THE JOURNAL

Rainfall Radar, etc.

6 August Wednesday

The man who offered to paint the house said “I’d cost you less than the paint”.

5 August Tuesday

I now have a weather app on my phone. It is for the Irish weather and it can be accessed for various things. One is by region and another is a Rainfall Radar. There are other things to check for too, like wind and sea crossings. Everyone can check the things that concern them. There is a special place for Blight. Potatoes are always important here. When growing potatoes there is always a danger of the Blight. Blight can destroy an entire potato crop in no time at all. No one in the middle of the city is going to care about the possibility of Blight, but here it is a big topic of discussion, in season. When there is possibility of Blight, it appears as a place to check on the app. The rest of the time it is not there. Rainfall Radar is listed even when there is no possibility of rain, but Blight is only listed if the threat is present.

4 August Monday

We went to visit Johnnie and Marian. They have a farmyard which is completely decorated. There are many things painted red and blue and white. Some things are painted red and blue. Some things are painted blue and white, and some things are painted red and white. Some things are painted with all three colours. There is some yellow here and there, but red, white and blue are the predominant colours. A gate with wire mesh in between the bars is painted red, with white around the top edge. It stands open against a bright blue wall. There are dozens of bird houses. Some of the birdhouses are for feeding and nesting. Some have become only decorative because they are in places where the rats could get at them so they are not safe for birds anymore. There are planters with red and pink flowers in them. There are lattice work things in various shapes for plants to grow up and there are stable doors painted in several colours, both inside and out. There are tables and chairs everywhere as though at any moment anyone at all might want or need to take a sit down. One table has cups and saucers glued down in position for four people. Just inside one shed was another table with two chairs and a big ashtray. This is for sitting inside when there is rain. It is inside but it is still outside. It is not like going into the house. There is a gazebo which was probably planned for two people to sit in, but two people would be a squeeze. One person could sit there comfortably and again, be out of the rain. John and Marian are brother and sister. I do not know who has the ideas.  We saw John’s big and very well organized workshop in one barn. Maybe it is just his or maybe they work in there together. There is a sound system with eight speakers all piled one on top of the other. I don’t know if they were all hooked up but Tipp FM has never sounded so good..

3 August Sunday

The Cabbage Whites are back. They have been flapping and fluttering over the lavender and the sweet peas for hours and hours. It looks like it is the same group all the time but perhaps some fly away and others take their place. It’s a breezy day, so the whole gathering of butterflies could even be blown away while a new gathering gets blown in. It is impossible to know. The clouds are racing along with the breeze, so in between moments of bright sun, there are moments of overcast greyness. When the grey takes over the whiteness of the Cabbage Whites seems even whiter. It glows. The whiteness of the wings glows while the wings are flapping. On the subject of white, I saw three small puffballs up near the farm yesterday. Their whiteness is another sort of glowing. They are really bright and fresh looking. I decided to wait a day or two before collecting them. I do not know if this is a bad idea or a good idea. Last year I saw a huge puffball in the same vicinity and while I waited for it to get bigger, it disappeared. I am now remembering what a friend who is knowledgeable about mushrooms told me after that. He said You must never wait. He said If you find a puffball or indeed any mushroom, grab it immediately. Here I am again, greedily waiting for my puffballs to get a little bigger. Maybe I should walk up and fetch them right now.

1 August Friday

Today I saw a bar doubling as a bicycle shop. It is normal and traditional to see bars which also function as grocery shops. Mary Halley’s bar in Clogheen used to have a huge smoked ham hanging over the bar. The whole place was two tiny rooms and the bar was not very long. Drinks had to be ordered around the ham. I have not been in there for a long time, but I would guess that there is probably still a ham hanging there. People running bars often double as undertakers, and sometimes as auctioneers or property valuers. There are not so many people to do business in a rural places so it is practical to double up on jobs. This is the first time I have seen a bicycle shop and a bar together, but it makes good sense. There is not so much day time drinking these days, so repairing bikes is a good activity for the quiet times. It keeps someone around just in case someone does want a drink.

31 July Thursday

I went to have my hair cut. The man doing the cutting loves to cook. I have never been there without the postman or a courier arriving with a parcel of new cookbooks for him. He loves cookbooks. He loves to cook and he loves to talk. He talks about what he has cooked recently and he talks about what he is going to cook. Today he told me that he has all the ingredients for tonight’s dinner cut up, prepped and in little containers in the refrigerator ready to go. He makes dinner for between 15 to 18 people every single night. He is feeding a large extended family. I do not know if they all live in one house or in several houses. I do not know how many are children and how many are adults. There is a large vegetable garden down the back. There are chickens and ducks. I know as much as he tells me in the time it takes for my hair to be cut. Last night, he organized those people still sitting around after dinner to help him cut up the vegetables for tonight’s dinner. He likes to get everyone working. And Thursday is his night for working late so he prefers to be ready. He described his newest favourite Sunday supper. He said it was such a hit with the family that they want him to make it every Sunday. He had three chickens which he rubbed with herbs and seasoning and he put butter under the skins. When he had finished with that, he pushed an open can of beer up each chicken’s bottom. The can made the chicken stand up straight. He then put the three chickens into a barbeque. It was a big barbeque, probably like a Weber, with a rounded top. The chickens were able to stand up in there in the dark on their beer cans. As the beer heated up in the cans, it fizzed out like a quiet volcano and the chickens were cooked from the outside in. He was delighted with the end result and so was everyone else. The older woman beside me was the only other person in the salon. Her hair had some gloopy mixture on it. She listened avidly to the whole description of the chickens. When he was done, she asked if she could do the same thing in her oven. He said Well, that wouldn’t really work, would it, as you need the heat to be coming from the bottom and you need to hold all the heat in a confined space to keep the steaming process going. He said you needed exactly what a barbeque could do. She still did not understand why her cooker could not do the same thing. He said she herself had been stewing too long and it was time for her to get her hair rinsed.

29 July Tuesday

We picked up Em in Skeheenarinky. Some flags have been installed along the road side of the meadow. There are about ten so far. They are small flags, not big flags. The road is narrow with grass down the middle. It dead ends just after the kennel. It is so narrow that it is not even easy to turn around. The only people who will see the flags are those come to drop off or collect a dog. Each flag is for a country connected to a dog, or rather to a dog’s owners. Most of the dogs who stay are Irish, but their owners are from various places. People are being invited to give Lukki a flag from their own place of origin. So far he has flags from South Africa, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, England, and Australia along with a few other European ones. I should have looked more carefully to be able to remember all of them. Although not a great fan of the United States, he suggested that I might want to contribute a flag.

11 July Friday

We have a long narrow sack with an elasticized opening at both the top and the bottom. The purpose of the sack was to hold all of the plastic carrier bags which every house acquired after trips to the shops. We shoved bags into the top of the sock-like sack and pulled one out of the bottom whenever we needed one. There are no plastic carrier bags in our lives now. It has been so long since the governement passed the carrier bag tarif. We are all conditioned to carry our cloth shopping bags or baskets. The ladies who invented this kind of storage sack must have been delighted with themselves. No more drawers full of unwieldy plastic. Every time the Irish Countrywomen’s Association had a sale someone would be selling these hand-made sacks. Now no one needs the sacks. I have been waiting and waiting to think up another use for my bag sack. It hangs limp and useless and faded from a coat hook. It is not even attractive. Somehow I cannot quite bring myself to throw it away.

10 July 2014

Rose has a method for serving up a hot toddy. Hot water, lemon, whiskey and sugar are put into a glass. The glass used is a particular glass with vertical ridges and a sort of lip about half way up the glass. The lip extends out from the surface of the glass in a way that allows the glasses to be stacked upon one another. When Rose has filled one glass with the hot drink for medicinal purposes, she sits the glass inside another glass. The person recieiving the drink can hold the glass which is not hot while drinking from the glass which is hot. Another method to solve the hot glass problem is a few sheets of newspaper torn off and wrapped around the glass with a twist where the newspapers join. This serves the same purpose but is not as attractive as a double height glass.

9 July Wednesday

Em walks and walks and walks. She walks as if she is measuring out space. Her steps will take her to a certain point and then she will change direction abruptly. Sometimes there is a bush or a wall or a chair in her path. Sometimes there is nothing in her path. Some instruction panal in her head gives the command to turn left or to trun right or to reverse direction, and she obeys. I have spent a lot of time watching but I can discern no order nor logic to her movements and her decisions. I am watching dementia in control.

8 July Tuesday

A Gas Man is someone who is humorous. To be called a Gas Man is considered a compliment. A funny or an entertaining person may be called a Gas Man, but something funny is not referred to as A Gas. I have never yet heard a woman described as a Gas Woman.

7 July Monday

The government gives grants for houses to be re-thatched. The grant is larger if the house is visible from the road. Houses near roads can be seen by visitors.. The thatched roof is a look the country and the government like to keep going. There are lots of complications to go along with a thatched roof. The belief is that a thatched roof is more prone to fire so the insurance on a thatched house is considerably higher than the insurance for a regular house. If a person buys an old thatched cottage, the person is obliged to keep the roof thatched. Roof repairs cannot be re-done with slates. If the thatched house is a wreck and must be torn down, a new house built on the same location must be thatched. Replacement thatching varies a lot. Sometimes it is done in the old traditional way. Sometimes it is a different sort of thatching and not at all what is traditional here but rather what is traditional somewhere else. The reeds might come from the area around the Shannon, or the reeds might be imported from Poland. The thatchers might be Irish or they might be over from England. Where the thatcher comes from will determine the style of the thatching. A small cottage nearby has just been re-thatched. No one lives in the cottage nor is there a plan for anyone to live in it. It has just been re-thatched and the ground immediately around it has been cleared. It all looks very nice. That seems to be enough.

6 July Sunday

People begin arriving for 11 o’clock Mass as early as 10 ‘clock. Some park way up near the bridge with the car facing in the direction in which they live. They park way up there in the hope that they will not be trapped in tight by other cars which come along later and park out towards the bridge. They park there so they will be ready to leave. The later drivers will park out there just because all of the places nearer have been taken. There are elderly drivers backing into spaces in front of the shop. They too are in Ready Position but they are closer to the church. They find it easier to back into a place before there are other cars to possibly bump into. Some people stay sitting in the car, waiting for others to arrive. Most get out and they go into the shop or they go into the graveyard to visit the dead. By the time they return from the graveyard there are more people arriving. They are able to talk and visit with the living. The older people arrive early. Younger people and families come racing down the hill at the very last minute.

5 July Saturday

The man on the radio said that one hurling team overcame another, rather than saying that one team defeated another.

4 July Friday

She has gone into hospital. She had a week in bed and then the pain got bad. It was so bad that she spoke of it, and she is not one to complain. The ambulance came and took her away on Monday. He said he did not like seeing her go off in the ambulance but he said again that she was not one to complain, so if she complained she must have been very bad. He said they were doing tests. He is old and she is old. He is very worried and he feels useless. He said he did not know what to do for a sick woman. He said “Give me an ailing horse or a sheep or a goat, and I know exactly what to do. I just do not know what to do for a sick woman.”

3 July Thursday

I was down in the book barn sewing book sections. I sensed eyes on me. When there are cows in the near field I sometimes feel I am being watched. It is not unusual to look up and to see two or three cows pressed against the fence and looking in at me. Cows are curious. There were no cows in the field today. When I looked up The Fox was just outside the window. The window is long and low to the ground. From the inside, it is at my waist height, but from the outside it is nearly even with the ground. The window is long. It is just under three metres long and about one metre high. The Fox was almost touching the glass. His breath was making the glass steam up. He looked at me and I looked at him. I did not move and he did not move. Standing so still in such an expanse of glass, made him appear to be less The Fox and more like a photograph of a fox. After a few seconds he raised his left front foot and then he waited a little longer. He turned his head away from my gaze, and he ran down the hill. For a few minutes, I watched the space where he had been standing and then I went back to sewing my books.

2 July Wednesday

These mornings, Em does not get up until 10 or 10.30. She wakes a little bit by opening her eyes to note the tea and breakfast making movement around her. She is aware of us stepping over her stretched out body, but she makes no effort to get out of the way nor to get up. She dozes in between our activity. Since she gets up so late and goes to bed so early, her days are short. She still spends a lot of her time pacing in circles around a chair or around a table. When she attempts to take a corner too quickly she crashes into a leg or a wall and just stands stopped and surprised by her inability to go forward. Sometimes the impact with something just knocks her to the floor. Then she looks around as if lying exactly where she is is exactly where she meant to be.

30 June Monday

It is hot. It is hot for here. It is hot enough for people to use the expression : It Is Hot Enough To Split Stones. This is the expression that comes out every time the heat builds up. It is not really that hot. I think the highest temperature is 23 Celsius or 73 Fahrenheit. That is not terribly hot, but it is nice. It does not get much hotter here, so we are at our optimum of summer heat. Everyone is excused for doing less than usual. This much heat brings the possibility of thunder and lightening. Last Friday the sky went black and there was thunder and a little bit of lightening. People are very frightened about lightening. The talk at the market was all about the fearfulness. I do not understand why it is considered so scary. They do not understand why I find it exhilerating rather than threatening.

28 June Saturday

I went to the market today. It was the first time in almost six weeks. I completely overdid it. I did not drive, but this is only the second time I have left our valley at all. The first time was just to the village and back. This trip had a great many installments. I climbed the stairs at the cafe where we went for breakfast. Stairs are difficult. I had no idea how difficult. Then we walked over to the market and there were ever so many conversations which should have been nice but everything took place while I was standing up. Standing up and talking is more difficult than I realized. It was Jim’s birthday, so we had to sign a card for him. The card was a secret. We were sent behind the table at the stall of the man who sells jellies and jams and chutneys. The card was hidden there. That meant another conversation and that meant more standing. It was a big birthday. Jim was turning 80. There was to be a presentation of the card and a gift for him at 11 o’clock. We were told this by the cheese lady. Everything was discussed, at each stall, in big whispers by everyone. Every discussion was accompanied by quick looks over at Jim to make sure he was at his stall and not near enough to hear the plans being discussed.. We promised to be back in time for the presentation. We rushed over the bridge and went to the supermarket. I walked at my usual speed. The excitement of the birthday plan made everything feel imperative and important and that everything must be done quickly. Everything was important. The supermarket was full of Saturday shoppers and their trolleys and conversations. Music played loudly. I got dizzy with it all. The walk over the bridge was too fast and the shop was too full. Looking for a place to sit down, I found a display made of three old pallets just beyond the check-out counter. There was an olive green rug spread over the pallets and there were various things on the old rug, not really as a proper display, but sort of on display. Things had been put there in clumps as a place for them to put. I found a little empty edge and sat down with my head low to stop myself from fainting. Within minutes an old man came along and grabbed at one of the items on display. It said GRIP N GRAB on the cardboard backing. The thing attached to the cardboard was about a metre long. The man bent the cardboard away from the gadget itself at both top and bottom. He nudged me so that I could observe how it functioned. He said his daughter had bought him one of these things. He threw a packet of cream crackers onto the floor and shouted “Watch this! I’ll pick it up,so!” He did something and picked up the crackers with the claw at the end. I nodded and dropped my head again. He stopped someone walking past and he threw the crackers down again and he did his demonstration again. After the third time, someone came and either took him away or took the GRIP N GRAB away. I did not look up. Simon came and found me and we walked slowly back over the bridge. We did not return to the market for the birthday presentation. We got into the car and went straight home. It was all much too much.

27 June Friday

Michael grew up in Clonmel. He said you could always tell when someone had recieved The American Parcel. They would be walking down the street wearing clothes that no one else was wearing. You would know that the clothing came from one of these parcels sent by well-meaning relatives from America, even if you did not actually know the person. The clothes looked different and they looked new, even if they were not exactly new. If you saw someone in a pair of checked trousers they had to have come from an American Parcel. Checked trousers were a dead give-away. Any time someone walked out in new clothes, he or she would be asked if The American Parcel had arrived. In one way it was a joke and in one way it was just showing that nothing happened without others taking note. If you were in a family who received an American Parcel, you wore the clothes but it did not mean you liked them. Recieiving the clothes was one kind of announcement. Wearing them was another.

26 June Thursday

Tommie came back to report that a second duck has been taken by the fox. He said he was not surprised by this news. After the fox took the first duck, Tommie knew he would be back for the second. He knows that the fox will now be back again for the third and final duck. The fox will not stop until he has had all three of them. He said that a fox always prefers a duck to a chicken. He explained how easy it was for a fox to grab a duck by its neck and to toss the duck over his shoulder while he or she carried the duck back to the woods to feed a family of young foxes. He said it is easier to get hold of the duck and easier to carry the duck. Chickens are okay but the feathers make the journey more difficult. The feathers and the shorter neck combined make the carrying more difficult. A chicken does not stay tossed over the shoulder like a duck does. Tommie ended his telling by saying, “You can believe that if you like, but I know it to be true.”

25 June Wednesday

When Joe’s cows are in the near field, there is often a wild tooting of his tractor horn at 5 o’clock. He races through the field rounding up the cows for their walk to the milking parlour. There are both long drawn out blasts and little pips. It is an exciting sound in the midst of the gathered quiet of an afternoon.. Sometimes he does not toot the horn at all. He just drives around and gets the cows walking in the same direction. I think they respond to the sound of the tractor as much as to the sound of the horn. The horn makes it all more imperative and makes me feel like they are really going somewhere special. This rounding up, with or without the horn tooting, is not an everyday thing. The cows are rotated around different fields eating their fill of one before moving on to another. We enjoy their company for a few days every few weeks when this is their field for eating. Along with their occasional presence comes the thrilling sound of their departures.

24 June Tuesday

The grass roof has gone brown overnight. In spite of day after day of hot sun and no rain, it has remained looking good and fresh and green with lots of purple strife standing tall and bright against the sky. Now the grass is burnt and the blossoms, though still purple, look weak and washed out. The difference from yesterday is shocking. We are promised a band of rain coming in off the Atlantic. I hope it’s arrival will be soon enough to rejuvenate the roof.

22 June Sunday

Yesterday was the longest day. The Summer Solstice. The sun rose at 4.56 and it set at 21.56. At midnight, the sky was still not dark. It was a dark blue but it was still a colour. I lay awake and looked out at the sky wondering if I would fall asleep before the blue disappeared into night black. I thought about the older woman who I had heard complaining so bitterly about these long bright evenings. She said she did not like to Go To Bed in the Brightness. She preferred the winter when it got dark early and she could go to bed early because everyone else went to bed early. It was okay to go to bed early because the darkness made the world quiet. With these long days she felt she had to stay awake simply because it was light. She felt lonely in the long light evenings but she did not feel loneliness with long dark evenings. She was not in the habit of sleeping in the day so why should she begin the habit of sleeping in the light. If she wanted to take a nap in the day she would have to remove her shoes and put them on again. All her life she has put on her shoes in the morning and she has removed them at night when she went to bed. She could not imagine taking off the shoes and putting them back on again in the middle of the day. That would be as disturbing as the long light nights, or maybe it would be more disturbing.

21 June Saturday

Now that the sun has come out and the days are long and dry and hot, we are surprised again and again by the absence of the shade. The big branches were cut off in the autumn. The cutting was years overdue as the main trunk of the tree has long been hollow and dangerous. Had the branches not been cut when they were they surely would have crashed down in the winter winds. The winds were wild. Trees and branches fell down everywhere. So regardless of how the branches came down, we would still be missing the shade as we sit out at the big table this summer.

18 June Wednesday

Simon wanted to make a rubber stamp of a fly. He wanted an image of a fly poised as if it had just landed upon something. His image of the fly was tiny. He wanted a smaller than life-sized fly but he still wanted it to appear real. He talked to someone at a rubber stamp company in Dublin. The man insisted that he himself had a better image of a fly than the image that Simon had sent. He sent his own fly image back by email. It was not a fly which had landed on something, rather it was a scientific diagram of a fly. When Simon phoned and explained that this was a completely different kind of fly and a different kind of portrayal, the man responded by saying “Well, what does it matter? Sure, a fly is a fly.” Simon returned to his original fly for the making of the stamp. When the invoice arrived for the finished stamp, it was described as Bee.

15 June Sunday

I found a wren’s nest over near the fig tree. It was down on the ground and empty, so I guess the wrens were finished with the eggs and the babies and the nest itself. The entire nest had been woven using Emily’s hair. There were a full selection of her long hairs. The black and white and a selection of grey hairs were all mixed together. A few tiny bird feathers were there too.

14 June Saturday

Tommie stopped down for a visit. He commented about the separateness of some neighbours. He asked us if we ever saw them and he asked if we ever spoke with them. He wanted to know if they ever spoke to us in response when we spoke to them. He told us that these people are people known to value their privacy. He announced: “It’s like they have their own language.”

8 June Sunday

At first I thought it was a grand idea for Em and I to take a stroll together. She cannot go very fast and neither can I. I felt we were more evenly matched. By putting her on the lead I thought we could do a slow journey up the track together. What I forgot is how often her back legs give way. I am not able to lift anything. My lifting ban includes her back legs. I cannot lift her hips and hold her up for the few minutes needed until she gets herself stable. All I can do is to stand patiently nearby until she is ready to push herself up and start her slow stagger again.

6 June Friday

It might just be a generational thing. There seem to be so many men with the name Michael. . There are of course a lot of men named John and Patrick, but it seems every other person of a certain age is named Michael. I have been remembering one Michael who was schedualed to have an operation which he did not want to have. I do not know if he did not want the operation because he was terrified, or if he did not want the operation because he felt he knew better than the doctors and he felt he did not need the operation. He evaded surgery for more than a year. Each time he was schedualed to go to hospital he would drink heavily for several days. He would drink so much that he would then be turned away by the hospital for not being in a fit state to be operated upon. Finally they took him into a bed early in order to control his drinking in the days before the surgery. After the operation and after a long recuperation, he was proud to tell anyone who would listen that he had been four hours On The Table. He felt sure that this long time of attention to himself was something unusual and special. It seems not long ago that he was bragging about all this but it must have been longer than I think, as this particular Michael has been dead now for at least seven years. The operation he avoided for so long was not the cause of his death.

5 June Thursday

I cannot hang out the clothes because they are too heavy when they are wet. I cannot carry the basket of wet laundry as far as the line anyway. I am continually surprised by my limitations. I tried to explain this to someone. She said “Oh You mean you can’t do the Pegging Out?” I forget that clothes pins are called clothes pegs and that the act of hanging out a wash is called Pegging Out. I never speak of Pegging Out since I never speak of Clothes Pegs.

2 June Monday

Every part of this recuperating brings me new ways of doing things. I can slip on my rubber shoes but I cannot put on my welly boots. The welly boots demand a degree of pulling and pushing which I am not yet capable of. Anyway, I cannot even do the bending which would be the first part of the boot putting on. The slip-ons are okay. Luckily, they restrict my movement to places with short grass. My little walks out feel adventurous to me but they are still very little walks. Short grass locations are just enough.

29 May Thursday

The bed is built into the walls. There are walls on three sides. The bed is high off the floor. The bottom of the mattress is at the same height as the window sill. I need a step stool to climb in and out of the bed. This bed has become my world. I have read about operations and the recovery time afterward. I have visited people in this state but I had never been in this state myself. I understood that the world gets smaller when one is confined. Now I am living this smaller world. My immediate world is the only world. The window at the end of the bed gives me a view out into the garden. Most of the things I can see are white. There are white lilacs, ox-eye daisies, cow parsley, hawthorn blossom and stitchwort. It is a big year for stitchwort. It is everywhere. The green grasses, leaves and foliage in between things as well as mounds of purple sage set off all the frothy white. The grey of the stone barn is a further backdrop for the shades of white. Later there will be other colours as more blossom appears. For now, white is the colour of this waiting.

19 May Monday

Again: That Man Who Waits Beside His Car While His Sister Walks Her Dog. The man and his sister continue to stop and walk the dog on the same impossible stretch of road. He is parking his car more and more out in the road every day. He barely uses the lay-by area anymore. As he leans against the car smoking and waving to each passing vehicle, he is imposing himself further and further out into the traffic of the road. It is as if he is daring someone to hit him. He salutes enthusiastically at each passing motor. He is impossible not to notice. The sister still pulls the dog up tight on his short lead as soon as she hears a motor approach which means she is pulling quite often on the poor dog’s neck. Her stick looks like it has gotten bigger. It is now a very short but very thick black cudgel. She holds it close over the poor dog’s head all the while that she is choking him with the lead. I cannot bear watching them. They each seem madder than the other. And everyday between 2.30 and 3.30 when I head down to catch the last post, there they are. With so few people out and about, these two are usually the only two I see. I feel I am setting myself up to be annoyed by passing them and their unhappy dog every weekday.

18 May Sunday

Em and I are back to walking up the boreen. We proceed only as far as the gate to Scully’s wood. I am being extra careful not to overdo her energy and leg strength. She often sets off with reluctance, but very quickly she becomes involved in the smells and the possibilities. The cow parsley has been filling up the space of the track at head height. At my head height, not Em’s head height. She can walk in the arched space in either of the two tyre tracks. I am having trouble walking anywhere. Even the lumpy grass in the middle is not a free spot. The cow parsley is so heavy with blossom that it just droops and falls. Today it is also heavy with the remains of the rain. Wherever I walk, I am slapped in the face and flapped around the shoulders. It is a soft and gentle slapping and flapping. It might even be fun if it were not so wet.

17 May Saturday

The last few days have been warm and balmy. We all feel like summer has arrived and we joke about how nice it would be if this would just continue for the next four months. We pretend that it will be like this for four months. Of course, there is no chance of this weather continuing for four months. We already know that the rain and cooler air will return tomorrow. People are worried for the schedualed Ardfinnan Tractor Run. The town has been decorated with bunting since early in the week. There are many events and fund-raising things planned. It is all to raise money for the hospice. The tractors, mostly old but a few new ones too, will drive through the countryside and through selected villages. People have paid money to sponsor the tractors doing their slow procession. Even though there are huge stretches of road with no one to watch them, they will drive slowly through the landscape in a long line. When people do see them, both the tractor drivers and the people on the ground will wave like mad. Since rain is promised there will be fewer people standing outside and waving but the tractors will continue their crawl. The older ones rarely have a roof so those drivers will be wet. We are all worried about the tractors driving in the rain tomorrow but today it is sunny, and lambs and calves are in every field. Blossoms and birds and bees are everywhere. Joe’s blue Teat Trailer with all of the pink nipples is parked outside a gate. Everywhere looks like summer.

16 May Friday

I am enjoying the posters for this upcoming election. There are more and more posters appearing every day. Maybe it just seems like there are more and more appearing every day. The posters are on utility poles and on trees. Some are on fences and gates and sometimes they are on the side of a barn. Some of the candidates affect a glamourous pose in their photograph. Some look dazed and unhappy as they attempt a confidence inspiring expression. One man looks like his shirt is always untucked. This is immediately understood, even from his head and shoulders shot. The faces scattered through the landscape make the countryside feel more populated and active. I do not know these people but I feel like I do when I see the same few faces again and again. I think what I am most enjoying is the imposition of language in the landcape. There is so rarely anything to read as we move around on foot or in cars. Knowing that in a week or ten days all of the signs will be gone and we will be just looking at cows and green things again makes it okay too. For now I am enjoying all of the slogans and the few names which repeat themselves. There are three people on one poster and the slogan across the top is The Cuts and Charges. They have made themselves sound like a music group when all they are doing is protesting various austerity measures and the new water rates.

15 May Thursday

Throughout the winter months and in this time before vegetation and foliage fill in the ditches, dumping places are exposed. There is one particular place which I keep track of. It is a deep dug-out area, just under the ditch and near the road. There are feed bags, and rusted buckets and many rusted things which I cannot identify. There are broken fence posts and old churns, and a fair bit of wire in coils. Sometimes I think this place was simply a dumping spot for the farmer and sometimes I think it was not just a dumping place. I think it doubled as a storage place. If the farmer were out in the fields and a fence needed repair, he probably knew that the wire he needed was right there. Mid-summer, the whole pile of stuff in its pit would be tangled up with brambles and growth but during a great part of the year it could just be considered Things In Storage. The particular farmer whose storage pit I pass and look into is now dead. I doubt anyone else is using the place either for dumping or for storage so in a few more years the brambles will have made it all disappear. The last of the still useable materials will succumb to the weather and the spot will no longer exist as any sort of a place at all.

14 May Wednesday

The Smell of Slurry over the land is terrible. We have closed all of the windows but still the smell seems to just ooze in. It is burning my eyes and my throat. I am glad I had not yet hung the washing out to dry. If it were hanging out it would simply be absorbing all of the slurry smell with its drying. I think it is a good day to go to do some errands in town. It is a good day to be anywhere but here. When I return the smell will be less horrible. It won’t be gone but it will be a little bit better.

13 May Tuesday

Oscar is now the neighbourhood dog. He hangs around most of the day at The White Cottage but even if he is up the hill at his own house, he keeps track of anyone walking the road. When he hears someone coming along, he rushes out from wherever he is and then he walks along with them wherever they are going. If they come back the same route, he will split off on the way back, otherwise he will just go home alone when the walk ends for the people he is with. We all enjoy his company. If the people he sees a have a dog with them, he joins along with their dog. If they are on their own, they are happy to have him. We are all happier to walk with a dog for company. I especially enjoy him since Em can no longer go with me. Dogs pay attention to things in different ways. I feel a dog and I are exploring together. Tonight we sat out in the evening sun even though it was still a bit cold. Being out in the air was the best way to enjoy the light. Oscar arrived and rushed around greeting us and peeing on things and drinking water. We listened for voices. We assumed that he was walking with someone. We sat for a long while after his arrival and no one ever came down the boreen. No one on foot and no one on a horse. After an extended visit, we went inside and Oscar went home. To have Oscar come calling all on his own is a new thing.

12 May Monday

Tommie stopped and spoke to me on the road. He was in his car. I was on foot. He gave some news of a local man. Then he commented on that same man and said how well he looked. He commented that the man looked very young for his age. He was quiet for a minute as he thought about this youthfulness. He concluded by saying “It must be A Lack of Bitterness.”

11 May Sunday

The cows have been using the upper boreen to go in and out to the far fields across the tar road. The grass down the middle is completely gone. At first I thought the grass had been eaten but eating is not possible when they are moving in a group. The track is completely churned up. Both the grass and the lumpy section of earth down the middle are just gone. The lumpy section had been high enough to scrape on the bottom of cars. Now the grass and the earth it was growing on have been trampled into a single muddy evenness. It is messy, but even so, the walking over such a definitively flattened surface is grand.

10 May Saturday

My room is full of dead bumblebees. Well, it is not full, but today I counted seven. Other days I have not counted. I have just noticed the bodies. The dead are all just in front of the door. They must be diving at the glass trying to get out. The impact with the glass either kills them or it stuns them. Either way they end up dead. I let a few of the living out every time I am up there. Some I catch in a jar and toss outside and some just fly right out if I leave the door open. I can’t figure out where they are coming from.

9 May Friday

The fox walked into the yard. He moved slowly. He moved as though he were confident about where he was and where he was going. He stopped and sat near the big table. Then he moved over to drink some water from the low water trough. He wandered here and there sniffing at things and looking at other things. He looked good with his shiny coat and bushy tail. He did not look in the least bit scruffy. There were no clumps of rough old fur. He looked almost as if he had been freshly brushed. He never looked at the house, even though he was very near to it. He must have smelled Em out in the grass. Possibly he has already realized that she is not much of a threat. He wandered around for 15 or 20 minutes and then he continued down the meadow. I watched from the window until he disappeared from my sight.

8 May Thursday

I am waiting for a man to deliver some mulch. I dare not use the telephone because I fear he will either try to ring because he is lost or because he is stuck trying to fit down the boreen in a truck that is too large. That is, of course, assuming that his mobile phone will have any reception wherever he is, which is not very likely. Indeed, if my own mobile worked here, I could be using that instead of avoiding the land line to await his call. Or he might just come down, and dump the very big and heavy bag somewhere where I do not want it and then it will be impossible to move it until it is half emptied. It cannot be moved except with a forklift. Even half empty the bag cannot be moved. . So I have the window open, even though it is cold and miserable. I am trying not to use the telephone. All I can think of are calls I should be making. Today is his delivery day for fuels, fence posts and whatever in the area and I was promised he would be here right after 10. So I am staying off the phone and sitting in the cold. It is now 1.30. Surely by now he has decided to leave it until after lunch?

7 May Wednesday

Twenty-four hours of Nearly Dead Dog and today Em is back. She is not begging to go up the track again but she is walking. She got up off the floor without needing The Morning Hip Lift. I was so happy to see her moving about that I wanted to take her photograph. That made me realize that I have pretty much stopped taking photos of her in recent months. It is not so interesting to take pictures anymore. She looks like herself, but a photograph of herself staring off in the distance would not really portray the vacant staring of an elderly dog. It would just look like Em looking off in a direction. A photo would not show the vacant stare but I would know. Even in a photograph, I would know. This is not a look I want to remember.

