

For the first time in fifteen years I have not made elderflower cordial. I feel I have let myself down. It was a combination of not being in the right location when the flowers were in bloom and falling down and smashing my hand. After 3 weeks of what I thought was healing, today I spent 6 hours in the hospital getting x-rays. It turns out that my hand has healed but it has healed incorrectly and it might be that the fracture now needs to be broken so it can heal properly. I will not know anything for certain until next week when I attend a Fracture Clinic. I am not looking forward to a return to the hospital even as an Outpatient. The corridors are full of beds with people in them looking miserable and eating their dinner on trays while their families cluster around them with carrier bags full of useful thing which there is no place to put down and everyone is in the way because the corridors were never meant to have loads of beds in them much less guests so there is a constant clogging up of any and all movement. Everything is on wheels but that does not help as there is no room to maneuver. It has been a depressing day. And the birds have eaten every gooseberry off all four of my bushes.

4 July Tuesday

The days have been warm and sometimes hot. The days have been warm but the sky has sat heavily upon us. The sky has been oppressive and white or the sky has been gloomy and grey. The sun rarely breaks through until eight or nine at night. We waver between hoping for rain and hoping for blue sky. All conversations return to these two possibilities. I spoke to a man in a shop doorway. I did not know the man but as I was leaving I asked, “Is the sun going to break through today?” He took a big breath in and he said “I am going to tell you Yes.”

5 July Wednesday

I had never visited the barracks. Kickham Barracks are named after the poet Charles Kickham. Five years ago the Army people moved out and over to Limerick. The barracks have been mostly empty since. The area inside is visible through a fence on one side. A sign on the gate advertised a temporary café serving food for the duration of the festival. We went in and walked around. The buildings were low and white and small and cheaply built. Three of the shabby white buildings had large white letters painted in a window: HEALTH CARE. ANIMAL CARE. CANTEEN. The buildings were all locked up tight. There were no more signs for food, nor for the festival nor for anything else except a threat about parking within the grounds. There was no bunting, no colour, nothing to suggest a week long celebration. It was a bleak walkabout on a hot day. We left and went elsewhere to find something to eat.

6 July Thursday

The small sign advertising HONEY FOR SALE is wrapped up with a black plastic bag and tape. A stone is in the middle to keep the plastic from blowing off. The sign has been there for years. It has two sides and is visible from both directions on the road at Kilnabutler near Cahir. If we forgot to buy honey on the way we were always reminded to get some on the return trip. We often read in the newspapers and hear on the radio about the destruction of the bee population by pesticides and big business. The covering up of this one sign brings the scary news a little closer. We note it as there is less and less honey to be found.

7 July Friday

I never know if hanging up a dead crow is meant to be a warning to other crows or if it is just a proud show-off moment for the killer of the crow.

A Fine Big Lump of a Lad.

8 July Saturday

There is a muddy little nest just beside the door into my work room. I cannot enter without getting dive-bombed and I get dive-bombed as I exit. I am surprised every time. The swallow, or maybe a sparrow, is never in the nest but she appears the minute I go near. She moves fast. I duck to avoid getting hit. Maybe this is preparation for more babies.

9 July Sunday

The shop installed an ice cream machine. It is popular. Whenever the temperature goes up no one enters the shop without buying a cone. It is that white kind of swirly ice cream that comes out of a nozzle in the machine. It is not scooped ice cream. There is no choice of flavours. There is just ice cream and it is white and in a cone. I understand there are milk shakes available too but I rarely see them. Today I saw two elderly men in their parked car outside the shop giving their cones full and careful attention. It was a muggy hot afternoon. There was not a breeze nor any movement in the air. The men might have been speaking to one another while they licked their ice cream but there was no way to know as they had their windows rolled up tight.

10 July Monday

Two women were discussing the son of a neighbour. They had nothing but admiration for the fellow. They spoke of his good manners and his hard work and his prospects. One woman said “Ah yes. He is A Fine Big Lump of a Lad.”

11 July Tuesday

We walked over Joe’s fields this morning. We arrived up at the farm just as the cows were leaving the milking parlour to start their walk back down into the fields. They stopped dead and watched us until we were well out of the way and then they set off down the track. Our timing was perfect but it was perfect only by chance. More cows, another herd, are in the lower meadow. They have been moaning and bellowing for two days. These are Anthony’s cows. I think one cow makes a noise and then the others join in. I wish I knew if it were pleasure or annoyance or need which makes the moaning commence. It is the kind of question I always intend to ask a farmer but then I forget.

12 July Wednesday

At 9 o’clock this morning the Fracture Clinic was teeming with people. Each person took a number and waited for the next step. In between things I sat beside an older lady who asked what had happened to me. She admired my flesh-coloured splint, and I admired her own navy blue splint. She said she had been wearing a blue blouse the first day she came in so she thought perhaps they had tried to match it for her. She asked where I lived. She was thrilled when I said Grange but disappointed to realize that we lived at opposite ends of Grange. She is nearly in Cahir and I am nearly Newcastle. She said we might as well be from different counties. She said Grange is nothing but one huge farmland full of fields. She said that we all get Lost in the Landscape. She was sad that there was nowhere in the village to meet anyone except the church or the school or the graveyard. I said “Well, there is Frank’s shop.” She agreed. And she was quiet. She said “ There is not much to buy in Frank’s shop. I can buy bread and a paper in Frank’s shop but it is scarcely worth driving in that direction as I can get those things anywhere, and other things besides.” I left the clinic with a spare flesh-coloured splint and an appointment to return after four more weeks of wearing it. The lady from Grange had left before me. She waved from the stonewall where she was sitting to wait for her lift home. She had been told that she need not wear her splint any longer.

13 July Thursday

From a distance there is a blue haze on the grass roof of the shed. The tall blue flowers growing there are not cornflowers. That was my first thought but this is not a flower I recognize. It is not easy to get close enough to see it and with my hand in this splint I cannot safely climb a ladder. Now Rachel tells me that she believes it to be Vipers Bugloss which usually grows at the edges of dry fields. It is not native to Ireland. A dry roof is probably quite similar to a dry field, only smaller.

Aut Even

27 July Thursday

Oscar is appearing irregularly these days. He is getting old and no doubt believing that he can keep track of the world as well from his hilltop yard as he can from his sleeping spot in the middle of the road in front of Sharon’s house. Perhaps his hearing is deteriorating. For years it has been impossible to walk the road without him racing out from wherever he was. If I whistled or if I did not whistle he always knew I was passing. He knew when anyone at all was passing. The sound of quiet walking conversation or even the sound of footsteps was enough to let him know.

28 July Friday

The figs are coming along. We need some long hot days. We need a week of hot days to bring the figs to ripeness. There are so many things not doing well this year. Tommie calls it Things Not Coming Good. I hope the figs are not another disappointment. Today I picked all the black currants. It is a job which was not difficult even with the splint on my arm. It is not difficult but it is slow. It is a slow job even without a splint. I thought it might take me an hour but I spent more than three hours clearing the bushes of every single berry. Then I spent another hour clearing the leaves and stems from my containers. The currants are now bagged up and in the freezer. I forgot to count how many bags I had. It seemed like a lot. Simon is making a black currant pandowdy.

29 July Saturday

Tom told me that it is considered very unlucky to meet a woman with red hair on the road early in the morning. I asked if it was different to meet a woman with red hair on the road in the middle of the day. Was the luck different then? He did not answer me. He pretended not to hear my question.

30 July Sunday

Aut Even means Beautiful Place in Irish. It is the name of a hospital in Kilkenny. I must go there for my cataract operation on Monday. One eye at a time. First the Right eye. Four weeks later they will do the Left eye. Breda assured me that I will be the youngest person in the waiting room. She said everyone else will be in their eighties. Yesterday at the Farmers Market, Jim, who is in his eighties, told me that when he had his own eyes done last year, the waiting room was full of nuns. There were nuns of all ages. Or all ages from about sixty upwards. He was the only man. He was the only person who was not a nun. Jim asked the doctor about the large number of nuns. He joked that perhaps they were getting a group rate. The doctor said they were all bussed in from a convent. He avoided the question of the group rate.

It Would Put The Heart Across You.

2 August Wednesday

I never see slugs in the morning. I get used to not seeing them. I certainly do not look for them. The slugs are back. It is good weather for slugs. I should not say the slugs are back. The slugs are never really gone. They disappear in the day and they reappear in darkness. We just get accustomed to not seeing them. This kind of weather that is not too hot and not too cold is ideal for slugs. They enjoy damp evenings. I should remember to close the bathroom window. There are no screens on the windows. The few insects that come in neither bite nor sting. The slugs enter through the open window or maybe they ooze up through the drain hole in the tub or the sink. They might just spend the day sleeping somewhere in a dark place like under the sink waiting for dusk. This evening there was one lying across my little plastic containers of contact lenses. The slug was about two inches long and the usual drab brown colour. The lenses on the shelf are only for my left eye. The right eye has been done. It was done on Monday where I was the youngest person present and there was not a nun to be seen.  I am now seeing the world with bright colours and a stunning clarity. Black things now appear to have a lot of blue in them. Some greys appear violet. I do not know if this is the actual colour of these things or if the colour will settle down and go back to what I believed it was before the surgery. Have I been seeing colour wrong all along or am I seeing it incorrectly now? The colour of the slug is the same as it has always been. I shall never need a contact lens for the right eye again. But as long as I need these lenses for the left eye I would prefer not to have a slug recline upon them. It is a worse thing to find a slug stretched out on my toothbrush bristles. Once I see one in the bathroom I know they could be anywhere at all so it does not matter where they are when I see them as I know that they have already been oozing over anywhere and everywhere as and when they like.

3 August Thursday

Fergal came to collect some boxes. He asked where our dog was. He told us his own dog had died last month. He is still mourning. The dog was an Alsatian. He had had it for twelve years. He misses it every day. He has two other dogs but he does not love them the way he loved the Alsatian. The other two dogs are Rottweilers. He claims they are sweet and gentle. He saw that he was not going to convince me about the sweetness of any Rottweiler. He said he lives on a housing estate outside Dublin. He said every house in the neighbourhood has been robbed but his own house has never been robbed. He said his dogs terrify everyone. He said that just hearing them bark Would Put The Heart Across You.

