THE JOURNAL

2 April Wednesday

I know that I will continue to miss Tommie in the coming months and weeks. He was so sad and miserable, and his poor health was dragging him down. He was not allowed to eat any of the things he loved to eat. Without those small pleasures his life was grimmer by the day. He knew the time was right to die.  It was only at his funeral that I finally learned his age. The priest announced that he was 94. Our conversations and the sharing of delicious seasonal fruit have been such a special part of my life in recent years. It was a pleasure to know him. There will not be another such friend.

4 April Friday

A cut of tart = A slice of pie

5 April Saturday

The bees are busy. Their combined buzzing as they zoom in and out of the roof above the door to the book barn is loud. The days are beautifully warm and the nights are cold. This weather is wonderful.

7 April Monday

Wild garlic is everywhere. There is so much of it that I can enjoy stepping on it in order to be surrounded with the tangy smell. We are eating it often. We are eating it several times a day every day.  The stems, cut up very tiny, as though they are chives, make a citrus-like topping to sprinkle on anything that we might be eating.

9 April Wednesday

The girl at the counter ran off to collect something that the woman had forgotten to put into her shopping basket. While waiting, the woman leaned heavily on her walking frame. I recognized the woman but I did not know her name. She turned away from the counter and showed me her shopping list. It was written in pencil on a piece of card about the size of a postcard. The surface of the card was a bit nubbly, sort of like watercolour paper. She told me that she had been using this same piece of card for her shopping list for nearly three months now. After each trip to the shop, she returned home and carefully rubbed out the list, and then she began again. Sometimes she used both sides of the card, but usually one side was enough. She was proud of her eraser which she said was white and soft and perfect for the job. And she was proud of the re-using of the same piece of card, which she informed me was good for the environment. She wanted me to admire her thoughtfulness and her care, so I did.

10 April Thursday

Stitchwort. Primrose. Bluebells. Wild Garlic. Vetch. Forget-me-not. Lesser Celandine. The verges and the hedgerows are full of flowering plants. Many fields are full of bright yellow rape.

11 April Friday

We have had over a week of warm and sultry weather. Maybe it is ten days? We stopped counting because it is all so pleasant. We have been eating out doors, throwing the doors and windows open to the sound of birdsong. The birds are noisy and happy and busy with nest building. Everyone wonders aloud if this is our summer. There is a fear that this might be the only good weather we have all year. The lack of a proper summer last year keeps our expectations low. Brendan announced that this spate of recent good weather has been Last Summer Come Late, so he claims it is safe to anticipate more good weather to come.

12 April Saturday

This is the second week of the fresh asparagus from County Wexford. Each Saturday I buy two or three bunches and we eat it several days in a row. This asparagus is the very first that we see each year, and it is the best that we will have. The crop from this small grower lasts for six or seven weeks, so it is important to purchase some every week at the Farmers Market. It is important to savour it and to hold the taste in our minds and in our mouths, because it will be another year before any other asparagus tastes as good.

13 April Sunday

Something is dead in the shed. The smell is terrible. I leave the door open all day in the hope that the air will blow out the odour. It is not working. Whatever it is, this dead thing is only in the early stages of rotting.

14 April Monday

Today I made my first batch of wild garlic pesto.  I must make a bigger batch so that I can freeze some. Ideally I should walk up the Mass Path to Johnnie Mackin’s to fill up a big bucket with leaves and to dig up more bulbs to replant down here under the trees. I fear the walk up there is completely overgrown. It promises to be a struggle. I cannot remember the last time I walked up that way. The longer I wait the worse it will get.

15 April Tuesday

The people who go to the Farmer’s Market regularly on Saturday always bring their egg cartons back. They give them to Keith, or to Pat the Fishmonger, who keeps chickens and ducks. His eggs are often, but not always, on sale too. Keith’s eggs are more plentiful and they are always on sale unless one is late arriving at the market and he has already sold out. Keith glues a piece of paper with his name onto his boxes but Pat just re-uses any old box. He does not label it in any way. Keith also places a small piece of paper inside each box. He and his wife make a tiny printed label to put into each box of eggs that he sells. The label is made of two small pieces of paper, cut carefully with pinking shears and glued together with the date hand-written. The printed note gives the Best Before date. Making a little label for each box, one at a time, is a labour-intensive way to sell eggs. I am collecting these labels.