6 May Tuesday

So—the new walks with Em have perhaps been a bit too much. Perhaps I should have tried every other day. Or perhaps I should have tried every third day. Every day, one after another, whet her appetite for more and she could not wait to get going in the morning. It was too many days in a row. We now have a dog who can barely stand up. She can barely stand and barely walk and she is collapsing in a heap after just a few steps. Either she is dying or she is just exhausted and needing a few days off. I hope it is only exhaustion. I really, really hope it is only exhaustion.

5 May Monday

Another Bank Holiday. Grey, overcast and cool. I am hoping the sun will come out. I have taken Breda’s advice and have been giving Em some strolls in the boreen.  She suggested that I drive Em up as far as the farm and use the downhill slope to get her to walk back down to the house. It is difficult to get Em in and out of the car these days, so even though it is uphill, I have been putting her on the lead and setting off. By attaching her to myself, she has to come along with me and since she does not resist, I like to think she appreciates having the decision made for her. To begin, we only went to the first gate on the left, the one leading into Joe Keating’s field. Another day, we progressed as far as the gate into Scully’s wood. Today we went all the way to the farm and I think she wanted to Keep Going. It is a slow walk, but that is mostly because she needs to sniff at every single thing. It is so much better and more stimulating than wandering around in circles out in the grass. Since we got home she has been sleeping soundly. Both the stroll and the nap are an improvement on the ceaseless pacing around a random table or a chair.

4 May Sunday

We set off to walk down to the joining of the two rivers but when we got as far as the bee hives, there was a man working on the them. He was wearing the full protective clothing of a beekeeper. He did not say that we could not walk past but he quietly suggested that the bees were stirrred up and that it might be best to come back later. He spoke to us from a distance but he kept his voice very low and calm. He did not want to upset his bees. We turned around. The hives are located along the edge of a field of rapeseed which is now in full bloom. The bright yellow flowers and the bright orange of the strapping material which had held the hives together look wonderful together. Rapeseed is a relatively new crop in this area. People still stop and make photographs of a bright yellow field when they see one. They show the photographs to one another and they admire the colour.They remark at how lovely it is. It is an exciting and welcome change from green green green. So far people only say good things about the fields of rapeseed. Maybe they have not yet noticed how horrible the smell is. To me, it smells like fibreglass resin. In large quantities, it smells toxic and the odour hangs heavy over the land. For now, it is all wonderful. Rapeseed is welcomed as a dependable cash crop which also makes the landscape look pretty.

3 May Saturday

There is a square white plastic bucket with a green lid on the ground just outside the gate at Michael and Biddie’s house. A rock sits on top of the lid. The lid is a clip-on lid. The rock is there just to be on the safe side. I think the container is positioned as a receptacle for the delivery of milk, but I am not sure. It might be for eggs or for anything else. The two words on the bucket are DRY COW. No doubt this bucket held some kind of something for the care of dairy cows. The bucket has been emptied and cleaned and now serves another purpose. Every time I pass, I check to make sure that DRY COW is still in position.

2 May Friday

The hawthorn is in bloom all around. I cannot decide if it is earlier than usual or later than usual. A woman in the village told me that the branches full of frothy white blossom look just exactly like heaven.

1 May Thursday

It was A Big Decision. I needed to buy a new bag of food for Em. I was buying a brand of dried food that was specially recommended for elderly dogs. There are a lot of foods for Seniors, but that usually means any dog over the age of 7. Since she is over 15, I was advised that this particular food was a better choice for her. We tried a three kilo bag of the food and she liked it. Along with her daily tablets, it seemed to help to keep her mobile, alert and bright-eyed. I went back to buy more food and I was faced with the dilemma of buying another 3 kilo bag or a 15 kilo bag. The food is very expensive. I was offered a special price on the larger bag. I stood in the shop and I wondered if it was crazy to buy such a lot of food. I then had to wonder if it was a very negative thing to think that Em might not live long enough to eat a whole 15 kilo bag of the special food. I stood in the aisle of the shop as I went back and forth with these thoughts. I did not want to wish an early demise on my basically quite healthy old dog. I bought the 15 kilo bag. As I was paying, the sales rep from the company who produced the food arrived. He was happy to see me buying his brand as the very first thing he saw when he entered the shop. He raced out to his car and ran back to hand me a ten euro voucher off the purchase of my next 15 kilo bag.

30 April Wednesday

There is a new outdoor table and chair arrangement at McCarra’s. It was made by the men on the FAS scheme. The table is constructed out of two metal bicycle wheels, without their rubber tyres. They are connected with a piece of metal which works like an axle. One wheel is flat on the ground working to stabilise the table and the other one is the table top. A piece of glass has been fitted on the top wheel so that a cup of coffee or a cold drink can sit safely on the flat. There are four seats. The seats are black bicycle seats fitted onto two welded metal structures which have been painted bright red. The idea of the project was to make things with recycled materials. Everything was found and re-used except for the seats. When it came to the placing of the four seats, the men were unhappy to have four different and old seats from four different bicycles. They chipped in together and bought four matching black seats so that the two seating structures look smart and welcoming. We are looking forward to sitting outside with a cup of coffee but we are waiting for the weather to improve.

29 April Tuesday

The young girl was whining to her mother. She did not want to scrape the potatoes for the midday meal. She asked “Can’t we just skip the potatoes and eat something else for the dinner?” Her mother answered,”Of course not! If we do not have potatoes, it will not be dinner. Dinner without potatoes is Just Salad!”

28 April Monday

I am often using the word Doctor when I should be using the word Mister. I always call a dentist Doctor, but a dentist is not a Doctor. A dentist is never a Doctor. A dentist is a Mister. Some Doctors are called Doctor and some are called Mister. The Surgeon is a Mister but the General Practitioner is a Doctor. I am better at using the right form of address than I used to be, but I continue to get it wrong more often that I would like. Some of these people do not mind but some get very upset and they correct me immediately. These people say “I am not a Doctor. I am a Mister.” They correct me so quickly that it is as if they fear someone will overhear them accepting a title which is not rightly theirs to have. I have never really found out definitively who is who and when who is who. And because everyone here is quickly on first name basis, the medical person very often becomes someone with a name rather than a title. In the case of my first GP, the doctor and her husband shared a practice. Since they were both Doctor Carey, it was easier for her to be Doctor Rosaleen and for him to be Doctor John. Now that they have retired and a group of new doctors have taken over their pracice, there are two doctors among them named Kelly. These two Doctor Kellys are not married. In this case to differentiate between them, the woman doctor is now always spoken of as Doctor Maria Kelly and the male doctor is just Doctor Kelly. We call our dentist Daniel.

27 April Sunday

There are 28 beehives just beyond the green barn. They were not there the last time we walked along this farm track. There is bright orange strapping on the sides and tops of the hives. These must have been straps to secure them while they travelled from wherever they were to where they are now. The loosened orange straps make the hives look like gifts which have been recently unwrapped. There is a rope across the area where the hives are stacked. The rope keeps people away the bee hives. The rope threads itself through a piece of slate with two holes in its corners. On the slate are very small white letters which read HONEYBEES WORKING!

26 April Saturday

I was waiting in the car outside the church and just across from the shop. Rain was bucketing down. Simon had gone into the shop to buy the papers. A little red car pulled up in front of me. A woman jumped out of the passenger seat. A billow of smoke came out of the car with her. She ran in a funny way in order to protect her burning cigarette from the rain. She had her hood pulled up but she had no umbrella. She opened the gates to the church and attached them in the open position. Then she ran around the side of the church and did something else. She scurried back to the car and opened the door. Another large cloud of smoke billowed out. There were two young men in the car. They were smoking and she was smoking. Everyone had their hoods up. The car with its inhabitants did a U-turn and went back in the direction which it came from. It all happened really fast. The church was now open for business.

24 April Thursday

When there has been a bank holiday everyone asks the same question of everyone else: “Did You Get Away?” No one says “Did You Go Somewhere?” Or even “What Did You Do?” Getting Away implies escape from normal life. Maybe Getting Away is the expression used because we are living on an island. Nobody Goes Away, they Get Away.

23 April Wednesday

Today, I picked up a coloured leaflet for a sale of hats. The hats were being sold off by Teresa’s Hat Hire in order to make room for New Stock. The hats shown in the photograph as well as Many More were all available for 50 euro each. Potential customers are advised: To ensure a perfect matching hat, please bring your outfit. The world of Hat Hire is a mystery to me. It is not unusual to be driving through the countryside and to be in the middle of nowhere and to see a sign in front of a bungalow offering Hat Hire. And now, here is the chance to buy the very hats which have been rented, borrowed, worn and admired at weddings, christenings, at the races and wherever else women are wearing hats these days. The leaflet made it all look very exciting. In fact, it is just the selling off of well-worn hats.

22 April Tuesday

Over the weekend, PJ and Gavin went up the Mass Path with a chain saw. They cleared the fallen trees which were blocking the way since the winter storms. In some places they just cut a section out of a lying down tree so that those of us who walk the path can walk through the opening. In other places, whole trees were pulled or cut and removed from the path. Where the fallen trees are at head height or higher, they have been left. Those trees make a series of arches. It is a kind of architected space along the track. It is lovely to walk through these places. We no longer have to climb over trees nor crawl underneath other trees. The walk is a fully upright and pleasant walk again. It is still very muddy.

21 April Monday

I am now so accustomed to going out for walks without Em that I no longer feel guilty when I close the door and leave her in the house alone. I do find that as I am walking, I look around for her. Out and about is when I expect to see her off in the distance in front of me or trailing far behind as she sniffs and explores things. Out in the world is when I miss her. Wandering around in the grass near the house is not the same as being off discovering each day together. She wanders in circles and I wander in and around with her. Her own aimlessness makes me walk aimlessly. The more I move about the more she walks so that is good for her elderly legs. Once in the house, she continues to walk but her journey is either around the big table or around a chair. The tight circles around a single chair are the ones that really depress me. She focuses on something and goes around and around and around it. She can continue the same path of circling for a very long time. Her little bell jingling as she walks reminds us that she is not resting but walking and walking and walking.

20 April Sunday

The Abbey Walk is our current favorite walk. We start off at the new graveyard and walk a narrow road to Molough Abbey which was an Augustinian Nunnery dedicated to St.Bridgid. The original nunnery was founded in the 6th century but the present remains date from the 13th century. There is a cloister with the intact frames of two high windows as well as two small domestic buildings. None of this information is available at the Abbey. I went on a walk with an archeaologist and a local historian a few years ago. There were about 40 of us gathered on a wild and rainy Sunday afternoon. We walked up from the village and we were introduced to the history of the Abbey and shown a very small area of orange paint on one wall as well as a carved symbol by the stone mason. We received all of the information while huddled under umbrellas. There were children in prams and elderly people who did not walk up from the village but who met us there. Everyone was eager to be a good audience but everyone was cold and wet and glad when it was over. Now I delight in returning to the Abbey. I am pleased to point out the few things I know about it. Sometimes when out walking, we stop at the buildings and sometimes we do not. We walk down the road and then through fields and down to the place where the River Nire flows into the River Suir. This meeting of the rivers feels like a very special place. Some options on how to make the walk into a circular walk are being explored. But walking back the same way we arrived is just fine.

19 April Saturday

The man who turns wooden bowls was at the market today. He had set up his lathe with the long curved branch held securely on the ground with cement blocks. On his early visits to the market, he wedged it under the back bumper of his automobile, but perhaps the cement blocks work better. He has a foot pedal with which to control the turning. Learning to turn wood and then the making of wooden bowls and plates seems to be a rite of passage for men when they reach retirement age. Some men become very skilled and enjoy using different kinds of wood to make different kinds of containers. Others just make the same thing over and over again. A table full of bowls with handwritten labels announcing each kind of wood is much nicer than a table full of matching bowls all made from the same wood.

18 April Friday

Every Good Friday is different but every Good Friday is the same. There is always a deep silence over the countryside. The silence is deeper thatn usual because there is less activity. Lots of things are closed. Restaurants, bars, banks, schools and post offices are closed but many other places like petrol stations, supermarkets and garden centres are open. Most places can choose whether or not they want to be open. This is the first day of a four day weekend. A long weekend means people need food and things, but it also might mean that they want to go away. Every business can decide but places which serve alcohol cannot decide for themselves. They must close. The laws decreed by the Catholic church are still in place. There is usually a lot of panic buying of alcohol on the Thursday before Good Friday. Just because it is not possible to get a drink on the Friday, people feel an imperative need to have a supply ready just in case. There are two places where it is possible to get a drink on Good Friday. One is a train station. If you have a ticket to travel, you can sit in a station bar all day long.. People used to go and buy the cheapest ticket possible and then sit and drink the day away. The other place is in a hotel bar. Legally it is required that one be resident in the hotel but there were lots of ways that people were able to get around that, like if they knew the bartender or if the waitress was their cousin. Now people feel confident enough to drink at home. In the past, most people did not ever drink anything in the home, except maybe for medicinal purposes. Still, this attitude that one must drink simply because it is against the law to drink is mad. It would be easier to change the law. And yesterday, I learned that it is also a Catholic rule that one cannot eat meat on Good Friday. Butcher shops remain open, and have ignored this for a long time.

17 April Thursday

The woman did not want to go to the event by herself. She did not want to have to arrive alone and she did not want anyone to notice her arriving alone. She wanted to arrive with someone else even if after arriving she would desert the other person immediately. She said she needed someone To Take The Bare Look Off Her.

15 April Tuesday

The phone books arrived again today. Last week, I phoned the Eircom people and asked for new telephone directories. We had not received a new one since 2010. The girl on the phone said they would post them out immediately. They did, and we got them the next day but the books they sent were for the 06 area not for our area which is 05. I phoned again and we were sent out two more books, one with the residential listings as well as a copy of The Golden Pages for businesses. Everything is smaller about these new books. The measurement from top to bottom and from left to right is the same but the thickness is greatly diminished. The text within tthe books is smaller. The paper is the same thin paper as is always used in the directories, but I think there are fewer numbers and names within as so many people have given up having a landline. We need a magnifying glass to read anything at all.. And even though we now have four books rather than the two requested, they still take up less space on the shelf than two of the older ones.

14 April Monday

The Man Who Waits Beside His Car While His Sister Walks Her Dog. The first time I saw this man, I was on the way to the post office in the afternoon. He waved to me as he stood beside his parked car. I waved back. On my return up the road, he was still there so I stopped to ask if he was alright. I thought perhaps his car had broken down and that he was waving to ask for help rather than just being friendly. He said he was fine and that he was only there waiting for The Sister to walk her dog. He was an older man and his sister looked to be about the same age. She was down the road with a sheep dog and a big heavy stick. At the time I thought it an odd place to choose for walking a dog. It is a narrow length of road and it is probably the single stretch where the cars go fast. There is no way to get off and out of the way of a big truck or a tractor. The ditches are high and there is no edge nor sidewalk. But then I thought that maybe the dog just had to get out of the car and that was why they had stopped where they stopped. Now, almost every time I go to the village in the afternoon, I see the man leaning on his car, smoking a cigarette, and waving to whoever passes. The Sister is either walking up the road or down the road toward the bridge. If a car comes along she whacks the dog with her heavy thick stick. The dog is on an extremely short lead so there is no way he could get out in front of a car even if he wanted to. I think she just hits him to let him know who is in charge. There are many quieter roads and plenty of field tracks where this dog could walk with a lot of pleasure. I think the spot is chosen both by and for The Man Who Waits. He has lots of people to salute while he waits and probably every so often someone stops to speak with him. The location is chosen for the man’s convenience and the poor dog gets a walk even if it is a terrible struggle down a busy tar road in between beatings.

13 April Sunday

Shovel Duty is a new part of life. The Elderly Em never goes far from the house anymore so when she poops we try to locate it and pick it up with the long handled shovel. Our walking routes through the grass criss-cross between buildings and it is easy to be stepping in something at any time. The little modules of excrement are firm and not squishy as long as we get them before they are stepped upon. They tend to be in a little line, three or four of them dropped as she moves away from the activity while still doing it. The shovel we use has a rounded surface with a dulled point on the end. It was the one Tom Browne always used for throwing sand and cement into the mixer. Because Tom always used it for that, it became the one which Simon also used for cement mixing. The surface of the shovel is coated and crunchy with old dried concrete. Now it has this new function which is good because the shovel itself is light. Since the handle is long, it is easy to swing and toss the little poops over the fence, over the wall or down the banking. It does have one downside and that is that there is a fingernail shaped hole in the middle of the metal. If the balance is not right, whatever has been picked up might fall through the small hole. I could go and find a less worn out shovel but it has become a challenge to balance everything while getting it out of the way. There has to be a modicum of satisfaction in every job.

12 April Saturday

I gave two empty egg boxes to David the Egg Man at the market. He thanked me four times. He was so grateful to receive them that I felt embarassed that it was only two boxes. I wished it had been a dozen. He said that he has been so short of boxes that he was obliged to order some to be sent down from Belfast. He hated to have to do that. Paying for the boxes annoyed him and he hated having to order a large quantity of them. He fears people got out of the habit of saving their egg cartons over the winter. He hopes that everyone who buys his eggs will remember to bring him their empties now that spring is here. I am not sure what the weather or the season has to do with it but he sounded so very certain that the springtime would make a difference, I feel I must believe him.

10 April Thursday

I took some freshly cooked rhubarb down to Tommie and Margaret. He had told me that he loves rhubarb but he said he never ate it because he did not know how to prepare it. He does not know how to cook anything and Margaret is no longer allowed to cook. Her eyes are too bad. Her hip is bad too. It gives her a lot of pain so even if she could see to cook, she cannot stand up to cook. Not only can she not stand for long but she is also falling down a lot. I took some custard to go along with the rhubarb. Margaret answered the door when I knocked. She opened the door wide and called out “Who Have I?” She could see the shape of a person but she could not tell who the person was.

9 April Wednesday

Alma told me that they do not milk on a Sunday now. The quotas for milk production being what they are means that things have gone so official that farmers cannot milk every day of the week without producing too much milk. Too much milk will get them into trouble with their farm subsidies. I was confused at how the cows cope with eating grass all day in order to produce milk and then not being milked. The cows cannot understand about quotas and subsidies. They just eat grass and make milk. Alma said the cows can get used to anything and that one day without being milked was Not A Bother for them.

8 April Tuesday

When school lets out at the Loreto in the afternoon, the Gashouse Bridge is impassable. It is always a mistake not to think about what time it is before driving that way. The girls in their dark green knee-length pinafores and dark green socks or tights and bright red sweaters are everywhere. They are on the pavements and they are crossing the road. The many pairs of bare white legs look terrible on a cold day. There are buses to collect some of the girls and dozens of cars to collect others. Cars are parked all along both sides of the bridge. Other cars come along and stop right in the middle of the road when the drivers see the girl they are there to collect. None of the cars use an indicator when they pull over nor do they let other drivers know that they are about to stop. They know what they are doing and it is our job to let them do it. At this same hour every school day afternoon the Gashouse Bridge belongs to the Loreto School girls and their parents. For everyone else it is simply a bad route to have taken.

7 April Monday

Wild garlic everywhere. It smells good when I step on it. It smells good when I pick it. It tastes good and it looks good. I always welcome these first bright green leaves as a sign that spring is really here. Later the leaves will go darker and the white star-like flowers will appear. By then spring will be well established.

6 April Sunday

Em is still and always getting stuck under chairs or in amongst the legs of tables. She has been trapped between a wall and a standing lamp, and trapped between a door and the door jamb. Some times she can get herself out of these physically challenging situations but sometimes she just stops struggling and she waits. She waits for someone to come along and release her. Sometimes it is not easy as it is a case of lifting a chair or a stool up and over her but if part of her is straddling a side piece of the furniture it is not possible to lift both the object and the dog without hurting the dog. Her patience and her resigned acceptance of each new entrapment are upsetting for me. I don’t know if they are upsetting for her. This is just her life.

5 April Saturday

For someone to announce that she is Pushed To the Pin of My Collar is another way of saying that she is under great pressure or at the very end of her tether.

4 April Friday

Someone is moving into The Tailor’s Cotttage. It is always called The Tailor’s Cottage even though there has been no tailor in it for as long as I have been here. The tailor’s name was Willie Hurley. When anyone speaks of him, everyone else has something to add. People came from Clonmel and even farther away to have things made by him. His house was surrounded by bushes which were high and overgrown. Just outside his door there was a pile of marmalade jars. They were the two-pound marmalade jars. The heap of jars was higher than his head when he stood at the door. The high bushes and brambles meant that not much light got inside the cottage. The high bushes and brambles also made sure that the local children were terrified of him and his cottage. Willie Hurley knew everything. He listened to the radio all day. He knew everything that was going on everywhere and he could talk about it all. One of his many jobs was to sew uniforms for the guards. His house was piled high with cloth and with clothes. Some clothes were hanging and some were folded into piles. He had an old treadle sewing machine but he also did a lot of his sewing by hand. No one knows how he learned to sew. His own mother could not sew at all. Everyone is agreed that he was trained by someone else.

3 April Thursday

I met the Dulux Man in Cahir this morning. He greeted me enthusiastically. We have not met for maybe half a year. He immediately asked about Em, and then told me that his own sheep dog lived until she was 18. Since Em is only 15, he does not consider her particularly old. He introduced me to his new dog whose name is Cleo. She is a spaniel and was bred for a hunting dog but she was gun-shy. The owners were about to shoot her because a gun-shy gun dog was was useless to them, so the Dulux Man was happy that he saved her from that fate. Everything he tells me is always told in the same breathless and speedy recitation. He leaps from one thing to the next and there is no chance of the conversation being a conversation. It is just a chance for him to talk and for me to listen until I decide that it is time to continue on my way. He told me about a cat who was on television because it was 25 years old and he told me about a Jack Russell who had been thrown out by someone in Cork and then had his back leg ripped off by some other bigger dogs. His eyes filled with tears as he spoke about the poor dog who he has never known. He loves all animals. His tears provided a gap in the telling, so I was able to say my good lucks and move along the pavement.

2 April Wednesday

One bird sits on the top edge of the barn for hours. He or she sits right above the bird house but not on the roof of the bird house. I do not know if he or she is standing guard or just checking out the neighbourhood as a possibility for a future family home. Other birds are staying away. This bird seems to have marked the territory at least provisionally. I feel like an estate agent keeping track of possible new tenants.

1 April Tuesday

Tea time or just after tea time is when the candidates go visiting. That is the time when they have finished with their own daytime jobs and that is the time when they are apt to find people at home. They have to be careful to pitch the time correctly. Interrupting families while they are eating is not always a good idea but leaving it too late when people are settled for their TV viewing is not good either. Rural canvassing also means that they cannot be arriving after dark as it might frighten people and that is not going to win votes. Candidates in towns or villages can do a whole street quickly but visiting in the countryside means a drive from house to house. It might not be possible to hit more than ten or twenty places in an evening. It is easier now that the clocks have changed. Darkness does not come so quickly. Most people running for office in an area like this assume that everyone already knows them. If they are of the parish, and if their families have been of the parish for a long while, it is just a matter of letting people know that they are running for an office. Then there are the candidates whose father or mother or spouse held the office and if that person has died, especially while holding the office, there is an implicit acceptance that the job should of course stay in the family. A right to ascendency only works if everyone already knows that and adheres to it. Introducing oneself to strangers, who might even want to talk policy, is different than just reminding people that you are ready to step into family shoes.

31 March Monday

There is a someone new living in Michael O’Connor’s cottage. There are new shrubs planted and there are flowers in pots on the windowsills. There are five baby goats, as well as cats and ducks. There is a large garden area dug and the frame for a polytunnel has been erected. After several years with the house sitting empty, it is exciting to witness all this activity. There is more happening in a day than ever happened in all the years that Michael lived there and still, the covering has yet to be stretched over the tunnel.

30 March Sunday

We put a bird house up high on the gable end of the barn. It sticks out from the profile of the barn and I am not sure that I like the look of the location. I was thinking maybe we should move it before any birds get settled inside but already the box is inciting busy interest. At dfferent times during the day, the birds come and sit on the roof of the barn and then they hop onto the roof of the bird house and lean over to look inside. There is a lot of in and out and flying back to the tree and and flying back to the house. I do not know if the same birds are coming to look and look and look again or if it is different birds.

28 March Friday

Even with all of her confusion, forgetfulness and stumbling in circles, Em never fails to check the Crumb Jar. The Crumb Jar is not a jar. It is a wide mouthed metal pot which stands on the floor beside the Rayburn. This is a good time of year to check it because any crumbs from making toast on the stovetop end up being swept into the pot. In summer there are no crumbs being added to the pot because the stove is turned off. But just in case, Em checks it several times a day, everyday.

27 March Thursday

Simon is planning a trip to Galway. He looked up the train scheduale. If he gets on a train in Cahir at 8 am and switches trains first at Limerick Junction and then again in Limerick, he will reach Galway at 2.30 in the afternoon. On the return trip he would need to get on a train at ten past nine, do the same two changes in Limerick and at Limerick Junction in order to arrive back in Cahir at 5.30. The trip there would take 6 1/2 hours. The return trip would take 8 1/2 hours. There is no way that the journey can be done in one day by train. Driving takes only about 2 1/4 hours. Is it any wonder few people bother to travel by train?

26 March Wednesday

Traditionally, busy butcher shops have had a woman sitting in a home-made booth. The booth is constructed out of plywood. The woman sits inside the booth either directly across from the counter with the meat or at a right-angle to it. After some meat has been chosen and cut and weighed and wrapped, the customer is given a piece of paper and he or she goes over to the woman in the booth. The person in the booth is never a man and never a girl. The woman takes the paper and tallies up the purchases with a pencil and tells the customer the total. The woman has a drawer where the money is kept. The woman never has a cash register. After paying her, the customer returns to the butcher who has usually watched the whole transaction. Nevertheless, he asks for the piece of rubber stamped paper and then he hands over the wrapped parcel. The butcher never touches the money and the woman never touches the meat. Some shops are now eliminating the woman and the booth. Increasingly, the butcher moves to the end of the counter and takes for the meat himself.

25 March Tuesday

I went to collect my dress from Jurgita. She is the seamstress from Lithuania who was making adjustments for me. When I arrived, my wool dress was on her dummy and standing right in the middle of the shop. An older woman was examining my dress very carefully while Jurgita finished pinning trousers for another customer. The woman asked what I thought of the dress. I said that I liked it. I said that it was my dress which might explain why I liked it. She was interested to know that it was my dress, but she offered no opinion of her own. She circled around the dummy a few times. She asked me where I would wear it. I did not know what she meant by that. I said I would wear it wherever I felt like wearing it. I said it was not a single occasion garment. She said, “Oh, you know what I mean! Now, would you wear it to the races?” Going to the races is a major social event here. There are always photographs in the newspaper of people dressed up for the races. Woman wear elaborate hats and fancy dresses. Even in terrible rain and mud they dress as though it was warm and sunny. I think they mostly dress like that in the hopes of being photographed. My dress did not look in anyway showy enough for the kind of thing I think she was suggesting. I thought about this all the way home. I decided that acknowledging that a dress is one which might be worn to the races implies its specialness, even if it is never worn for that purpose. Of course, I could be wrong.

24 March Monday

Lashing rain all day. Most of the rain is falling sideways. I am not sure if something can fall sideways. Maybe the word fall is what is wrong here. Nonetheless, sideways is how the rain is moving from the sky before it reaches the ground. The rain is sideways and sometimes diagonal and it is drenching and it has not stopped once all day. The daffodils have been beaten down. They are lying flat on the grass. Em has had a spring haircut, which offered a brief distraction from the weather. I stayed and helped to hold her up on the grooming table. Her back legs collapsed frequently. It was a job to get the horrible clumps cut off first and then to wash and dry her and then to start again to cut the rest of the hair. Altogether it took about an hour and a half. Most of the time she looked out the window at the rain and the few passing cars while the cutting was being done. There was no struggle and no wiggling. She is a placid dog even in her decrepit condition. I think for her it was a very big day out. She now looks like a much younger version of herself. And still, the rain falls.

23 March Sunday

Where you live is Home. Where you started from is your Home Place. The Home Place is hugely important. No one here ever gets over not being in their Home Place even if they never go back there for years and years. On returning from anywhere, one is always welcomed home whether where you are returning to is your Home Place or simply Home.

22 March Saturday

Em tends to walk out the back door and take a sharp left through the narrow space between the bench and the table. There is a step down and onto the slate path which she has been hesitant to take recently. It took me a few weeks to understand why she stops at the step and never goes further. Tendrils of honeysuckle were hanging down and blocking her way. They were not dense but they were there. The old Em would have pushed right past them, but now they are enough to stop her in her tracks. Today I got out the clippers and cut the honeysuckle. I made a clear opening for her to pass through. I thought she would be happy. She went out the door, took the left, stepped off the step and fell flat in a heap onto the path. The honeysuckle was just one obstacle. The step was another.

21 March Friday

I went to the hospital yesterday. I was told to PRESENT at the hospital at 8 am. I was not told to Present Myself, nor was I told simply to arrive. PRESENT is the verb used. Now that the things which needed to be done there have been done, I have been told that I will need to see the doctor IN ROOMS. IN ROOMS is where the doctor is when he is not in the hospital. IN ROOMS is the doctor’s office, or consulting rooms.

19 March Wednesday

The radio gives traffic and travel bulletins at various times throughout the day. It is especially thorough during the morning and evening rush hours. In addition to the road reports there are notifications of any flight and ferry delays. It is normal to be told that things are all moving smoothly, not only if there are problems The road bulletins cover the entire country. Information is given both for highways and for the traffic moving through the cities of Cork, Dublin, Limerick, Galway and Waterford. Just now I heard that the movement in Galway is Slow Enough Through the City Centre. Anywhere where a problem or an accident has happened is mentioned no matter how obscure the road or in what part of the country the road is located. Back roads are given the same attention as the big roads. The AA Roadwatch covers the entire country and still, the whole report only takes a few minutes.

18 March Tuesday

I was waiting my turn. There were several other people in the waiting room and there were enormous stacks of magazines piled up on the chairs where no one was sitting. Underneath all of the chairs were plastic bags full of books and magazines and papers. There was very little unfilled space. Over near the doorway, stood a high stool with a torn grey plastic seat and back. Upside down on the seat was a small white plastic laundry basket. It was too small to actually be a laundry basket. It was rectangular and the same sort of shape and made for carrying or holding things. On top of the upside down white basket, there was an open lap top computer. Its back was resting against the back of the seat. The electric cord for the computer hung down and went right across the open doorway. Each time someone entered or exited through the door, the woman in charge cautioned them to be careful of the flex. I sat and waited for someone to trip over the cord. I waited for someone to trip over the cord and pull the lap top off its precarious perch. By the time my turn came and even as I was departing everything stayed standing, including the woman working at the computer. She said standing up was better for her back.

16 March Sunday

Yesterday we walked up the Mass Path for the first time in many months. The large lake which was at the bottom of the meadow has drifted off downstream or sunk into the ground. The entire area.is still wet. The mud is ankle deep. There is a line of dusty dried mud all along the edges to mark the height of where the lake used to be. The leaves and grasses look like they have been sprayed with something grey and toxic, but it is just mud. All the way up the path there are trees down. In some places we could squeeze underneath the trees. Sometimes we had to crawl up and over them. None of it was easy. In a few cases there were branches broken off but mostly it was entire trees pulled out of the soil by their roots. The ground was so wet and the wind has been so fierce that the entire root systems just could not hold on. In some places the trees have fallen away from the path. In a way this seems good because it opens up some light in the tunnel of the path, but it is not really good because it smashed up stone walls as it fell away. There must have been twenty or thirty trees down between the bottom where the stream is and the road at the top. It was hard work to get up through it all. We usually don’t like road walking very much but after all of that tree climbing and mud, it was a relief to be on the firm dry surface.

15 March Saturday

I have been watching Em’s deterioration into old age for so long now. I marvel that I can continually note new levels of her slow-down. She still shows a lot of curiosity about the world around her. Her reactions are just slower. She is able to stand and look out an open door for 4 or 5 minutes before making the decision to walk through it. She rarely walks all through the house any more. Her movements are in a smaller number of places and her sleeping spots are always new and often in places she has never before tried. I do what I can for her comfort and pleasure. It is hard to brush her as her scalp is tender. Strong and vigorous brushing is no good but a gentle bit of stroking with an old soft brush is okay. Her skin shows very pink and delicate through the thinning hair. There are a lot of clumpy bits which I keep hacking off with scissors. She is not so good at cleaning herself these days. We now divide her food into three small meals a day which the vet says is best for elderly digestion. It also provides for a bit of excitement and anticipation. When she and I go out and wander about on the grass she turns left and then she turns right and sometimes she stops abruptly as if she has hit a wall. Sometimes she follows me and sometimes she does not follow me. Sometimes, I leave her outside wandering around on her own and doing her about face turns until I worry that she is so tired that she will fall over. Today Oscar came by for a visit and his wagging tail hit her in the face and knocked her to the ground. That is when I knew it was time to bring her back into the house, even though I do think she enjoyed the excitement of his visit. Getting knocked down once was thrilling. Getting knocked down twice would be too much for one afternoon.