4 August Saturday

The nest by the door into my workroom now has baby swallows in it. The mother gets angry when I attempt to enter the room. I have given up. Anything I need to do in there can be done another day or next week. I have decided to just wait until all five children have left home. None of them are even flying yet. They just sit in the nest and wait for their mother to return.

5 August Saturday

Cate’s mother suffers from bad arthritis. She is 91. Terrible pain in her knees makes it difficult for her to walk. Cate had heard about a cure. She offered to try it on her mother. Her mother was willing to give it a go. She was ready to try anything to stop the pain. Before bed, Cate wrapped her mother’s knees in leaves of cabbage. Then she wrapped cling film around the cabbage so it stayed nice and firm around the knees. She did not want the cabbage to come loose in the night in her mother‘s bed. In the morning she went upstairs and found her mother still in bed. Cate was looking forward to news of the miracle cure. Instead her mother had had the worst night ever and had barely slept a wink because of the excruciating pain in her legs. I have no plan to recommend this cure to anyone but I did need to ask if the cabbage was cooked or raw. Cate said it was raw.

6 August Sunday

The clock in Cahir has not worked for a while. It is at least three years since I looked up at it expecting to see the correct time. Now the clock is gone. It might have been absent for a long while already. I got out of the habit of looking up to see the time because it was always wrong no matter what the clock showed. It might have been a year since the clock was removed. There is some black plastic tacked into the space where the clock was. I shall now try to keep an eye on that space to notice when the clock is returned.

7 August Bank Holiday

An elderly robin has become a friend. He stays nearby whenever we are outside. Mostly he sits on the back of the chair where one of us is sitting. Then he moves to sit with the other one of us. He hops along the tabletop. His head and wing feathers and his red breast are scruffy looking. That is how we know he is not young. His scruffiness is what makes him distinctive. It does not matter which table we are sitting at or whether we are drinking tea or coffee. He seems to like the companionship. Or maybe it is the sound of our voices.

Michael

8 August Tuesday

We walked over Joe’s fields today. The track was slippery with mud and muck. I found two fine round things to draw but they were too muddy to carry home. One was a wheel made of wire with spokes and the other was a wheel made of wire with spokes that had been run over and mashed into a more useless shape. I felt a bit bad about my new boots getting so muddy and coated with green manure. The old boots had been Letting in Wet for so long that I had to stop wearing them. I had to stop pretending that they were fine when they so obviously were not all right. Even on a dry day I was coming home with wet feet. I spent a good part of the walk dragging my feet sideways in the long grass trying to wipe the muck off the sides of my new boots.

9 August Wednesday

The robin has a name now. He is Michael. He joins us by the back door and he sits with us at the large table over by the fence. Wherever we are out of doors, Michael appears and is committed to Staying Near. He sat on a branch while I picked raspberries. He came into the kitchen and rested on the windowsill while we were preparing food and cleaning up. He jumps when there are sudden movements or loud noises but he seems to enjoy quiet words or nonsense syllables babbled softly in his direction. We are not getting too much done because we are constantly popping in and out or looking out a window to see where Michael is. We crumbled up crackers on the table for him. There is water for him to drink. He came with me as I went all around the tree and up the stone steps squeezing figs to test them for ripeness. He appears to pay careful attention to every single thing that is done out of doors.

10 August Thursday

No one speaks of Bathing Suits or Bathing Costumes. The garment that a person wears to go swimming is called Togs. A person puts on their Togs. When someone is changing clothes before going swimming, that person is said to be Togging Up.

11 August Friday

Michael was late arriving this morning. Every day he has been waiting on the table outside the kitchen before we are even up. He was doing the morning waiting for a long while before we realized that it was the same bird out waiting out there every morning. Today there was no sign of him until noon. We were worried about his leg. We are still worried about his leg. One leg is now at a wonky angle. The displacing of the leg happened some time yesterday. A bigger fatter stronger robin had been rushing onto the table and chasing Michael away each time he was there. That was when we realized that Michael is not an old bird as we first thought. He is a very young bird. The older robin who was pushing him out of the way had seniority. At the end of the afternoon we saw that Michael’s left leg was sticking out at a right angle. He kept falling over while trying to eat crumbs. We think he flew at a window and knocked himself down onto the ground. But we wonder if the older fat robin chased him and frightened him and forced him into the window or the wall of the house. It must be the impact with the ground that damaged his leg. We were happy to see him back today but we are worried about the leg. We are worried and we have no idea what to do about it.

Eight figs are not enough.

15 August Tuesday

Michael is here to greet us. Michael is here to greet us whenever we return to the house. It does not matter if we are coming back from ten minutes away or from three days away. He arrives and hovers close and comes indoors and generally lets us know that he is glad to be nearby. I have now been told that it is normal for young robins to adopt people. I thought we were special and that Michael was special. I still think he is special. It is just that it is not such an unusual thing to have him want to be with us. I do not mind that. Michael flies away when the other robin comes to frighten him but nothing we do frightens him. He has graduated to sitting on Simon’s shoulder now. He has not sat upon me yet but he is happy to sit very close to me.

16 August Wednesday

It was a wet morning so I did not mind putting on a rain jacket to walk up the path. I figured it would keep the foliage drips off me. It would protect me from the blackberries, wild roses, nettles and anything else. Most days have been too warm to walk while wearing a waterproof coat and long trousers. I felt happy to be heading up the Mass Path. I wanted to see how things were doing after the heavy growth of summer. My feelings of pleasure were quickly dampened. I had water down my neck and thorns pulling at me from all directions. They ripped at my coat and they ripped my skin. They ripped through my trousers. When I reached the path outside Johnnie’s orchard I found myself completely trapped by the nettles and brambles both the ones hanging down and the ones climbing up. I was really stuck. I could not move forward and I could not move backward. I could not even fall down. I wiggled and wriggled and I wondered how long I might need to wait before someone came along. I could tell that no one had been up or down the path for weeks and weeks. I feared I might have to wait for weeks and weeks trapped and held in position by thorns, unable even to reach into my pocket for my phone. Eventually I escaped. I staggered the last bit of the path out and onto the road feeling wet and hot and beaten up and not very happy.

17 August Thursday

The baby swallows have begun to fly. They are racing in and out of the nest and lining up along the edge of the grass roof. I no longer have to worry about the mother protecting her brood. I thought it was safe to go into my room again. Instead I now I have five adolescents racing and rushing. The wind is wild today so it is hard to even sense which direction they will dive from next. I was only inside the door for a few minutes when all five of them rushed in and began to swoop around me. There was no chance I could catch them so I just sat down and waited until they flew out again.  My next job will be to get a shovel and brush to clear the large pile of crunchy excrement from the bottom of the door and from the floor directly under their nest. It seems foolish to do it until I am certain that they are no longer returning to the nest.  I have already cleaned the handle so that I can go in and out without grabbing a handful of crunch.

18 August Friday

Eight figs are not enough. I continue picking any that are squeezable. I cannot wait for full ripeness because if I wait for a fig to fully ripen the birds eat it before I can pick it. If I pluck one On The Squeeze and bring it indoors to ripen I can usually collect enough for a tart. I had eight but Simon told me he really needed a minimum of twelve. Yesterday I threw one out. This morning I found three more had rotted. They were covered with hairy mold. Worrying that we might never have even one fig tart this year, I went to check the bush and came back with seven. Now I have thirteen and there are three others that might be ready by the end of the afternoon if the heat continues.

Michael sat on a low leaf while I collected the figs. His leg looks much better. He still favours it, but it no longer sticks out at that terrible angle. He sat on leaves or on large stones while I picked raspberries. He has no interest in eating fruit. Maybe robins do not eat fruit or maybe he is just too young to know that he might love it.

19 August Saturday

As I approached the place where the road starts to climb again, Oscar came rushing out to greet me. We both hopped and danced around for a few minutes. I was delighted to see him. He was delighted to see me. I had been told that he was so old and so fat and so awkward in himself that he was spending all of his days lying prone in front of his own house. He was no longer hanging around at Sharon’s nor was he sleeping in the center of the road in order not to miss anyone on foot. He looks terrible. There are huge clumps of fur coming out all over him. The clumps are nothing more than the result of the seasonal moult but for some reason they are all reddish in colour. He is normally an all black dog so I do not know why the hair he is losing is red. His tail is now red too. I feared he might be too idle to walk with me but he came all the way down the boreen to the house. He gasped with heavy raspy breathing all the way. Maybe he has a lung infection or maybe it is just his extra weight. When we got here, I tried to brush him to get some of the clumps off and out but he was not interested to stay still for that kind of thing. He just drank some water and took off for home.

20 August Sunday

Rain is running down the wall in the bathroom again. We were promised a bit of a hit from Hurricane Gert. Gert has been driving her way across the Atlantic. It has been raining all day. I am not sure if this rain is Gert or if this is just rain. I have gotten into the habit of keeping the towels well over to the right hand side of the copper pipe towel rack. If I let them hang towards the left they get soaked when the rain comes in. I keep towels on the right all the time now even if it is not raining. Newspapers get spread across the floor only when the rain is falling hard. Because the floor is made of rough Killenaule stone, it is a very uneven floor. Once water hits the floor it goes off in several directions. Someday the mystery of exactly where this leak is will be solved. I hope it gets solved before we need to move from newspapers to buckets.

21 August Monday

I saw Kevin this morning. He has had a messy swallow’s nest on his roof. He had been grumbling about the droppings and the mess. He came out one morning and found two dead baby swallows that had fallen down the drainpipe. There were two more on the ground. They were still alive so he brought them into the house and placed them in a shoe box with a pair of old socks for padding. He tried to feed them something but they were so tiny they would not eat. He rang his daughter for advice. His daughter rang the woman at the animal sanctuary over in the Nire Valley. The woman rang him back herself. She asked Kevin if he had been out for a drive recently. He said he had indeed been out in the car just the day before. She told him to go to the front of his car and scrap off the dead insects and to swish them around in his hand until he made them into a little paste. He did as she told him to. He collected the bugs and made the paste and tried to feed it to the baby swallows. They ate a little bit. The woman arrived and collected the box and took it away with her. She said if the birds survived she would return them to Kevin and then they would be ready and able to fly off to Africa with the rest of their flock. Since she has never returned with the birds, Kevin believes that the birds will never get to Africa. He said Sure, they only got as far as the Nire.