Meanwhile, I have an egg box from Pat that is from Mooncoin. I love the name Mooncoin. It is a poor translation from the Irish, which is roughly Coyne’s bogland. Mooncoin is a long narrow village in County Kilkenny.  It is a place that we do no more than drive through and right out the other end. Mooncoin consistently scores high in the Tidy Towns Competition each year. Other than that, we rarely hear anything about it. Having an egg box from Mooncoin gives me great pleasure even thought I know the eggs inside are from somewhere else.

16 April Wednesday

Dan Joe wears his cigarette lighter on the lapel of his suit jacket. He wears a tweed suit jacket all year round and most days he wears a necktie too. The lighter is attached to his lapel with a large safety pin. He says he needs to keep it handy. He needs to know where it is because most of his pockets have holes in them. He explains that since hardly anyone smokes anymore, it is not easy to get a light when you need one and it is a bigger problem to have a cigarette and no flame to light it than it is to have no cigarette at all. As he spoke to me, the lighter swayed back and forth on his chest.

18 April Good Friday

The bull is again residing in the front field. His bulk makes him appear like a huge black cut-out in the middle of the grass. He eyes me slowly when I walk by. He does not move his head, only his eyes.

19 April Saturday

The smell of slurry fills the air. The stench is awful. It burns the back of my throat when I step outside. The stench of death in the shed remains terrible. I keep thinking that what I need to do is to go around all the inside edges in the shed to see what has curled up to die in a safe and hidden place. The trouble is that I do not want to find the rotting corpse so this is a job I put off day after day. A job to Put On the Long Finger.

20 April Easter Sunday

I finally finished moving all of the firewood from the cut-up apple tree that fell down in the destructive winter storm, Éowyn. That wood will not be ready to burn for at least six months. The tree was torn apart. Andrzej cut it up and stacked the wood neatly in the outside shelter of the sauna. Now that room is about to fall down and its roof is flapping. We have decided on a plan to build the new space but that cannot be done until this wood is moved. Today Niall arrived with more firewood. I feel like I will never be finished with this endless wheel-barrowing and stacking, and still every evening is cold enough to need a fire in the woodstove.

21 April Easter Bank Holiday Monday

On again off again rain. The sun in between the small downpours is hot. I am trying to do outdoor jobs but each time it rains I go back into one of the barn buildings and I do a different kind of job. All day long I am bouncing between indoors and outdoors.  I never take off my Wellie boots. I am always ready to go back outside. The Shallykabukies with their striped shells are everywhere after the rain.  They are on the windows and on the doors and they ooze along in the wet grass.  The tool shed still smells of death.

22 April Tuesday

I have set up a small work table in the Envelope Room. I am finally replacing some of the interiors that have faded or just generally look bad. I do not want to re-do the entire room but I am happy to dip in and out with this job as the weather continues cool and wet and un-spring like. With this table in Ready Position I can repair the interiors that need replacing without turning it into a full-time job.

23 April Wednesday

Anything Strange? is the question. News from real people is what is of interest. The local happenings, or even a lack of anything happening, is what is important. Both world and national news are on the radio, the television and the internet. That kind of news is available but it is not the same as real news. Real News is that from real people in the immediate world where we live. It involves those people that we know. It is about who is planting what and how a sick cow is recuperating. It is about who died and about who has a new motorcar. I gather bits of local news in order to pass on to Tommie, but then I remember that he is dead and there is no longer any need for me to collect the correct kind of news to answer his question Anything Strange?

24 April Thursday

Josie is a nickname for Joseph, not just for Josephine.

25 April Friday

Every evening the teat trailer reappears in Joe’s yard.  Every morning it disappears when it is taken off to whichever field the calves are in. Joe fills it with some kind of formula so that the calves do not need to drink milk from their mothers.  He can sell the mothers’ milk. Soon the calves will be off the formula and they can eat grass like all of the other cattle. The teat trailer will get put away in a shed. It used to be a bright pink but it has faded over the years.

26 April Saturday

The noise in the SuperValu was loud.  It was barely possible to hear myself think.  The Pope’s funeral in Rome was being broadcast live on television.  There were two large screens set up, one in the bread department and one near the check-outs.  The Mass was being broadcast complete with its translation from the Latin for everyone to hear.  I saw the young man who took over the business from his father.  I said that I had never been in a supermarket where a funeral was being broadcast.  He said he had not either, but his mother insisted that he do it. She said he would never forgive him if he did not, so he did.  He added the the two televisions to further please her.