14 March Friday 14-3-14

The entire country is in a bit of a tizzy. Today is the last day of the Cheltenham Races. About half the country left by boat to spend anywhere from four days to a week there. Of course, lots of horses go too. The national news is full of Irish wins, Irish injuries and Irish odds on Irish betting. Then on Saturday the Irish play the French in the final of the Six Nations Rugby Championship in Paris. Hundreds or thousands of people will be flying off to France for that, or else they have already gone. The politicians are away celebrating Patrick’s day in foreign countries under the guise of diplomacy, and hordes of marching bands and majorettes and state troopers are arriving from faraway to demonstrate how Irish they are. They will all be participating in the parades to be held here on Monday. It is a particularly mad time with all of these things happening together.. Mostly, it is good for the airports and hotels and ferries.

13 March Thursday

The starlings are back. Today is the first day we have seen them. They are diving and swooping at the barn roof and its edges. Plans for nests are in the collective mind. Spring is officially here.

11 March Tuesday

Well, Girl! Well, Boy! This is what people in Clonmel say to one another as greetings. The Boy is not really pronounced as Boy it is more like By. Bey or By. I cannot really decide. I would never say it. I would never be able to get it right. Girl is also used to punctuate sentences. When used like that, it has nothing to do with whether the person being spoken to is male or female. It is just a form of friendly address.

10 March Monday

Three elderly men and on elderly woman were sitting together at a table. They each had a big mug of milky tea. While everyone was stirring in their sugar, the woman went back up to the counter. She came back and handed out Twix bars to each of them. They all made the same noises of delight and immediately opened the wrappers. They ate their Twix bars in unison. Treats are very often the same treats as they have always been. They are relished for their familiarity. A slice of brack or a scone is always welcome because it is familiar. A treat must not be a threat.

9 March Sunday

The endless rain has stopped. It is still cold. Some days are bright and clear. We have had mornings with a heavy crunchy frost which melts into a warm and lovely afternoon. Some days are grey and dull. Other days the fog sets in and we can see nothing in the distance, neither near nor far. Everyday, rain or clear, the shop still brings out its stand-up metal sign. The sign advertises Anti-Mould Products. Everyone who has not used them yet will still be looking to purchase something for their clean-up of some mildew somewhere in their life. I doubt anyone has escaped it but some of us are slower to clear it up than others.

8 March Saturday

There is a three foot drop from the edge of the flower bed down to the concrete path in front of the barn. I was inside working at the big table and Em was wandering around on the grass. She must have seen me going into the barn, or else she caught sight of me through the glass. I looked up just in time to see her making a straight line towards me. Lucky for both of us there are some stones along the edge of the bedded area. She was trying to raise her legs high enough to step over them. A more nimble Emily would have bounded over the not very large stones. This old Emily couldn’t handle such a lift of the leg. Her struggle gave me a bit of much needed time. I was able to deflect her from her straight line before she fell down the three foot drop to a very hard landing.

7 March Friday

The telephone is working again. We were on the verge of deciding that maybe it was enough to have only the internet phone and mobile phones. We thought we might give up on a landline, but everything in this valley is more difficult than normal. Since nothing works all the time, a landline is a pleasing constant, when it is working. The sun is out. Em is having a better and less bumbly day. The door is still not working right, but spring feels closer.

6 March Thursday

Simon took Em’s wicker bed out to the barn and he used a jigsaw to cut the front down to floor level. He also cut a bit off each side to widen the opening. Em has not used this bed much in recent months as she stumbles when she tries to get into the bed and then she falls when struggling to get out. I think she just decided there were other less complicated places to sleep, so she stopped trying to get in and out of it. Simon thinks this new opening will give her the enclosed cozy bed back. We keep trying to do as much as possible to make her life pleasant. He has glued up the edges so tomorrow, when it is dry we will see if she is interested to get in.

4 March Tuesday

A frequent sight is a dog lying in the space between the road and the place where he or she lives. It might be the end of a driveway, or the wide opening of a farmyard, or the bit of gravel and soil just outside the gate. These country dogs locate themselves between that which is their own territory and the territory which is the outside world. Sometimes the dogs are stretched out and almost on the road. Sometimes they are stretched out as long as their bodies can go and just their front paws are on the tar road. I do not know if they are expanding the sense of their own world or if it is a teasing taunt. They are not interested to chase the odd car or tractor which passes. They are simply watching. I think there is a strong sense that their world is inside and the world beyond is outside that line where the road begins. But maybe their world is everything that they can see.

The phone is still dead.

3 March Monday

The phone is still dead. It has not worked consistently since early December. There are phones out all over the place. It is not just us. Trees have come down and knocked out lines and the soggy ground has caused things to tip and drop and droop. Many trees are down and have been cut away from where they fell. We are lucky that we had the branches of the big ash cut in the autumn. They would never have survived the winter winds. Many people are terrified of trees which is why they do not like them near to their houses. There are people who claim to hate trees. How can you hate trees? After this winter, many people are more fearful than ever. A lot of trees planted are the wrong kind of trees. If the trees planted near houses were not the ones which can grow to be massive, some problems would never arise and the presence of the houses in the land might be softened. A lot of houses end up with a naked look in an over zealous attempt to keep nature under control. The houses sit on their plots surrounded by cement and tar. Nature, like mud, is something to keep at a distance.

2 March Sunday

Walking with Em is improving. We go out into the yard together and wander around. I look at trees and storm damage and the buds. She walks about and stops at odd moments and then turns and turns back again. She does not know where she is going or she does not remember where she is going but she seems to want to keep going. There is much less falling about. Her legs are getting stronger. Once again, I thought she was dying but she seems too busy for that now. I am delighted. Every so often we manage to get down into the meadow. I was worried that she might discover the new lake at the bottom where the stream has flooded. If she got into the water she would not be able to swim and I do not think she would be able to climb out. The rushing water against her weakened legs would be too much. So far there is much to examine in the meadow. The many turns and wrong turns take so much energy she has no chance of getting as far as the water.

28 February Friday

The door still will not open. It will not open nor will it close properly. Each time I bang my body weight against it to open the lower part of the door, I am hurt by the horse chestnuts in the pocket of my raincoat. I have bruises on my hip from the ramming of the horse chestnuts between the door and my hip. Getting in and out is such a job that each time I remind myself to throw the horse chestnuts away, but it is such a pest to get the door closed again, that I forget all about them until the next time. The phone is still dead.

27 February Thursday

There are orange signs everywhere. They are in the ditches, leaning against walls and buildings. They are usually positioned near to a group of sandbags. The signs say ROAD FLOODED in black letters on the bright orange background. At the moment there is not any flooding on the roads. There are long puddles and there is a lot of water but there is not enough to be called flooding. The signs are not being collected and put away as there has been so much flooding already, that the understanding is that there will be more flooding. On a certain level there is only one topic of conversation. On another level, everyone is so weary of this topic that they barely speak at all.

26 February Wednesday

Em is very fragile. She is stumbling and staggering. Most times her legs do not seem strong enough to hold her up. She is forever on the verge of falling over. It is difficult to watch her like this. The smallest thing in her path is enough to knock her off balance. A dead teasel lying on the grass, a shoe on the floor. I am moving things around manically so that I do not have to watch her struggle. When she walks, her legs are unequal in their strength so sometimes she is falling into a circular movement. She is falling into a circle. She is always on the verge of tumbling but the circling and the stronger legs mostly keep her from collapsing. Sometimes they do not and she falls to the ground in a heap. Pushing herself back up to standing is sometimes easy and sometimes very hard work. Twice today I have helped by lifting her back end up and she has immediately begun her wandering again. She is very interested in the smells. Her hearing is bad and her eyes are not good but there is nothing wrong with her sense of smell, even in this soaking and sodden world.

25 February Tuesday

Everything is wet. The world is wet. The kitchen door is nearly impossible to open. Once it is open it is nearly impossible to close.Walls are slimey with moisture and with mildew. The boreen is ripped up worse than ever. The damage has been done simply by the force of rushing water. The house is in pretty good shape. No tree limbs have come down on top of it. The telephone is dead and the mobile phones don’t work very well. There are daffodils coming up and there are snowdrops still in bloom and most trees have buds. Spring is burgeoning, but it is hard to believe anything can be happening in all of this wetness.

24 February Monday 2014

The landing was rough. The wind pushed the plane. The stewardess announced that since it was raining very hard, we would be sure to get wet while going down the steps and walking across the tarmac to the airport. She admonished us all to put up our hoods. If we did not have a hood, she told us to put on our hats. For those with only a hat, she said we would have to keep a hand on the hat or else it would blow away. She made these motherly suggestions first in English and then in Irish and in French. Everyone looked around at one another to see that all of our heads were covered before we even began the move away from our seats.

Plough Teeth

7 August Thursday

She goes into the open closet (or cupboard) (or press) and then half falls out and cannot get herself upright again.  Shoes and boots fall out and tumble at her feet.  Things tumble around her feet and they trip her and then she cannot stand up and so she collapses again.  It is difficult to watch but it it easy to see that it is more difficult to be her than it is to watch her. Almost all of her movements are in some kind of circle.  The back legs are weak and one leg is weaker than the other.  When she is out of doors, her movement is almost always downhill.   The downhill movement is not intentional.  Watching the circling and the pull of gravity is not unlike watching water swirling down the drain in a tub or in a sink.  The direction is inevitable, so it is not worth struggling against it.

8 August Friday

We ate the puffballs last night.  We had kept two and given one away.  Simon cut them into cubes and gently coated them in fine cornmeal.  The cubes were then lightly browned in a skillet and served with a sauce made of fresh sweet peppers. They were delicious.  There were seven of us eating them and when we finished, we all wanted more.  We now have our attention on another puffball growing in the same vicinity.  It is tiny but we will keep checking it every day in the hope that while it gets bigger, some others might grow up around it.

10 August Sunday

The Stonethrowers Rally has held us prisoner all day.  Actually, we have been sort of captive for two days.  All day Saturday there were cars tooling around the area.  Each car had a sticker on the windscreen. The black and white sticker showed a number plus the word RECCE.  The driver and one passenger were studying the route.  I am guessing that they made note of sharp bends, pot-holes, the camber of the road as well as long straight stretches.  Most of the passengers I saw had clipboards or notepads for taking down information. Today no one is allowed on the roads. From 8 am, the roads, though officially public roads, are no longer available to us. Early on Saturday evening, the officials were going around and taping people’s gates shut with red and white striped tapes, so they could not leave or at least they could not open their gates again. Some people sit outside their houses all day on Sunday to watch and cheer on the men in the numbered hot rods.  They sit outside their houses but they do not sit too close to the road.  Some people choose to escape for the entire day.  They leave early in the morning and cannot come home until after 6 o’clock. Animals, especially domestic ones, get upset and have to be locked indoors.  Grazing animals get put into fields as far from the roads as possible.  This is not the first time this has happened.  It seems to return to these roads and our area once every four or five years.  The first time we encountered it, the cars on Saturday were doing SCRUTINY, and now the same activity is called  RECCE.  Otherwise things are the same.  There are emergency numbers to ring if anyone needs to get out while the races are screeching around.    No doubt the bales of hay on difficult corners are all in place.  Some fences and walls will be crashed into.  In the next few days, people will report to one another about whose walls and hedges got smashed. The high pitched roaring of engines and the loud popping of the exhaust are the same.  From here in our valley, the sound is not so horrible but it is horrible enough.

11 August Monday

Peter explained that the rusty metal things I found are called FLAILS.  I have been calling them PLOUGH TEETH.  I like my name better but his name came with an explanation of how they function in a mowing machine. He explained how they are attached in a horizontal position and how they look when they start to be used.  At a certain point when they are getting worn on one side, the flails are taken out and turned around so that the wear can then happen on the opposite edge.  By the time I found my two, both sides had been rounded off.  They were no longer rectangles with a hole at one end.  Although the edges seem quite sharp to me, they are no longer useful for their job.

12 August Tuesday

Em went for a haircut today.  Her long sheep dog hair was matted and filthy in places.  She is not very good at cleaning herself anymore.  It is not even that she is not good at it.  I think she no longer notices that it is something which needs to be done.  I thought I would have to stay to hold her up on the table but Kate was able to maintain her in an upright position with two hanging straps.  Her feet were standing on the table but her own energy and strength were not needed to hold herself up. She was not exactly dangling but it must have been a bit like being on tiptoes. When we returned from an hour of walking, she looked like a different animal.  The area all around her bottom has been shaved right off and her tail is now like that of a lion.  Her tail is a thin rope with a tuft at the end.  The huge plume is gone, but so are the random clumps of old excrement which were wadded up there. Her back legs look very thin and extremely fragile. There is very little muscle left in her hips.  It is sad to see but it is also very useful to see how old she is.  We have become used to her moving with less agility but her eyes and her hair made her look like the same old youthful and cheerfully ready-to-go Em.  Now the patches of pink scalp showing through her short hair and the shaky old dog legs cannot help but remind us that the old Em is gone. That and the perfumed shampoo smell.

A new bench

13 August Wednesday

We have a new wooden bench and a new wooden table outside the kitchen door.  They were made for us by the brother of the the woman at the timber yard.  The bench is wide and comfortable.  We sit there every chance we get.  The old bench has gone down to the burn pile in the meadow.  It is has not been possible to sit on it for a very long time.  It had a narrow seat with a very straight back.  It was originally a church pew.  I loved how it looked but it was never a pleasure to sit upon it.  Simon rebuilt its legs several times just to keep it standing.  In recent years, we put things on it and we put things under it but we rarely sat upon it.  Now we are enjoying this new bench and the new table which is more narrow than the previous table but is just fine for the space it occupies.  The old table has joined the bench down on the burn pile.  Half of its top had rotted and it was unsafe to put any weight at all on the surface.  Everyday I expected it to collapse. One leg was rotten at the bottom and was held up by a brick and some pieces of slate. As with the bench, Simon had repaired this table many times.  He built the table originally and he kept it standing upright for more years than perhaps he should have. It was positioned right up close to the bench so even if we had wanted to sit on the uncomfortable and shaky bench we would not have been able to move the table enough to get into the space to do so. Now that we have finally replaced both of these things we are wondering why we waited so long to do so.

14 August Thursday

I met a farmer I had not seen for months.  We stopped to talk and to discuss the things that had happened since we had last seen one another. We both commented at how close by we can all live but how easy it is to not cross paths.  Just walking a different field or driving a different route can change all kinds of things.  He said “We lose each other in the landscape.”

15 August Friday

Stopping at Rose’s for a quick drink, we talked with another Michael.  He was complaining about how few choices we have for going out to dinner.  We agreed that there were plenty of places for a certain kind of Big Feed dinner with lots of potatoes and piles of vegetables and meat and gravy.  There is always somewhere for Bacon and Cabbage.  For any different kind of eating, or for a more considered quantity of food on the plate, options are limited.  Some places appear but they do not last long.  If we do not test out a new restaurant quickly, there is always a chance that it will be closed by the time we do get around to going there.  In cities, there are lots of places and the pricing is competitive.  Here there are fewer choices and the prices are higher.  This Michael spoke of a restaurant on the coast that we like very much.  He was interested that it exists in an old industrial building.  He liked the look from the outside.  What he did not like was that a woman clapped her hands every time food was ready to be picked up from the kitchen and served.  He did not like the clapping and the echo of the clapping.  Most of all, he did not like the high ceilings and the exposed beams. He did not like the industrial look indoors. He said he did not like paying good money to go and eat in a shed.  His wife did not like eating in a shed either, although she liked the new and shiny details of everything else inside.

16 August Saturday

Some apples are ready to pick and to eat.  The ones called Irish Peach are splendid. Lots of others are getting riper by the day.  Our trees have never been so full of fruit.  The blotcheens are ripening, as are the wild damsons.  We lost a lot of the damsons in the boreen when Ned came down to cut the hedges with his big machine  last week.  We were pleased to have the heavy growth cleared but it is a pity he could not have timed it so that we had picked all of the damsons first.  There are raspberries to pick every day. I pick some in the morning and some in the evening. The Mirabelle plum tree has only one plum on the entire tree.  The figs are ripening but they need a few days of very hot weather. The mornings are cool and the nights are cool and already drawing in , but the growth is going well. It will be a great year for blackberries.

17 August Sunday

The three puffballs which we have been watching and waiting for have been destroyed.  They were kicked by an animal or maybe by a child.  There is nothing to be done about it.   We will continue to watch that spot and maybe some more will begin to grow near by.

18 August Monday

A World War One commemoration is being prepared in the village.  I think the discussions and planning for this have been going on for a long while, but it is only now that we are seeing it taking shape.  A large stone has been placed on a raised plot just at the corner of the car park beside the church.  I don’t know what kind of stone it is or where it came from but it is big. The area around the stone is paved and there is a ramp gently leading up to it. In the last week, someone has carved out a square. The next step is that a plaque with the names of the five local soldiers who died in the war will be placed in the square. At the end of the month, a ceremony is to take place.  The people who are doing the presentation have been rehearsing with Irish songs and Irish poetry of the time.  Everyone has the date marked on their calendars.

Ironmongery

19 August Tuesday

Emily has had a blood test.  She had a section of her front right leg shaved to accommodate the needle. She has had an Ultra Sound. Her tummy was shaved clean for that. Her tail was already shaved except for a white plume of hair at its end. Her back legs and hips and all around her bottom are shaved.  This is all in addition to her haircut of last week. Various other places around her body are worn down.  Most of these places are just a result of age. The overall effect is piebald.  Her various tests showed that she has a compromised liver.  We now have special food and pills for her, as well as a fortnight’s supply of steroids.  I wonder if the steroids will give her back her wasted leg muscles, and help her to stand herself up from a lying down position. I wonder if they will help her hair to look healthy and shiny and fluffy again. They cannot give us back a youthful dog but they can hopefully rejuvenate this old one.

20 August Wednesday

I have been drawing and drawing and re-drawing my rusted objects.  I am collecting the drawings together into a kind of inventory.  I think I am compiling an ironmongery on paper. Up until now, the found pieces have been lined up on the long bench.  Some have been hanging on the wall. Some others are on the ground opposite the bench. One is in position near my door as it has the function of helping to open that door. There are a lot of different pieces and parts. Most of them are variations of the same things.  Since everything I find here is usually agricultural in its initial use, the things are often repeats of the earlier found things.  Now I am attempting to document the same things and the differences of the same things.  It is often tedious as I am constantly feeling that my drawing has become a sort of stuttering.  While I am drawing, I stop because I think that I just drew this exact thing.  And often I did just draw that thing but it was not exactly the same thing which is why I am trying to draw it again.  I dream each night of black ink drawings of the endless variations of the same objects. It is driving me mad.

Emily D. 1999-2014

Emily is dead.  Our wonderful friend died on Sunday 24 August.  For twenty four hours she could do nothing but lie on her side.  She would not or could not roll over onto her other side. She ate some small pieces of chicken and she took a tiny bit of water from a spoon.  She lay in front of a glass window in view of the Galty Mountains. There is no way that her old eyes could see the mountains but it is nice to know that they were there for her.  We were not there.  She was in Skeheenarinky and we were far away. We are heartbroken.  Her death was not a surprise but it was a terrible terrible shock.  It is still a terrible shock. We have been moving around the house and outside always expecting to see her.  We are always hoping to see her. We are not able to move her water dish nor any of her other things.  We are pretending that she will be back soon.

Vocabulary of loss

30 August Saturday

There was a man painting the door of O’Dwyer’s shop.  It was a wooden door which is really just a piece of plywood with hinges.  All day long the door is held open and attached to the wall of the building with a padlock.  It has various notices for events and things for sale pinned on the inside of the door which is actually outside all day long. The man was holding the door open by leaning it against a can while he drew out two vertical panels with a long sign-painters brush.  In the top half of the painted door he had already drawn a large square.  I complimented him on his steady hand.  Drawing out long lines with liquid is not easy. He was proud of his work.  He explained that the two panels at the bottom would be painted as proper wooden door panels while the top section was to be painted to look like glass. I am wondering when I will ever see this door as the shop is open from early in the morning until quite late in the evening.  This outside door is only closed when the shop is closed.  Then the padlock is on the other side, and the notices are hidden inside and protected from the weather.  I will have to go down at night specially to see the finished paint job.  All this makes me realize that I simply do not know when they close the shop.  It is a place that seems to be always open.

31 August Sunday

In Waterford there is a bread roll called a Blaa. Sandwiches are always offered on a Blaa.  I often intend to find out how and why the Blaa got its name and also to find out why it is only a Waterford word.  As far as I know, no where else in the country serves up a Blaa.  The Blaa is not an item for export.  Not knowing and not getting around to asking keeps the mystery going for me.  It also means that I am both surprised and delighted each time I hear the word again.

1 September Monday

I have a new vocabulary.  It is the vocabulary of loss.  There are a lot of words I rarely use in relation to myself.  These are a lot of words which are now in my conversation every day:  Bereft.  Mourn.  Heartbroken.  Devastation.  Vacuum.  Absence. Grief.  Death.  Sorrow.  Pity.  Sorrow.  Consolation.  Sympathy. Remembering.  Forgetting. Commiseration.  Oh dear.  The list goes on and on.  Sometimes these words are only said in my head.  Sometimes they are written. Sometimes they are part of conversations.  Sometimes they are said out loud.  Everywhere I go the news has spread.  One person tells another.  Each time I speak with someone we need to go over Em’s death and we need to find the right words to say everything that needs to be said.  I have spoken with people who still miss their deceased dog after 34 years, or 12 years or 7 years.  One person listed the things that she has saved from her dead dog. She has his hair clippings, his nail clippings, his baby teeth, his collar and his toys.  She has made a sort of shrine so that she will never forget him. He has been dead for 6 years. She swears that she misses him every single day.  Another woman told me that losing her own dog was like having the back wall of the house fall off.  I know exactly how that feels.   For now, I still expect to see Em appear from someplace indoors or someplace outdoors.  I just assume that where she is is just somewhere nearby and that I will see her soon.  There are grubby marks low down on various corners and on the edges of door frames where her body has rubbed as she passed by again and again. These marks suggest her presence not her absence.

2 September Tuesday

The woman in front of me was filling out cards for the weekly GAA lottery.  She had three of the yellow cards lined up on which to write her details.  She was old and her hands were stiff.  She held the pen awkwardly. Her handwriting was slow. She only needed to write her name and phone number. Because the writing was laboured and probably painful, she interrupted herself often to speak. She did not attempt to write and to speak at the same time. She remarked to the woman behind the counter that “It’s Heading Up Nicely.”  Then she announced, in a louder voice, to anyone in hearing distance, that the jackpot had climbed to well over seven thousand euro now.  She said,  “There’s a lot of people waiting on that money.”

3 September Wednesday

I went down into the meadow with the idea of demonstrating how lovely the mown paths were. The bright green short grass paths winding down through the long grasses always suggest promise to me, even though I know exactly where they lead.   Instead of the lush short grass of the winding paths contrasting with the surrounding mixture of late summer burnt and  golden grasses, I was showing off a meadow half devastated by the strimmer, with a scatter of cut grasses over everything.  In some places the paths were barely visible.  I could see the paths because I knew they were there.  I am not sure anyone else could find them visible enough to follow, much less find them interesting.  The apple trees are fuller than they have ever been.  There are masses of apples reaching ripeness on every branch.  Most of the branches are hanging heavily with the weight of all the fruit.  The blotcheens are ripe and ready for eating.  Every single fruit tree is heavily entangled with convolvulus vines.  The vines are just reaching up from the ground and encircling the trunks and the branches and it is all a mess.  I have been leaving the vines because if I start to tug at them I might lose a lot of fruit in the struggle.  Between the messed up paths and the not raked up grass and the trees that look like they are being choked to death, the walk to view the meadow was not my best idea.

4 September Thursday

There was a murder last night.  It happened right underneath the bedroom window.  I woke up to the squealing and screeching of a captured creature.  I could not tell if it was a bird or a rabbit.  It might have been anything at all.  The sounds were terrible.  They were the sounds of fear and desperation.  There was struggle.  The noises were all the voice of whoever was being killed.  It varied as things went from bad to worse.  I could do nothing and I could see nothing.  For less than a minute, I thought of rushing outside with a light but I knew that it was already too late.  The fox had someone already in his mouth and the screams were the last moments of a life.  I lay in the dark and I listened.  I had no choice but to listen.  It was gruesome and noisy, and then it was all completely quiet.

Finishing the walk alone

5 September Friday

The excitement about the new Rose of Tralee seems to be over.  Or it has just been pushed aside while other things take priority in the news. The competition happens every year and even though it seems quite old-fashioned to hold a beauty contest, it gets a lot of young women entering and a lot of people watching it on national television.  The women who enter are all of Irish descent although they can be from anywhere in the world.  There is a Hong Kong Rose, a Dubai Rose, a Melbourne Rose and sometimes even a Japanese Rose.  They come from everywhere.  I do not know how they are chosen from the place where they live.  There must be a preliminary Rose of Tralee competition to see who will represent a particular city or country.  Once the competition arrives in Kerry, there are handsome young men assigned to each Rose.  They accompany herself on whatever activities are done over the week or ten days of the competition.  The escorts are chosen from all over Ireland.  They often appear in tuxedos. The women have to perform different tasks such as discussing their jobs, their education, and answering questions about their dreams and aspirations.  They have to perform some sort of Party Piece like a song, or a dance or playing a musical instrument.  Some recite a poem. I do not think there is anything as sexist as a bathing suit contest but it is understood that the Rose of Tralee must be attractive. I have probably written about the Rose of Tralee competition before but I have not watched it for a long time.  For me, once was enough. This years Rose is from Philadelphia.  After she won the crown she declined a toast as she announced that she is a teetotaller.  Later it was noted that she is gay.  Some people seemed disturbed by this and there was a lot of discussion on the radio and in the papers.  The new Rose was asked why she did not tell anyone beforehand that she was Gay..  She said that no one had asked.   After a little flurry, the whole issue has died down and now the 2014 Rose can just get on doing whatever the Rose of Tralee does for the year of her reign.

7 September Sunday

The raspberries continue to be ripe and ready every day.  Some evenings I collect them before dark so that they will be there for breakfast in the morning. More often I have to step out in the morning in my bathrobe and my wellie boots to get just enough to eat with cereal. I go back out later in the morning to fill up a larger bowl, but I am enjoying the portion control of picking just as many berries as I want to eat.  The leaves and the grass and everything are all drenched on these cool mornings. The days have been hot.  There is so much picking to do.  The blackberries have never been so plentiful although I think that I think this every year.  I keep picking and picking.  Some for the freezer and some for the eating. The blotcheens  are delicious.  We made jam with the wild damsons but somehow we never make anything with the blotcheens.  We just eat them.

8 September Monday

The man was here to do the yearly clean and re-conditioning of the Rayburn stove.  The days are very hot so it is perfect time to have it done.  If we wait too long and the days get cold, then the stove has to be turned off for several hours before the man can do the job.  On a cold day, we kick ourselves for not having the job done in the warm weather.  I came in from town while the man was halfway through the job.  I was running back and forth putting things away and he was running in and out putting things in his truck.  In a matter of minutes we had bumped into one another several times while both trying to go through the narrow doorway between the kitchen and the big room at the same time.  Every time we laughed.   It got funnier as it happened again and again. He said “You know what this is?  This is called The Dancing Point.”

9 September Tuesday

The house is about to be painted.  The old wooden gutters have been taken down. Simon made the gutters himself.  The ones on the house were square in shape and the ones on the book barn were vee-shaped.  They were made of treated wood and they have lasted well, but this is a wet country.  They lasted sixteen years. For the last two years they have been leaking badly in several places. So maybe I should say they lasted fourteen years. The wooden gutters have had their day.  They will be replaced with aluminium gutters as used on farm buildings.  But first the house must be washed with the power washer and then the painting will begin.  After the painting is finished, the new gutters will be put in place.  The week promises to be dry so we will not miss them for a few days.

10 September Wednesday

The nights are drawing in fast.  They are already feeling chilly.  I have decided to walk down into the meadow each night the way I used to walk with Em.  It has been a long time since she gave up on that walk and just preferred her stroll in the upper grass near to the house before bed.  I loved my walk through the meadow with her and now I have decided that I should re-start it sort of as a way to think of her and to have a breath of air at night. Some nights I feel a little bit lonely walking down the path in the dark.  Some nights I feel a little bit nervous.  It is not really fear. I think it is just the feeling of being alone in the dark with no light except that from a torch whose batteries are weak.  Having Em rushing off into the night and barking was never really more than a nominal idea of companionship.  It just meant that we neither started nor finished the walk alone.

11 September Thursday

There is still a lot of haying activity. I get mixed up about what is hay and what is straw and how each crop gets collected and stored.  Silage is baled up into black plastic. Today I saw a big tractor pulling a device behind it.  The device picked up a bale of whatever goes into the silage and the whole thing got wrapped up into black plastic while the bale twirled around on a spindle sort of thing in the middle of the trailer.  When the plastic wrapping was completed, two arms from the machine let the bale roll gently off, sort of catching the bale before dropping it on the ground alongside with the others.  It caught the bale in bent places of its arms just like elbows.  The dropping onto the ground was a gentle rolling off. The stubble which is left in many fields is from straw.  I just learned that the cutting of hay does not leave stubble. Some things are collected into big round bales and some are in big rectangular shapes.  There are also small flat bales from smaller older machines.  I learn these things but I never seem to have complete knowledge of what is keeping everyone so busy in the fields and on the tractors.

12 September Friday

Father Sean Nugent died.  He was local to the area.  He was always spoken of as Father Sean Nugent, never as Father Sean or Father Nugent.  I guess using his family name kept him connected to his people in the area. For some of his years as a priest, he was the priest in the village.  Or I think he was the priest in the village for a time.  Actually, I have no idea how long he was there, but I seem to have gone to a great many funerals where he was  officiating.  I remember him mostly because he often spoke of a man he was burying as AN INOFFENSIVE MAN.  Hearing someone described as Inoffensive always sets me thinking.  I cannot decide if it is a fine and complimentary thing to be described as Inoffensive or if it is tantamount to saying that the person in question was actually quite boring. It might be a way of saying that the person in question did not have a great many good qualities so it is best not to say too much. I will not be attending the funeral of Father Sean Nugent. I did not even know the man. But I cannot help but wonder if he himself will be described as An Inoffensive Man at his own funeral.

It Looks Well

13 September Saturday

People often say that something Looks Well.   They don’t say that it Looks Good or even that it Looks Nice. It Looks Well is a real compliment.

14 September Sunday

The house is all painted.  It is looking good. We step outside often to look at it and to admire it. It took a bit of getting used to the colour.  I don’t know whether to call it dusty pink or raspberry ripple or what.  It looks different at different times of day.  It does look fine and the off-white surrounds on the windows look sharp.  Maybe it actually looks ridiculous and we are only thinking that we like it because we are getting used to it. What I am worrying about is what we are going to do with Em’s house.  We had to move it away from the wall before the work got started.  The roof, which has been falling in for quite a long time completely collapsed.  The floor fell apart as the house was moved.  We found a large cache old bones, remnants of rubber toys and clumped up filthy blankets.  The bones made me weep.  The walls have served as a gallery for a long time. Every photo of another dog and announcements about puppies to be viewed and dog shows were put up on the walls.  There were a few cat pictures on the left side but it was mostly dog things that got stapled up.  Now everything is peeled, faded or torn.  Em had not actually been using her house for a long time.  I think she could not go inside perhaps for fear that she would not even know how to get herself back out.  She was avoiding  places like that. She no longer wanted to sleep in her wicker bed and preferred her sheep’s wool mat to anything that held her in position. Since she never slept outside and only used it during the day, I thought of her house as an office.  Now the fact that we have moved it at all makes it seem crazy to move it back into its old position.  To take it down and throw it onto the burning pile seems so final.  It is all happening a bit faster than I would have liked.

15 September Monday

The postman was in a bit of a tizzy this morning.  He is one of several substitute postmen who have been driving down to us since John is still at home recovering from surgery. Today’s man said it was a terrible day for him as the new Tesco Club Cards were being sent out and that meant that nearly every house was getting a delivery.  He said that there are many houses which he only goes to once a week or not even that often but when the Tesco Club Cards get sent out the whole entire Post Office and all of the delivery men are just rushed off their feet.