Fire Depot

22 August Tuesday

The Fire Depot in Clogheen occupies a tiny building. The building is attached to a house on each side. There is no chance that even the smallest fire engine could fit inside the depot. When I see it I wonder what is kept inside. Maybe it is full of shovels and buckets and ladders which can be collected in any old vehicle on the way to a fire. Perhaps there is a hose and a small water tank which can be hooked up with a trailer hitch too.

23 August Wednesday

This is not a country for figs. I remind myself of this again and again. I am always hopeful that the summer will be so hot that the figs will be juicy and wonderful to eat in the hand. This will never happen. After all the squeezing and waiting and throwing away of moldy figs I finally got the right amount for a tart. There was extra fig juice to pour over it. The tart was perfect. I have now begun collecting for another one. And all this while the raspberries keep coming and the blackberries are ripening by the minute and the ditches are full of honeysuckle. Sadly we have not one apple on any of the trees. The few that appeared have been attacked by birds and have fallen to the ground. It is a shock to have eight leafy trees all devoid of apples. The late frost in the spring is what we are blaming but when I see that other people have heavily laden trees I feel extreme Apple Envy. I wonder if there is something other than the frost to blame.

24 August Thursday

There is a lot of talk about Lollipop Ladies. School is starting next week. No one speaks of Lollipop Ladies in the summer. Now young children must be trained to pay attention to what the Lollipop Lady tells them. For me, the person who stood at the crosswalks to stop the cars and let the children go from one side to the other side safely was called a Crossing Guard. It was ages before I understood what a Lollipop Lady was. A Lollipop Lady has a long stick with a round sign on the top of it. The sign says STOP. When the Lollipop Lady walks into the road and holds up her sign the cars must stop and then the children can cross. The round sign on the thin stick looks like a lollipop so that is where the name comes from. There are Lollipop Men as well as Lollipop Ladies.

25 August Friday

Way back when Mick the electrician installed sockets in this house he was eager to install more then we thought we needed. He said “Better To Be Looking At Them Than Looking For Them”. He said this again and again and again. I was reminded of Mick and his words this week. Peter Ryan said he did some work at a house. The work he was doing was not electrical work. He saw there were 38 sockets installed in the bedroom of the house. He said “I do not care what people get up to in their bedrooms but no matter what way you think on it, 38 sockets are a lot of sockets.”

26 August Saturday

This morning Michael is sitting on the table while he eats his crumbs. He sits on the table the way a mother bird sits on her nest. His left leg has gone off into the same uncomfortable looking angle it was at a week ago. We thought it was fully healed. Now it looks like a bit of wire hanging off his body. It does not look like a leg. It is worrying. When he stands on the dish taking sips of water, he can hardly stop himself from falling into the water. Balancing on one leg is no treat. Luckily flying is no problem for him. I use a piece of Kilkenny limestone to gently smash his biscuits into small pieces. He does not fly away when I mash. He stays close waiting until I stop so that he can begin eating.

27 August Sunday

Today is the last day that I need a contact lens. After forty five years of using them it is odd to know that I will not need to buy them, put them in, or take them out ever again. Monday is my second eye operation. I went to see Mr. O’Reilly this week. He was pleased with the first eye. He said it is perfect. He was not so pleased with me. He said that I fought him during the surgery. The local anesthetic did not relax me enough. The day after the first eye was done he said I would have a choice, but this week he said I have no choice. He wants me to have the general anesthetic for this second eye. I asked him about the change in colours and he said that was normal. I wanted to know more about how my two eyes will function together. I wanted to know if the blacks and greys would still be full of blues and lavenders or if everything would settle down. I wanted to know why the road in front of me looked grey and the road in the rear view mirror looked lavender. I guess these sorts of questions are no longer interesting to him. He knows how things go. He looks very young but still, he has been doing these operations for a long time. None of it is new and exciting for him. Mr.O’Reilly told me that I ask too many questions.

Frank’s Shop

30 August Wednesday

As I drove to Kilkenny a sign appeared several times on trees and posts. It was not until the return trip from the hospital when I was not allowed to drive that I realized that HAM SANDWICH was not an announcement for something to eat. The big black letters had a date printed small below it. That was when I realized that HAM SANDWICH was the name of a band.

31 September Thursday

Michael was being badly bullied by some bigger fatter robins this morning. He walked into the kitchen so I fed him some cracker crumbs on the floor. He ate in his sitting down position in peace and quiet.

1 September Friday

My eyes are seeing colours in the new way all the time now. Most greys have a lot of lavender in them. I was afraid two eyes done would return me to the old colour range but blues and lavenders are now more prevalent than blacks and greys. Sometimes I need to ask someone else how a colour looks to them. I cannot close first one eye and then the other to test by myself anymore. The world looks a lot more lively. This morning the entire valley disappeared in a thick white fog but even the white fog had a nice bright tone on it. By the time the sun cleared it away I sort of missed the look of the world ending at the fence.

2 September Saturday

Last Saturday we had a stall at the market. We sold our books and cards. Jim brought a table and a canopy kind of cover for us. It did not rain so we did not need the cover but it was nice to have it just in case. Catherine loaned me the postcard rack from the shop. She said I could take it if I took all of the cards out and then put them all back in when I returned the rack. I asked what would she do if someone needed a postcard while they are all shoved into a box. She snorted and said “No one is after buying postcards anymore.”

The stallholders at the Farmers Market try to offer some things to interest the busloads of visitors who arrive every Saturday morning. Sometimes as many as five buses arrive. The tourists might be from somewhere else in Ireland or from England or they might be from France or Germany or Israel. They could be from anywhere. Once there was a load from China. They come to see Cahir Castle and the Swiss Cottage and the tiny John Nash church. It is always nice if lots of ducks are in the river. The visitors love the ducks. The trouble with busloads of tourists is that they are driven from place to place and that usually involves a lot of eating stops and a big breakfast. They have no need to buy plants or raw fish or vegetables. Stella makes some small single portion rectangular cakes with them in mind as well as scones, which are popular. Traveling types might purchase apples, berries or a jar of jam. They might buy a wooden egg cup or a bowl or a tea cosy.

Pat likes to have different tables now and again just to vary what the market offers. I was convinced that the visitors would be delighted to see some of our cards on offer. We filled up the rack with a fine selection. The rack held about 24 cards. We tried to bring things mostly of local interest or of Irish interest. Catherine was right. Not much of anyone wants to buy postcards anymore. A busload from Dresden spent a long time looking at every single card but they did not buy any. They did not look at the books. We did sell some things and we had a lovely morning. We came home with gifts of a cauliflower and green beans.

When I returned the postcard rack to the shop Catherine said someone had been looking for a postcard that morning for the first time in months and no one knew where the boxful off the rack had been put.

Today, customers of the regular sort, not the visiting sort, asked us why we were not there with our books again. They are asking when we will return. This week we were just customers but maybe we shall borrow the table and the canopy and the postcard rack and do it all again sometime before winter comes.

3 September Sunday

Michael sits on my knee. He sits on Simon’s shoulder. He has not sat upon my shoulder and he has not sat upon Simon’s knee. Today he sat on Maud’s foot. He is completely happy to be near us and on us. Sudden movements frighten him but mostly he appears to like the sound of voices and the presence of people. He made a diving attack on some other robins who showed up and started to eat some of his crumbs so I am less worried about him being able to survive than I was. His leg is bent but it does not stop him from flying. It does not dangle from his body in such a useless way.

4 September Monday

The physiotherapist was happy with my hand. She sent me home with more exercise instructions and a piece of rubber. It is three months since my fall and fracture. I feel I am healed. She said it will be a few more months before I regain full strength. She said there was no need to see her again but even so there is a good chance that I will see her again as she lives just up on the road in Grange near to where the old dog walks the middle line every day to go to Franks’s shop. We spoke of the old dog and we spoke of Frank and his recent surgery. Now that we know who each of us are and we would recognize one another we probably will indeed see each other often. There is a good chance we saw one another before but since we did not know each other then we did not know that we lived sort of nearby.

5 September Tuesday

Frank’s shop is closing. Today is the final day. Frank is in hospital.  He is in intensive care. He had surgery last week. If the shop is closing it is all very serious. The shop is Frank’s shop. The family lives in the house connected to the shop but I have never seen Frank’s wife working there. I never saw Frank’s wife at all. Or if I did see her I did not know who she was. His son worked in the shop sometimes. Last time I saw the son in there I asked for a lemon. The son asked why would I be wanting a lemon. I bought milk just so that I would be buying something since I had gone there for a lemon but there were no lemons to buy and I felt I could not leave without buying something. The shop has been a center for local news and for couriers dropping off parcels for people who live down long hard to find lanes as well as a place for basic groceries and newspapers. It is the only shop in the village. There is the shop and the church and the school and the community hall. That is the entire village center. Frank used to have a post office counter in the shop but that got taken away a few years ago. Now there is only a post box outside. There are also two pumps, one for petrol and one for diesel. I am sad about the village without the shop. I am worried about the old dog who walks there every day for his treat. I am worried for Frank’s family. I am worried for Frank. We are all worried for Frank.

Never not in my ears

6 September Wednesday

I am taking Jessie and Molly out for a walk every afternoon. We have been walking in the same field each day. Today is the eighth day. It is a walk I do not have a name for yet. We walk through a gate and up a track to get to the field and then through another gate before we get to the field. We go all around the perimeter and the rejoin the track near the second gate. On one side there is a small house which has been empty for as long as I have been here. The doors and windows are broken in. Most of the house is covered with green growth: brambles and bushes and trees. We can see this building from the road at certain vantage points. I wish I knew whose house it once was. The field is owned by a man named Murphy but the house might have nothing to do with him. The hay or wheat has been cut so we are not walking on a crop. The remaining stubble makes a clacking kind of sound when we step on it. When both dogs are close to me we sound like an cartoon orchestra but mostly the dogs are rushing around at high speed and I am clicking and clacking through the stubble alone. I am trying to find the right word to describe this crunching hollow noise. I am trying to find a word for the noise and I am trying to find a name for the walk.

