THE JOURNAL

19 September Thursday

On every day that is bright and clear and dry, the roads are teeming with farm machinery. Everyone is busy cutting and bringing in their silage and hay and working to get all of the harvest work done.  Every road is full of large machines all traveling at fearsome speeds. And there are a fair amount of small spills.

20 September Friday

The young feral cat is no longer looking so much like a kitten.  It now arrives frequently without its miserable mother. This is a new development. It sits on the bench outside waiting and hoping for something to eat.

21 September Saturday

There is always yet another discussion on the radio about Birthday Cards.  There continue to be grandparents who post a card to a grandchild and include some cash in the envelope, but the child never receives the card nor the money.  The grandparent phones in to the radio in a state of outrage. There is an understanding that birthday cards posted in brightly coloured or shiny envelopes look like exactly what they are and if the handwriting looks like that of an older person, these envelopes are intercepted by unscrupulous people, maybe people who work at the post office or maybe not. The thieves throw the card away and keep the cash.  Talk show hosts on the radio have been discussing this problem for years and years, but it seems that every person sending cash forgets the advice not to enclose cash in a colorful envelope or else they do not listen to the radio anyway, so they think that they are the only ones who are sending a small amount of paper cash to a child.

22 September Sunday

I enjoy a line up of things at the far edge of a field:  a parade of cows heading toward the milking shed or a row of plastic wrapped bales looking like punctuation.

23 September Monday

There is a dead bird on the path.

24 September Tuesday

The days remain warm but the mornings are cold, as are the nights. The mixture of hot and cold causes misty pockets of fog to settle into low places. Sometimes these pockets are so dense that it is impossible to see for even a few metres in front of yourself. By mid-morning, the fog pockets have burned off but in the early morning the radio warns us to be careful of Clutches of Mist.

27 September Friday

We do not purchase sliced white bread often. When we do it is because there is no bread in the house and because Brennan’s TODAY’S BREAD TODAY is the only remaining choice in the village shop. This kind of squishy white bread is suited to some meals like Beans on Toast or French Toast or a Bacon Sandwich. When we have to buy this bread our menu adjusts accordingly. Since we do not really want this bread at all, the good thing about it is that we can buy a half a loaf. Or a HALF PAN as it is called. A HALF PAN is exactly that. It is a half a loaf of bread, or half of what came out of the pan. Today is the first time I noticed that A HALF PAN contains TEN slices of bread. By the time I noticed this the bread was nearly gone. The next time we buy this sliced white bread might be a long time from now. I hope that I remember to count the slices to see if it is really exactly ten slices. The flimsy white cardboard in the shape of a piece of bread is always in position exactly where the half is determined to be. Which I now know is between the tenth and the eleventh slices.

28 September Saturday

Including the woman behind the counter, there were three people in the shop, besides me. Both of the customers ahead of me discussed their cold or virus or flu with the woman. Everyone has this disease and no one can shake free of it. We do not even know what to call it. It is debilitating but not in a way that knocks one into bed. It just means we are all functioning well below par and we are complaining and comparing symptoms a lot, which does not make us feel better but it is all we can do. The older man in front turned to me as the woman at the counter went to get some paracetamol for him. He asked, “Are you a Quinn?” When I said, “No, I am not a Quinn, ” he squinted at me more carefully and said: “You’re not the one I thought you’d be.”

29 September Sunday

Torrential desperate lashing blustery rain. All day.  It does not matter how well protected one is. This rain comes from every direction and it is soaking. It is a good day to stay indoors.  In between the days or hours of heavy rain, there is bright warm sunshine.  I continue to collect a good bowlful of raspberries daily as well as cutting and trimming back endless amounts of lavender.

30 September Monday

Three pieces of enormous farm machinery meeting up on the narrow road make for a traffic jam. There is nothing to do but wait.

1 October Tuesday

A man stood in front of me at the supermarket. He placed five large heads of iceberg lettuce on the counter. The clerk looked at him and said, “You’re making a salad?”  He said “No. Rabbits. I have fifteen rabbits.They are the ones eating salad.”

3 October Thursday

The two cars were destroyed. No one was hurt. Ambulances arrived from both Cahir and Clonmel. Later the occupants of one of the cars received a bill for 1500 euro. It was a call out fee for the ambulances. They rang the ambulance office and said that they did not ring for the ambulances and luckily for them, they had not needed the ambulances. The question they had is Why do we have to pay? The woman on the phone asked if they were over 65. She explained that if so, they were okay because OAPs do not have to pay the call out fee anyway.

4 October Friday

I went to visit Tommie at the hospital. He was told he would be there only for three days, but it has now been three weeks. He is in the newly opened Slievenamon Ward. Slievenamon is a nearby mountain. We see it in the distance every day.  The name means The Mountain of Women. Tommie says he does not mind being in a ward named for women because he knows that this mountain is a fine mountain. Then he informed me that Women Are Important In A Society. This conversation and every conversation was interrupted by the horse racing playing on an enormous television screen in the corner. The sound was loud. As each race began, we had to stop talking so that Tommie and the two other men in the ward could watch the outcome. I took him a bag of tiny grapes from the Farmer’s Market.  He ate a few handfuls then he told me to hide them. He said that he is not allowed sugar in any form. He said he is not allowed much of anything. He told me that he is longing for a piece of toast but he is not allowed any of that either. Above his bed is a notice directing that his diet be Minced and Moist.

5 October Saturday

There are several places on the road down to the village with clumps of sheep wool all over the bushes. It is not like the old dirty wool hanging from a gate.  I have been driving past this wool all week. I cannot figure out where it came from. Maybe there was a truck loaded with freshly sheared wool and it blew out as the truck passed?  Sheep lose a little wool as they wander around but not as much as I am seeing.  There are never any sheep walking down that road either as it is much too busy. Each time I pass the wool on the ditch I think I will ask someone, but then I forget about it when I get to wherever I am going.