16 September Tuesday

I walked out over Joe’s fields this morning.  I wanted to walk up the mass path, but there is no way to get through.  Branches and trees have fallen and there are masses of  brambles blocking the way. It will take some big work before we can walk that route again. The grass in the fields was heavy with dew and my trousers were wet up to the knee before I had gone any distance at all. I could see Joe on his tractor far ahead.  He was rounding up the cows for the slow walk to the milking.  Rather than straggle along behind them, I stayed on the fields and walked through one fenced off area after another.  I think there were eight fields to pass through.  I had to crawl underneath the wire.  It was a wet thing to do.  Walking is a dilemma in these early autumn days.  The ground is heavy with wet in the morning but once the sun burns off the wetness,  it becomes too hot for walking.  So I walked and crawled through the wet grass.  Going under the two kinds of fencing is always a bit of a challenge.  I hate to hit the wire and get an electric shock. There is a string which is used a lot on most of the fenced areas.  I think of it as a new kind of fencing but I think it has been around for a while.  It is not new. The string is white with either blue or yellow interspersed with the white.  I can never be sure if the string is electrified.  To a certain degree the cows get conditioned to understand that the string is on, but I think it is often not on.  They see it and avoid making contact because they have been shocked by it before.  Like the cows I choose not to make contact with it.  In a few of the fields there was evidence of recent grass eating. Since the cows had been eating away,  there was a lot of manure. in the remaining grass.  Each time I crawled or rolled under a fence I had to check where I was going in order to make sure I did not land in manure.  The fresh stuff is slippery and messy but the day old stuff has a crust over the top of it.  It means crunching through the older stuff and then landing in the wet and slimy stuff which has been kept wet by being protected.  None of it smells but it is messy. By the time I reached the gate and climbed over it onto the road, I was soaking wet.  I had avoided all of the manure, except for a bit on my boots.  I felt a real sense of accomplishment and it was still early morning.

Wool buying

17 September Wednesday

There is a new sign announcing Wool Buying Every Thursday at the Co-op. The Wool Buying on Thursday is not a new thing, but the sign is new.

18 September Thursday

I just learned that Oliver Hackett is dead.  His death was not recent. He died back in March.  He had been unwell for a while.  I was surprised that I missed the news of his death.  The imperative of death makes such things big news when they happen, and immediately after that they are simply Already Known Facts.  I had not even noticed that his grocery shop was closed and that the doors to his big shed where locked up tight.  He sold firewood and coal and canisters of propane gas out of the big shed.   I just did not pay attention as I passed by in the car.  I did not pay attention for many months.  There were several years when Oliver was trying to sell his entire business with his house attached.  He had it listed on the internet.  I am not sure how long he was trying to sell it, but after he died I guess neither his daughter nor his son wanted to take over the whole operation.  Oliver often had a tetchy manner.  Once he was delivering several loads of firewood to us and he said something about me being English.  I said that I was not English.  I told him that Simon is English but that I am not. He took offense and acted as though I had been lying to him for years. For a long while, he refused to speak to me at all when we met.  If I entered his shop he made a snorting sound and ignored me.  I do not think that he was angry because I was an American.  He was angry because he had been so certain about who I was and he did not like to find himself wrong.

19 September Friday

It is not a wise thing to offer someone A Ride.  Offering A Ride is a salacious invitation. Offering or asking for A Ride in a public situation is bound to cause some sniggers, especially if the one doing the offering is a woman.  It is best to offer or to request A Lift.  That way there is no danger of a sexual implication.

20 September Saturday

Last night we had our first rainfall in weeks. It was a good soaking rain.  It was probably not enough rain to make the farmers happy, but nonetheless, it was welcome rain.  I took the walk through the woods and along the river in Cahir.  It was no longer raining but there was a bit of drizzle in the breeze or just blowing off the trees. I met John, the Ancient Man, and we stood together in the dampness and spoke for a while.  He had his umbrella but he did not put it up.  I had a hood on my jacket but I did not put that up either.  It was not really wet.  He asked me about Emily and I told him that she had died.  He was very sorry to hear it.  He spoke about how he still looks behind him for his Ancient Dog who died two years ago.  He still looks for her and he still feels surprised not to see her struggling long behind him. I know exactly how he feels.

I told him that he was looking well and he told me that he had Gone to 90 since we last spoke. He said his sister had Gone to 92 and that she has started riding herself out in a wheelchair.  He is disgusted with her.  He is still walking his 5 miles every day but he said that he is walking more and more slowly, so it takes him a lot longer than it did even a few months ago.  Most of his day is now taken up with his morning walk. He does not want to shorten his route but he might have to consider it come winter. He asked me if I had heard the news about the Irish woman who had won 87 million euro on the lottery last night.  No one knows who she is or what part of the country she is in. He is hoping that he might come across her on his walk today.  He asked me if by chance she was me.

21 September Sunday

Today I was told that each of us dies twice.  The man who told me this said that You die once when the breath goes out of you.  You die again the very last time that someone says your name out loud.

24 September Wednesday

We drove to Thurles to take the train to Dublin.  Once we were on the platform, we saw that there was an earlier train and that the earlier one was an Express. There would be no stops until Dublin. We decided to get on that one instead of the one we had planned for.  After a few minutes, an announcement came on and we were told that the Express was running 12 minutes late.  We did not mind.  it meant that we would still be in Dublin sooner than we had planned.  We were looking forward to tea and toast in the dining car.

As we boarded the Express there was another announcement saying that there would be an unschedualed stop at Port Laoise.  The train was packed.  Every seat was full and there was not much standing room.  Just about everyone on the train was going to The National Ploughing Competition.  The Ploughing is in Port Laoise this year.  Almost all of the people who had boarded at Cork where the train originated were going to The Ploughing.  There was no tea and toast in the Dining Car for us.  There was no Dining Car.  No doubt all those farmers and their families who were going to The Ploughing had eaten their breakfast hours ago, well before leaving home and probably before they had even done their farm chores.

At Port Laoise, the cars emptied out. We looked out the windows as the platform filled up. There were many buses outside the station waiting to take everyone on to The Ploughing.  The few of us who were left on the train looked around and smiled at one another.  Suddenly there was so much space. None of us needed more than one seat for the rest of our journey to Dublin, but there was so much space after everyone got off that we felt fortunate.

25 September Thursday

Nonnie went to visit another woman who had recently lost her husband.  The death had happened some months ago and far away.  Nonnie went to pay her respects now that the woman had returned here.  She asked if the husband had been buried close to their family home.  The woman said that he had not been buried but cremated instead.  She said she still had the ashes and had not yet decided where to put them. Nonnie gasped and dropped her head down hard on the table.  She banged her head a few times and she moaned.  She lifted up her head and said Oh How could you cremate That Beautiful Body? Then she banged her head down again.

Rubber sparrowhawk

26 September Friday

I am always surprised when I find myself standing on Mitchell Street in Clonmel and suddenly it is full of people all rushing from one direction.  It happened this morning. Mitchell Street is not a very wide street nor is it a busy street. It is not open to motor traffic so it tends to be a quiet street.  To see ten or twenty people arriving quickly from the same direction is startling.  Fifteen or twenty people is enough to fill the area. The side street is Abbey Street where there is a church about halfway down on the left.  The people gushing up and onto Mitchel Street are coming from a mid-morning Mass.  To a person they appear to be in a rush. They are each coming from the same place and now they are each going somewhere else.  Since the opposite direction only takes them to the river, they are all moving away in the same direction and they do not move slowly. Once they get to Mitchel Street some go left and some go right and very quickly the sense of  group movement is over.  Everyone who was in the crowd coming from Mass are now just people walking out in the town.

28 September Sunday

The raspberries are slowing down.  We have day after day of hot sun.  These raspberry canes usually keep producing well into October.  I cannot understand why they are slowing up now when the weather is on their side. They did begin their season much earlier than usual so perhaps they have just worn themselves out. The productive season might be exactly as long as it has always been but if it started earlier it may need to end earlier.

The blackberries make up for the diminishing raspberries.  I cannot pick enough of them.  Today I picked for less than an hour in sun.  I started up at the tar road and walked back down here while picking.  I only picked on the left side of the boreen where the morning sun was warming both the berries and the bushes.  I had a field full of frisky young heifers following me on the right side.  They rushed and jostled each other to watch me over the ditch and kept changing position to go along with me as far as they could.  We finally got to the narrow end of their field.  I continued on without them so they took off racing one another back into the open space.   I came home with enough to provide a big bowl of berries to eat and two big bags full to drop into the freezer. The house has been stained by blackberry eating birds flying over.  It is a mistake to wear a white shirt while picking blackberries.

29 September Monday

There has been a big sparrow hawk on a long bouncy stick in a field up past Flemingstown.  The bird must be made of rubber or plastic.  It looks very realistic and it is never not moving. It swoops and dives and looks a lot like a real bird with its wings outstretched in flight.  The movement of the bird keeps it moving.  I do not know what the stick is made of but it is strong enough to keep the bird bouncing and diving.  The first few times I saw the bird I did not realize that it was attached to anything.  I thought it was a real sparrow hawk and I nearly went off the road with excitement.  As crow-scaring devices go, I have never seen anything better.  Now it is gone.  I shall look forward to seeing it reappear in another field, but I may have to wait till next year.

30 September Tuesday

Every so often my phone takes a little film by mistake, instead of taking the still photograph I was trying to take.  Those little films get deleted as they are never anything worth keeping.  The only time I ever made a film on purpose was while walking up the path with Em about a year ago.  She was already walking slowly enough so that I could follow her. I think of that kind of walk as her Stately Pace.  Not so very long ago her racing and rushing up and down would have been impossible to keep up with.  I kept the film.  Now I am glad I did.  Simon put it up on YouTube for me.  It is a short quiet walk with Em. There is only the swishing through the grasses and a bit of birdsong.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKSh1MOPiY

1 October Wednesday

Today is the first day of mandatory water charges in the country.  There used to be charges for water but some years ago they were eliminated.  Now charges are being put into place as part of the ongoing Austerity Measures by the government.  Many people, or maybe most people, do not remember a time when they had to pay for water.  A great many people feel aggrieved.  This is a country with a reputation for being very wet and having lots of rain.  People feel they should not have to pay for such a plentiful resource as water.  The trouble is that there are systems to run and pipes to repair.  The nation has been bankrupted and has had to be bailed out by the EU.  Even though things are a lot better than they were a few years ago, there is still an enormous debt.  Businesses have gone under.  People have emigrated.  Homes have been lost because people can no longer pay their mortgages.  Jobs are still hard to find and people have taken huge cuts in their wages and pensions.  People do not have the money to pay yet another charge, but the government does not have the money either.  People have not finished feeling outraged and abused about the new property tax.  Now the water charge has been dropped upon them.

In the last weeks, there have been lots of discussions on the radio about how to lower the water consumption in a household.  People were advised to use showers at schools and clubs and places of employment as much as possible.  There were a lot of suggestions about using water in other places rather than using ones own water. Water butts in gardens were advised.  People were told to put a rock in the toilet tank and to flush less frequently.  They were told to repair any leaky taps. In the last four days, people were advised to use the last days of free water to wash their cars and water their gardens and do lots of jobs that they might usually put on the Long Finger.  As well as cars, things like curtains, patios, pets and  garden furniture could be washed with impunity in the final days before the charges. The implication was that one might never again be able to afford to wash these things.

Today the radio is full of people who are busy running in and out of their houses trying to read the water meters each time a toilet is flushed.  They are taking photographs of the meter and its red numbers with their smart phones.  They are discussing the charge per litre and the information that they can and cannot get from the water board about the water charges.

We do not have to pay water charges because we have our own well.  We have always been careful with our water.  We know that our well is deep, but there is always the vague fear that even so the water in the well might someday run out.  Being careful is a good idea for everyone, as well as for the environment.  Maybe after the initial shock of this new charge, the people who are now upset will realize that being careful is a good idea. When the government put in a tax on plastic bags in shops about fifteen years ago, they thought that everyone would be too idle to carry their own shopping bags.  The government assumed they would make a lot of money to put towards environmental projects.  Instead everyone quickly became conditioned to carry their own bags and the government has not done well with making the money it expected.  People might quickly embrace this water tax as a challenge in the same way.

Gone Down With The Weather

2 October Thursday

I had a cup of tea in the kitchen of a friend this morning.  Her table is directly in front of a large window. It is pleasant to look out this window.  The view and the light across the hills and fields changes all the time.  It is a pleasure to sit there.  Everyone who passes directly in front of the house, in a car or on foot, is also visible.  We watched a man in a red fleece walking rapidly down the hill. He had a dog running along with him.  My friend asked me who the man was. I did not know his name but I described where I thought he was living.  I really thought I recognized the dog more than the man. A few hours later I was back at home and I heard shouting.  I looked across the valley and I saw a man with a red fleece up on the hill which used to be part of Johnnie Mackin’s land.  It is such a steep hill that it seems as though it is at a right angle to the meadow below it. Anyone walking on the hill looks like they are balancing impossibly sideways in space. The man was shouting at a dog who was far behind him. From where I was standing I thought maybe it was the same man but I could not be certain that it was the same dog. At the end of the afternoon I was driving back up from the village and I saw a man in a red fleece in the distance.  I felt confused.  This might have been the same man and the same dog.  It might have been the same man two of the times and a different man one of the times.  I thought the dog I saw in the morning was black.  Then I thought I saw a yellow-ish dog.  Then I thought I saw a black dog again.  If there was someone around who regularly wore a red fleece I would know exactly who it was.  But no one would be walking all day long.  Ordinarily I do not see too many different people out walking.  This makes me feel I should know anyone and everyone that I do see out walking.  Maybe these were three different men and three different dogs. Maybe it was a coincidence that today they were all three wearing red fleeces.

3 October Friday

An older man leaned over a pram in which a small child was sitting.  The child was probably about two. The man made some little cooing noises at the child.  Then he stood up straight and asked the mother ” Now was that one the baby once?”

4 October Saturday

David had no eggs left.  We were not very late arriving at the market.  It was only ten o’clock, but he was already out of eggs.  He had his table set up and he had his dark red umbrella in position as normal, but he was just standing and chatting with people who came to buy his eggs.  He was happy to collect the empty egg boxes which we brought for him.  He explained again and again that his hens have Gone Down with the Weather.  He reported that with the cold mornings and the cold nights and the early darkness the hens go off to sleep sooner and that means they are laying fewer eggs. He said they might just get accustomed to the early darkness and then return to their usual production.  But he said that for the moment it is A Tragedy.  He said this is exactly the moment when everyone is making their Christmas Cakes.  This is when they need eggs.  He said there could not be a worse moment for his hens to have Gone Down with the Weather.

5 October Sunday

There are a huge number of spiders around.  There are a huge number of spiders in this house.  I thought it was just me because I am not so fond of dusting in corners.  Now I read in the paper that there are a remarkably large number of spiders everywhere.  It is a combination of the very mild weather we have been having and the fact that this is the mating season for spiders.  I know so little about spiders that I do not know if they are laying eggs which will be waiting to hatch until next spring or if these new spiders will all be born right away.  They must be arriving later otherwise we would have spiders crawling up the walls and in corners of the room all winter.  I hope this is not the case.  I do not relish a house full of spiders all winter long.

6 October Monday

Breda’s father Jim slipped on some oil and broke his hip.  He was operated upon down at the hospital in Waterford.  I understand that he is already walking again, carefully and with the help of a frame.  He is 85 years old and has always been a very robust and active man.  He has seemed more youthful because of his terrific attitude and energy.  He has a reputation as a great dancer. Now I am told that he will need to Soften His Cough.  I did not understand the expression but the more I think about it, it is making better sense.  It is just a way of explaining the slowing down and accepting of being a little bit older and a little bit more careful.  To Soften His Cough means that he will need to accept change.

7 October Tuesday

The shops in the Market Place in Clonmel are all being painted.  I do not know if they are owned by one person but suddenly almost all of them appear to be getting a fresh coat of paint.  All of the shops being painted are unoccupied. Each of the empty ones has a sign in the window advertising that it is For Rent or To Lease or To Let.  The signs vary in the shops. The street is a narrow pedestrian street. Today I counted five places which are still active while twelve of them are empty. The new and fresh colours on the shop fronts does cheer things up a bit but mostly it is very dreary to walk along there.  I tend to walk a different route just so that I do not have to view all of the vacant buildings.  It used to look toothy to see a few empty shops in between those which were open.  Now that there are so many more empties than fulls, it is just sad.

In Residence

9 October Thursday

I needed to clean out the car before taking it in for inspection.  I use the excuse of the NCT test as a reason to give it a thorough interior cleaning once a year.  This level of cleaning is not expected. It is my own requirement.  The outside of the car is more important especially the inner wells around the tires.  The wheel wells of this car always have a good three inches of caked in mud and soil just from our daily driving up and down the boreen.  If we were to take the car in with all that mud they would refuse to do the test.  We would have to pay for the refused test and then we would have to re-book it, return mud-less and pay again.

I had been to the dump, so I was unloading the various re-cycling containers.  I thought it a good idea to do the dump run before the cleaning.  I had both the back and the front doors open.  A big yellow Labrador arrived as I was making trips back and forth to the shed.  He followed me around for a while and then he jumped up into the back of the car.  He sniffed around inside and then he moved up and sat on the passenger seat.  He looked out the windscreen.  I have never seen this dog before.  I expected to see someone walking down the track.  I expected to see someone who would call this dog by name and who would continue on their walk and take the dog along.  He was not a young dog.  He was an older dog with that heaviness that Labs often have.  He was older but not elderly.  He was sprightly enough to leap up into the back of the car without taking a running jump.  I know most dogs in the area.  It is unusual to see a dog I do not know. If I do not know a dog by name I at least know him by sight. I usually know the people he is connected with and it is unusual not to know where a dog lives.

I talked to the dog while I cleared stuff from the car and did a bit of window cleaning.  I decided that perhaps he could smell Em in the motor.  I was finding a lot of her long hair in clumps as I worked.  He did not do anything except sit in the passenger seat.  Sometimes he looked at me but mostly he just looked out the window.  When I started the vacuum cleaner he jumped out and by the time I turned it off again, he was gone.  I did not even see which way he went, but I am sure I will see him again.

10 October Friday

The trees are still laden with apples.  The very warm weather and the craziness of the whole growing season all the way back to last spring means that the different varieties have all ripened at abnormal times. I do not understand it at all.  We are a bit overwhelmed.  I have boxes of apples picked and stored in different places.  The mice have found some.  A lot of them are not as great for eating as they usually are.  We have started to make applesauce with a combination of different varieties.  We have started to make applesauce to defeat the mice.  The applesauce is delicious.  I have frozen some and I have taken bowls full to different people. I saw Tommie and I asked him how Margaret was.  I asked him if they liked applesauce.  He said that she liked it and that he loved. it.  I told him I would bring some down later.  He said “If I know you are coming, I will be In Residence.”

11 October Saturday

Hay and straw has been baled up and stacked for the winter.  Every single barn and shed everywhere has enormous piles right up to the ceiling.  The sheds are  open on one side so that there is air to circulate around the bales.  Some bales are still outside.  There is a big stack on the Cooney’s corner on concrete slabs so it is off the ground but it is still out of doors.  It looks like a building.  It is six bales high and seven bales long by five bales wide.  The bales on the front of this bale building look like structural columns as they are the cylindrical rather than the rectangular bales.  As a building it is domestic in scale.  It is a golden house in the end of afternoon sunlight.

12 October Sunday

Simon and I took a working walk up the Mass Path. He carried a big saw and a small saw.  I carried a small saw and clippers.  We worked at clearing away a dead tree which fell and has been blocking the way.  A few weeks ago the lower level was cleared of nettles and brambles and thin branches but this fallen tree has made further passage up the hill impossible.  If we had had a chain saw it would have been a really quick job.  With hand saws, it was slow and complicated.  We were tangled up with brambles and branches.  I worked away at one big branch which came down hard on my head.  We both ended up bleeding and slightly beaten.  We did get the tree cut and moved but then as we went up towards Johnnie Mackin’s there were more sections all closed in with brambles and vegetation and hanging tendrils of thorns.  At that point we gave up and decided to continue the struggle tomorrow.

 

13 October Monday

Every morning starts with a dense fog.  Today the postman came down and said there has been an accident on Knocklofty Bridge.  The road has been closed and all movements are being made difficult by detours and by further fog.  We cannot see over the valley.  We cannot see past the fence into the field. Everything is wet with heavy dew.  The heavy fog holds everything in silence.  I went out to pick my breakfast raspberries today wearing the high rubber boots. My sleeves got soaked immediately just from the water on the leaves.  By lunchtime everyday, the fog burns off and each afternoon is hot and bright. Mornings are for hats and waterproofs and the afternoons are tee-shirt weather. There is a manic feeling that every single job which needs doing before winter comes must be done in these four or five bright hours.  No matter what else needs to be done the dry sunlight hours are for out of door jobs.

That kind of a way

15 October Wednesday

The bridge into the village is an ongoing worry.  It is an old hump-backed stone bridge.  Every so often someone announces that it is about to collapse.  Someone always says the bridge will cave in any day now.  Ten years ago some work was done underneath it and the report then was that collapse was imminent.  We all feel worried for a while each time this discussion comes up.  Then we forget about it as we drive or walk over it every day.  When the bridge collapses there will be a great many of us who will not be able to get to the village without a very long detour.  As the fears build up people discuss the idea of a temporary bridge or of a little boat to take people over the river.  Discussions about how we will deal with the collapse of the bridge can keep a lot of people talking for a long time.  It is never a matter of IF the bridge collapses. It is always WHEN. I am back in a worrying phase about the bridge.  I really do not want to be the one driving over it when it decides to let go. I look forward to forgetting the scary rumours once again.

16 October Thursday

I like being out on the road.  I like the possibility of seeing who I might meet.  I am not necessarily wanting to meet anyone, but there is something nice in knowing that if I walk out and if I do meet someone that someone will be someone I know.  As with the man in the red fleece last week, an exception is possible, but it is rare.

Today I met Sean while walking.  He is still recovering from his treatments and he has been walking out most days to build up his strength. After months and months, he is looking well and getting stronger.  We walked together.  When we got down near the road we call Neddins, we heard the sound of toenails clicking and hitting the road.  Oscar rushed out to greet us and was excited to see two of us.  He  licked and leaped and pranced around and then we all three continued with walking.  We reached my turn to go down the boreen and home.  Sean was continuing to the cross at the top of the hill.  We stood in the sun while we said goodbye.  Oscar looked back and forth at each of us.  He was torn and he rushed first to me and then to Sean and then to me again. He did not know who to go with.  He did not know who would give him the best walk.  Finally he decided on Sean who would definitely give him the longer distance.  I was glad to watch the decision making process.  Oscar is loyal and loves us all.  I like to watch him share his love.

17 October Friday

You Know That Kind of A Way.  This is said in lieu of You Know What I Mean. It is said often and it seems a way of not expressing what one means very well and just hoping that the listener knows enough about what is being discussed.

19 October Sunday

We took the X51 from Galway.  It was fast and it traveled on the new motorway, so it was a smooth journey.  There was an old man sitting in the front seat behind the driver.  He fell into a deep sleep as soon as the bus started.  He slept the full hour and a half .  He woke up as we pulled into Limerick station and he was the first one off the bus.

We went into the station café for tea and toast while we waited for our connection.  The old man came in soon after us.  He ordered a piece of apple pie.  The counter lady poured cream over it.  He took the pie to a table and ate it fast.  He ate one bite right after the other without stopping.  He finished the pie and left his plate on the table.  The man then went up to the counter and ordered a big slice of layer cake.  The counter lady held up the jug of cream and he nodded.  She poured a lot of cream onto his cake.  He came over to our table and asked if he could join us.  He sat down and began to eat his cake with the same undivided attention with which he had eaten his pie.

He had a short sleeved tee shirt and he had no bag with him.  It did not seem that he was going far.  The weather was too cold for a tee shirt and no jacket.  He sat down with us when there were a lot of empty tables so I knew he wanted to talk.  He asked if we lived in Limerick.  I said no and I asked him if he lived in Limerick.  He said no.  He said he lived in Galway. He had just come over on the bus for a slice of cake but the pie looked good, so he had a piece of pie first and now he was having cake which is what he came for.  He told us that he was retired and that he used to be a farmer.  I asked if he missed the farming and he said no.  He said he did not miss the farming but he did miss his wife.  She had been a teacher and she died two years ago in December. He said the hardest thing was losing your life partner.  Losing your partner and living in retirement had a way of making life empty.

He said he enjoyed his travel card.  Every person in the country over the age of 65 has this card.  The card allows them to travel on buses and trains for free.  They can take someone along with them too.  Two people can travel for free. He enjoys the freedom of his card but he would like it better if his wife could travel with him.  Today he had ridden for an hour and a half to get to Limerick.  He ate pie and cake and soon he would be on the bus back to Galway.  That would be another hour and a half.  Riding the buses was a way for him to pass the time.

We said goodbye and went out to wait for our connecting bus.  We watched as he came out of the station and climbed back on board the X51.

21 October Tuesday

I thought we would be blown away last night.  The promises and threats for the encroaching hurricane announced that the entire country was in Yellow Alert. I gathered up a few things that I thought might go flying around outside.  As I was coming up from the barn I cut off a single rose bud which was just about to blossom.  I knew I would prefer to watch it open up indoors rather than have it beaten to death by wind and rain.  I also picked the very last sweet peas of the year.  I woke up off and on all through the night.  The noise of the wind was mighty but there was no rain.  This morning I expected to see branches down and lots of chaos but there was very little damage.  Leaves and small branches were scattered about but the big promised storm seemed to miss us.  It missed us or maybe it got weak before it got as far as here.  The mountains protected us.  I could not help but feel a little disappointed after so many dire warnings and the excitement of the radio announcers.  If there had been terrible devastation I would no doubt feel ashamed.  The day dawned bright and mild and breezy.  The hedge cutting man and his machine made more trouble than the storm.  There were stones out of the wall all the way down the boreen from where he bumped into it.  Some of them were too big for me to lift so I had to leave those for Simon.  Clearing them away made plenty of work.  We did not really need the mess of a hurricane.

& Again, The Man Who Waits By His Car While His Sister Walks the Dog.

22 October Wednesday

There was a diagonal stripe on the road.  It was several feet wide and was made up of purple and black and bluish marks.  I looked at it and I looked at it again and I thought about it as I walked by and over it yesterday.  I could not figure out what caused this colour nor its odd angle and width.  I thought about it again today as I walked by.  I think I passed over this stripe of splotchy colour three times before realizing that it is made up of bird droppings.  The birds sit on the electricity cables crossing the road overhead.  They sit on the cable and they excrete all of the blackberries they have been eating.  A simple solution to my question but it took three days for me to get to the answer.

23 October Thursday

My old hat is not even my hat.  It is Simon’s hat, but it is so old and faded and beaten that he never wears it. It has a bite out of it on the brim. Some visiting dog did that.  This is a hat from far away.  It is made of felt.  It is called a Crusher because it is made to crush up and stick into your pocket if you are out wearing it and then decide that you do not need it. These hats used to come in two colours.  Maybe they still do. One was a day-glo orange.  The orange is preferred by hunters when they are out deer hunting.  The hat makes sure the hunter can be seen. This hat which I now think of as my hat was once a forest green.  It has faded and it is pretty much not a colour.  It is just dirty looking. This hat has become my preferred walking hat.  If it rains when I am out the hat will keep the wet out for a while. Not forever, but for a good while.  It also has a bit of warmth. Each time I wear it, people comment on it. They are not commenting because they like it.  I think they are commenting because it is a sort of surprising thing to be out in the world wearing.  If I were an old farmer it would be okay but I am a woman and not a farmer and it is not really okay.  People who comment on it are always a little bit embarrassed for me. I am not embarrassed.  I like my hat.  I like that it reappears every year just now as the weather changes.

24 October Friday

She is very ill and will need some chemotherapy or some radiotherapy or maybe both kinds of therapy.  She has also signed herself up as being willing for some medical trials because she knows there is not much hope for her anyway because her illness is very advanced.  She feels she might as well be useful as research.  Maybe it will help someone else.  Her niece is furious with her and says she has no right to be a human test tube so she has turned off her phone most of the time as she does not need or want the niece shouting at her. Because her phone is so often turned off, it is not easy to phone her and we have to wait until she turns it on again. She was glad to hear good things said about the radiotherapy being done in the hospital in Clonmel as that is where she will have to go because Waterford is just too far and she will need to be in and out a lot and often.  Her Home Help has been the best person to advise and reassure her about the hospital and their competence.  She always speaks of her Home Help as My Home Help.  She never says a name so I do not know the Home Help’s name.  Her Home Help has told her to eat lots of garlic and local honey as these things are especially good for fighting cancer.  She does not like garlic so she thinks she will double up on the amount of honey she eats.  I think it is very late for these solutions but when she is on the telephone she speaks a lot and very quickly so I do not have a chance to tell her anything she does not want to hear anyway.

25 October Saturday

I can hear winter rodents in the walls.  They are either in the walls or under the floor.  Sometimes they are noisy and working or just generally scrabbling about.  Every year we think there is no way for a mouse to get in.  Every year the mice find a way in.

27 October Bank Holiday Monday

Twice in the last week I have seen the siblings.  He stands leaning against the front of his car and waves aggressively at each car that passes.  Not many cars pass so he puts a lot of energy into the wave. Perhaps I should call it enthusiasm rather than aggression. He takes a step out into the narrow road just on the off chance that as a driver you might not see him.  This means that not only do you see him but you have trouble not hitting him.  The sister is not far down the road.  The dog cannot escape these mad people.  He is held tight on the lead.  She allows him about a foot of length on the lead and he has the big black cudgel held inches over his head each time a car comes along.  There is no chance that he can forget anything.  His life looks like hell. The sister stops and holds the beating stick over the dog’s head and watches each car as it passes.  The brother smokes his cigarette without using any hands and he waves manically.  On the trip down to the village I felt so annoyed that I did not salute and I did not even turn my head.  On the return trip, he stepped out into the road even more dangerously than usual.  I nodded.  I did not salute.  Seeing them twice in one week makes me cross.  Wondering why they choose this busy patch of road for a dog walk is one question Why I let them annoy me so much is another.

Knocklofty Bridge

28 October Tuesday

Veronica went for hospital tests after fasting overnight.  She had to wait all day long for the tests to be completed.  At 5.30 she was given what she called a Fairy’s Cup of Tea and a Fairy Scone.  She said she felt like she was being fed in a doll’s house.  She had never seen such a tiny scone.  She had never seen such a tiny cup.  She was still grumbling about this miserable scone two days later.  She said It was so small it wouldn’t fill the holes in your teeth.

29 October Wednesday

I love my head torch.  I love the way that I can angle it to project higher or lower on its elastic strap.  I love the perfect circle of light as I move out into the darkness. I can pick apples off the last producing tree even when the night is pitch black and moonless.  I have two hands free to do whatever I want to do.  I thought about getting a head torch years and years ago.  I wish I had not waited so long.  I would have loved this perfect circle of white light to have been part of my evening walks with Em.

30 October Thursday

I need to chose my days carefully.  A windy day is a bad time to empty the ashes from the wood stove.  I have never found a better method than to scrape the ashes from the top part of the stove so that they fall through the grating into the bottom pan.  Then I ease out the flat pan with its little handle and I walk carefully and very slowly to the back door.  There are three rooms to walk through and at any moment a draft or trip of the foot could send ashes flying all over the place.  I used to try to empty the ashes into a bucket placed just beside the stove, but that seems to spread them a lot.  It makes a mess.  A gentle easing out and slow walking is my preferred method.  It is always tricky to open the kitchen door.  I like it if someone else is around to open the door for me.  Otherwise I have to put the tray down carefully, open the door and then proceed outside with the same slow steps.  I always take the ashes to dump at the foot of a rose bush.  I was told years ago that wood ash is good for roses.  I do not know if it is true.  I do not know if my climbing rose benefits from the copious amount of wood ash it receives.  It is convenient that the rose is located in a straight line from the kitchen door and that it is far enough away for the ash not to blow back.  So far my slow walking method has never failed.

31 October Friday

When I drive over Knocklofty Bridge in the direction of Clonmel, the first thing I see once over the bridge is a sign saying You are Entering County Waterford.

When I drive over Knocklofty Bridge in the direction of Ardfinnan, and away from Clonmel, the first thing I see once over the bridge is a sign saying You are Entering County Tipperary.

The River Suir is the border between the two counties.  I am unsure who claims ownership and responsibility for the bridge.