7 September Thursday

The two-sided sign at Kilnabutler which was wrapped in black plastic all summer has been unwrapped. The honey is ready.

8 September Friday

The winds are wild and gusty. We are being buffeted about. The sound of the wind is never not in my ears. It is always in my ears. I hear it when I am inside the house and I hear it when I am outside the house. I hear it while I sleep and while I eat. I hear it while I am thinking of other things. I am worried about Michael. I have not seen him all day. I hope he is tucked away somewhere safe and out of the wind. I think he spends a lot of time under the rosemary bush. I hope he has plenty to eat.

9 September Saturday

Billy the Wood came and delivered several loads of firewood today. We had far too many phone calls back and forth to get this delivery arranged. It seemed to be unusually complicated to get a time organized. When I had to ring him, I thought maybe it was his wife answering the phone. Even as I say this, I do not even know if Billy has a wife. I do not know anything about Billy. Billy’s voice does not really sound like a woman’s voice but it does not sound like a man’s voice. It does not sound like any other voice I know. It is a strange and most particular voice. I find it just as strange when he is standing in front of me as I do when I am on the phone and I do not know if I am speaking to a man or a woman. The wood that Billy brought is half ash and half birch. I was wondering whether to cover the pile with a big tarpaulin but the rain started lashing down before I decided. This wood has been wet before so I cannot worry about it being wet again. And anyway, any kind of a cover would have been difficult to hold down in the wind. I would have needed a lot of big pieces of the wood on top to hold it down and then all the wood piled on top would all get wet anyway.

10 September Sunday

The woman walked into the waiting room and waved to the receptionist. She shouted “It’s Myself!” as she plopped down into the chair nearest to the door.

11 September Monday

The wind never stops. It never stops. It is exciting and it is completely annoying. I cannot remember how long it has been. It seems like it has been windy forever. I feel we could be blown away. We might end up in another country or at least another county. The sun has come out and in between glorious bright sunshine there are small amounts of rain. The rain falls while the sun shines. Every few minutes the day is different. Some robins have appeared around the table. They are here to eat crumbs but none of the robins are Michael. I am looking carefully at their markings and their legs which are all strong and straight. I am looking for the crooked tail feather. I am worried. I thought maybe all the robins had gone away but that is not the case. I wonder if Michael has been chased away by bigger birds or if he has been blown away by the wind or if he has been the victim of a bigger creature. Some of the robins are here. Where is Michael?

A Right to Strong Suction.

13 September Wednesday

I am hoping that Michael has found a new place to call his own. I do not know if the other robins chased him away. There are two robins who still stop at the table regularly. They both have fat bodies and strong straight legs. They are not Michael. I was worried about him in the wild winds but the winds have stopped now. I thought he might be sheltering but if that was the case he should be back. I have spent time in the places he used to go with me. I have picked raspberries and talked to him as if he was nearby. I hoped that if he was hiding my voice might encourage him to come out. I have done some weeding. I have sat on the kitchen bench and I have drunk tea out at the big table always hoping and hoping he might appear. I have been hoping his curiosity would make him come along to see what I was doing.   One day I sat on the bench in the rain under an umbrella just in case he felt the rain provided a safe time to come out of hiding. Most birds are not out in the rain. I hope wherever he is that he is happy. He might not remember our voices and our treats. The brain of a robin might not hold onto a past. Maybe the present is enough. I still look outside for him many times each day. I hope he is not dead.

14 September Thursday

Evening is a constant challenge. I tend to think of evening as the soft time before full darkness. It is the time before night. Evening is the few hours between afternoon and night. Around here, if a man tells you he will deliver something in the Evening, he means he will be with you any time after dinner. That means you can expect him any time after your lunch, which is his dinner. The time after dinner can extend right up until night. Evening is then Evening. Sometimes it is possible to pin a person down to a specific time, but mostly you just have to wait.

15 September Friday

I entered the room. I heard a thud. I looked up. There was an owl looking straight at me. He was pressed up against the outside of the window. I was just inside. We were very close to one another. His right wing was spread out in a flying position and the left one was down beside his body. He must have flown into the glass because of the light. We stared at each other without moving for several seconds. Then he stepped backwards off the window ledge and into the darkness.

16 September Saturday

Mary was at the market this morning. She does not look well. She too has had her cataracts done recently but she is not happy. She says that her vision is all wrong. She looked like she might cry at any moment. She studied my eyes carefully to try to see how they are. She did the same thing to Jim who had his done last year. I am not sure what she was hoping to see. She also had a knee replaced in the spring. I think she is more than a little exasperated about getting old. She is annoyed with various body parts that have always worked properly and are now demanding endless attention. On top of all that, she is angry at the European Union. They are discussing, or maybe they have already passed into law, something about the power and the energy consumption of vacuum cleaners. Mary is outraged that Those People in Europe feel they can intrude on this aspect of her life. She complained to everyone she saw. She asked again and again, “Whatever are you to do if you feel you have A Right to Strong Suction?”

17 September Sunday

It has been there for a while now. Maybe it is already four or even five months. For a while I assumed it was a temporary solution. I thought it would just be there until something more permanent could be found. Now I realize that the waste bin is going nowhere. It is tied to the front gate with rope. It rests against the inside of the gate at an angle. It is silver and the kind of bin with a pedal on the bottom. It is made so that a person can step on the pedal and open the bin. There is no need to touch the top flap to open it. But a foot pedal is no help for the postman. I doubt he could reach down inside the gate and push it with his hand with enough pressure to open the top. Even if he could reach in and press the pedal, I fear the opening of the top would slap him in the face. And anyway, now a flood gate apparatus has been put across the front of the gate so it will be even harder to lean in and reach the pedal. No doubt the postman just opens the bin with his fingers. And anything he places inside will stay good and dry even on a desperate rainy day when no one goes out of doors to check the post anyway.

Two Fox Morning

19 September Tuesday

A Nominated Neighbour Scheme is being introduced. From what I understand, older people living on their own will receive a card to hold up in a window to tell a visitor that they are not recognized and therefore they should go to the Nominated Neighbour whose name and address are displayed on the card. The neighbour will then check the callers identity and maybe even return with the caller to the persons house after having been satisfied that they are genuine. Of course, this all depends on the Nominated Neighbour being at home when a stranger calls. It also depends on the stranger not being a complete lunatic.

20 September Wednesday

They promised rain for today and said it would be Turning Persistent For a Time. Once the rain started, it rained without stopping for the entire day and into the night. Persistent seems a polite word for this kind of downpour.

21 September Thursday

It was Jim who said it to another man. He said it with a great laugh. Everyone laughed so I smiled along though I did not really understand it. I have thought and thought about this expression but I still do not understand it. He said “You’re lovely up front like the back of an old dresser.”

22 September Friday

The raspberries keep ripening. The blackberries keep ripening. I pick them. We eat them. I give them away. I freeze them. I feel like I am constantly picking berries. We gathered all the wild damsons and made an enormous quantity of thick sauce. It is a beautiful colour and it tastes wonderful. We will be able to dig it out of the freezer for months and months. There is a lot of it. There are rose hips and elderberries and sloes.  I am not even dealing with them. Andrzej and I went up to Johnnie’s orchard on Monday. We took four buckets with us. We returned with one bucket only partly full. Thwarted optimism. My apple trees are not the only ones that have suffered a dreadful year. It does not make me feel any better to see so few apples elsewhere.

23 September Saturday

A Two Fox Morning and it is still early. Several have been through the yard. The first was the old scruffy looking fox climbing uphill and moving slowly. It is hard to assign this fox a colour. He is messy and sort of brown and dirty and his tail is half cut off. It looks like his tail was caught in something and cut with a straight line down the middle. This tail does not come to a point anymore. This tail ends with a straight line. I have never seen a tail cut like that. I have never seen any fox with his tail cut. The second fox moved quickly and gracefully almost like a dancer dashing quickly from place to place without any sense of rushing. The second fox was beautiful and red with a perfect white tip on its bushy tail.

Hand Cut Gate

30 September Saturday

I have a new feeling about the slugs in the bathroom. Even if the window has been closed for hours I walk in at night and I know they are there. I turn on the light and I enter the room and I stand very quietly in the doorway. My eyes search around from floor to ceiling. I don’t move. Only my eyes move. I do not know if slugs can hear anyway. I know they are there even when I cannot see them and I am determined to let them know that I know. Sometimes I see one on the side of the sink or in the tub. Sometimes I do not see any but I know they have been there by their tracks all over the mirrors and the windows. I hate that they are hiding in the underneath dark places. Once I leave and turn off the light I forget all about them but I do not like to be surprised by even the smallest of slugs.

1 October Sunday

Yesterday we went to a celebration gathering for Pam up in the mountains at an old hotel. We had never been to this hotel before. It smelled badly of mildew and damp and there was a lot of wallpaper peeling off the walls. In some places the paper had been stuck down with bits of sello tape and sometimes staples had been used. Many friends and family were there and there were a few speeches and stories all about Pam and her long life. It was a cheerful event. Small triangular sandwiches were served with the crusts cut off. This was the kind of food Pam liked to serve and to eat herself. She loved having tea. It is a pity no crisps were served as everyone who knew Pam knew how she loved crisps although since her preferred place to eat them was in bed maybe it is just as well they were not on offer. As we drove back down the mountains and over the Vee the sheep were everywhere on the road.  It made for a slower drive but not an unpleasant one.

2 October Monday

Everyone has things left for them at one shop or the other. McCarra’s shop and O’Dwyer’s shop are both helpful about taking things in for people. There are too many people who live up the mountains or down terrible roads like our own. The couriers cannot be seeking us out all day long as there is often no phone service and anyway we all end up stopping in at the shop eventually and then we can pick up whatever was left for us. The trouble is that the person who is looking for the parcel is rarely the one who put it wherever it is now.

Maud left something for us at the shop last week. Now we have come to collect it. No one knows exactly what size the parcel is and since they do not know what it looks like it is harder to find it. The area behind the counter and up on the shelf is cluttered with things dropped off by neighbours and friends and couriers. Everything gets put somewhere but that somewhere is not always evident. The thing might be behind the counter or it might be in the hardware shop or if it is large it might be in the shed or it might be behind the post office counter. Things are always found eventually but the finding is rarely fast.

3 October Tuesday

I arrived on the street in front of the clinic. There was a woman standing in front of the door. She shouted at me, “The Eye Man, is it? He is right in there but you’ll have to wait. He has a following, so he does.” She moved out of the way to allow me to enter the building. It was my final check up after the cataract surgery. The waiting room was full. There were two seats taken for each appointment. There were a lot of elderly people waiting and each of them had a younger person with them. I was the youngest person of both sorts and I was the only person on my own. The woman beside me spoke in a loud voice to the man next to her. She said, “So you’ve been here before?” He answered, “I must have been.”

4 October Wednesday

I sat in the log cabin at Daltons’ while my head lamps were adjusted. I was impressed that there is now a huge plate glass picture window in the cabin. No other customers are going to be left sitting there for hours while everyone goes home or out to lunch. I could see out into the work area and anyone in the work area could look in and see me sitting there on the plastic couch. I had already washed the car and filled the tires and cleaned out the inside and Mike had given the whole thing a look over. All this had involved two days of preparation. The lights were the last thing to do as the smallest bump in the road could set them off kilter. The man was not sure he had fixed them properly so he would not charge me for his time. He told me to come back after the test and if I had not passed because of the lights he would not charge me anything but if I passed I could give him ten euro.

I went to the NCT office and sat inside with the other people waiting for their test results. There were eight of us. There were three large windows so that we could watch the testing area and keep track of our own car. The new theory is that no one repairs their car before the test. They just wait to be told which parts failed and then they go and get that thing fixed. Variations on this were being discussed endlessly as we all waited. The rumour is that the authorities want to get old cars off the road so they are trying to find more things wrong with older vehicles. My vehicle is old. It is 19 years old. I had no doubt something would be found to be wrong. I was right. I failed the test but not because of the lights. I went back to the man and paid him ten euro and then went to Mike to discuss what needs to be done to pass. It is the rear suspension and the steering linkage. He says it is not a problem and that it will be simple to sort. But not today.

5 October Thursday

I heard Johnny announce  that he was shocked by the whole thing.  He said “I Nearly Fell Out of My Stand Up!”

6 October Friday

Breda and her sisters are trying to keep track of Jim who is 91 or maybe 92. He is living in the house he has always lived in. He is not driving any more so they take turns ferrying him to doctor’s appointments and out for his shopping. They have a sort of rota as to who visits him when just so they can keep track of him. They were taking it in turns to bring him a cooked dinner until one of the sisters decided it was better for him to prepare his own food. It kept him active and gave him some engagement both with his shopping choices and the preparation of the food. Breda stopped by yesterday and saw Jim standing by the gate.   The neighbour’s horse was just over on the other side of the gate. She assumed that Jim was talking to the horse but what he was doing was peeling a carrot over the gate so that the peelings dropped onto the ground. He said the horse could eat them if she wanted. He had two more carrots in his back pockets. The one on the left side had been peeled already. The one on the right side was still waiting to be peeled.

7 October Saturday

There are still sweet peas to bring into the house. They are perfect to look at but they are devoid of smell. The cooler nights must have chilled them into this state.

8 October Sunday

The woman who died is not a woman I know. Nor do I know her family. They all moved away years ago and she herself has been in a home for twelve years now. Two women were discussing her. They were fondly remembering that her specialty had been pricing the cakes for the Bake Sale.

9 October Monday

I still go out most mornings to pick raspberries for breakfast. Every day I think that today will be the last day. There are fewer berries and some of them are just too ripe and too wet. The ones that are a deep dark beautiful red do not taste much like raspberries. Instead, they taste like fruit water. I pick the ones that are lighter in colour and almost a bit unripe. I go out to pick wearing my dressing gown over my pajamas and my Wellington boots. If I got dressed in my clothes for the day before I went out to pick raspberries, I would get so wet that I would need to change maybe even before I ate breakfast. That is just how wet the leaves are. And this is why I am often greeting the postman standing outside in my dressing gown with my partially filled bowl of berries. He does not seem to notice nor to mind my appearance. He is happy to accept a handful of raspberries before continuing on his way.

10 October Tuesday

I received a text from the library informing me that the book I had requested was now on reserve for me. It will be held for 7 days. I have no recollection of requesting a book. Once again this book offers me the pleasure of complete surprise. Once again, Marie, the head librarian, has decided that this is a book I should read. It might be a library book or it might be her own book. Either way she is certain that it is a book I need to read. It is a book I shall want to read. I have no doubt that this is the best possible service any library can offer a reader.

11 October Wednesday

No one wants to turn on their heat yet. We all speak about it. It is almost a competition. It is only the 11th of October. It becomes a game to put it off for as long as possible. If anyone does turn on the heat they probably won’t admit it. The first of November is the ideal. Already the nights are chilly and the mornings are damp and cold. When the sun is out it is easy to forget about the cold and about the clothes not drying and the extra sweater. A fire in the wood stove is welcome enough at night. But when the day is cold and windy and wet the house can feel just miserable. Today is wild and windy but bright and sunny. We are not thinking about heat.

Fetching the Mail

24 October Tuesday

There were two Americans behind us on the bus. They were in their mid-sixties. A man and a woman. I think they were in their mid-sixties. I did not look closely because to do so I would have had to turn right around to stare directly at them. They were with two more Americans, also a man and a woman. The second couple were sitting in the seat across the aisle. I think these two were a little older. Maybe they were in their late sixties. Maybe they were the same age. They all had southern accents but I could not decide exactly from which part of the south. They spoke quietly. The two behind us discussed what to capture on their camera from the moving bus. The woman was beside the window and she had a proper camera rather than just a camera phone. We passed a field of sheep. The man said, “Get the sheep. Get the sheep. Get the sheep.” She snapped and snapped. He said, “Get the sheep. Keep shooting.” He was not bossy with his orders. He was just excited. There were only about twelve sheep in the field and the bus was moving pretty fast. The sheep were widely spread out so maybe she had enough time to photograph each one, but I do not think so. A little later, he said, “Get the tree.” She did. Then they discussed the tree.

Sometimes the four people spoke together. At one point, the woman across the aisle asked how long they had stayed in one place. They all agreed it had been six nights in one place and three nights in the next place. They joked about the woman updating her diary. Except for this interchange, each couple mostly just discussed things quietly between themselves.

I was not eavesdropping intentionally but I was exhausted from the long overnight flight and I was too tired to read and too tired to even fall asleep. The gentle excitement of photography from the moving bus was just enough to keep my interest. As the bus rolled down the hill into Cahir, the woman behind me was rapidly snapping the river and the weir and a heron which all looked beautiful in the sunlight. The couple on the other side of the bus were both taking pictures of Cahir Castle. We stood up to get our things together in anticipation of getting off the bus. Neither couple turned to look out the opposite side of the bus. The ones looking at the castle did not see the river and the ones looking at the river did not see the castle. Neither couple called over to the other couple to point out what there was to be seen out the other side of the bus.

I have been thinking of these people since I got home, and as I have drifted in and out of jet lag. I am hoping that at the end of each day of their travels they switch cameras and look at what was available to be seen out the other side of the bus. That way they can have a more complete picture of where they have been.

25 October Wednesday

We missed the hurricane. It was the biggest natural disaster in years and years. We missed all of the problems and the dangers and the excitement. I felt a little left out to be far away. I still feel like that. Our own house was fine. We did not lose any slates and we did not find much damage except for branches and one plum tree that was blown down. And of course, the leak in the roof has let in more water, but that could have happened with any normal rain storm. It did not need a hurricane. We have been getting reports from everyone we speak to. Some people lost electricity for a week or ten days while their neighbours next door did not. In many cases the neighbours with electricity have filled their freezer with the food from the freezer of people who lost their electricity. Tom Cooney’s galvanized roof flew off his hay barn and landed two fields away. It could easily have cut off someone’s head. PJ and Fiona felt it landed too near to their house. They were fearful that it might take off again in a fresh gust of wind. Tom Cooney told me that he is waiting for the insurance company to assess the damage but he knows he will have to pay at least part of the repair himself. He said they are backed up to their teeth with claims. He is in despair as he feels the entire world to be in a perilous state. He said his roof is just a small thing. The Mass Path is impassable. Trees and branches are down. I could not walk far enough to find out if the problem continues all the way up the path or if it is just the first hundred metres past the stream.

26 October Thursday

There are many freshly cut trees everywhere. Big and sturdy stone walls have been knocked down by falling trees. Branches have been thrown into enormous piles to be dealt with later. The bright look of sawdust and exposed timber stands out from all of the gloomy grey light. Other trees that fell where they stood have huge ripped apart trunks. In some places it is difficult to remember how things looked before the storm.

27 October Friday

The new modem is coming today. I do not understand it all but Simon spent a lot of the day yesterday talking to Winnie Hickey. Our internet has come from a system of bouncing connections all down the country. The last bounce before the bounce to us was off the roof of Winnie and Michael Hickey. This system has worked well for years. We could always phone the Hickeys if anything was malfunctioning with our internet. So that is what Simon did today. First he talked to the internet company, then he spoke to Winnie and then he went back to several different people at the company. No one gave him the same answers, Winnie assured him that no matter what they said the problem was nothing to do with the hurricane. She said that was their easy excuse but she said things had gone wrong a few days before the hurricane. We would have believed the man if she had not told us otherwise. The guy was trying to pretend it was the hurricane but then suddenly he said a tree grew up in the way. Simon said it was not possible for a tree to grow that fast and exactly in a position to be blocking the connection especially not at this time of year. The guy on the phone was waffling. He sort of implied without saying directly that they had sold off part of the company and the people who bought it could not be bothered with our small area of bouncing connections. Winnie is already signed up for a new service. She recommended that Simon do the same. That is why he ordered this modem which is to arrive today. I am confused by all of it.