2 November Sunday

I am so pleased that we are able to walk up the Mass Path again.  Every day I enjoy it.  There is still a lot of ducking under branches and fallen trees, but it is now passable.  Most of the brambles and nettles are dying back.  The remaining apples have fallen and the small yellow crab apples and the larger russets are all over the path in two different places.  They make the walking treacherous and a bit exciting.  They offer a surface not unlike spilled ball bearings.  Stones covered with slippery moss make other obstacles.  Over all I find the hazards to be an important part of the climb.

3 November Monday

Thinking about which county Knocklofty Bridge is officially located in sent me to look for the postcard Coracle produced a few years ago.  It is a reproduction of a painting done in 1940 by Johnnie Mackin.   Johnnie’s abandoned house is just up the Mass Path.  I walk through his land most days.  I pick apples and pears from his orchard.

Johnnie had a big reputation locally as an inventor.  Most of the things he invented had already been invented but that did not bother him.  Once he invented a gun.  When he went to see how it would shoot, the gun backfired and the bullet lodged into his head.  The bullet did not kill him.  He spent 6 months in bed being cared for by his mother and his sister.  He would not go to the hospital. He died decades later at the age of 88 with the bullet still embedded in his head.   While he was recovering from his gunshot wound, he taught himself to paint.  Many of his pictures were of religious subjects but sometimes he painted the local and non-religious world.  The paintings were done with house paint so they have not lasted well.  We thought we should reproduce the painting before it self-destroyed.

The text on the back reads:  One of the first service buses crossing the River Suir on the border of Tipperary and Waterford.  The donkey and trap carry the artist’s mother and their dog and flour brought from Clonmel, as well as a bottle of Guinness for Jimeneen English, standing by the water pump opposite his lime-kiln.

It still does not answer the question of which county claims Knocklofty Bridge, but it is nice to show this card.

The Short Baldy Irishman

4 November Tuesday

I just finished sewing up a book with red thread.  I tossed the little leftover pieces of cotton onto the compost heap.  Some of the pieces will blow away.  Every year in the spring I see nests being built using the tiny bits of thread which we have used for our most recent book-making.  If this red lasts the winter there will be bright additions to many nests.  I can recall different books when I look at spring nests.

5 November Wednesday

Maud told me of a woman who passes by her house in Cork several times a day.  The woman never passes without rubbing the number thirteen on the door.  She said it is her lucky number and she dares not pass the house without making contact with what she considers Her Number.  It is the number she uses for any lottery or raffle that she enters.  She sticks with the same number knowing that it will come good eventually.  I cannot not remember if their number is made of brass.  If it is, all of the daily rubbing by this hopeful woman will be keeping it nice and shiny.

6 November Thursday

Various dogs come to visit.  Each one runs around sniffing and peeing and examining things.  I have been thinking that each dog is arriving and discovering the residual smells of Emily.  I should probably accept that Em’s odours are now long gone.  None of her canine friends are savouring her memory.  What each visiting dog is smelling is the signs left by the last visiting dog.  Thor and Molly, Walker, Oscar and Ruby. Each dog delights in the scent of another dog.

7 November Friday

Today was a fine day for the dump run.  We transport our stuff to the dump about once a month.  No one would ever drive down here to collect it.  There are so many things to gather together from the lean-to and the house and from the different barns.  There is cardboard and paper, and the clear plastic bags with clean and dry recyclables.  I put a lot of the newsprint aside for the dog sanctuary but the shiny magazines and other paper are no good to them.  There is the black bag with horrible things.  There are food tins and empty jars and bottles for separate recycling bins.  There are plastic water bottles.  By doing all of the things separately we do not have to pay to put a lot of things into the clear bags.  It is a time-consuming job.  It is largely a matter of consolidating. It is nearly enough to call in the Army Corps of Engineers.  No matter how recently we have been to the dump, the load always fills the entire car. At least on a clear, dry and not cold day it is not a terrible job.  It is just a job. Arriving at the recycling depot is better in good weather too.  The man in charge was marveling about this still fine weather we are having.  He said it is so mild that he had a butterfly in his sitting room.  He did not want to put it outside because he knew the night chill would kill it.  There are still a remarkable number of spiders around too. The thing that really excited him as a sign of the unseasonable weather was that there was A Fly in His Kitchen.  He repeated this three times, with delight.

8 November Saturday

Being in a doctor’s waiting room with nothing to read is my idea of hell.  There are always some people staring off into space.  Some fiddle with their phones.  Sometimes there is a noisy television set or else people just look at each other.  Today a woman was telling her daughter not to touch the magazines as they hold the germs of all the sick people who have come through the waiting room. Not everyone has something contagious when they go to the doctor but that did not seem to occur to her.  She did not call the magazines magazines.  She called the magazines Books. She said the only thing more disgusting than the books at a doctors office were the books from a public library.

9 November Sunday

The Village Lotto Jackpot is now 9050 euros.  Everyone was excited when it reached  7000.  Now the anticipation of a winner is even higher  Everyone comments on the amount and then adds that it would be a grand thing to win the lottery just before Christmas. They are excited for someone to win it but at the same time they are also excited by the idea of it getting as high as 10,000 before someone wins.  There is a lot of discussion.

10 November Monday

There are several words which are consistently said with a Y at the end.  One is Roundy.  Roundy might be used when someone is speaking of a pair of Roundy Eyeglasses.  They would not say Round nor Rounded.  They would not say Circular nor Oval-Shaped.  They would always speak of Roundy which maybe makes things sound more Round.  Another of these words is Baldy.  No one speaks of a Bald-Headed Man nor of a Bald Man nor a Bald Head.  I was reminded of this today when someone described himself by saying: “I’m the short Baldy Irishman with glasses and a white beard”  just so that those who did not yet know him would be able to recognize him easily.

The Bed Push

3 December Wednesday

The Village Lottery has still not been won.  The jackpot is now up to 9650 euro. Every week it creeps up a bit. People are only buying tickets for one euro a chance and some of the money has to go to the GAA organization which does the organizing.  I do not know how the funds get divided.  Maybe it is half and half.   Every week a few people win the Lucky Numbers.  That keeps the excitement building.  It keeps everyone involved.  A Lucky Number might be 10 or 25 or even 75 euro depending how many people have to share it.  As it gets closer to Christmas and the jackpot gets bigger, more and more people are buying their tickets and hoping to win.

4 December Thursday

The stream down below flooded during the recent heavy rains.  The water in the stream came up and over the crossing area. The vegetation is all lying down flat and some plants have been pulled right out of the ground by their roots.  The exposed parts of the nettles, wild irises and long grasses are all pale and sickly green, unlike the dark and bright green of their higher parts.  The pale whitish green bits are the places which were not exposed.  Maybe they were underground. There is not a plant still standing upright. The two pallets which we were using as a bridge to cross over the swampy places have been thrown a few metres away by the power of the rushing water.  Now there is no chance to not go through swampy bits.  Everywhere is a swampy bit. Everywhere is wet and both the water and the mud are deep.  The only way to cross if we want to walk up the Mass Path is to sink in deep and get wet.  How wet we get depends on the height of our boots.  All of the plants are stretched out from left to right which makes the whole area look like it has been combed with a huge toothy comb.

5 December Friday

There is a Bed Push schedualed for Saturday. People are planning to push a bed along the road from Goatenbridge to Ardfinnan. Or maybe it is from Ardfinnan to Goatenbridge.  I assume the people pushing the bed will take turns.  I do not think one person will be doing all of the pushing.  I wonder if the bed will be fully made with sheets and blankets and pillows or if it just be a bare mattress on a frame. I trust the bed will be on wheels. The Bed Push is in memory of a young boy who died a few months ago.  He had had heart problems since birth.  Last spring he had an operation. Everyone was pleased to learn that the operation was successful.  Sadly something was not right and a few months later the boy died.  He was only about 12.  So now there is to be this Bed Push in his memory.  Hanging beside the small poster there is a form. People are invited to write their names and to pledge some money. I do not understand what the money is for nor how this boy’s memory will be helped by pushing a bed for 8 kilometers.  Maybe there are large medical bills and the fundraising is to help the family with the expenses.  Maybe the fundraising is for the hospital where he spent time. Maybe it is the boys birthday and it is a way to ensure that he is not forgotten. I spoke to several people and no one seemed to know what was going on. We all agreed that the death of such a young boy was a tragedy.  We were also in agreement in our hope that it will not rain on the Bed Push. We noted that things are slow enough along that windy road what with tractors and farm vehicles.  Getting behind a bed being pushed by people will slow things down to a crawl. The road from Ardfinnan to Goatenbridge is a road to avoid tomorrow.

Vincent’s

6 December Saturday

There is a smudge down the middle of one length of the tar road.  It is a green smudge and it appears every year about now.  The smudge is made of a very low growing moss.  In places it does not look like vegetation but more like a bit of colour which has been wiped onto the surface of the road.  The vehicles which travel on the road straddle the middle with their tyres.  The center bit does not get touched very often.  If two vehicles meet and they each move over to their own side they still do not really spend much time in the middle of the road.  The smudge just stays where it is and in this bright eerie light of a grey day, the smudge glows as if it is lit from below.

7 December Sunday

Everyone has spoken of the absence of Cocoa.  First one person said something and then someone else said something.  We are all sort of asking each other even while we know.  We are noting Cocoa’s absence. No one has seen Cocoa for a long while.  I keep thinking that I will bump into PJ as I walk out the end of the boreen and just ask about his missing dog.  For a while, I thought Cocoa might be in the big shed or just sleeping under a table when I walked up near the house. I expected him to appear. In truth, he has not been interested in me since Em stopped walking up the track with me.  Cocoa has always been a traveler.  It was not unusual to come across him way down in the village or off on a road in any direction.  Sometimes when I have seen him far from home,  I stopped and he jumped into the car and I took him home.  Sometimes I have just rung PJ to say where I have seen him.  Since Cocoa is a spaniel I think he is by nature a dog who likes to follow a scent and the scent he follows often takes him far.  Donal is the one who used the word Traveler to describe Cocoa.  It is a good description but now we all fear that his traveling has taken him away for good.  He has been gone for too many weeks now.  No one expects Cocoa to reappear.

8 December Monday

There are always too many jobs to do to prepare for winter.  There are the jobs which I know have to be done and there are the jobs which I write down on a list so that I will not forget them.  The list gets long and then it gets longer.  The more I think to put on the list the more other odd things appear.  It is, of course, too late to prepare for winter.  Winter is already here.  Still there are enough jobs not done that there remains the illusion of preparation.

I should fill some empty bottles and the large plastic containers with water just in case the pipes freeze at some point.  It is best to do this before the advent of long-term freezing weather.  I should bring in more fire wood.  Bringing in firewood is a constant.  It is never done.  It always needs to be done again.  I need to fill the bird feeders and I should lay in a good supply of seeds and food for them.  I should gather up all of the terra cotta plant pots and put them under cover so that they don’t get full of water and then freeze which makes them crack.  The plants to stay in pots over the winter need to be carried into the book barn.  I need to get Simon to help me to carry the big ones but I should empty the windowsills so we have room to put them into positions.

I should ring Martina O’Gorman at the office of public works and ask her again to have someone come and fill the very deep potholes in the boreen.  It usually takes three or four phone calls to her before anything happens.  This will only be my second call.  I need to cut down the raspberry canes although I guess that might wait until February.  Most of these jobs are the jobs to be done when there are a few hours with weather that is neither too cold nor blustery nor weather that is too wet.  The mornings are too frosty and the afternoons are short.  There is a small window of time to get out-of-door things done at this time of year.  The days are not long and darkness comes early.  Just because the weather is okay and maybe the sun comes out, it is not always the exact right time to drop whatever else is being done in order to do a few hours outside.

Someone told me today that wood ash from the stove must be scattered at the base of the lilacs.  I have always dumped ash under rose bushes.  Maybe now I will vary the location of my emptying. There will be plenty of ash to go around.

I should do another round of mouse poisoning.  I try to put traps in the house but in both book barns I have been resorting to poison.  Finding corpses is never pleasant but the squished version of mice in traps gets depressing.  Tommie told me that if you have rats you do not have mice.  And the reverse is true.  If you have mice you probably do not have rats.  The lower barn has large shits in one corner so I fear that there might be rat activity there.  There is already the smell of a dead something down there.  We are filling some gaps where the floor meets the wall with self-expanding polyurethane builder’s foam.  The rats might eat through it but if we are lucky they might be annoyed and just give up. One method I have been told is to put broken glass down under a porch or in a similar place where rats are known to congregate.  Once a rat cuts his feet on the glass and the smell of blood is in the air, the other rats attack him and kill him.  Compared to that kind of death, poison  seems almost gentle.

I wanted to direct the growth of some of the fruit trees.  Tying a rock or maybe a brick with a rope and tying the rope to a branch over the winter is a way to condition the branch to grow low and to stay low for the future.  We should have pruned the apples trees after they fruited.  They might have to wait till February now.  Figs need to be snapped off their branches, leaving only the tiniest little ones.  I should have done that in November but it is not yet so long after November.  Even as I write these things here, I know I am not thinking of all of the jobs and even while I write them I know that this is a form of stalling.  Lucky for me it is very dark outside now and wildly windy so there is no chance of doing any of these things that I am thinking need to be done.  All of my Should Do jobs can be done later.

9 December Tuesday

The charity shop run by the organization of St. Vincent de Paul has been re-branding itself perhaps to make it look more trendy and more like a regular shop.  First there was the logo which appeared a few years ago.  SVP was written in a connected text with lots of lines through it. The multiple lines were to suggest speed I think.  Now the SVP is still on one end of the sign but bigger letters announce the shop name as VINCENT’S. It could be just the usual shortening that seems to happen with each saint’s name.  St. Patrick’s Day is just Patrick’s Day.  Stephen’s Day is never St. Stephen’s Day.  It is just Stephen’s Day, the day after Christmas. Since every single day is attributed a different saint in this still very Catholic country, it is redundant to bother to say the word saint. I do not know if the name VINCENT’S will get a new crowd into the shops or if it will just make the regular crowd feel more glamorous.

The Pouring of Tea

10 December Wednesday

I spoke with an older woman who told me that she hates buttons.  I thought that her dislike of buttons was a result of her age. I thought possibly she had arthritis or some other stiffness in her fingers.  I thought that her extreme dislike of buttons might come from an inability to do and un-do buttons.  I asked her as diplomatically as I could if perhaps this was the reason for her strong dislike of buttons.  She assured me that neither age nor pain had anything to do with it.  She said that as a child she had no opinion one way or the other but as an adult she has always hated buttons.  She said she has hated buttons for as long as she can remember.

11 December Thursday

There is a line-up of cows eating in Joe’s field every other day when I pass.  The field slopes down and away from the track.  The area closest to where I walk is covered with short stubble and the earth has been all mushed up by the feet of the cows.  Each time the single line of cows is there they are farther down the hill and farther down the field.  The cows are eating some kind of leafy dark green vegetation.  I call it The Kale Eating of The Cows but really I do not know what it is they are eating. The fence wire which stops them from moving all the way down the hill keeps them in their line and keeps them from eating too far into the field.  Since I do not see them in this field every day, I do not know if the eating of this leafy crop is rich and therefore they get enough iron or whatever by eating it every other day.  Or maybe they are there every day and I just miss seeing them.  From where I am walking all I see is a lot of cows from behind, one beside another, with their heads down. The chomping cows go lower and lower down hill as the area of stubble gets larger. The stubble and the messed up earth which they leave behind  show how much they enjoy this eating.  They leave nothing green in their wake.

12 December Friday

I watched four men at a nearby table.  They had an ordinary metal pot of tea to be shared out among them.  I was seeing something that I had seen many times before.  One man lifted the pot and offered tea with a word or a little nod of the head to each person before he poured it.  If there had been a woman present at the table, she would have done the pouring but since there was not a woman the men did it for themselves with the same formality and politeness.  It never matters if they are workmen with heavy muddy boots or if they are men in tidy suits.  The pouring and the drinking of tea is a gentle sharing between Irish men.  There is ritual and there is a kind of reverence for the ritual.  This pouring of tea and the drinking of tea together is not like tea shared anywhere else.

Deep mud

29 December Monday

The field has been planted with some kind of winter crop.  It looks like grass and has not yet grown much.  There is no height to it.  It is just grass growing in long even rows maybe for no other reason than to keep the topsoil from blowing away.  Or maybe it is a grassy crop which will rejuvenate the soil for spring planting.  I was not very interested in the crop even as I wondered about it. I was interested to see a black and white form lying exactly in the center of the field.  Even at a long distance I could tell that what I was seeing was not a reclining cow or calf.  I was looking at a dog and I was pretty sure it was a sheepdog.  I called out a Whoo-hooooo! kind of noise and the dog looked up.  He looked up and then he looked all around and then he stood up.  It was indeed a sheepdog and after identifying where the sound came from he quickly picked up whatever it was he had been chewing.  From where I was walking, I had not been able to see that he was chewing on anything.  He had been chewing on the long leg of some tall animal.  I would guess it was a deer leg.  He picked up the leg by one end and half dragged and half carried it off down a banking and into some long grass. All the time that he was running he was looking behind to be certain that I was not coming after him. He did not want to share his bone and he did not want anyone to take it away from him.  I did not want to follow him and I did not want his bone. I was just happy to see a sheepdog, and ever so happy to see a sheepdog with a secret.

30 December Tuesday

People who have just passed their driving test are now required by law to have a large white sticker with a big red letter N on their car.  The N stands for NOVICE.  I think this law has been in effect for a year or so now.  A Novice driver must keep the sticker visible on whatever car he or she is driving for two years. I assume the sticker can be peeled off and put onto another vehicle.  I do not know if it matters if the sticker is on the front of the car or on the back of the car.  Today I saw a young woman with the big red N on the windscreen of her very small car.  The white square sticker was so big that she had her head bent at an impossible angle trying to see around the sticker. For the first time, I felt that the N might be more of a danger than a help.

31 December Wednesday

The jackpot in the village lottery has still not been won.  No one managed to secure the big prize before Christmas. Now the jackpot has gone up to 10,100 euro.  The last draw had eleven people sharing the Bonus Numbers with each person winning 20 euro.  One person won the Lucky Number.  That was also a 20 euro pay-out. The prize continues to grow and now the speculation is who will win it and get to pay off all their holiday debts in one fell swoop.

1 January 2015  New Year’s Day

The whole day was wet and grey and windy.  Sometimes the grey of the sky was very bright.  It almost looked like the sun might break through, but it never happened.  The rain was not all day rain and we managed a walk around the boreen without getting drenched.  We just got sort of misted by the on and off again drizzle. During the entire circuit, we did not see one person, nor one dog nor one motor vehicle.  There was a deep, damp silence over everything.  I did not feel much enthusiasm about taking a walk but I knew that if the youthful Em were still here with us, there would be no question about whether or not we took a walk.  The only question would have been when we would walk and, indeed, would the walk happen soon enough to satisfy her impatience.  Rain and cold were not her problems so she had no patience with excuses.  Heading off reluctantly today made me think of her. I quickly decided that it was wonderful to be outside and that the bit of rain was not a problem for me either.  It was not a very beautiful day to begin the year, but it was quiet.

2 January 2015 Friday

Today we took the longer walk over Joe’s fields.  The cow track was full of deep mud and muck.  There was no where to walk but right through the mud, as the fields are all flooded and sodden at that low point. I was sinking ankle deep in the mud and hoping that it would not go over the tops of my boots.  I was sort of wishing that I had worn my Welly boots even though I dislike walking any distance in them. This was the one day I absolutely should have worn them.  The only way to walk through the morass was to keep looking down and to be constantly on the look out for a less deep area of mud or for a bit of raised grassy banking to step up and out of the wet for a few metres. Each time I looked up I was blinded by the bright sun which was still low in the morning sky.  If I looked down I could only see mud and if I looked up I could see nothing.  The wind was sharp and cold.

Later I went down to the village and I met a man who had just returned from his own walk.  He told me that tomorrow will be desperate and wet beyond all belief so it is the right thing to be out on a walk today. This man and I were the only ones thinking and talking of walking.  The village was all in a flurry. One of the McCarra family was getting married at 3 o’clock.  There were men in suits and women in sparkly fancy dresses and high heels.  Kieran was wearing a suit and tie  as he carefully loaded a sack of coal into an old woman’s car.  There were several women rushing in and out of The Hair Den.  One woman drove up and jumped out of her car and ran inside.  She was wearing a hairdressers big black cape, with a small towel tucked in around her neck.  Her hair was all up in curlers.  She had driven home to do something and now she was back to have her hair finished.

To Soften His Cough

3 January Saturday

Last year discussion began about the possibility of a Community Alert for this area.  In a district with such a spread-out population, it is not always easy for people to know what is going on. If something bad or unfortunate happens, some people might not know for days or weeks or even ever if they do not bump into someone who remembers to tell them.  Frank’s shop is in the center of Grange and there is also a school and the church there.  For a long time, I thought Grange was a town land, and not even a village, but now I know it is a village.   It covers a huge area geographically with small winding roads through farmland, but it is easy to go for a long time without ever going into the center of Grange.  For those who do not frequent the shop or the church or the school or visit someone in the graveyard, there is no reason to be there at all.  It is a bit of a stretch to even call the center the center.

There were numerous meetings about setting up the Community Alert but there seemed to be a lot of snags and a lot of disagreement about how to proceed.  I did not even know such meetings had been happening until six or seven months into the discussions.  At some point I was told by a neighbour that the alert system had finally commenced.  All of us who had signed up were promised texts about any local problems.

I was in the middle of London in November when my first text arrived.  This is what it read:

Alert re small blue/grey car trailer, full load of briquettes stolen from area 9th or 10th/11/14 Report any sightings to Cahir Garda Station

On getting the text, I looked around me at the noise and activity of Tottenham Court Road. It was hard to even think about the trailer load of briquettes but somehow I still sort of felt I should be on the look-out. I felt like I wanted to help.

Today I received my second ever Text Alert.  Today’s message reads:

Alert – diesel stolen recently from the area, please be alert for any suspicious vehicles and report same to Gardai

I have not heard if the Alert system is being helpful to catch any criminals.  Two alerts in two months suggest that we are not living in a high crime area.

4 January Sunday

Simon had a small cylinder of Kilkenny limestone cut for Emily.  It is not polished.  It has simply been sanded.  It is a soft grey colour.  When wet it is dark and shiny.  It has her name and the years of her life carved into the top.  He placed it in the grass over near the fence and just close to the fig tree.  The location is sort of facing out into the sloping field where she played afternoon games with the frisbee.  It is not a big stone.  It is about 275 cm.  It is small and low, and it is placed so that you have to walk to it.  It is not something to be viewed from a distance.  We planted snowdrops in the grass around it.  They should be coming up soon.  There are also some little grape hyacinths which will come later in the spring.  Small and delicate blossoms seemed like the right thing.

Simon goes to the stone and speaks to Em often.  He goes and speaks with her before he leaves to go away on a trip and sometimes just in the middle of a day. I do not have the same relationship with the stone.  It is a lovely thing and I am glad it is there.  I talk to Em at any moment all day long when I am anywhere at all.  I can miss her and think of her anywhere and everywhere.  Most days, I feel that she is with me wherever I go in the same way that she always was. When I look around I am always sorry not to see her.

5 January Monday

Mattie Hayes owned a shop on the Cashel Road.  It was a sort of general store with food and hardware and everything.  Out back there was coal, and bags of turf and piles of sand and gravel and bags of cement and any number of useful things.  It was possible to go there with a car trailer and to shovel as much sand as you needed into your trailer.  I don’t know how Mattie charged for it, but it never cost very much to get a load of sand, especially because you had to do the shoveling work yourself.   I am not sure when Mattie Hayes closed down, but it has been a while.  Now the same premises contain a grocery shop called CostCutter.  There are no more rolls of fencing wire or things piled high on palettes out back. The only remnant of Mattie Hayes is on the gable end of the building.  The gable still has an H, for Hayes, in a circle, painted yellow and blue in the Tipperary colours.

6 January Tuesday

Breda corrected me about the expression To Soften His Cough.  I thought that it was was a way to say that someone, especially someone elderly, needed to slow down. I misunderstood the expression.  It is more like a form of reprimand.  She gave me two examples:  If a young man was in the habit of driving fast and recklessly and then he had a crash, it might be said that the crash would certainly make him Soften His Cough.  He would have to adjust his behaviour.  As with a wild young man whose partner had a child.  The change in life circumstances would require him to Soften His Cough.

Black Cat. Black Kitten.

7 January Wednesday

I spoke to Peggy and wished her a Happy New Year.  She was cross because Robert and Geraldine have not started building their new house yet.  They have had planning permission for some months already.  She feels that there should be nothing stopping them.  She thinks the house should have been started by now. She thinks that the house should be finished by now.  Their house, when it is built, will be right on the opposite corner to her.  Actually it will be up in a field sort of high above the corner.  To listen to her speak it sounds like the house will barely be off the edge of the road.  At the moment there is a long-derelict house and a lot of tangly growth right on that corner.  Peggy is often fearful at night because she is certain that there are people hiding in the bushes waiting to see if she is going out or coming home in the dark.  She is frightened of turning off her outside lights. She believes that having new neighbours will prove a deterrent to any bad people hiding in the bushes.  She is eager to feel less alone in her home.

8 January Thursday

The opportunity for women to go to a clinic and get artificially inseminated is openly available in ways which never could have been imagined not so many years ago.  The possibility and the option and the costs are all freely discussed.  It is not called AI as it is when farmers speak of Artificially Inseminating cows. No one speaks of the AI Man coming down on Friday or of going to meet the AI Man.  It is all in more delicate terms, even though it is the same thing.  I do not know the language of these fertility clinics but I am interested to learn that the majority of sperm being used in Ireland comes from Denmark.  The sperm comes from Danish men.  It is an interesting situation.  If a huge number of women seek to be artificially inseminated over a long time, the entire look of the Irish people could change.  Perhaps this will become a race of tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed people.

9 January Friday

A sign has been put up near the river in Cahir. It is right beside the place where the The Foreign Nationals gather to drink beer.  The men have been standing and drinking and smoking in this spot for five or ten years now.  There are two large bin bags attached to the side of the wall. On both  Saturday and Sunday mornings the blue bags are completely full to the tops with beer cans and bottles.  Perhaps they are also filled on other days.  There are never any bottles or cans on the ground. The drinkers are tidy.  There used to be a mess on the ground but since the two bags have been provided it seems a very organized system.  There is never one bag, but always two. Now the new sign proclaims that this area is an Alcohol-Free Zone. The round sign says that a fine of 1905 euro will be imposed on anyone breaking the rule.  1905 is a strangely large and strangely odd number for this fine.  And even while the sign has been put in place, so have two fresh empty bags.

10 January Saturday

Today’s walk was down to the Abbey and then down as far as the final gate.  The fields on both sides of the track have been plowed up and turned over.  The earth is churned up in deep dark brown chunks.  We did not go all the way to the river. The wind was blowing sharp and cold. From the gate back to the Abbey and then to the graveyard at the top is a long continuously uphill walk.  It is not a steep uphill walk but it is always climbing, both gently and not so gently in places.   The wind was against us all the way.  I was pushed by the gusts.  I had a hard struggle walking in a straight line.  I had a hard struggle walking at all.  By the time I reached the car I was tired.  I felt a bit beaten up.

11 January Sunday

We are still saying Happy New Year to everyone we meet.  If we have seen the person since the new year began and we have already said Happy New Year once, we do not need to say it again.  Each person responds by saying And Many Happy Returns.  Most of us get a little confused as to whether we have said Happy New Year to every single person or not.  It is better to repeat ourselves and to say it again rather than to fail to say it at all.  Some people accompany every Happy New Year with a handshake. Today we were out for a walk when a car slowed and stopped. It was Donal and Breda and they wanted to say Happy New Year.  Donal turned off the motor.  No one came along so we talked for a while in the middle of the road.  After ten minutes or so, Peter and Breda came walking around the corner.  They started Happy New Years all around. Since Peter and Breda began by shaking hands with us and with Donal and Breda who were still in the car, we all had to begin  again and shake hands all around.  We shook hands through the car windows and we shook hands outside. Breda and Breda and Peter and Donal and Simon and myself.  We laughed as we shook hands and said Happy New Year again and again.

I reach a point each January when I wonder how much longer it is essential to continue saying Happy New Year.  I always want to make note of the time when we stop saying it and when we stop hearing it being said.  But every year it is suddenly no longer part of our daily greetings and I do not know exactly when it stopped.

12 January Monday

The expression used most frequently is  The Apple Does Not Fall Far From the Tree.  Another version is You Didn’t Pick That Up Off the Road.  Both things mean that someone is demonstrating a characteristic which is familial.  It might be that you are doing, saying or otherwise behaving like your father. Or maybe you are like your mother.  Maybe you are doing something that everyone in your family does.  Now I have learned a new expression, which means the exact same thing:  Black Cat. Black Kitten.

Rolling a rock down the road

13 January Tuesday

The Jackpot in the village GAA Club Weekly Lotto has still not been won.  There were a few weeks after Christmas when there was no weekly draw, but now things are back on schedule. The Monday night draw had 9 winners of three Match Numbers with each of the 9 people winning 20 euro each.  The Lucky Number for one person was also 20 euro.  The Jackpot is now 10,250 euro.  Everyone continues waiting and watching to see who will win it.  People who never usually buy tickets are now buying tickets.  It is too large a sum of money not to be interesting.

14 January Wednesday

There was a little covering of snow this morning.  Looking across the yard I could see that the barn roof was completely white.  Not a slate could be seen. The ground was covered with snow and anyplace where the grass was not too long was all white.  Tall grass remained visible and uncovered so I could tell the snow was not a big snow without looking much further.   The fields and the hills in the distance looked lovely.  Everything looked lovely and it all looked completely different.  It is so rare to look out and not to see bright green fields that it looked like we were somewhere else.  Here did not look like the same place. Being here while being elsewhere did not last for very long but it was nice while it did.

The birds have been eating from their feeders like maniacs.  Some days I fill the feeders and they are empty again in just a few hours.  The cold and the storms must make them hungrier than usual or else the hours available for getting food are just shorter due to the bad weather.  To provide more food for them, I have started spreading some out on the table.  At first I was nervous that a table covered with seeds would attract rats but instead I see 12 or 15 birds on the table eating away.  Not a rat in sight. Every so often a pair of magpies come along.  They scare all the small brown birds away.  I think the pickings are not filling enough for them so they do not stay long and very soon the small tits and finches are back. Today the food was completely eaten off the table before all the snow had melted.

The lower barn is full of the sound of chirping birds.  It sounds the way it usually sounds in the spring.  There are a lot of young birds up in the roof.  It is not normal for there to be babies and nesting at this time of year. Everything is a bit off.  I hope the parents are finding enough to feed the infants as they are promising that the cold will now get much worse. It is really cold down there already.  It is cold outside and it is cold inside.  We have been packing and organizing books all week and we have to keep making trips back up to the house just to get properly warm.  We wear hats and scarves and sweaters all the time but still it is cold.  Sometimes the noise of all the birds makes it hard to even hear the radio while we are working.

15 January Thursday

Rocks fall out of the walls and the ditches of the boreen.  They fall out and into the track and then it is not possible to drive without hitting them.  The space for driving is barely wide enough already.  There is no room to go around anything.  Sometimes the rocks get dislodged because of the rain and the softening of the earth. Other times it is the foxes and pheasants and cats and badgers who traverse up and down along the edges of the boreen in and out of the woods and fields who loosen the stones. Today I found a huge stone in the middle of the track. It was far too big for me to lift.  I pushed it and rolled it and kicked it downhill for a long way.  There was no where to get it out of the way.  The banking and the ditches on either side all went up. Eventually I got to a place where I could roll it off and into some undergrowth.  It was hard work. Oscar was walking with me and he was impatient with my slow progress with the big stone.  I was enjoying the struggle.  He jumped up and down with excitement when I finally finished with the rock and started to walk normally again.

16 January Friday

After several days of wild winds and storms, today the sky is blue and bright.  The Galtees and the Knockmealdowns have snow on them. It is still bitterly cold and there are sticks and branches down everywhere but I have not seen any fallen trees.  Most parts of the country have had it much worse than we have had it here.  I took Molly for a walk and found that I was babbling away to her the entire time.  Children and dogs give freedom to talk any amount of nonsense.  Or maybe it is not always nonsense but it is just the freedom to talk out loud. I really enjoyed my conversations with her. Walking with another person is nice but a dog is something else.