28 October Saturday

Pat Looby loaned me a copy of WASTING TIME ON THE INTERNET by Kenneth Goldsmith. It has been sitting around for a month or more. Now that there is no internet here and spending time on the internet is not even vaguely a possibility, I think it might be as good a time as any to read this book. The promised modem arrived but now the mast from which it receives its signal in Ardfinnan is down. So we remain without the internet. We are without our mobile phones too. We are reduced to using the landline and the dictionary. I have become accustomed to using my phone for everything. I check the weather with my phone. I am out of the habit of listening to the radio for this information and I no longer remember when to tune in in order to catch a weather forecast. Small things have become big things.

29 October Sunday

Maud had the whole day to herself. She told me that Peter had gone off to Chase a Churn. He drove to Gorey which is more than a three hour drive. He said it was worth it because it is not easy to find a butter churn with its top still intact. He would not be home till late. Maud was pleased to have the time to putter around and to just do what came into her head rather than doing things that needed to be done or demanded to be done. She told me that she had bought a lovely bunch of organic celery in the market. It had lots of leafy foliage and a glorious smell but she knew there was nothing at all to eat from it. The stalks were too thin to be worth anything. I wondered why she had bought it. She hung the celery in her window with a piece of pink twine. The sight of the celery hanging there pleased her enormously and she was glad to have had the time to do something like this with her afternoon. I forgot to ask if the celery was hung with the leafy part up or the leafy part down.

30 October Bank Holiday

Fetching the Mail has taken on a whole new meaning. We drive three miles down to McCarra’s shop and sit in the tiny room which used to be the Christmas Room and then was the All Year Round Gift Room. Later it returned to being a place to eat or to use the internet and the photocopier but lately it has a bunch of chairs and a few tables and a lot of merchandise which is piled up and waiting to be shelved somewhere else in the shop. We use the signal to take in the mail and to send out some mail. Our mobile phones do not work in the shop but they do work outside the shop. At home nothing works yet. We make two Fetch the Mail trips to the shop each day.

Gallybandy

1 November Wednesday

Being in the SuperValu in Cahir on this Wednesday morning felt like a mistake. The whole store was full of boxes being unpacked and goods
being shelved as well as lots and lots of elderly people. Almost everyone was on a frame or a stick or being pushed in a wheel chair. Every aisle was a traffic jam. There was a lot of laughter as people struggled to get around the boxes and to get to the products. The whole place was full of delight at so much chaos. By the time I reached the check-out counter there were two people in front of me waiting while one lady placed her goods on the counter. She apologized to us all for being so slow. The elderly man behind her told her to take her time and indeed to take as long as she needed. When she was finally finished paying and loading her shopping and thanking us all, she rolled her trolley away. The man who had been behind her was tall. He stood beside the counter with all of his things still in his trolley. He announced, “I will put my purchases on the counter when I am ready.“ The check-out girl waited a few minutes and then she said, “So, now then, are you ready?” He said, “I am. Indeed I am.”

As he banged his items onto the counter he shouted out what each thingwas. He appeared to be buying two of everything:
“Two Bags of Apples!
Two bottles of Dettol!
Two tins of baked beans!
Two packages of Kitchen Towels with two rolls in each package!
Two bags of Golden Wonder potatoes!”

Everyone watched him as he emptied his cart. It would not have mattered if I had been in the other line as every single person in both check out lines stopped what they were doing to watch him and to listen and to look at what he was buying. He said “Maybe I have two wives and I am shopping for them both!”

He announced that he came for The Shopping every Wednesday morning and that he always arrived by helicopter. He said it was the best way to travel when the roads Go Muddy and the trees are falling every which way. The man had only one tooth in the top front of his mouth and very few along the bottom but he had a good loud voice.

By the time I left the store he had loaded all of his groceries into his car. He did not have a helicopter. He had small old car with agricultural plates. It was thirty years old and the shine had gone off the paint. It was a dull orangey red. It had not been shiny for a long, long time. He had both front doors of the car open and he was parked in the place reserved for Mothers and Babies. He was standing near the front of the car shouting to each person who left the store. He asked who might be needing a lift home in his helicopter.

2 November Thursday

John Dowling gave me a box. The box was held closed by a big thick rubber band. I marveled at the strength and the width and the large size of it. I could not have been happier with this gift. The box itself became irrelevant. As did its contents. John told me that a rubber band this size is called a Gallabandy. This is a new word for me. A Gallabandy is a big fat strong rubber band which is produced, of course, for the normal functions. Locally, a Gallabandy is valued for being exactly the sort of rubber band needed to make a slingshot.

3 November Friday

I was in the hairdressers. People were discussing their plans for the weekend. One woman said she was going to go up to Eason’s to buy herself a good book. Someone a few chairs along screamed, “You mean to READ?!!??”

4 November Saturday

We were just beginning to prepare supper when the gas ran out. The supper was fresh hake from the market. It needed to be cooked quickly,
in a hot pan. After considering a few options, Simon unhooked the gas canister from outside and put into the back of the motor. I drove to the shop to get a replacement. It was only about seven thirty but it was fully dark. I was worried that there might not be anyone there to lift the heavy full canister up and into the car. I knew it would be much too heavy for me. Luckily Kieren appeared just as I arrived and he loaded it for me. I had not wanted to go to the shop but the moon was big and full and the night was still so I was happy to be out driving through the dark with not another car in sight. There are times when the complete lack of any lights on the road is wonderful. Some full moons light all of the land and turn the world blue and bright but this full moon was just a circle of light. Nothing else was illuminated. Everywhere else was very very dark.

5 November Sunday

We all comment about the weather. We comment on the weather all the time. Today is bitter and cold and windy. But it is dry. That is the positive in every weather conversation. If it is not raining, it means that life is good and therefore we can only complain so much. We have been told to expect more of this cold. It has been unseasonably mild for so long now that the cold is a shock and a surprise. Tommie grumbled about it. Really what he grumbled about is that there is not one thing that any of us can do about it. He said, “We have no say at all in the weather. They put it inside into the radio and then it is after coming out and into our houses. We are just the ones who get it.”

6 November Monday

There are two and sometimes three men working on the humpback bridge into the village. They are pointing and scraping at cement and stone and doing things underneath that we cannot see as we drive or walk past. We hope that this work will help the bridge to last for many
more years. There is a small container dropped in place by the bridge. It is called a Welfare Pod. One door on the long side has a crossed
knife and fork. That is the little kitchen and eating room. The short side of the Pod has another door and that is a loo. The kitchen and the loo are both only entered from the outside. There is a discrete separation between the two activities.

7 November Tuesday

When walking a path where no one else has walked for a while I feel that I am jostling the settled nature. Or that is the word I use for
it. I am jostling the landscape. I am jostling the land to help it remember feet going along it. Stepping down on upright grass and pushing through weeds begins the path-making all over again. The path feels fresh and new even when it is not exactly new and not exactly fresh. It is not making a path. It is just re-claiming where it was and reminding it and me that it is the same place only different. Jostling the memory of the land.

Campbell’s Tea

22 November Wednesday

I was stopped going through the security line at Cork Airport. The security woman took me and my bag aside. Before opening it, she said “You are carrying coffee in a tin?” I said “No, I have tea. I have two tins of Campbell’s Tea.” I had been a little worried that the security people might consider the metal tins to be potential weapons. I babbled a bit and said that I liked to take Campbell’s tea as a gift because I love the big yellow tins and because people love to receive them. I forgot that I was in Cork. The woman was not worried about the metal and the possibility of it being bent or shaped into a knife or a weapon once I was on the plane. She did not care about the tins. She was disgusted that I was not taking Barry’s tea as a gift. Barry’s tea is the only tea to buy or to drink if you live in Cork. Barry’s tea is a Cork product. It is a Cork institution. The Barry Family are from Cork. They still live in Cork. They donate generously to all things Cork. Barry’s tea is synonymous with Cork. I worried that she was going to confiscate my Campbell’s Tea. She made me wait around a bit. She let me and the tea go, but she did not want to.

23 November Thursday

Young people do not go to High School. They go to Secondary School. I was surprised to see a musical event listed to take place at the CBS
High School. The CBS is the Christian Brothers School. The ground floor of the school is for Primary School boys and upstairs is the
Secondary School, for the older boys. It is called the High School because it is upstairs. It is higher off the ground. The man who explained this to me said that he himself left school early. He told me that he never got Up the Stairs.

24 November Friday

I turned the corner in the boreen and surprised the fox. He surprised me too. He turned his head and saw me just exactly as I saw him. I was close enough that I could have touched him with an outstretched arm. He leapt high across the track and into the woods without missing a beat.

25 November Saturday

Yesterday morning was cold and frosty. There was a thick covering of snow on the Galtee Mountains. They looked like the Alps. The
Knockmealdowns and the Comeraghs were less heavily coated. They were only sprinkled with snow. We had no snow down here. It was all in the distance. The good thing about the snow and the cold was that I thought there might be fewer slugs alive and crawling around in the
bathroom. The unnaturally mild weather has meant that they have not died off or gone into hibernation or whatever they do in the winter.
Every evening I have been finding at least one stretched out on the sink or the tub or the shelf and every time I throw him or her out the
window. There was no slug to toss out last night. I hope that means the end of them until next year.

Tuesday 1 slug
Wednesday 1 slug
Thursday 2 slugs
Friday 0

26 November Sunday

Simon found a pumpkin in the ditch. We had walked down the Long Field in cold windy sunlight. He chose to return by walking around by the road. I walked back up the way we had come. I wanted to look again at the metal things on the rock in the low place where rocks and rubble have been dumped to keep them off the fields and all in one place.This rock depositary has been used for a long time. Years. Most of the rocks are probably parts of the stone walls that separated many small fields before the Long Field became one enormous field. There are
plenty of furze bushes and brambles growing around the piled up stones. It is a place to aim for on the walk. I always think of it as
about halfway but it is not really halfway. And of course it depends from which end of the field you begin your walk. There are eight metal
things on the rock. They have been there for at least two months. Each one has two big bolts in it. I guess they were taken off a piece
of machinery during the harvest and replaced with new parts. Or maybe they are waiting for collection and will be used again. It might be
that the farmer knows exactly where he left them. Lined up together on the rock in the sun they looked like a little flotilla of boats.