Blessed

17 January Saturday

Most Friday nights the fish and chip man sets himself up across from the bar.  He has a very long van which he drives into position in the afternoon.  He parks it right in front of Shirley’s house.  If she were at home she would not even be able to see the street because the van is that big and he parks it that close to her front. Luckily it does not matter anyway, because she is in France and her house is for sale.   After positioning the van, he drives off in his car and returns at about 5.30 to get things set up. He spends a lot of time going in and out of the bar.  He comes in to get a pint of lager for his fish batter.  Sometimes he comes in to borrow a bit of kitchen equipment from Rose.  I never see many people going to his van to get fish and chips but if he is inside the bar he can keep an eye on possible customers by just looking out the window. When he was first locating himself in the village he used to bring in free chips so that everyone could taste his wares. He still does that at the end of the evening when he has left-over chips but when the customers have stopped coming. In the summer months he is rarely around because he sites himself at seaside locations or at the fairs around the country. He comes back for the dark and winter months and he must get enough customers as he returns week after week.  Everyone knows him even if they do not know him by name.

18 January Sunday

Both pockets of my jacket are full of dry pieces of lichen.  Each time I walk up the path I see lots of lichen and I cannot pass without picking it up.  Lots of the pieces are still attached to sticks and branches that have fallen into the path.  I love the silvery green colour of it.  Some days when I come home I remember to remove the days collection from my pocket and I put it into a bowl.  Most times I forget.  That is why my pockets are full of dry pieces of lichen.

19 January Monday

I rushed down to the post to get some parcels there in time for the pick-up deadline.  I thought I had timed it exactly right to get there before the pick-up time at 3.45.  As I got out of the car I saw the postman loading up his van.  I felt cheated as I knew it was not even 3.30 yet.  I called out to him and said “Is that the afternoon collection?  Are you early today or am I late?”  He said  “No, no, you are grand.  This is a sack of coal.  I am just getting it in now to save time on my way home.”

20 January Tuesday

Three young men were standing on the street talking.  Maybe they were not even young men.  Maybe they were boys.  Anyway, they were young.  They looked very rough.  They looked like they hoped that they looked tough.  They all wore similar clothes.  They had hooded sweat shirts and baggy track suit bottoms.  They were all skinny and two of them had tattoos visible on their necks.  They were all smoking cigarettes.  I was standing near them as I waited to cross the street.  I heard them discussing something in loud voices.  Every bit of their conversation was full of swearing and cussing.  One of them punctuated a sentence by saying “Well, I know I am Blessed that way.”   One of the others answered by saying “Yes, I know.  I am Blessed in that kind of a way myself.”  It is not unusual to hear people speaking of being Blessed.  It is usually older people who say it.  When these boys said it I know they meant that they were fortunate or just lucky. As many times as I hear someone speaking of being Blessed, I am still surprised by it.

22 January Thursday

I have a new text message from the Community Alert system.  It instructs us all to be on the look out for a Silver Opel Vectra.  It describes a tell-tale dent on the driver’s side and says the car is using two different sets of number plates.  One number is a Cork registration and one is a Dublin registration.  We are to alert the Gardai if we see the car.  They end the message with this warning: The Occupants May Engage in Crime.

Cotton

23 January Friday

I went to have my hair cut.  The Waiting Until It Is Your Turn couch at the hairdressers’ was covered with boxes and bags and Christmas decorations.  The woman in charge directed one of the girls to clear the couch so that I could sit down.  The girl moved most of the stuff to the floor. Just as I was about to sit, another girl came flying out from the back and jumped up onto the couch.  She stood there in her heavy boots wrestling with the last of the lights and the tinsel in the window.  She was oblivious to anything except the job she was doing. Lucky for me, my turn in the cutting chair came quickly.

24 January Saturday

The more seed I put out for the wild birds, the more the birds come.  I keep finding new places to put the seed.  I continually seek the safe places where I do not think the rats will go. I know that rats can go anywhere.  I know they can and will go anywhere but still I try to find good feeding spots. And, so far,  the birds are happy with every single place.  I cannot stop putting seeds in the places where I already placed the seed because now the birds expect to find it there, so the number of deposit places gets more and more.  The amount of wild birdseed I need every week grows and grows.  Tommie was scornful.  He told me that it is a bad idea to begin feeding birds because they will never stop eating.  He said you can feed them as much as you want and you will never get anything back.  He said if you are going to feed animals you should only do so if you are going to get something in return.

27 January Tuesday

Thread is not called thread.  Thread is cotton.

31 January Saturday

Michael was pleased with himself.  He stepped into the bar.  He came in with something to tell.  He had seen the advertisements for the special silver paper with adhesive backing.  He had noticed the advertisements for years now.  The advertisements were always in the back of the shiny magazine that came with the newspaper on Sunday. The silver paper was expensive but it promised to save money.  Even more important, it promised to save heat.  The silver paper came in a package of six sheets. The advertisement claimed that by sticking the sheets on the wall directly behind a radiator, the heat would reflect back into the room.  Michael said he had always wanted to try this silver paper but he always felt it to be Savage Dear.  He felt it too dear to take a chance on.  Last week, he came across a whole roll of the paper in a shop.  The roll was not expensive and it promised to do the exact same thing as the stuff in the magazine.

He had to buy it.

He bought the roll and he took it home.  He cut pieces to fit behind several radiators.  He and his wife were quickly impressed with the results.  He claimed that the spare room had never been so warm.  His bargain roll provided so much silver paper that he began to stick it up in other places.  He cut pieces to size and put the paper all around the window surrounds, first in the spare room and then in other places.  The problem he then had was that there was a lot of silver to be seen.   His wife said that maybe he should slow down until they decided if they wanted to live with shiny silver window surrounds. She was not certain that the heat would reflect into the room anyway if there was no radiator in front of the silver paper.  His next step was to paint the window surround with white paint.  He said that the heat difference was maybe not so good with the silver painted over but at least they were no longer overwhelmed by silver.  And his wife did say maybe he should have used a ruler to make the pieces straight when he cut them.  But he said the white paint kind of made everything look more even and anyway they were probably warmer than they had been.  When he was further quizzed by other people in the bar, he said Sure, but who sits and looks at the window all day?

Jackpot

11 February Wednesday

The jackpot continues to grow larger every week.  The jackpot continues to not be won every week.  The jackpot now rests at 10,850 euro.  Conversation continues about the who and the when of the win.

A List Called Later

6 March Friday

The lawn is a mess. Cows have been in and walking about.  I am not sure if they came in from Joe’s field after breaking through the fence or if they came down the boreen from the other Joe’s farm.  No doubt we will be able to figure it out in the daylight.  In this fading light, the churned up grass, the patties of manure and the broken daffodils stems look terrible.  It is best not to look too closely.

7 March Saturday

The sun is out.  It is cold and bright.  The lawn looks even more dreadful.  There are no breaks in the fence that we can see. It is easy to see that the invading cows came down from the farm above. The grass in the middle of the track is trampled all the way up and the tyre tracks are churned up with hoof-prints and manure.  As we drove up this morning on our way to the market, Joe was there just opening a gate.  He apologized for Friday’s invasion.  The winds were terrible for the whole day.  The winds are still terrible today.  The gusting wind had closed the gate which he had left open across the track while he was bringing the herd up from a field.  They all took off  and rushed down as far as our house.  Cows get excited to go somewhere new and especially to go in a crowd.  He said he ran after them but that only got them going faster and he could not get in the front of them all to turn them around.  Since it was a downhill run they were able to go faster and faster. By the time he got to our yard they were eating everything they could find, tearing the young grass and rushing around. He offered to come down to scrape up the manure and to try to flatten or fill some of the hundreds of holes.

8 March Sunday

A big white sign with red letters is stuck up in the door of the shop.  It reads NO TRESPASSING.  It seems like an odd thing to have on the door of a shop which you want and need customers to enter.  I commented about the mixed message.  John said that the signs are very popular with farmers.  He said they want that exact sign especially now in lambing season.  He said they forget that they need such a sign until they get out to their fields.  They want to know where to get one so it is good to make the sign both visible and available. Some fields have signs made from odd bits of tin which has been hammered and flattened out and painted with these same words.  Often the signs have been up for so long that the painted words have flaked off and now there is nothing but the piece of flattened metal on a gate.  It is easy to know the intention of the farmer just by seeing the piece of tin.

9 March Monday

Joe has been down and scooped up a lot of the manure.  We were not here when he came.  There is not much to be done for the broken and squished daffodils.  The snowdrops were dying back anyway so their wreckage is not such a pity.  The lawn looks crazy.  The grass has been growing already and growing fast, so it is long and the impressions of the cows feet are deep.  The whole area looks madly bumpy.  It is treacherous to walk over the grass as many of the holes are potential ankle-breakers.  The holes are deep and slippery. It would have been worse if the ground had been very wet when the cows arrived.  It is all so rough that I think it will take a long time for it to even out. The idea of running a lawn mower over it all is hard to imagine.  Joe must have looked at the problem of all the holes and decided to pretend it was not there. Nothing has been said about it.  Nothing has been done.  It has never been a smooth croquet playing kind of lawn but now it is a more like a lumpy mattress with a lot of trampled grass and broken daffodil stems.

10 March Tuesday

There continues to be no winner in the village lottery. The jackpot now stands at 11,450 euro.  At last night’s draw, seven people received 25 euro each for matching three numbers and one person got 20 euro on the Lucky Ticket.  The wait for a winner continues for another week.  The conversations and speculations continue. I must ask someone what is the largest amount this lottery has ever reached before being won. From most of what I hear there has never been a jackpot bigger than this one.

11 March Wednesday

I always have A List Called Later.  When I am going away for either a short or a long time I begin the list in the days before I leave.  The list is comprised of the things I have not had time to do before I go.  It has things that have been put on the Long Finger maybe for quite a while.  The list contains things which I want to remind myself not to forget when I get back.  The failure of the List Called Later is that I can avoid looking at it for quite a while after my return so later becomes even later.  Making the list does not guarantee that I will look at it.

Spring calves

12 March Thursday

The rain has been coming down sideways.  How can I say the rain has been coming down when in fact it has been moving sideways.  The wind is gusting and blowing. The rain is not able to fall straight down.  The rain never stops.  It is not vertical rain.  It is horizontal rain and it is a drenching rain.  It is impossible to go even the shortest distance without being soaked by it. Every activity which involves leaving the house is carefully considered. It is hard to open the back door.  It is easy to postpone going to one of the barns because there is the hope that the rain will let up soon and the day will clear. Other days this week have begun wet and windy and then they have cleared and become glorious blue sky days. This day holds none of that optimism.  It is grey and cold and gruesome. The compost bucket is full but there is no way I am walking out to empty it. The compost can wait.  So far, nothing is important enough to merit the  soaking which simply stepping out the door makes inevitable. Everything can wait.

13 March Friday

The security van was backed up in front of the shop. I am always a little nervous when I see these vans.  The men who get out with helmets are sometimes wearing bullet-proof vests.  I know it is rare for these vans to be held up but I know that it is not unknown for these vans to be held up.  When they are held up by robbers it is always in some rural village.  This is a rural village.  It would be as good as spot as any to rob the van. I always feel the tiny bit of nervousness and then I just continue with whatever I am there to do.

There were two people in front of me waiting for Helen at the Post Office window.  It is rare to have even one person in front of me.  This is not a busy post office.  It has a lot of regular activity but it does not have lines of waiting people. It is just a small facility in the middle of the shop.

The security man came out of the post office with his special sealed up box with its built-in handle.  Helen dialed a number and told someone that the money had been collected and was on its way.  While she was making her phone call, the security man stopped to look at some stuffed animals on a shelf.  He put his money box down on the floor and he tossed a small bear into the air a few times.  Then he went to the counter up front in the shop and asked something, perhaps he asked the price of the bear.  He returned and put the bear back on the shelf.  He picked up his secure money box from where he had left it standing on the floor and continued walking out to his secure van.

14 March Saturday

Jim and Keith had very few vegetables on their stall at the market today.  What they did have was big bunches of daffodils for sale.  The daffodils were being sold for the benefit of the Hospice.  There was a big bee in one of the blossoms.  It was a sleepy bee.  It might have been a bumblebee. It was fat enough to be a bumblebee.  The flower was one of those very pale almost-cream-coloured daffodils.  It was barely yellow,  so the bee was very visible.  Keith moved the bucket with that one bunch of flowers to the edge of the table so that the bee could be in the sun. He thought if the sun warmed it, it might wake up and fly off. Every person who walked by stopped and commented on the bee.  Every person stopped and examined the bee quite close up.  It was the first bee I have seen.  I think that it was the first bee that any of us were seeing this year.

16 March Monday

No one says that they will Knock on the Door.  They say they will Knock the Door. Or that they did Knock the Door.

17 March Patrick’s Day

We went down to the village to meet Greg and Breda for a walk in the mountains.  While we waited for them, I studied the display of St.Patrick’s Day stuff which was right inside the door of the shop. It was sited in such a way that it could not be missed. Almost everything was cheap and shiny, and of course, it was green.  Or it was both green and orange.  There were a lot of things on the display stand.   There were flags and hats and banners and bibs and small ribbons with a safety pin. There was so much on the display rack that I wondered how much had been purchased.  I wondered if much of anything had been purchased and now, on the morning of the day, it was nearly too late to sell another thing so it will have to be put away until next year.  Beside the display was a basket of products to be raffled off for Easter.

We left the shop and all evidence of the National Holiday and drove up to The Boulders.  We walked for a while until we reached the river and then we dropped down through a rocky overgrown boreen and eventually back to the village. There was a lot to look at in the bright spring morning.  We saw sheep up on the mountains.  We saw two herons.  There were many birds and buds and some lesser celandine in bloom as we dropped off the moorland and back into farmland. We did not see one other person.

18 March Wednesday

People do not seem to be joking so much about who will be the winner.  The whole thing has become serious.  There is a careful, quiet attention to the results of each weekly draw.  I feel I too must keep my attention on the draw. The Jackpot has still not been won.  It has now risen to 11,600 euro.  It is a lot of money. Monday night’s draw had 14 winners of the Match Three Numbers variety.  They each won 20 euro. One person won the Lucky Ticket prize of 20 euro.  And there were six Special St Patrick’s Day Prizes of 50 euro each.

19 March Thursday

The day is bright.  The nights are cold. There is frost on everything each morning but it melts away quickly.  Joe’s cows are in the near field.  The other Joe’s calves are out in the field above.  They have only been out of doors and in the field for a day or two.  First the cows and then the calves.  These are signs of spring.  For a few days the calves were just in the farmyard on their thin legs which did not look strong enough to hold them.  They all had new tags in their ears. The tags look huge in relation to their heads.  Now the calves have been moved into the field and there are two white plastic houses for them to go into if they feel weak or cold, or maybe there is food in the little houses.  Oscar was walking with me and then he ran off and wiggled through the gate.  He ran over to the little houses.  He went right inside.  I was worried that he might frighten the calves.  He is big and black and larger than most of them.  Perhaps they would think he is a mother.   I worried that he might be eating their special calves formula.  Mostly I worried that Joe would see him down in the field among the calves.  Joe has never liked Oscar and each time Oscar walks by with us Joe makes noises to shoo him out of the farmyard and away.  I am not sure that Joe likes any dogs.   If he sees Oscar in his field  surrounded by the calves I do not know what he will do but I fear it will not be nice for Oscar.

Not a gift.

20 March Friday

I nearly missed it.  I nearly missed the time of the solar eclipse because I was busy trying to find out what time it was supposed to begin.  It was an overcast and drizzly morning.  It had been grey and gloomy since first light.  I tried to use the internet to get the information but it was not working.  I turned on the radio and after a while the announcer began to talk about the eclipse.  He talked about the coming eclipse and then he talked about the actual happening of it.  As I listened, the birds stopped singing and the sky went from grey to a rusty reddish brown. The soft drizzle did not stop for a minute.  The announcer spoke with various people around the country.  He paused for a chat with a postman in County Cork who had stopped his van on a hill to get a good view of the whole thing.  The postman described his bit of blue sky getting dark.  He described the silenced birds.  There was no rain where he stood. The radio announcer asked if there was a big crowd there with him.  He said No, I am here all on my own just outside Bantry.  He added, And if anyone complains about their post being late, I will be telling them that I was forced to stop for electrical problems due to the solar eclipse.

There are a lot of things described and made visible on the radio.  Every afternoon, there is a program which follows nesting birds and their eggs and later their hatched chicks.  We can sit in our houses or our cars or our tractors all over the country and listen to someone on the radio describing what they are seeing on a special camera which has been installed in a bird box.  They can see the birds.  We cannot. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people around the country follow these birds over several weeks simply as a result of the power of description.  Listening to the eclipse being seen by someone else was much like listening to someone else watching eggs hatch.

23 March Monday

Everywhere we look when we drive or walk through the mountains there is gorse in bloom.  The bright yellow flowers are a delight.  Usually in the places where the gorse grows, there is not a lot else growing.  As soon as I say that I can look out the window and see exceptions.  But it does not grow everywhere.  I think it is about acid in the soil.  I always start to describe things which I do not know much about and then I get trapped by not knowing and by not stopping.  The gorse is also called furze which is a word I like and I would like to say furze when I speak of gorse but I always say gorse.  Not many people say furze but some do.  Breda told me that her sister was out of doors near her house and was startled by the the sound of popping.  Lots of popping.  It took her a while to find the source of it.  It was the gorse blossoms popping.  I have never heard this sound. I do not know when it happens.  We see the gorse in bloom from February through to May or June so maybe it is when the flowers are first coming out.  I am longing to hear this.  There must be someone to ask who will know when to be listening to the gorse popping.  There is always someone to ask.  There is always someone who knows.

24 March Tuesday

On describing a current court trial, the reporter said that  The Victim and the Accused were known to one another.

25 March Wednesday

He kept waking up to the sound of scratching.  It was early early in the morning.  It was just Coming Light.  The extremely manic sounds of the dawn chorus were loud.  The scratching woke him up and as a result of being awake, he lay in his bed and enjoyed the birdsong.  He had no doubt that the scratching sound was mice in the walls and the roof.  He put out mouse traps and a little bit of poison.  He knew it was just a matter of time before the mice were silenced.  A week passed and the scratching continued.  Maybe the scratching got worse.  He was woken up every morning.  Listening to the morning birdsong had been a pleasure but now it was annoying.  He was feeling defeated by the mice.

Jimmie stopped by one day and they talked about things.  The subject of the mice came up.  Jimmie told him that his problem was not mice but crows.  The two men went outside and looked up at the steep pitch of the roof.  Jimmie pointed to the bits of moss growing on the slates and in between the slates.  He said the crows are eating bugs and things that live in the moss.  The scratching he was hearing was their claws trying to gain purchase while slipping and sliding on the roof.  Jimmie told him that unless he cleaned out the moss he wouldn’t get rid of the crows.  Jimmie reminded him that the same thing happened when they were children in their father’s house.

He told me all of this when we met on the road.  I was on foot and he was speaking out his open car window.  He was pleased to have a solution for the scratching sound, but irritated that it had to be his own brother who put him straight.  Both brothers are well into their seventies but they maintain a competitive kind of relationship.  Jimmie was older and he had always known better.  He would always be older and he seemed always to be the one in the know. It was getting late for a change.

26 March Thursday

The wind is wild.  The washing I hung out earlier seems to be gone.  Or some of it is gone.  I decided to wait until the rain stopped before heading out to check it. When I did get outside it did not seem to me that there were as many things on the line as there had been but I could not decide what was missing so I did not know how to miss it. I walked out into the field wearing Welly boots thinking I might see something that looked like clothing or towels in the long wet grass or tangled on a bush. Either whatever flew away flew far away or I just did not hang out as many things as I thought I did.

The reason things are falling onto the ground and blowing away is not only because of the wind.  My clothes pegs have not weathered the winter well.  The plastic ones have suffered from being out of doors over several winters.  They are cracking and breaking and generally falling apart.  The plastic pegs have perished.  The wooden pegs are giving up too.  There are divided opinions about clothes pegs.  People feel strongly about them.  The plastic ones are supposed to be better because they do not leave brown marks on clothes the way a wet wooden peg might do.  But I am fond of the wooden ones. I try not to use them on things like white pillow cases so I always have a mixture of the two kinds.  When I buy wooden pegs I always buy the ones which promise to be Storm Proof.

27 March Friday

Simon took his old tablets to the pharmacist.  The plan was for her to incorporate them together with his new monthly prescription.  When he went in today to collect them, she gave him back the flowered box in which he had delivered them to her.  He said Oh dear, I was hoping to be rid of that box.  I was hoping not to have it back.  She said Everyone here thought you had brought me a present!

Wind. More wind.

28 March Saturday

There are fewer primroses in the boreen than usual. Each time I walk down I wonder and worry about it.  At first I assumed that most of them had not blossomed yet, which is still partly true.  There are a lot of leaves which have no flowers blooming yet, so there will be more.  I thought that the final heavy cut back of the ditches in the autumn might have had an effect but that does not account for the many primroses which grow low down on the side of the banking and which were never touched by the cutting blades.

Fewer primroses but masses and masses of wild garlic.  Johnnie Mackin’s orchard is a thick blanket of leaves of garlic.  Every so often some daffodils appear but mainly there is not much else to see but wild garlic surrounding every apple tree and stretching as far as I can see.  I detour into the orchard daily and walk around sort of dragging my feet just to make myself dizzy with the smell.  Simon has gone a bit crazy with making varieties of pesto with the young leaves.  His latest version uses buttermilk.  His latest version of everything uses buttermilk.  So far everything he does with the wild garlic is delicious.

Fewer primroses, loads of garlic and an unusual number of pheasants in the fields and the woods and on the road.  This morning two unknown dogs spent a busy hour in the garden sniffing and exploring.  One was a big Alsatian and the other a black dog of indeterminate breed.  I do not know them by name but I recognize them as local.

29 March Sunday

Shift is a word used when people talk about a Snog.  It took me ages to  know what a Snog was.  A Snog is what the English call kissing and cuddling.  Neither a Shift nor a Snog is  actually having sex.  It is the anticipation and the pleasurable playing around with face and lips and body.   It is what we would call Making Out, or Necking, or Parking (if there was a car involved).  Shifting or Making the Shift is I guess just about the same in meaning. I cannot really find the connection between the word and the activity but probably I am missing something.

30 March Monday

We are being beaten hounded buffeted tormented and lashed by loud and wild winds.  Day after day the winds do not stop. The sound is in my ears all day and all night.  Even when we think we are not hearing it, we are hearing it.  I suppose many people live in their hermetically sealed houses and do not notice it as much as we do.  We have lots of drafts.  We have doors which do not fit tight.  Sometimes I envy those people their snug houses. I would like a bathroom that was less cold.  I would love a bathroom which was less cold. Most of the time I like knowing that the weather is part of my every day life.  Weather is never not part of my life. The moment I write this I am reminded that I just returned from the barn where I had to give up working with paper because my hands were too cold.  I could not carry the paper up from the barn to finish the job in the house because it was too windy and too wet to even try.

31 March Tuesday

The young calves are moaning and bellowing up above in the field.  Their voices join together in a booming chorus.  As soon as one gets started, they all join in.  I think they are shocked and thrilled by how much noise they can produce from their small bodies.  Joe has several blue teat feeders hooked onto the sides of the gate.  The formula to fatten them up is poured in twice a day, I think.  The calves jostle and shove one another to get themselves a rubber teat and a good sucking spot.  There are always one or two calves who stand quietly off to one side.  Maybe they are waiting for something better to come along.

1 April Wednesday

The jackpot continues to grow.  It is now 11,900 euro.  This week’s draw included 4 winners of the Match 3 numbers and the usual one Lucky Number,  Since Easter is coming there were 6 special Easter prizes of 5o euro each.  And 6 other people won Easter eggs. I do not think anyone would be thrilled with an Easter egg when they were aiming to win 11, 750 euro.  Still, there is always next week.

Dung on offer.

2 April Thursday

Along the road at the end of a drive or directly in front of each house there are three bright orange plastic barricade things.  Each one is about one metre by one and half metres and standing on two black moulded plastic feet.  The three barricades support one another and stand as a triangle shape over the place where the water pipes go from the mains system into that property.  It took me a while to figure out what the barricades were for.  Any house which has a well has none of the barricades in place.  The bright orange is a shock to see as we move along the roads.  It is so garish in contrast to the early spring greens and the greys of stone walls.  The plastic things have been appearing over the last week or two.  An white flat bed truck dropped them at each spot and set them up in their little triangles. Now some of the barricades are no longer standing and they are lying flat in a pile on the side of the road.  On investigation, I see that each house has a newly concreted place with a metal square for the new water meter system.  The new meter is hidden below the metal square. In some places the new meter is in a grassy verge so there is no concrete. When the meter has been installed, the plastic things are laid to one side.  The same white truck which drove around putting the barricades up is now going along and collecting the plastic things.

There has been a lot of noise and protest about the new water charges.  Many people still feel outraged about being asked to pay for water in such a wet country.  More people feel angry about this new tax on top of so many other new taxes.  Every weekend there are Anti-Water Charge marches in Dublin and sometimes also in various towns and cities around the country.  There is a lot of anger.  It is less noticeable around here.  Seeing the orange barricades going up and then slowly seeing them be removed is encouraging conversation about the tax but the conversation is still a quiet conversation.  It is harder to gather people together to make a mass opinion on anything when we are all so widely spread apart.

3 April Good Friday

Good Friday is not as massive an event as it used to be only a few years ago.  Bars and restaurants are still forbidden to serve alcohol.  As a result they are all closed.  Shops and supermarkets are not allowed to sell drink either.  The only way to purchase a drink is to have a ticket to travel.  One can sit in the bar of a train station or at the airport and drink.  Some people buy a ticket for the next nearest station and then sit and drink for the day just because they can. Not so long ago the pub would be packed with people on the Thursday night before Good Friday with everyone trying in a manic way to drink two days worth of alcohol just so they would not miss anything.  Mostly people do not care these days.  It is no longer unusual to have alcohol at home.  If people want a drink on Good Friday they are free to have one in the privacy of their home.  Most people are not concerned with what the church and its lingering hold over the government decree.  And the entire country is not shut down any more.  Many shops are open and the big stores all have sales.  It is easy to not even notice that it is Good Friday except for the deep quiet over the countryside.

4 April Saturday

One woman was reassuring another.  Sure, she said, we all have more liver than we need.

5 April Easter Sunday

I love the daffodils which appear in unexpected places. Sometimes they are on the side of the road in a little group, or far off at the edge of a field not anywhere near a house.  Sometimes they are up on top of a stone wall.  These have never been planted in the place where they are growing.  Maybe some soil got dumped or something got moved and the bulbs just got carried along to a new spot.  The daffodils had to have traveled to their new location by some human act.  They are a variation on the sort of volunteers which plant themselves by being blown to a new spot.  Daffodil bulbs are too heavy to blow anywhere.

6 April Easter Monday

It is too hot to do anything outside.  A heat haze sits over the valley. I am torn between thinking I should be doing a thousand jobs in the garden and thinking it is better to just sit down and savour this unexpected warmth.  Marian told me that she has not seen the inside of her house for three days now.  Everyone jokes that we better enjoy this stretch of heat as it might be all the summer that we get. I prefer not to believe that.

7 April Tuesday

DO NOT JUDGE A BOOK BY IT’S COVER! is a new sign in the library.  Below the sign there is a table with about twenty books on it.  Each book is wrapped in newspaper and there is a piece of pale blue or bright green paper taped on its front with the words: CHOOSE ME! or PICK ME! or READ ME!  Under the big letters is a clue to the subject matter of the book.  One clue was Bio-fiction/Scandal and another was Humour/Tourettes.  I am wondering if after you decide to take a book on the strength of these  clues you are then allowed to change your mind when you go to check it out.  The book will need to be unwrapped so that the librarian can stamp the due date.  Not knowing what you got till you get home would prolong the mystery but would probably not be practical.

8 April Wednesday

There is yet another group of new-born calves in Joe’s concrete holding place beside the barn. They are struggling to get their legs working correctly.  They look surprised about everything. Skittish is the word to describe them.  The calves who were born a few weeks ago are still down in the lower field and they are getting stronger, more confident and more boisterous by the day. This is one of the teat feeders which is being used to provide both sets of calves with their fattening up formula.  It can be hung as high or as low on the gate as is needed.

Below is a home-made feeder which belongs to the other Joe.  I call it the Teat Trailer.  I do not know what Joe calls it.  It can feed a real crowd, but the height does not look optional. The rubber teats are replaceable and appear to be available in various colours.

9 April Thursday

We walked up along the hill by Flemingstown early this morning.  The heat was already building up.  The ground was dry.  There was no mud anywhere, even in the very low bits of the fields where we usually sink ankle-deep.  Once we were out on the road, Michael came along in his car.  He did not say hello.  He just asked straight off if we might be in need of a load of dung.

The things we need.

10 April Friday

I am disturbed about the absence of the dog on the bus.  The look of the national bus service, Bus Eireann has changed over the years. The actual buses get more modern, but the basic bus colour combination is always red and white, with the words Bus Eireann written in green.  Sometimes the bus colour is more red. When the buses became less rounded and more square and modern they also became more white with less red.  Whatever colour was predominant there has always been a running dog on each side and on the front of the bus.  The dog was a drawn picture of a red and orange Irish setter. It was not a photograph of a dog.  The new express buses are nearly completely red and the dog is no where to be seen. I hope this is not the norm and just some aberration for the express service.

11 April Saturday

It has been one of those days.  Just as I was about to leave the house there was a downpour.  The downpour was heavy and included about ten minutes of hail.  It stopped as abruptly as it started.  I walked out in bright sun with a large rainbow off on my right.  The sun stayed strong while I climbed the Mass Path.  As I reached the tar road, a wind began to gust and everything went dark.  I zipped up my jacket, put up my hood and kept walking.  It did not rain.  On reaching the corner the sun came out again and the wind dropped.  My hood went down again. Things remained blustery but bright.  Oscar heard my whistle and joined me.  We walked together until we were stopped by cows crossing the track.  They were moving from one field across to another field. As we waited the sky went dark again and rain poured down.  I hunched in my coat. Oscar squeezed in close to me.  There were no trees nearby to shelter behind or under.  We just made ourselves small and we waited.  By the time the cows were in their new field the rain stopped again.  I walked the last bit down the boreen with my jacket open and my hood down. Oscar ran ahead of me.  Once we arrived here we wandered around together. He sniffed at things and I examined things like the new buds on trees. It was so lovely that I did not want to go inside and Oscar did not want to home.

13 April Monday

Michael Keating died yesterday morning.  He had eaten his breakfast and he was getting ready to go to Mass and he just died.  It was very sudden.  Everyone is stunned. The wake was held today from 3-8 at his son Joe’s house just down the road from his own home.  We walked over the fields at about 5 o’clock to pay our respects.  It was the usual time for the cows to head up for their milking so they were already on their way to the barn.  We drove them along ahead of us as we walked.

Joe had been out in the morning and put down a few loads of gravel at the entrance to the field nearest to his house.  Cars were being directed into the field to park in order to get them off the narrow road.  A metre wide piece of plywood was laid down over the cattle grid in the driveway so that no one would twist an ankle walking over it. People were arriving and leaving all the time.  The field never had fewer than fifteen cars in it.  I think we were the only ones to arrive on foot.  There was a constant stream of new arrivals.  Three men wearing reflective vests directed the traffic in and out of the field.  There was another man out at the Knocklofty road directing people down to the house. Michael lived in this area  for his entire life.  He knew everyone and everyone knew him. One man, standing in the road, announced that Michael had been universally liked and respected. He repeated the word Universally several times.

We went into the house and spoke with Biddy and the family in the darkened room where Michael was laid out.  There were some photographs of him on the mantel.  There was also a photo of his daughter Mary who died two years ago.  Then we sat down and had a cup of tea.  The biggest tea pot I have ever seen was being carried about.  The tea pot seemed to provide endless cups of tea.  It had to be carried with two hands. Someone said that it was borrowed from the village hall.  I think maybe there were two of these gigantic pots making the rounds. Everyone had a cup of tea and everyone talked quietly.  Everyone said that Mary’s death had broken Michael’s heart and that he had never been the same since.

When we left the house, the evening was still bright and more people were arriving.  As we walked home on the road, we met many other people on their way to the house.  A few stopped to ask us if they were going the right way for Joe’s house.  Others stopped to speak of the sad and sudden death of Michael.  Some people were on their way to the wake and some people were on their way from the wake. Not one car passed us without stopping.  It took longer than usual to walk home. The wake was supposed to end at 8, but people kept arriving until 10 o’clock.  I understand that big lights were put up in the field to help people find their way to and from their cars.  The funeral is tomorrow at noon. There will be masses of people there too.

15 April Wednesday

The boreen is a mess.  It is more like a dried up river bed than a road. After a year of ringing the council to try to get some repairs done, we received a form inviting us to apply for a road repair scheme.  Today a man came down.  He was an engineer.  He never got out of his car. He talked to us through the open window.  He said that he has seven people applying for the allotted amount of grant money.  One of the other roads needing repair is a mile long and it has 14 houses on it.  There are only two houses on our road.  He said our road is too narrow for the machinery anyway.  He said that our road is not really a road. The whole time he was talking he gestured with his hands.  He had PEANUT BUTTER written in capital letters across his left palm in blue ink.  I could not stop looking at it.  I wanted to mention the peanut butter, but I kept to the subject of the road which of course will not be done this year.

16 April Thursday

Someone won the jackpot.  The total was 12,050 euro.  The winner was someone over in Ballinamult.  John told me that it was a fine thing that it had been won.  He said that after all these months now everyone in the village can stop dreaming about being the Biggest Winner Ever.

17 April Friday

Every day things are moved outside to be on display in the space between the food shop and the hardware shop.  At the end of the day everything gets put away again. Without exception, it is all useful stuff.  I watched this morning as a wheelbarrow, and various things on wheels were all moved out.  There were bags of kindling, small bags of coal, peat briquettes, 40 kg bags of coal and a big sack of timber blocks, 75 litre bags of multi-purpose compost, a display of gas canisters and a sign advertising key cutting.  The sign was not on wheels.  And now, since the weather has been so good, the bicycle table and the four seats made from red bicycle seats are out too. The arrival of this outdoor seating is a real sign of spring.

Stitchwort

18 April Saturday

I have stopped feeding the birds.  I have stopped filling the bird feeders.  I ran out of nuts the other day.  The wild bird seed had already run out a few weeks ago. I have been asking other people if they are still feeding the birds.  One person told me that she feeds the birds all year long because she likes to have them outside her windows all the time.  Another person told me that he has stopped ever since he saw the birds feasting off a bush full of berries.  One woman told me that it is time for them to learn to fend for themselves.  She said if she continues to feed them they will only get lazy and then they will not know how to take care of themselves and their young.  I stopped feeding the birds only because I ran out of nuts and the shop had no more when I went to refill my bucket.

I have stopped feeding the birds their special bird nuts but I continue to take scraps of bread and crumbs outside.  Rather than throw crumbs and bread into the grass, I put them onto one of the wooden tables.  I also put bread and crumbs along the top of a stone wall.  Sometimes the table  and the wall are covered with snacking birds before I even get into the house again.  I cannot see the top of the wall from the house but I can see the table. Today I found myself wondering once again if the birds are eating the things as quickly as it seems to be disappearing.  I wondered out loud if it was a rat or if the birds were indeed eating everything.  I am certain if a rat were dining on the table there would be recognizable droppings and since I have seen no droppings I can believe it is not rats. I watched some birds pecking at the table and then I went off and did some other things.  I came past the window a little later and saw a fox standing on the table eating bread.  A magpie stood on a nearby chair observing the fox, or maybe waiting for a turn at the crumbs.  The fox threw back his head and chewed with his mouth open and his head rolling from side to side.  He stood on the table and ate with gusto. He ate just the way Em used to eat when something was a treat and she wanted to make it last.

20 April Monday

I have not heard the man with the strong Dutch accent who reads the weather on the radio for a while.  I cannot remember when I last heard him.  He is often absent for long periods of time.  Sometimes he is gone for so long that I think he must have found another job, but then he comes back again.  Maybe this time he has indeed found another job.

22 April Wednesday

I waited behind a man at the Motor Factors store.  He was buying some part for a piece of farm equipment.  On the back of the man’s T-shirt were the words:  If she’s not blue she won’t do.  The words were printed in blue letters.   It was taking a while to identify what was needed.  Both the man behind the counter and the customer looked in catalogues and made phone calls to identify and locate the correct part. I had a lot of time to study the words on the back of the man’s shirt.  I could not decide if the message was sexist or what it was.  The more I looked at it the more I did not understand it. When the man finally turned around to leave, I saw that there was a blue tractor on the front of his shirt.  The blue and the she were both a brand of tractor.

23 April Thursday

There are several grubby places which remind me of Em.  They are low down on corners.  One is on the way out of the bathroom.  Another is on the edge of the wood box.  Maybe she used these spots to give herself a nice rub in passing.  Or maybe they only mark the spots where she was rushing and cut the corners a little tight.  The grubby places are exactly at the height of her body.  I have been unwilling to clean away the marks.  I like being reminded of her movements.

24 April Friday

The fish and chip man spends more and more of every Friday night inside the pub.  Every so often, he steps out for a cigarette.  While he is outside, he checks on his fryer and his van. Maybe his customers are a late crowd.  He comes back week after week. I rarely see anyone buying fish and chips.

25 April Saturday

We went into the Convent of Mercy to view the items to be auctioned.  The advertisement announced an Auction of Antique and High Class Furniture, etc.  A great many of the people wandering around on the ground floor were there just for a chance to look around inside the large building. We were among the curious. One man who was snapping photographs in the chapel announced that he was only there for the memories.

The furniture on show was a disturbing conglomeration of utilitarian stuff.  Some of it was old but a lot of it was just second-hand.  I am not sure that much was of real antique worth.  There were a lot of religious paintings and objects, church kneelers available in groups of three, four or six, an altar and innumerable boxes of assorted china, glassware, and cutlery.  There were many many tables and many many chairs. Everything was brown.  People were marking things on their blue cards in advance of the auction.  There were twelve rooms and corridors jammed full of things.  The objects were marked on the card by the room in which they were displayed as well as by a number.  Number one was a crucifix in the Kitchen.  The last number was 488 and denoted 6 plastic deck chairs in the Green Room.

I liked a wooden kitchen chair which had been attached to a little platform. (No.321 in the Dining Room).  The platform had two big wooden wheels on each side and a small wheel at the back.  The whole thing had been covered with dark brown paint.  The all over brown made it into a wheelchair instead of just a chair on a wheeled platform.

Just as we were leaving, it began to rain, so we stayed to watch the beginning of the auction.  Everyone was telling everyone else that the convent has been purchased by a group of Egyptian Coptics.  Several of these men were there in the auction room, wearing long black robes and long black cardigans and black head coverings with brightly coloured floral embroidery.  I wondered why a group of Egyptian Coptics have chosen Cahir for their new home.  The auctioneer began the proceedings by instructing everyone on the procedures for bidding, paying for and collecting items after the auction.  He announced that throughout the proceedings the Seventh Commandment was in effect.

26 April Sunday

The stitchwort has turned all of the ditches into masses of tiny bright white flowers.  I never know if what I am seeing is the Greater Stitchwort or the Lesser Stitchwort.  I do not mind which it is.  The distance is full of white flowering blackthorn and there are various fruit trees with white blossom. The wild garlic is in flower too so that means lots of exploding star white flowers amongst dark green leaves. Lots of white flowers and lots of bright sky.  It all looks like spring even though today is a bit colder than I would like.

Spring stick

27 April Monday

Yesterday I was happily obsessed about spring and all of the white blossom visible in every direction.  I was not too happy with the hard cold of the day, but at least it was sunny.  Today is wretched.  There is wind and rain and grey sky with only small moments of sun.  There has even been hail. The hailstones were the size of bonbons.  This morning the postman told me that it was snowing in Donegal.  Now the lunchtime radio announces snow in Wicklow.  Winter seems to be getting closer.

28 April Tuesday

A text arrived from the library telling me that the two books I requested were ready for collection.  They were on hold for me to get at my convenience. I had not requested any books.  I am no longer surprised by these messages.  When I receive one it means that the librarian herself has decided that I should read a certain book.  Sometimes the book is one of her own books and she just thinks I must read it.  Sometimes it is one to be checked out from the library.  The librarian is a voracious reader and cannot help but share her finds with other readers.  Most of her recommendations are good.  If I read one that I do not like she is always disappointed.  I hate to disappoint her.   I love rushing in to town to get whichever book is her next offering.

29 April Wednesday

I spent a cold hour in the blacksmith’s shed.  The door was open and the concrete floor and all of the piled up metal made the cold feel even colder.  He had been grinding and sanding flat some of the rusty objects from my collection.  We are going to try printing some of them but they were too rough in their found states.  I can draw them when they are rough but to use them as printing blocks demands a better surface. He had the pieces laid out on a piece of wood. As he showed me the sanded pieces, he identified each one by its function.  Several of the pieces were ones I had been certain that I knew the function of.  I was completely wrong about every single one of them.  We also had a conversation about horseshoes and he showed me his collection.  The shed seemed to be in chaos but he was easily able to put his hand on anything he needed.  It was his stuff and he knew where everything was.  I picked up a broken thing with a curved end and he said I could have it.  He said that he and I were probably the only two people in Tipperary who would be interested in it anyway.

30 April Thursday

We drove up the New Line to The Boulders with Breda, Siobhan and Molly.  It was cold but clear and crisp as we walked across the hills.  When we dropped down to the the river,  Simon left us and continued alone down the rough track towards the village.  We walked up and down and around.  We were able to see a long way in every direction. As we returned to the road and the van, an old man in a bright orange vehicle stopped.  It was a tiny little pick-up truck with a very small bed behind a tiny cab.  He called it My Kubota which was the name printed on the side. It had no road registration at all.  It was sort of like a dune buggy truck.  He had a sheep dog in the front seat beside him and a dead lamb in the back.  The back was small enough that the young lamb just about filled it up.  It had not much more space than a wheelbarrow back there.  The man was dressed like old farmers are always dressed.  The old man was dressed the way all of the old farmers used to be dressed.  He was not wearing a fleece nor a T-shirt nor jeans.  He wore a woolen suit jacket over a pull-over sweater with a white checked button down collar.  Nothing was very clean but everything was tidy.  He was wearing his working clothes.  He had been out on the mountains checking his sheep.  He asked a lot of questions because he needed to know who we were and where we lived.  Where we lived would help to explain who we were.  Once he knew that Breda lived next door to Jimmie and Esther, he was pleased.  He explained that the dog in the seat beside him was the brother of Rex.  He himself had given Rex to Jimmie as a pup.  A tractor came along and we all had to move off the road so we did not get much further in the game of questions.

1 May Friday

Walking up the Mass Path is different every day.  New growth is appearing quickly.  Each day there are more things to note.  There are fallen trees and branches which were not down even a few days ago.    Some I can step over and some I must slip underneath.  Some of the big ones which fell in the autumn are easy to walk under without me bending at all and now they are getting covered with vines and leaves.  They are becoming arches. Everything is adjusting itself.  There are violets in places where I have never seen violets before.  Up near Johnnie’s orchard there are branches of an apples tree blocking the path. Their buds are still tightly closed and they are bright pinky red.  I like them best now just before they open.  Because the branches are across my path, I come upon the buds at eye level.  There is no way not to look at them before I duck down low to go underneath them. There are lots of plants in early stages. There are bluebells, ferns and Alpine Milk Vetch as well as bright moss and all of the other things that I cannot or will not name here.  The orchard itself is a solid blanket of wild garlic with thousands of white flowers in blossom.  Each time I walk up the path, I think that it is perhaps time to carry my clippers with me just so that I can clear the path of the things that grab onto me.  Today I found a good stick and beat my way through some of the brambles.  After the ease of moving through winter vegetation, a stick is suddenly once again both useful and necessary.  After I am free of the bushy stuff, I am happy to march the whole way home with my stick.  I beat at the air and I wave it around. I salute the odd passing car or tractor with my stick.  Sometimes I give it to Oscar when we meet but usually I find him another one as I am always reluctant to give up a good stick.

We walked out from The Boulders.

2 May Saturday

I was told that a sure method for defeating weeds was to throw shells onto a path.  Any sort of shell will do the job: mussels, oysters, scallops, cockles.  The shells break down when pulverized and the weeds will not grow, probably because of the salt or calcium and whatever else shells are made of.   I love the idea of a shell path.  I love the sound of crunching shells.   Today, after shucking some oysters, I took the shells out onto the gravel of the car park area.  Even while doing it, I knew it was a ridiculous effort.  The weeds are so dense this spring that in some places,  it is difficult to see the gravel.  I lined the shells up in a spot where I knew they were going to be rolled over and well crushed by the car tyres.  I have been doing this for years.  It has never stopped a weed. At this point, we could dump a ton of oyster shells out there and I do not think we would defeat one weed.  I looked out and saw the fox arrive about ten minutes after I came inside.  He quickly flipped the shells over and licked out the taste of the oysters.  When he was finished, he left the shells scattered about and walked off into the field.

4 May Monday Bank Holiday

An announcement on the radio about failing to pay your TV license ends with the warning that as well as a fine, you risk having your name listed in your local paper.

5 May Tuesday

Clearing weeds off the patio always seems mad.  The patio is not a patio.  We just call it a patio.  The patio is the remains of an old milking shed.  The concrete floor has grooves in a diagonal pattern to allow for run off.  The places where the concrete meets other areas of concrete are not tight.  Weeds and daisies and all sorts of things grow up from the cracks.  I am torn because I love the daisies when they are all in bloom, but when they are all in bloom there is no way to walk on the patio without marching through all of the plant life.  Increasingly there is no way to walk through the patio at all.  The good part is that the ugly concrete is disappearing.  The plants are taking over the whole patio.  The bad part is that on a wet day it means that our trousers get soaked.

6 May Wednesday

For a couple of years there used to be two kids in the SuperQuinn car park in town.  In the middle of a school day there would always be the same two kids.  There was a boy and a girl.  The girl was about twelve and the boy a little younger.  They would pace all around the car park constantly watching for people returning to their cars. One of them would politely offer to return your shopping trolley for you.  It costs a euro to get a shopping trolley and the only way to get your euro back is to return the trolley to the correct place.  The kids must have thought we were all stupid.  Today, I found myself wondering when I last saw them.  SuperQuinn was taken over by SuperValu more than a year ago.  It must be a good while before that since they were last doing their rounds.

7 May Thursday

We walked out from The Boulders.  There has been a lot of rain lately but this morning was bright.  Everything was squishy underfoot.  The Boulders are large stones beside the narrow tar road about two kilometres up the New Line.  There is a little bit of blue paint on a few of the stones.  We call this spot The Boulders.  The Boulders is just the place to pull off the road and park in order to walk in the Knockmealdowns, in one direction toward the Mass Rock and in the other direction down toward the river.  There is just enough space for one car to pull in at The Boulders.  As we walked we were closely followed by twenty or thirty sheep who must have hoped we were the farmer bringing them something to eat.  After we left the river, we went through a gate and left the sheep to their free wandering. We dropped down through grass roads for about an hour.  We met Michael who was on his way home for his dinner.  We told him that we had heard a cuckoo for the first time this year.  He had heard it too. We reported on the heron which we see every time we are up there.  He spoke of some unknown birds being From Foreign.  He just meant that they were not normal birds for these parts.  After arriving down in the village, I drove Breda back up to The Boulders to get her van.  A tiny lamb tumbled out of the undergrowth and right onto the road.  I nearly ran over it.  Another one had his head stuck out of the vegetation.  I turned in at the next farm and knocked on the kitchen door.  A woman shouted for me to come in.  She was setting the table for dinner. A big table. Six or seven places were being set.  Four cars and a tractor were parked out front.  I explained about the escaping lambs and she asked questions about the location of the breakthrough.  I described the spot and told her which side of the road it was on.  She nodded and said she would ring Johnnie whose sheep are in that field.  Her kitchen was full with the smell of potatoes and cabbage. Today’s walk was both quiet and eventful. We felt fortunate that it did not rain.

Stand clear. Luggage doors operate.

8 May Friday

A cardboard box had been cut open and flattened out on the ground.  On top of the cardboard there was a brown rubber backed door mat.  and the whole thing was topped by an orange rubber traffic cone.  I thought it was all covering up a hole in the tarmac, but instead it was covering up a spill.  Someone had dropped a bucket of paint.  Sky blue paint oozed out from the edges of the cardboard.  The apparatus and the traffic cone were in place to protect customers to the shop from stepping out of their car and right into the pigment.  After three days the cardboard and the carpet have been removed.  What remains is a sky blue shaped mess with orange cones on either side of it. I assume that the cones are still there because if the paint was oil based, it might still be wet.

9 May Saturday

As I walked toward the entrance of the market, I saw a man walking away from the market.  He had four leeks in his left hand.  He had nothing else.  He carried neither a bag nor a basket.  I could hardly believe that he came to the market just to purchase four leeks.  I have been thinking about him all day.

10 May Sunday

It is crazy weather.  The sun is out most of the time.  The rain is lashing down most of the time.  The sun does not disappear behind clouds.  The rain just falls hard and then not so hard and then just a little.  The rain continues without cease.  The birds keep singing.  Sometimes the noise of the rain on the roof of the big room is so loud that it is difficult to hear myself think.  But beyond the sound of the heavy rain the bird song breaks through.  The wind is gusting and blowing all the time.  The wind never stops either.  Nothing stops.  Rain. Sun. Birds. Wind.  Nothing stops so nothing else stops.

11 May Monday

I am obsessed with the recorded announcement: STAND CLEAR. LUGGAGE DOORS OPERATE.  It repeats again and again for the entire time that the luggage doors are open.  The doors swing upward from the side of the bus whenever there is a stop and when someone needs to get something out or to put something in under the bus. Underneath is the storage place for baby prams, suitcases and other cumbersome packages.  Each time I listen carefully to the announcement.  There is something wrong with the sentence.  I feel certain it should say LUGGAGE DOORS OPERATING or LUGGAGE DOORS ARE OPERATING. I listen hard to try to hear if I am missing a syllable or a word.  I have listened so hard and so carefully so many times that I now find myself saying the words along with the announcement. I repeat the words at exactly the same speed as the recording.  It is more intoning than speaking the words.  If they are repeated ten times I chant them ten times.  I harbour a fantasy of everyone on the bus repeating the words along with me and along with the announcement.  It would be a quiet kind of joining in.  When the announcement stops and the doors return to their closed position, everyone will continue reading or texting or sleeping and not one of us will refer to the chanting which we did together.  The next time the door opens we will all do it again. And again.  All the way to Cork or Dublin or wherever the bus is going.

15 May Friday

I went to catch the 3.45 post.  The village was full of cars.  I parked at the bottom of the bridge and walked in. I thought the cars were lined up for a funeral but I knew that funerals are always always at 11 in the morning.  This was not the right time of day for a funeral.  People were standing in front of the church and across the street in front of the shop and facing the church.  Everyone was talking but there was not much sound.  It was quiet with the waiting.  I nodded and spoke to people as I went along and into the shop.  The entire side of the street in front of the church was blocked off with striped plastic tapes.  I went into the shop and posted my parcels.  By the time I had done that, the lights were turned off, the shades were pulled down and the door was shut.  Kieran pulled the grating halfway down.  I was trapped in the shop.  I did my photocopying in the dim light.  The three of us talked in low voices even though we were inside the shop and we could have spoken in normal voices.  The man who died was 85 or 86 and had been poorly for 14 years.  For the last 8 years he had been badly taken with Alzheimer’s.  He had a large family.  I did not know the man and I do not think I know his family.  I might know some of them by sight but this was not the time to find out.  He had six or seven daughters and one son and they all had children and then there were some great-grandchildren too. The reason that the funeral had to be so late in the day was because they were waiting for the sister of the deceased.  She was 84 herself and had to take several planes to get here from the western provinces of Canada.

When the hearse arrived all of the striped tapes were quickly removed and the family was able to park all along in front of the church.  We watched from a small unshaded area of the window.   Dozens and dozens of floral wreathes and bouquets were taken out of the back of the hearse.  Each one was handed to a young girl.  There were lots of little girls in bright outfits.  In no time they were each holding flowers.  When the coffin was carried into the church, the girls and their flowers followed close behind and then the rest of the family went in and then other people filed in.  Not everyone went into the church. There are always some men who stand outside and smoke and speak among themselves while the service goes on inside. Other people simply take their leave after the coffin has been carried into the church.  That was when I slipped out and under the grating and headed back to my car.  In the thirty minutes or so that I had been in the shop, another 8 cars had pulled in and parked behind me. Cars were parked right up the side of the narrow bridge.

Decided

17 May Sunday

We have eaten Lumpers!  Up until now my only experience with a Lumper was in reports of the famine.  It was one of the potatoes which suffered badly from blight. Because there were so many Lumpers planted at the time of the famine, they contributed to massive crop failure.  I understood Lumpers to have a bad reputation.  I have never seen a Lumper for sale in a shop nor at a market, so I was surprised when Simon arrived home with a bag of them.  He was excited.  My heart sank.  I feared that we were stuck with yet another bag of floury potatoes which would not behave properly. I feared that we would complain and moan through this bag of potatoes.  The Lumpers were ugly.  They obviously earned their name because of their bumpy and not beautiful appearance.  To our surprise, the Lumpers are lovely to eat.  They are a delicious potato with a great texture. They are not at all floury.  We cooked them in several different ways and each time the eating was pleasurable.  These Lumpers came from Antrim.  I wonder if we will be able to find them again or if their presence here was a freak.  If no one but us likes them, the shop where they came from might be tempted to say No when next offered a load of Lumpers.

18 May Monday

Jo Hyland locks and unlocks the church and keeps track of the cleaning.  I do not know if she does the cleaning herself, but I think she does.  She is also the bell-ringer.  She pulls the thick ropes to ring the bells for Mass and for funerals.  She is a very small woman. She is described as being Low to the Ground. I just learned that she is 93 years old.  She will let her daughter or someone else unlock or lock the church if she is unwell or if the weather is wretched, but she will not allow anyone else to ring the bells.

20 May Wednesday

Late afternoon sun.  Suddenly at 5.30 it is a beautiful day.  It is almost enough to make me forget the rain and hail and the broken heating system.  It is almost enough to make me forget how unpleasant it is to even be thinking about a heating system at the end of May.  We have had Thor staying for a few days.  It has been so nice to have a dog in the house again.  He is quite deaf so he follows us around because he needs to know where we are.  I find myself looking for him if I do not see him often.  I do not know who is following whom.  I took him out walking. We met Oscar.  Male dogs do not always get along very well but both Thor and Oscar are agreeable animals. They quickly fell into step together.  As a result of their exploring and sniffing, I made the walk much longer.  Thor would look back every so often to check if I was with them.  I could shout out a direction to Oscar and I could be certain that Thor would follow.  It is not possible to shout directions to a deaf dog but hand signals do work.  Oscar became the guide dog.  A guide dog for a dog. We all had a great walk yesterday.  We had another great walk today.  Thor is very small and Oscar is very big but somehow they managed to find a pace to satisfy them both. I was worried about Thor struggling through the cow parsley and the long grasses but he was so determined to keep up that no obstacle slowed him down.  It is so much better to walk with a dog.  Everything is better with a dog.

21 May Thursday

Tomorrow is voting day for the referendum on Same-Sex Marriage.  Both radio and television have been full of discussions and arguments.  The newspapers have been teaming with articles and essays. There are posters up on trees.  Polls report daily on the swings of the Yes, the No and the Undecided.  It has seemed clear that the Yes vote is way out ahead but I think no one dares to feel certain.  The rural vote is less positive than the urban vote. And now we are dropping into this day of silence from the media before voting begins.  The referendum is a huge thing in this old-fashioned but strangely progressive country.  It is a huge thing, period.

Rainsunrainwindsunrainsunwindcloudrainsun

26 May Tuesday

The driving entrance to some houses is called an Avenue.  I think an Avenue usually has a tarred surface.  If not tarred, it is at least a hard surface.  An Avenue is not a dirt track with grass in the middle. An Avenue simply by its name suggests something a little bit finer and a bit wider.  An Avenue implies something grand.  I never hear an Avenue called a drive nor a driveway.  Nor is a boreen an Avenue. A boreen is too rough.

Our own boreen has become a tunnel.  It is horribly bumpy underneath and it is wildly overgrown on the sides and the top.  The cow parsley has come into its largest and most frothy and effusive mode.  The cow parsley is meeting itself at the top and making a canopy under which we drive and walk.  It is a fluffy tunnel. The blossoms touch the car on both sides and on the roof as though they are some kind of car wash.  An Avenue would never have anything at all touching a vehicle as it drove along.

27 May Wednesday

The posters have all been taken down.  The feeling of exhilaration and celebration after the successful YES vote has all settled now.  For the weeks and days before the referendum the topic was never far from our lives.  Directly after the results no one spoke of anything else. People flew from as far away as New Zealand and Australia just to be able to vote.  It was the Yes voters who traveled.  I do not think the No people were as committed.  There were many stories being told.  People were both thrilled and proud to have voted for equality. Now it seems that it is time to move on and to talk about other things.

29 May Friday

I followed a car pulling a horse box for about 20 kilometres.  On the back of the trailer there was a blue net sack with hay in it.  The sack bounced and twirled as the car and the horse box moved along.  Sometimes the wind caught the hay and made it spin even more than the bumping along on the back of the trailer already made it do.  I could not help but worry if the horse inside the box had some hay to eat during his journey or if his supply was what I was watching bouncing and blowing away in small bits all along the road.

30 May Saturday

It was cold at the market this morning, but it was dry.  I spoke with the woman who sells knitted things.  A few weeks ago she made a tea cosy that looked like the front of a Volkswagon camper van.  She was very pleased with it. Everyone admired it. Since then she has made two more versions of the camper van.  She says she is trying to get the windscreen wipers right. I like the early version where the wipers are made up of several little stitches but she is working on a longer loop which does look more like an actual wiper.   She has three camper vans and a beehive and little Aran sweaters with buttons up the front, as well as some other styles of tea cosies.  They are lined up on two levels on her table.  They look wonderful as a group.  She rarely sells one.  She says that she makes tea in a mug with a teabag herself.  Maybe no one is using tea cosies these days.  She said she won’t make another camper van until she sells one of the ones she has already knitted.

It has been trying to rain since 11 this morning.  The weather report promised that it would rain all evening and into the night.  Evening is anytime after lunch so we knew the afternoon would be a wet one.  After returning from the market, I stalled on going out to do anything.  Simon rushed outside to do some jobs immediately before lunch.   I stalled and stalled.  It was cold and windy as well as threatening rain.  Just changing into my grubby garden clothes was something I put off.  A few minutes ago I walked down to the book barn and a steady soft drizzle was coming down.  I finally have my excuse not to go and work outside. Now I can settle to something inside.  It is a real relief.  We are so weary of this cold and gloom and sun and rain and no sun and the never-ending chill over everything.  It is not so many hours before the month of June begins and it is not very nice.

31 May Sunday

We walked to the Abbey and down toward the river.  Wild wind sun rain wind sun cloud rain sun rainbow rain sun kind of weather continued during the whole walk.  The barley is thigh-high on both sides of the track.  At the bottom gate we spoke with four Frenchmen in full fishing gear.  They were getting ready to cross through the field full of calves to the riverbank.  They were surprised to see us.  We were surprised to see them.  We never see another person down there except maybe the farmer who owns the fields. They had extremely long fishing rods which flapped about in the wind.  They knew the rain was coming again. They spoke no English. We discussed the weather in French and then we all continued with what we were doing.  We all knew we would get drenched.  I had to change my trousers when I got home.

The Fox & The Fox.

1 June Monday

The rusty metal things which the blacksmith scraped and prepped were all mounted on wooden blocks by Simon.  Sadly, not one of them is a success for printing.  Each piece looks fine on its little block.  To the naked eye they look flat and smooth, but as soon as we tried to print them the defects and the unevenness were all too evident.  After work on the Adana failed, I tried hand-rolling them with ink and doing individual prints by rubbing on the back of a sheet of paper.  That was a failure too.  They might have been interesting in any of these methods even with all of the defects.  They might have looked fantastic with all of the unevenness and bumps but instead they just looked messy and kind of ugly.  We are disappointed.  So far we have not found a new solution.

2 June Tuesday

It used to be normal that if a person was at home, the door of the house was open. It was mostly the kitchen door that was left open but it could be another door.  It was a way of letting passing people know that there was someone there.  It was also a way of letting air into the house. It is not such a common thing now for lots of reasons.  Most people do not want to let all of their heat out.  Nor do they want passing people coming in.  It is not such a friendly world and not everyone who passes is someone that one knows. Most people are off at jobs so there is no one at home in the daytime anyway.

Today I went to the Breast Check Mobile Unit.  Every two years we women are sent an appointment for an X-ray.  The Breast Check Unit is a long trailer which is driven to the grounds of the hospital and parked there for a few months.  The truck part of the trailer drives away, then metal steps are put in place and the unit is open for business. Everything needed is inside. The big machines, the curtained changing rooms, waiting benches and a desk.  Everything is attached to floor and walls, so that when the unit is moved somewhere else nothing will be disturbed.  When I arrived this morning the door was closed.  The keys were hanging in the lock.  I opened the door and walked in.  Two women were there putting on their uniform tops.  They were not fully dressed yet.  One of them snapped at me and said that they were not open yet.  I said that the door was unlocked.  She said “Unlocked yes. But Not Open.  When we are open, the door will be open.”  I went back outside to wait for the door to open.

3 June Wednesday

It is still colder than it should be for this time of year.  The greyness is the depressing. Walking across Joe’s field, I saw The Fox outlined against the flat colour of the sky.  He was very close to me.  I stopped and he stopped and we looked at each other.  After a few minutes he moved off slowly up towards his woods and I continued over the hill.  When I mentioned this casual meeting with the fox to a neighbour she immediately wanted to know if it was Her Fox.  She has been worried about a fox loitering near her ducks and geese.  She described the fox to me.  She said Her Fox had a light coloured tip at the end of his tail.  I do not think Her Fox is the same as The Fox.  I always call the fox The Fox. I never call him mine.  Yesterday there were two foxes walking up the boreen just beside the house.  When they saw movement through the window one ran off in one direction and one turned and went back the way it had come.  I shall still call each individual fox The Fox, but I am happy to see that there is more than one.

4 June Thursday

I learned a new word today. Perisher.  I am a Perisher.  I am someone who feels the cold.  I spent all day today pulling my sweater on and off.  It is not only the unseasonable strange weather, it is me.  It is normal to hear someone say that they are Perished With The Cold.  The word Perisher is a new to me.  Now I have this word so even if it does go from sun to cold and cloudy several times an hour, I can enjoy my new word.  Everyone else can wear T-shirts but as a Perisher I will always keep something warm near.

5 June Friday

I am sitting upstairs in the cafe looking out at the ducks and the river and the castle.  I have the newspaper.  I have a coffee and a scone.  I have five new books purchased for one euro each from the Lion’s Club fund-raising bookshop.  I am waiting while Mike gives the car a service.  Another customer arrived with a problem before I did so he needs to take care of that car first.  I will have a longer wait.  The bookshop and the post office were my first stops.  Now I am here.

I am taking a closer look at the books I bought.  Two women sat across from one another at the little table in the bookshop.  There was a tablecloth and a small money box on the table.  One woman sat behind the table and the other sat across from her blocking all movement on that side of the shop. They each had large cups of tea. They never stopped talking for one second.  They went on and on in minute detail about anything and everything.   Actually one woman talked and the other just repeated things back to her like an echo. Everything was imperative. I was the only customer.  It was difficult to focus on the books in such a small space with so much talking. I do know quite a bit more than I want or need to know about the woman who was doing the talking.

There is one other table occupied up in this part of the cafe. It has been lovely and quiet while I have been sitting here.  The silence was just interrupted by a woman at the other table.  She made a phone call to a man named Frank.  She cancelled her twelve o’clock appointment for getting a tattoo.  She told him she was chickening out.

6 June Saturday

I was pleased to meet John as I walked through the woods on the river path in Cahir this morning.  He is walking a bit slower but he still has a steady pace. He continues to do his five mile walk but since March he is no longer doing it every day.  He said I am still walking five miles but it is taking longer and longer.  He now walks five days a week. He is feeling bad about not doing the full week but he said that he is feeling tired.  He is nearly 92.  He told me that he will never see 91 again and that indeed he does not feel certain that he will make it to 92.  Two weeks ago he traveled to Istanbul with his daughter.   He liked the architecture very much but he did not like the food.  He said everyone there had a new car. There was not an old car to be seen.  He would have liked to have seen a bit more of the traditional building methods but it was too difficult to go out into the countryside.  He said he was glad to have gone but he was more glad to get home and to have some normal food.  He was glad to return to his walking schedule.

8 June Monday

A baby fox came to the kitchen door this morning.  The door was wide open. He was just walking into the house when I  appeared.  We were both startled.  He was gone almost before I had a chance to register his presence.