Back to the pumpkin. Simon was walking up the road just after the fork. There are no houses nearby. He saw a pumpkin in the ditch. And
of course the ditch was not a down ditch as most people know a ditch but a Tipperary ditch meaning a section of hedgerow. Someone had
thrown the pumpkin there, maybe from a moving car. It was resting deep and snugly within the tangled brambles and hawthorn branches. It was not visible to anyone in a car or a tractor, but it was visible to a walker. He scrabbled in the ditch and rescued it. It was not broken nor were there any gashes from the thorns. Simon was not able to walk too far with the pumpkin in his arms so he waited under a tree until I
drove down that way. I was wondering why it was taking him so long to get up the hill. Now we have a pumpkin sitting outside waiting to be
cooked and made into a pie or a cake or eaten as a vegetable.

27 November Monday

Going to the village to post a few parcels before the afternoon pick up became a long trip. There was work being done between the
graveyard and the bridge. It was big work with lots of men and lots of trucks. Yesterday there was one truck and a few men there with two at each end. They had STOP & GO signs that they turned around every few minutes. Today I had to wait about 15 minutes for a little white
van with flashing lights to arrive. This was the Convoy Vehicle. He arrived and turned around and then led myself and two other cars down
the road where one other car was waiting to come up. Then the Convoy Vehicle turned around to lead that car back up. I had to wait to
travel in The Convoy as I went back home too. There was no other way to go unless I drove all around by way of Ardfinnan and that would
have been stupid. It seemed to me that the two men with their two signs and their mobile telephones did the job just as well, and faster.

A Sparrow On Galtymore

28 November Tuesday

We walked up the small road past Tommie’s and met Michael at Middlequarter.  He thought we were walking toward the waterfall and he warned us that it was wickedly muddy and slippery up there right now.  We knew that to be true so we said we would wait for another day to do that walk.  He told us that Rose’s mother MaryAnn swore that the waterfall was a Tried and Proven cure for alcoholics. If any man went and stood up under the rushing water at The Gash he would be cured of his drinking addiction.  She used to tell this to anyone who would listen as she stood behind the bar serving drinks. After a bit of laughing, Michael said goodbye.  He was on his way to the stream just below to rinse off his Wellington boots.  He had been with his cows and he had muck and hay and mud coated almost to the top of the boots. He said he did not want to sit into his car with all of that still on his boots.

30 November Thursday

The pumpkin rescued from the ditch was too old to be edible. One side started to rot so I cut it open. The flesh had gone all spongy. I think it had been frozen and thawed one time too many.  I scraped out the seeds and dried them in the oven with a bit of oil.  They are delicious. The pumpkin is in the compost heap.

1 December Friday

We spent a lot of the morning looking for an apple corer.  We knew we did not own one.  We were looking for something that might work the same way.  I texted Breda.  She did not have one. I texted Siobhan.  She did not have one but she met us for a walk and brought a potato peeler thing which she thought might do the job.  We bumped into Biddy at the graveyard. She did not have one either but she remembered that she used to have one.  She could not recall the last time she even needed an apple corer. There was not a corer for sale at the shop.  Kieren found a short piece of pipe with a sharp end in the hardware shop. The pipe had been part of some shelving unit.  We decided that might do the job.  It was the best solution so far and in the end it worked beautifully.

2 December Saturday

I went down to the post office yesterday afternoon to catch the last post before Monday.  There were cars everywhere. It was the wrong time of day for a funeral. Funerals are always at 11 am.  This was a wedding and everyone was just leaving the church after the service as I arrived.  There were cars parked everywhere all the way up to the bridge and there were people all over.  The men were all wearing suits and ties and looking smart.  The women and girls were all completely underdressed. Everyone seemed to be dressed for a wedding in the middle of summer. There were lots of spaghetti strapped dresses and bare legs with fake tan and high heeled sandals.  It was a bright and sunny day but the temperature was 2 degrees.  It was nearly freezing and in my many layers and my wool hat I was still feeling the cold. These women must have been nearly dead.  I saw a few hats but they were summery wedding hats not wooly cold weather hats. I saw one little white furry cape that covered someone’s shoulders and came halfway down her upper arms.  The shop was full of people laughing and talking and getting warm. They were getting cash and cigarettes and talking about what a lovely ceremony it had been. The wedding was for David John and his girlfriend.  I do not know her.  I do not even know her name.  They have been together for maybe seven years and they have two children.  People save up for years to have a wedding.  They are more apt to buy a house than to have a wedding. That is the current order of things.  DJ is Rose’s son. She had opened the bar for an hour before the wedding and it was going to be open for two hours after the service. That is why people were in the shop getting some cash.  People like to drink before a wedding and they like to drink after a wedding.  Two buses were going to come after the two hours to collect everyone and take them down to Dungarvan for the party and the Afters. Later in the night, or in the early morning, the buses would make a few trips to bring everyone home again and deliver them all to their houses.

3 December Sunday

I saw Mary at the market yesterday. She is the Mary I usually see at the Farmers Market. I do not think I have ever seen her anywhere else. She is the Mary who loves Edvard Grieg.  She has traveled to Norway to sit on Grieg’s bench. She and Anne baked cakes and pies and scones for the market for at least six years.  They also took baking orders for special occasions. They had a little mobile stall from which they sold their wares.  The stall was small and high off the ground. It meant that they were standing way up above their customers. The cakes were at the level of the top of my head. I could never see what was available.  I had to ask. Mary’s pear and almond tart was a great favourite.  Anne’s husband arrived early each Saturday morning and got the stall backed in and level and secure and then he went home and came back later with Anne and her baked goods. The two women retired a few years ago. Anne and Mary stopped selling at the market and I have never seen Anne again.  Mary comes to the market every week.  She swears she has never baked another thing from that day to this.  When I saw her today she looked a bit lost.  Maybe a bit naked.  Then I realized that she was wearing no glasses.  She too had her cataracts done this year and she has had a bad time since then with infections.  I asked how her eyes are now and she said they are terrific.  She told me they are so good that she can see A Sparrow On Top Of Galtymore.

4 December Monday

Simon and I spent an hour or so with clippers and saws trying to work our way up the mass path. We had not gotten too far when we reached a fallen tree.  It was too big for our little saws.  It needed a chain saw and since we did not have a chain saw, we back-tracked and went through Cooney’s wood where tree felling has been going on for weeks and weeks now.  We struggled up a steep banking, got into the field and walked along the side parallel to the path. A small fox run at the top of the hill allowed us to slip back down onto the path.  We were both scratched and bleeding from the pushing and cutting through brambles and branches.  We had thick clods of mud encasing both the top and the bottom of our boots from the field. The very sticky soil made walking hard. The soil is called Clay. No one calls it dirt.  Dirt implies excrement.  Clay is what fills the fields. The way it clumped around our boots made our feet heavy and awkward. We staggered down the road with clay falling off at intervals.  At the fold in the land near Ballynamudagh, Oscar came rushing out to greet us and he walked with us all the home. With sunset at about quarter past four we just made it before dark.

The Fermoy Pencil

6 December Wednesday

Em hated closed doors.  A closed door inside the house was a personal insult.  She moved through the house at intervals checking in rooms where she thought something might be happening.  The bathroom was on her route.  After years of slipping in and out and rubbing her side along the edge of the door frame, she left a grubby smudge at dog body height.  She has been dead now for three years but the smudge remained.  Even though it looked like dirt on paintwork to anyone else, it was a sign of Em for me.  Now the smudge has been cleaned away.  Another sign of her absence.

8 December Friday

Wild lashing rain with a bit of sun at rare intervals but really it is the kind of day to get soaked no matter what you do or how long you spend out of doors. Ned came down to fill the oil tank. We have to be at home when he comes.  The generator needed to fill the tank must be plugged in to the house currant through an open window.  A normal sized oil lorry will not fit down the boreen.  Ned was soaked through when the job was done.  He was happy to sit down with hot tea and biscuits.  He spoke about one man giving another man the hard time he deserved for abusing public trust. He said that The one man Lacerated the other man.  I had never heard Lacerate used like this. Ned said, “He gave the fellow a Real Laceration.”

10 December Sunday

Our Green Cone is a green plastic cone which is wider at the bottom that it is at the top. It is made so that we can throw bones and fish skin and any amount of horrible stuff which would not be appropriate in the compost heap.  No rodents can dig down and get at anything because of the basket-like container at the bottom of the cone.  The container is dug into the ground. We still use the regular compost heap for vegetable matter. The green cone gets the horrible things.  If I go out to the cone at night I use the head torch so I can have two hands free for opening the top and tipping something inside. Last night my entire bowl, complete with fish skins and bones, slid into the cone.  I closed the top and went back into the house.  It was cold and dark and the contents of the cone smelled. My arm is not long enough to reach down into the cone even if I wanted to. I considered the bowl gone forever.  It was a heart shaped sponge-ware bowl which had been a gift.  Today Simon went out and rescued the bowl with the help of a long spade.

11 December Monday

Dilly is not the only one who ends her sentences with the words PLEASE GOD. Many people use these sentence endings.  If I say “I shall see you on Wednesday” Dilly always adds the words  “Please God”. Sometimes she says “God Willing”. Both endings embrace the assumption and a certain acceptance that the future is not something that is in your own hands.

12 December Tuesday

A damp struggle up the path today. It was not really a walk.  It was a only a struggle. The really huge tree that was blocking all movement up or down has finally been cut and moved by Andrzej with a chain saw.  Unfortunately, he ran out of both time and light to do any more clearing because that one tree took so long. There are still other trees in various angles of collapse.  We straddled our way over one large one which was covered with ivy and very wet. I think it is the ivy that pulls some of these trees down. It strangles and weakens them. Most of the others just involved crawling underneath or a squeezing around. There are plenty of brambles tugging at our hats and skin. Still, after so many weeks or maybe two months, of not being able to walk that route it was a pleasure to be back up there again.  I saw two pheasants and the fox.

Once we were out on the road, we saw Tom Cooney overseeing the moving of hay bales into his new shed. Tom Cooney always wears a big black hat with a large brim so even at a distance it is easy to know that it is himself. His hat is not exactly a cowboy hat, though maybe it is a cowboy hat.  It has a distinctive look.  Not one other person around here wears a hat like that.  Tom Cooney drives a big black Land Rover and he has two large black dogs who go everywhere with him. Mostly they stay inside the vehicle while he is checking on things. If he lets them out to run around he cannot keep his attention on the job being done as he would need to keep all his attention on the dogs. The new shed is much bigger than the old shed. And now he has two sheds where before he only had one. The roof supports off the old shed have been removed. The old galvanized round top has been replaced with a flat roof. The metal was all deformed and bent after the roof blew off in the hurricane. I am glad I photographed it before it was replaced. Seeing the new roof makes it is hard to even remember what the old one looked like.

13 December Wednesday

Ever since the new motorway bypass was built we have had little reason to drive through Fermoy.  As a town it is a little too far away to be useful for everyday things and not special enough for a visit on its own. Today we made a detour into town to take a photograph of the Fermoy Pencil.  The pencil is located on the road leading out of town. It was a good moment for a photo as the pencil had been recently painted.  It looked bright and clean and crisp and the graphite point was perfectly sharp.  The pencil was originally erected as a sign post for the Faber-Castell company just down the road.  The factory opened in 1954.  They made any number of different writing implements. I do not know if the big pencil was erected right away. No doubt it has been replaced a few times.  Kids carve their names in the wood of the pencil at least as high as they can reach. They never get up to the top. The pencil is about two and a half meters high.  Whenever the column is repainted the words and names get filled in and the pencil once again becomes a smooth, new writing utensil. The Fermoy branch of the Faber-Castell factory closed in the early 90’s but people love the Columbus which is the name of this style of pencil.  Tom Martin & Co. took over the distribution of the Columbus throughout the country. I assume the company is responsible for maintaining the pencil itself. I love the Fermoy Pencil.

Clean Food.

15 December Friday

The sun was out. It was cold but bright. I walked over Joe’s fields. The ground was wet and squishy.  It was not cold enough to be frozen. I stumbled a bit in and out of the deep hoof marks left by the cows in the mud. Cows always churn up mud and when it gets really cold the hoof holes freeze. Because we had the deep cold and now we have this strange mild weather the hoof holes are deep but soft.  It is a different kind of treacherousness than the frozen kind. Later I spent part of the road walk detouring into any long grass to wipe mud and muck off my boots.  As I neared the turn into our boreen, I heard a siren.  It is rare to hear a siren. I stopped to figure out where it was coming from and where it was going. I could hear that it was up on the Ardfinnan to Knocklofty road but I could not decide if it was going towards Ardfinnan or away from Ardfinnan. When I saw a Garda car speeding up the road towards me with lights flashing and the siren going, I waited to watch it pass. It was the only car I had seen all day. The car stopped beside me and the siren was turned off. The Garda opened his window and asked if I had seen a car crash.  I said No.  He asked if this was the Knocklofty to Newcastle road.  I said No. I said, “This is the Grange to Newcastle road.” I told him to take the left at the top of the hill and to drive a short distance, about a kilometer, which is the entire length of that road, until he reached a T-junction.  I said, “That will be the Knocklofty – Newcastle road. The car crash you are looking for could be either down hill to the left toward Knocklofty or down hill to the right toward Newcastle.” He looked a little confused about what to do when he got to that decision-making moment. He thanked me, turned on his siren and set off again, at speed.

16 December Saturday

The little chicks are growing up at the Farmers Market.  Each week they arrive in a cloth lined box that sits on the end of the table at the egg stand.  There are four of them. This week they are four weeks old. They are fuzzy. Everyone who sees them smiles.  I think this is the third egg seller we have had since David retired.  One of them was charging so much for his eggs that people started to boycott his stand and there was a lot of grumbling among the customers. I had never before heard grumbling at the market.  People said “Can you imagine paying that much for a dozen eggs!  And they are not even organic!” as if they always bought organic when mostly they never bought organic.  It did not take many Saturdays before that egg man stopped coming to the market.  These new egg sellers have a huge stack of boxes out on their long table.  The baby chicks are at one end, the eggs are in the middle and at the far end of the table are jars of chicken broth. David had a tiny round garden table and he only ever had two or three boxes of six eggs out at any one time.  As he sold them he would bring a few more cartons out from the back of his car.

17 December Sunday

I took a cake and a card down to Tommie and Margaret.  Tommie was alone and he looked exhausted.  He told me that Margaret fell outside the house on a tiny bit of ice yesterday and broke her leg. The ambulance arrived within half an hour which Tommie thought was good timing but he said it was a very long half hour for Margaret.  She had to wait on the cold ground as he dared not move her. She is now in Waterford awaiting surgery.  He slept very badly last night with the worry. This morning he went over to Grange for Mass as he could not deal with going in the village as usual.  He would need to be answering questions from everyone and he had no answers to give.  I knew he was not able for the drive to Waterford so I asked if he needed a lift.  He said, “Not to worry.”  He said that Some of His Own will be driving him.

18 December Monday

For as long as we have lived here, we have been run off the road by  enormous shiny milk tankers. It is a regular thing. Some of the tankers are from Glanbia and some are DairyGold. They rush around the countryside several times a week collecting the milk from farms. We are lucky they do not collect every day. Both kinds of these tankers go too fast. They are dangerous if we are walking and they are dangerous if we are driving.  Maybe it is more dangerous to be driving because they take up the entire road and they never slow down for anyone. I never thought the word GLANBIA was anything more than a company name.  Today Breda told me that it is the Irish word for CLEAN FOOD. Knowing this translation does not make the milk trucks any less dangerous.  If anything, it is disconcerting to imagine being run over by Clean Food.

19 December Tuesday

A box of birthday candles in the shop has been opened and 3 candles have been removed.  Or maybe 4 candles have been removed.  The box held 24 candles when it was new. Near the top of the box the price sticker has been amended to read 21 only.  At the bottom someone has drawn a zero over the 4 of 24, so there are either 20 or 21 candles in the box now. I do not know if the price on the packet takes the smaller number of candles into consideration.

The Irish Harp

21 December Thursday

The pressure is on. People stop one another to ask if everything is done. These are the Pre-Christmas things to be done. It is not only the things like the tree and decorations and the wreath for the door and the gifts and the turkey. It is all the other things which demand attention before the day. It is all the things to do before the Great Christmas Shut Down. Even though things do not shut down as completely as they once did, people act like the stores and the banks and the Post Office will never open again, and there will never be enough in the house to get through the ten days of the Shut Down. There are so many things which MUST be done before the holiday. I always feel like people are adding completely unnecessary things to the Must Do list just to increase the sense of panic. Every year I try to take note of all of the Important Things and every year I learn about some more things. A list might be the best way for me to keep track of the demands, even though I shall not be doing these things myself.  I shall no doubt forget some things:

1. The graves of the deceased must be cleaned and either fresh flowers or an evergreen remembrance wreath should be placed on  the grave. This is especially important for the recently deceased.
2.  The dog, if you have a dog, must be washed and groomed at the dog groomer.
3.  The car must be washed.
4.  The car should be filled to the top with petrol or diesel before Christmas Day.
5.  A haircut is essential.
6.  A supply of coal or turf must be bought and ready.
7.  The firewood supply must be stacked and ready.
8.  Teeth must be cleaned by the dental hygienist.
9.  The windows of the house must be washed inside and out.

22 December Friday

The weather is all wrong. It is unseasonably mild after a period of deep hard cold. There are daffodils pushing up from the ground. Some are already showing three inches of green. Lilacs and currant bushes have buds. The apple trees have buds and one even has a few blossoms. Roses are showing new growth. None of this is right. There are two snowdrops in bloom. They are also early but at least they are only a few weeks early. They are not as early as everything else. I heard on the radio that a daffodil grower down in Wexford has multiple fields of daffodils in full bloom. He is deeply upset. There is no market for daffodils in December. He said he is a ruined man.

23 December Saturday

There was a piece in the news about some youths wrecking a church. They went in and smashed things up. The church was in an isolated spot out west somewhere. No one heard them or saw them. They broke every window and most of the benches. They set a few things on fire. They did not appear to have stolen anything. They just destroyed the place. People have been discussing it.  Jimmie was very saddened by it. He did not like the disrespect nor the irreverence. He despaired about the waste. He shook his head again and again. In a quiet voice, he said, “It is the problem for kids today. They are trying to have fun but they do not know how.”

24 December Sunday

Every year Anthony makes a Christmas tree from tyres. Anthony runs the motor factors and tyre place in the village. Everyone with a car or a truck or a tractor goes to Anthony for new tyres and for repairs to flat tyres. He is as happy to fix a wheelbarrow tyre as he is to do a bicycle tyre. He has a lot of old tyres. Every year his tyre tree is a little bit different from the year before. The tree is built on top on some pallets and held on with a big yellow strap. It might even be the same tree each year with just slightly different treatment. This year he layered green leaves between each tyre. Every year the tree appears as a surprise.

26 December Tuesday

We walked up Middlequarter and along the old track which is more like a riverbed than a path. It would have been wise for me to take a walking stick. The rocks were slippery with moss and wet leaves.  We managed to do most of the walk before the rain started up again. The path is lined with holly on both sides.  The sharp edges of the holly scratched at us as moved through them. When we dropped down to the place where the narrow path becomes a farm track we passed Des Dillon’s cottage. As always, I admired his green gate.

27 December Wednesday

There is a lot of moss everywhere. I am not sure if it is because of the mild weather or if it is in spite of the mild weather. The luminous green glows and makes us pay attention to things which we might miss.

29 December Friday

THE IRISH HARP IS NOT CONSTRUCTED BUT CARVED OUT OF A SINGLE TREE LIKE A CANOE.

In 1993, we made a letterpress concertina of this statement for our Coracle residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. In 1998, we laminated some of the leftover pages of text that had never been folded. We put grommets and strings on them. We called them Tree Ties. Today I spent some time down by the stream pulling pieces of ivy off the tree so that I could expose the Tree Tie a bit. I do not remember how long it has been attached to that tree. It is in pretty good shape.