Good-looking to talk to

9 June Tuesday

Flower boxes are now in position on the long sweeping corner out of Ardfinnan.   There are thirteen of them.  They are freshly coated with red gloss paint.  The arrival of these boxes along the low concrete wall on the edge of a potato field is a sign of summer.  I think they are attached to the fence so that they won’t topple into the road.  Each box is about three meters from the next box.  The boxes are densely planted with petunias, geraniums and something white which I cannot quite identify while driving.  I will be better able to name the flowers as they grow a bit bigger. It is not a place where I would ever be walking.  I do not think it is a corner where anyone would be walking.  These flowers are for viewing as one passes in a moving car.  They are also for viewing from the four of or five houses across the road.  I think they are mostly there for viewing by the Tidy Towns Competition Committee who will be around later in the year. As a village,  Ardfinnan is very competitive in the world of Tidy Towns.  It took me three times going by in the car before I was able to be certain that there are thirteen boxes.

10 June Wednesday

The man on the radio said that the livestock population of this country is larger than the human population.  I think that the human population rests at about 3.8 million.  I wish he had given a number for the livestock.

11 June Thursday

There is a big machine doing this particular job.  All of the farm machines are big now.  It is silly to comment about one of them being big.  Driving on these narrow lanes is getting more and more dangerous especially when everyone is getting the hay and the silage in. The machines are as big as the road.  More and more often the huge machinery coming at us will be preceded by a car or a truck with lights flashing.  We see the lights and we slow and we salute but still sometimes there is no where to go.  Pulling off the road is not always easy as there is no where to go except into some bushes but the bushes won’t let us in even if we wanted to drive into them.  A few days of good weather means nothing stops. The weather has been good.

The big machine I am currently most interested in lays out long strips of plastic.  After this machine has been in it, a field looks like corduroy.  There are brown mounded rows of earth and then there are long parallel strips of plastic which look white or silver depending on the light.  This method was first used for carrots but now it is used for corn and maybe for other things too.  The plastic heats up the earth underneath it and the seeds germinate faster and the plants grow faster.  This machine unrolls strips of plastic which work as incubation. As the plant grows, the plastic, which I think is biodegradable, breaks down to let the plant through.  Maybe there are little slits in the plastic to let the plant grow up.  I do not what happens as the plant grows more.  Maybe the plastic breaks down in the sun and the weather. Maybe the plastic gets ploughed back into the soil. I need to find out more about the corduroy method.

12 June Friday

A car was left with the motor running right in the center of the completely empty car park at the graveyard.  It is a very small car park so being right in the middle of it meant movement was pretty well blocked by this car.  The driver of the car was down in the graveyard visiting with someone who is buried there.  I mentioned this to a friend.  I said I found it odd.  She said it is a normal thing to stop on a daily basis to to visit your mother or whoever is buried just so that you can say whatever it is you need to say.  She said that just because someone is dead you do not need to stop talking to them.  I agreed that that is fine and I agreed that it was not unusual,  but what I wondered is wasn’t it strange to leave your motor running.  She could not agree that it was strange.  She said, Well, sure aren’t we are all in a rush this days?

13 June Saturday

I overheard one man saying to another  “She is very good-looking to talk to.”

Bottling

27 June Saturday

Everything looks dry.  The grass roof on the book barn is completely brown and dead looking.  Fields are full of bales of hay scattered around or piled up. Other fields have black wrapped plastic bales full of silage lined up or clumped in a group. The freshly cut fields are all golden.  The fields full of things like barley, and potatoes and corn are still growing.  They remain green but still there is an overall look of dryness over everything.   The boreen is lined with long meadow grasses.  There are very few scratchy things.  It is just grass. The cow parsley is either completely gone or it is just a skeleton plant now.  The grasses have never been so long in the boreen.  It is necessary to close the car windows on both sides to prevent the grasses slapping us in the face as we drive down.  It is better than the brambles and the wild roses which have grabbed at me in other years.  They tear and scratch at the skin whether I am walking or driving. I should enjoy the softness of these grasses fluffing against my face.

28 June Sunday

We went to Veronica’s funeral today.  She died on Thursday.  She had been ill for a long time but her death still took a lot of people by surprise.  The funeral was at the church in Fourmilewater which was where her husband Tom was buried five years ago.  Tom’s funeral took place on a bitterly cold winter day.  That day the priest rushed both the service and the burial because snow was falling heavily and everyone was eager to get going before the roads got too slippery.  That day the altar girls wore winter coats over their robes and so did the priest.  In contrast, today was a glorious sunny day.  The church was full.  The community really turned out.  The funeral mass took place at the same time as the usual morning mass so I do not know if everyone was there for Veronica or if they would have been there anyway.  People were wearing sleeveless dresses and light summer shirts.  I think she would have enjoyed the light and bright clothing of the crowd. The priest kept calling her A Gentle Woman.  I think that must be the female equivalent of An Inoffensive Man.   A dead man is often described as An Inoffensive Man.  I am always unsure if this is a compliment or an insult.  I wonder if being described as A Gentle Woman is a similar way to say something without saying much. When the coffin was led outside to the grave, everyone followed.  Some people walked right down the hill and into the adjoining cemetery.  Other people lined up along the concrete wall between the church and the cemetery.  Some people leaned against the wall and others stood right up on the top of it. There was a lot of quiet conversation and even some giggling as we waited for the burial.  People exchanged little anecdotes about Veronica. Everyone who had ever met her knew that she was a great talker.   The consensus seemed to be that she was well able to talk for all of Waterford. The view out across the hills was south east towards the foothills of the Comeraghs.  The hills looked stunning in the bright sun. It looked like the entire congregation stayed for the burial.

29 June Monday

Mary’s mother wanted to know some things about us.  She wanted to know how it was for Mary to work with us.  She wanted to know more about who we were than simply being two names.  Mary told her a few things that she hoped would help her mother to form a picture.  She told her mother that we had walked to Dublin a few years ago. She told her mother that we walked to Dublin because that was our idea of fun.  She explained that it took us ten days to get from our house to Dublin.  Mary’s mother asked “Do they not have a car then?”

1 July Wednesday

As of today, the cost of postage has gone up. It went up last year at the beginning of July too. I do not know if it also went up the previous year.  An International letter stamp, which is for anywhere outside of Ireland, was 1 euro yesterday.  Today it is 1 euro 5 cent.  The domestic, or National, stamps have gone from 68 cent to 70 cent.  There are two ways to buy stamps.  If the postmistress sells them to me directly, she prints the stamps out from her computer and each stamp has a different picture on it.  If I buy a book of stamps the pictures will be the same for all ten stamps. The new National stamp has the head of a handsome red fox.  The International stamp has the head of an otter.  I would prefer to be using the fox but unfortunately the majority of what we post is going out of the country.

2 July Thursday

We had the big table all lined with books and cards.  Every pile of publications had a little piece of paper on it with the year.  The earliest year was 1964.  We had twenty five years spread out.  We could not fit everything on the table up to the present day. That will involve a second laying out.  This was the first installment of sorting.  The three of us were organizing, placing, re-positioning and listing the books and cards for several hours.  For the entire time we were working the door to the barn was wide open.  We needed the air.  The upstairs door was open too.  We had a nice little cross breeze keeping us from being too hot.  Suddenly a big gust of wind blew in.  Every little piece of paper with the dates written on it blew off the table.  I had jiggled the piles around at one point to make them fit the table better.  Sadly, that meant the piles were no longer in chronological order.  Getting the piles re-identified was frustrating   It all took far longer than we would have liked.

3 July Friday

I went out last night in the early evening sun to pick elderflowers for making cordial.  I was really tired and it was really hot, but I had to do it.  The blossoms are starting to go over.  I knew if I did not gather them then, I might just miss them for this year. They looked so plentiful and big and round and creamy in the distance but getting up close to them was not easy.  It was still hot but I put on long trousers and long sleeves and welly boots and took a basket and some scissors.  Not one of the easy to reach trees had any useful blossoms left anywhere low enough for me to reach.  I walked up the boreen and then I walked down again. I went out into the fields and all around the edges of Scully’s wood.  Wherever I could see good blossoms I had a struggle to get close.  Most of the trees had deep swathes of tall nettles growing right in front of them.  In some places there was two metres of nettle between me and the tree.  The top of the nettles was as high as my face and wading through the dense growth was hard. My face and neck and hands were thoroughly stung.  Not one of the several paths made by the fox to go in and out of the wood from the field was of any use to me.  It took me a ridiculously long time to collect my forty blossoms.  But I did it.  The cordial is made and is now it is infusing for 24 hours.  Later I will no doubt be glad that I did this, but when I finished last night I was only annoyed with the whole process.

4 July Saturday

I finished bottling my cordial just minutes before the rain came lashing down.  Everyone has been wanting this rain.  The gentle rain of last night was perfect for sleeping, but everyone at the market today agreed that such a gentle rain was tantamount to useless for gardens and crops. This loud beating rain is bound to cheer everyone up as long as it continues for more than a few hours.

Four Bianconi horse-driven carriages traveled from Clonmel to Cahir this morning in a re-creation of their historic journeys.  People were lined up waiting for them.  They were expected at 11 am and they arrived at 11.45.  One man told me that that was spot-on for Irish timing.  One side of the usual market area was cordoned off so that the horses and carriages could be on display there when they arrived.  It meant that David the egg man, Pat with his vegetables and the English man who sells potted plants all had to relocate for the day.  One man walked into the market and exclaimed “You’re all to one side like the town of Fermoy!”  It was good to hear the expression.  I had only heard it once before many years ago when Rose said it to someone who was walking with an exaggerated  limp in order to get sympathy.

A Cold Kettle.

5 July Sunday

A sign on a tree is advertising A SILAGE EXTRAVAGANZA — Family Day. I have no idea what a Silage Extravaganza might entail, but I assume the farmers will be cheerful to be celebrating.

6 July Monday

It was all day wet today.  The rain varied between lashing and just coming down.  It was never a mere drizzle and it was never warm.  It is July and it is chilly and wet and hateful.  I spoke to Marianne who was pleased that it was raining because she felt she now had an excuse to stay inside and watch the afternoon match at Wimbledon.  She was delighted with her change of plan until she remembered that their television does not work properly in the rain. The screen shows nothing but static when it rains which is not very good for tennis.  I set off for a walk at one point because I felt I just had to move.  If Em were still alive, I would of course be going for a walk.  She was not bothered about the rain.  If we all stopped everything in this country every time it rained no one would ever get a thing done. I dressed in full waterproofs and headed off and up the Mass path.  I did not get any further than the stream.  Branches have fallen and brambles have thickened and there was no way I could push my way through.  I got down on my knees to crawl but even that did not work.  I was trapped.  The growth was dense and clawing at me.  Everything was dripping.  The only way through will be with a saw and some secautars. That was not a job to do in the rain and that was not a job to do when what I wanted was a walk. I went the other way, up the boreen and out onto the road and once I met Oscar, we were both happy to march along in the gusty rain.  I wondered if maybe walking with a dog was even more of what I needed than simply walking.

7 July Tuesday

We do not have mosquitoes.  Summer guests are always surprised and even a little confused that we have no biting bugs of any sort. We have no screens on our windows.  The only reason we ever close our windows in summer is if it gets too cold, or maybe if the rain is being blown in a particular direction.  I can feel smug about the lack of biting insects but I am less self-satisfied when I think about the slugs.  This has been a bad week for slugs.  There is always a slug in the bathroom at night.  I have taken to closing the window tightly quite early in the evening.  I have put the plug into the bathtub.  Now I am thinking that maybe I have not been keeping the night slugs out. I am not stopping a slug who might have oozed up the wall and in through the window.  I fear that they are already inside and that during the day they are simply staying out of sight under the tub or somewhere dark.  At night they come out and travel around. A few nights ago, I picked up my glasses and touched a slug that was draped around the bow.  I dropped the glasses with a little shriek.  I am lucky that they did not break on the stone floor.  I am not afraid of slugs but I find them horrible to touch.  I do not wish to be surprised by the feel of a slug.  The next night I found a medium-sized slug stretched out on the side of the sink as though it were sunbathing.  It had a little curve in the body which suggested more than just sleeping.  I threw that one out the window.  Last night I found another slug curled around my toothbrush.  It was not on the bristles.  It was down where my hand holds the toothbrush, but that does not mean it had not already crawled over the bristles. I used to dread stepping on a slug in my bare feet in the night.  Now I feel I am under attack.

8 July Wednesday

First I learned the word Perisher.  I learned that I am a Perisher.  Being one who feels the cold and is always taking my sweater on or off, I am pleased with this new word.  I often find myself telling people that I am a Perisher.  I am interested to know if absolutely everyone else knew this word long before I ever even heard it. I mentioned it to someone recently and she said “Ah, you mean to say that you are a Cold Kettle!”  This is another way of saying the same thing, but these are words that belong to a different part of the country.

9 July Thursday

Margaret noticed that a fox was coming to eat the food that she had placed out for her dog.  She started to put extra food out when her dog was safely inside the house.  She kept a watch and saw the fox arriving and gobbling the food.  She changed the position of the bowl so that it now sits up on her wall.  She no longer has to worry about the dog getting the foxes food.  She is also able to watch the fox easily from inside her house.  She can not go too near to the window as the fox will sense her presence.  She stands back in the room a little ways.  She can look out but the fox can not see her.  Margaret tells everyone about her fox.  She has started to speak of him as her pet fox.  People are discussing this among themselves. The Knocklofty road is a busy road and the bend where Margaret lives is a bit of a blind bend.  People zip around there quickly in their cars. Some people think that it is wonderful that Margaret has this pet fox to feed and to watch and to think about.  Other people think it is an accident waiting to happen.  Either the fox himself will be hit by a car or else a car will swerve to avoid the fox as he jumps up or down from the wall directly into the road and there will be some sort of a crash. They shake their heads and make distressed sounds when they discuss the potential disaster.  There is not one person who does not have an opinion about the feeding of this fox.  I am wondering if this fox is the fox who lives up in Scully’s wood, or if it is a completely other fox who might live down in the quarry.

10 July Friday

Simon has been lightly cooking gooseberries with a few elderflower blossoms.  The perfume off this combination is wonderful.  It is more like muscat than like what it is. The blossom is just about gone now.  We are hoping that later in the year we will be able to recreate this taste of summer by using my elderflower cordial in place of the actual blossoms.  There is a good supply of gooseberries stored in the freezer.  I feel wealthy when I see them in there.

white (rose) bay willow herb

11 July Saturday

I met the man who walks down the river every Saturday morning. I do not see him every week but I know that whether I see him or not, he does the exact same walk every Saturday.  He told me that he walks every single day and that where he will walk that day is the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up.  He gave up smoking five years ago and started to walk daily. Now he cannot live without his walking.  Most of his walks are circular walks but on Saturday he walks the road from his house and drops down through the woods and then he walks the river path. He walks into Cahir and does one errand and then he turns around and walks home with his single purchase in a white plastic bag.  He carries the white plastic bag in his pocket.  The walk takes him exactly two hours.  Today I asked him why he does not try using a small back pack so that his hands are free when he does his return journey.  He said that he has a backpack at home but his wife will not let him use it here close to home.  She says that people will think ill of him if he uses a back pack in the local area.  She said that people will think that he has some sort of attitude or that he is trying to get attention.  She only allows him to use the back pack when they go away on holiday.

12 July Sunday

There is a large clump of white rose bay willow herb in bloom beside the round topped shed. I had never heard of nor seen the white version.  I am not sure if it is called white rose bay willow herb or just white bay willow herb. Laurie sent me some from Scotland.  She wadded wet paper towels around the roots and loosely wrapped it all in a plastic bag.  It arrived through the post in a padded envelope in only a few days.  It survived the journey well.  The plants have taken a few years to root and to settle.  This year is the best it has ever been.  The white blossom on tall stalks against the stone wall is beautiful.   Today’s watery grey light makes the white look whiter.

Shredded wood

30 July Thursday

There is a stack of plastic wrapped bales of silage in the field. It is not unusual to see plastic wrapped bales piled up, especially not at this time of year when everyone is rushing to cut and prepare their silage for winter. What is unusual is that these bales are not wrapped in the normal black plastic.  These bales are wrapped in bright pink plastic.  Bright pink is not a colour that we come across very often in our landscape.  I did a double-take when I saw these.  I nearly drove off the road.  Later I was told that the Co-op is selling this pink plastic and each time it is purchased by a farmer a percentage of the cost goes toward supporting research and treatment for breast cancer.

31 July Friday

A Fun Dog Show is schedualed for August.  There are five classes listed for Pure Bred Dogs and nine classes for Fun. One of the Fun classes is for Rescue Dogs in Best Condition.  I have been wondering about this.  Are these dogs who were rescued and are now in good shape, or are these dogs who have led a life of rescuing others and who are still in good condition despite all of their work?

1 August Saturday

A coach load of tourists from Israel arrived at the market.  They were there to see the castle and the cottage and since the farmer’s market was on they looked around. Many of them took photographs.  It is not easy for tourists on buses to buy things at the market as they are usually eating in restaurants and hotels and many of the market goods are in need cooking or preparation.  Things like eggs and fish and broccoli are not going to be very interesting for them.  They can buy apples or berries and maybe individual cookies or cakes.  Wooden egg cups tend to be popular as they are small and not perishable. Today one Israeli tourist bought fresh garlic from Jim and Keith.  Pretty soon another one came and bought some garlic.  Then another.  At least half of the busload of tourists bought Jim’s garlic.  More people might have bought the garlic but he ran out before they could do so.  It seemed an odd souvenir.

3 August Monday Bank Holiday

There was torrential rain last night.  It started at about five o’clock and continued all night long.  I woke up several times and heard it coming down hard.  By morning it had stopped and the sky was not clear but there was a bit of brightness in it.  We took a walk over Joe’s fields.  The long grass was wet and the grass which had been eaten down short by the cows was wet.  When we got to the dirt track the mud was deep.  The mud sucked at our boots as we walked up the hill.  There was the regular after rain mud and then there was mud which had been churned up by the cows walking through it. There was mud which was a slippery mix of fresh manure and rain and mud.  Then there were puddles which were full of muddy water and other puddles which were full of a mixture of rain water and cow pee. The different kinds of puddles were distinctive by the type of liquid in them.  The track is long so there was plenty of time to consider all of this mud.  When we reached the farmyard and went out of the gate and onto the road, we scuffed along in the grass to clean our boots.  We always walk in this same stretch of grass to clean our boots after a particularly mucky walk up the track.  Walking backwards, then forwards and a bit sideways through the long grass is the method for cleaning up.

4 August Tuesday

Everything is closed.  Well, not everything, but a lot of things.  The framer is gone for his two week holiday.  The tool hire place and the lawn-mower repair place are both closed.  The wood yard is closed.  The electrical supply place is closed.  Most workmen take this time off as even if they were trying to do a job no one else would be open for them to purchase materials.  It is the same two weeks each summer and every year it takes us by surprise.

5 August Wednesday

The raspberries are coming ripe.  They seem a bit early but I am not complaining.  They are delicious.  The black currants need picking.  Mostly we have very little growing this year.  A lot of apples are ripening on all but one of the trees but plums are not doing well. Maybe the plums will come later.  Even the sweet peas are fewer than normal. The figs are plentiful on the tree, but I wonder if there will be enough heat for them to ripen. The weather is so un-summery and grey and cool it is hard to know if the plants know to continue or if they are just skipping the season.

6 August Thursday

Joe has an open platform system for wintering his cows.  The cows stand on this big concrete platform which has  lots of drainage.  There is no roof over the cows all winter.  This worries me.  Joe assures me that the cows do not mind.  They are most concerned that their feet are not wet. It is bad for cows to have ice forming in their hooves.  It is bad for cows to have wet feet all day and all night.  The drainage in the platform keeps their feet dry.  Once, or maybe twice a year, an enormous load of wood shavings gets delivered.  It is dumped in the yard.  The pile is bigger than a large lorry.  It is not really shavings, it is more like long thin shredded pieces of wood.  Joe cleans all of the old wood stuff off the platform and then spreads the new shredded wood so that the surface will be ready when the cows are no longer able to be out in the fields all day. He has been doing this work over the last few days.  I love it when the pile of shredded wood arrives.  It smells good.  Then I enjoy seeing it disappearing one load at a time.  Winter seems a long time away but I guess it is wise to be ready.

Every night there are slugs.

7 August Friday

I spoke to a young man who regretted that he had never been inside a pub where people were smoking.  He was too young.  The smoking ban had already been in place well before he started going to any pub.  He had heard of the strong smell of old cigarette smoke mixed with the smell of fresh cigarettes and pipes and cigars.  He had heard stories about yellowed paintwork and nearly brown ceilings after years of smoke held inside in bars with closed doors and closed windows.   He was proud that the ban on cigarette smoking in public places was one of the first such national bans. But he sort of felt like he had missed something.

9 August Sunday

I strolled down the meadow path this evening.  Earlier in the day Simon finished making a new bench which he made with a long piece of Douglas fir.  He had been saving the wood for a long time waiting until he knew just what to do with it.   The new bench was just the right thing.  I sat on the new bench and looked at the pink clouds.  It was a beautiful evening.  I admired my new vantage point. I had never sat in just this spot.  I knew right away that I would enjoy sitting exactly here in the future.  I thought about Em and about how often I had stood down there in the dark just waiting for her to finish barking and to come back and join me. I thought about sitting on the bench in the darkness later in the year.  It might be a bit lonely to just sit there unable to see a thing if the sitting were not also waiting.  Tonight the cows were all in the adjoining field.  I could not see them through the bushes, but I could hear them pulling and tearing grass. It was a companionable kind of quiet.

10 August Monday

John the Post is not well.  He had surgery last year.  I thought he was getting stronger but he is now off work again.  When I last saw him a few weeks ago, he did not look good.  He was in a lot of pain.  For now we get our post delivered by Mick or Tom or Lee.  If Lee is on, the delivery is very early in the morning. He arrives so early that we rarely even see him.  If Mick or Tom are on, there is a chance we will receive some news about John.

11 August Tuesday

Mary arrived this morning.  She and Simon had just started working on their separate computers.  I was half-way listening to them discussing plans for the day and halfway listening to a lot of noisy bellowing from the cows in the field.  I looked out the kitchen window and saw two cows in the yard.  I rushed out and Mary rushed out behind me.  We chased the cows down the meadow and they jumped over the banking back into the field the way they had come in.  They had broken through the last section of the fence.  Maybe they wanted to get at the apples.    Just as we were congratulating ourselves, we discovered five more cows running up towards Johnnie Mackin’s.  Or they had been running up towards Johnnie Mackin’s but now they were coming back.  They saw us and turned around again.  Simon was guarding the place where the cows were trying to come back in from the field.  Each time he turned his back a cow jumped the banking.   Mary followed the ones up the boreen and managed to drive three of them back down and over to Simon.  Joe was on holiday but I got through to his brother Michael who was just having a cup of tea.  He came rushing down with Tommie, the young man who is taking care of Joe’s herd while he is away.  It was all exciting and chaotic.  They both had short lengths of stiff black rubber hose to wave at the cows.  We had sticks.  Two of the cows who were being pursued up the mass path by Mary crashed over another banking and off into Paul’s field.  Tommie went after them and drove them across the high field toward Paul’s farm yard and eventually to the road.  Except for those two,  the rest of the cows are back on their own side of the fence.  Every single one of them is lying down and they are all silent.  The broken fence is  blocked off with one of Simon’s old wooden gutters.  He has been wanting to find a use for those gutters.

12 August Wednesday

Every night there are slugs in the bathroom.  I never find them anywhere else in the house. That is not to say that they are not anywhere else.  I just do not see them anywhere else.  I throw at least two out the window each evening.  In the morning, I try to remember to pick up the pieces of tissue off the ground outside.  Maybe the same two or three slugs just creep back up the wall and into the window every day.  Even on the nights when I do not see any slugs, I know they have been there.  I see their wiggly trails all over the steamed up mirror in the morning.

Rubber bands on the path

13 August Thursday

Three of us took a walk in Killballyboy woods.  Sometimes the path we were on was narrow and sometimes it widened.  We walked side by side or single file or two together and one alone.  Our positions were changing constantly.  The track was not rough so we did not have to look down all the time but still it was important to scan the area ahead for roots or stones or holes as we walked.  Early on I noticed a rubber band on the ground.  It was a nice fat rubber band and it looked new.  I like rubber bands.  I noted that it was a good one.  Minutes later I saw several more rubber bands.  These were also thick and also new. To see one or even two rubber bands out in the woods is not noteworthy.  Walkers might have them on their their lunch bags, or they might be used to hold something onto a pack.  They might have been on someone’s wrist or in a pocket.  Very quickly, I realized that the number of rubber bands which I was seeing was not a normal amount of rubber bands to be finding on a forest path.

Later, I learned that this wooded area, which has been completely invaded by rhododendrons, is a popular spot for people who export the leaves.  Each bunch of leaves on thin branches is held together with a rubber band.  These are then shipped to Holland where the Dutch like them.  I do not know what the Dutch do with these bunches of rhododendron leaves.  Maybe they arrange them as greenery with various kinds of flowers.  The industrial scale cutting and gathering of these leaves is not legal in the forest. The people doing the exporting hire Romanian workers who work deep in the forest well out of sight of the paths.  The workers then gather somewhere discreetly at the end of the day to load the gathered leafy bunches into trucks.  It is hard to imagine how many bunches of rhododendron leaves it takes to fill a lorry.  The rubber bands are the only sign that the pickers have been there.

14 August Friday

Everywhere feels quiet.  The land is quiet.  There is little birdsong to be heard.  It is so quiet that it nearly feels worrying.  Someone told me that the silence of the birds is because they are moulting.  I do not understand the logic of this but it is something to think about.

15 August Saturday

There was another escape of cows.  There are always cows escaping.  This lot got out of their field, went down the Long Field,  then took a left onto the Ardfinnan road and took a right down the hill and into the village.  One of the cows bit a chunk of hay out of the Two Bale High Man who is standing at the corner near the bridge advertising a fun event.  After the cows crossed the bridge into the village, they spread out in all directions.  Local estimates claim that there were 80 cows.  It was 2 in the morning when they were discovered.  I do not know how long they were there before someone noticed them. Most interesting was how anyone figured out where they had come from.  Who would miss their cows at 2 am?  And these cows had made a journey of 4.5 kilometres from the farm where they lived.

16 August Sunday

The announcer on the radio spoke about how a player in today’s match had made a long reach.  He said He was Stretched Out Long, As Though It Were Morning and He Was Still On The Bed.

18 August Tuesday

I saw another bunch of the bright pink silage bales in a field today.  They were piled, placed and shaped together to look like a tractor and trailer.

19 August Wednesday

We woke up to rain.  It was heavy beating rain. We had been warned that this rain was coming and that it would continue for a few days this week.  The wet air felt different.  It felt like summer might be over.  I was sad.  Then I decided to cheer up and to believe the forecast that promised better weather for Friday and the weekend. The postman promised that They are Giving Good for the Weekend.  This is an often used expression and one can always choose to believe it, or not.

Andrzej arrived to do some heavy outdoor work.  The early lashing rain had changed into a soaking drizzle but it was still much too wet for him to even consider doing anything.  Then we understood that he had made the trip specially to bring us a big plastic container full of fileted mackerel which he caught in the sea last night.  He said it was only a few hours since he caught it and that we must eat it fresh for lunch. We were delighted and he drove off happy with his gift-giving.  I worried that he might meet Mary in the boreen forcing one of them into a difficult backing up.   Fortunately, she was late.  She came in announcing that she had brought lunch today for us all.  She brought bread and a rhubarb tart and mackerel.  Lucky for us that her mackerel is smoked so we are spared eating a mountain of fresh fish for lunch.

My favorite honey label

20 August Thursday

I bought a Half Sliced Pan.  Or a Half Pan Sliced.  I can never remember which way to speak about this bread.  It is sliced bread available as a small or half loaf.  I do not like this bread and I do not buy it often but some days and in some shops it is the only bread to buy.  The reason I mention it is that when I opened the package to take out a slice of bread the first thing I saw was a piece of cardboard in the shape of a piece of bread.  It had rounded bottom corners and the top was rounded.  The cardboard had one shiny side and one rough side.  The cardboard was white and the bread was brown. The cardboard was not heavy.  It was like shirt cardboard.  It was not strong enough to protect the bread if something heavy fell on top of it. There were not two pieces of card, one at each end.   I have no idea what function the shaped bit of card had for the half loaf of bread.

21 August Friday

Patsy Tom sat up on a high stool in Rose’s.   He sat at the same stool in the corner where he always sits.  He announced that he had been speaking with a man who told him that you cannot have a road without two ditches. As the hedges bordering each road are called ditches, we are used to seeing them on the sides of just about every road we traverse.  I could not understand what the issue was.  Instead, this was an opener for what became a long and heated conversation.  Everyone within earshot had an opinion about this man’s statement.  I left before anything was resolved.

22 August Saturday

Blackberries are ripening by the day.  It does not matter if the days have been hot or if there has been a lot of rain.  Every time I walk up and down the boreen or anywhere at all, I see hundreds of berries.  I stop to eat as I walk.  Sometimes I take a container and I pick the berries to bring home.  Sometimes I am just noting a location that offers easy picking and loads of berries so that I can return.

23 August Sunday

Em died a year ago today.  I still miss her. I miss her everyday.  I miss her in funny places and at odd moments.  I mostly miss her when I am out on a walk.  I miss her when I am out on a walk with another dog who is not her. I miss the sound of her soft snoring and the sound of her feet tapping through the house in the night.  I miss the lapping sound of her tongue in her water bowl. I would not say I am mourning.  I am just noting her absence.  Her sounds were part of the house sounds. Her bed is still in place. Her lead is still on the floor of the car.  Her water bowls, both indoors and outdoors, get re-filled regularly.  Visiting dogs use them. There does not seem to be any reason to move these things since they are getting used regularly. People ask weekly if we have thought about getting a new dog.  We have thought about getting a new dog but we have done nothing about getting a new dog.

25 August Tuesday

We have been given an Eircode.  There was a letter in the post which assigned us this seven digit number.  The letter tells us that we do not have to use this code when writing our address.  The letter is written in a pleasant tone.  It implies that it is understood that most people do not like change therefore no one is being asked to change.   The letter has a tear-out card at the top which we are instructed to carry in our wallets.  If we do not actually need to use the Eircode, I am not sure why it would be useful for us to carry the number around with us.  One of the benefits is supposedly for ordering things on the internet.  For years we have had to write a bunch of zeros or a random number whenever we were asked for a postal code. Now we can give this number.  Already we are hearing stories that it is no good to put the number into a GPS or any other kind of system.  I thought perhaps it would make deliveries by couriers easier as there are so few road signs in the countryside and there is such bad phone coverage and there is never a person to ask for help with directions when out driving.  The Eircode has not yet been set up to be used by any computer or satellite system.  So far, it is no more useful than not having a number.

26 August Wednesday

Mick is disturbed by the sugar spoon. He knows that he always has four heaped teaspoons of sugar in his tea.  The spoon in my sugar bowl is made of cherry wood.  It was carved by a friend.  I like having it in the sugar bowl so that we can see it everyday. Mick is confused because the bowl of my spoon is bigger than the teaspoon he would ordinarily use.  He wants to have one spoon to portion out his sugar and then he wants to stir his tea with the same spoon.  The teaspoon is the measure. Since my spoon is not the teaspoon he has lost his measure.  He does not enjoy adapting.  I usually try to put out a regular teaspoon when he is here but today I forgot.  He is too polite to say anything about the incorrect kind of spoon but his discomfort is obvious.

27 August Thursday

I went down to the shop and did a few errands.  I was a bit early so I sat in the car and read the newspaper.  Then I got out of the car and I leaned against it.  I looked around and I watched people coming and going.  The village is a busy place in the morning.  There were delivery men unloading things from trucks and vans. One would finish and leave and then another would arrive.  People went into the food shop and the post office.  Other people went into the hardware shop.  Some people went in and out of both places.  People stood and talked with one another outside the shop or with one person already in their car and the other outside talking through an open window.  Everyone had things to do.  I recognized everyone I saw.  Some people I knew by name and some people I only knew by sight.  Or maybe I did not recognize them but I knew their vehicle.

Tommie came down the road slowly.  Tommie always drives slowly.  He pulled up to the curb.  He did not pull up very close to the curb but it was close enough.  His car was not exactly blocking the road but it was making the thoroughfare into a single lane road rather than a place where two vehicles can pass each other.  He got out of the car and left the door open while he came over to say hello. We spoke a little about things in general.  We spoke about the weather and about his wife Margaret, who is not well, and about all the farmers getting their hay and silage in.  I told him that I was waiting to meet someone.  I said that I was waiting to meet a man so that I could lead him with my car to our house.  I said it was easier to do this than it is to give directions.  I told Tommie that I did not know the man I was waiting to meet.  I did not know if he was old or he was young.  I did not know what kind of a car he would be driving.  I did not know one single thing about what he would look like.  I said that so far I had recognized everyone I had seen so I knew that not one of those people was the man I was waiting for.  Tommie reassured me.  I was not at all worried, but he felt I needed reassurance.  He said You will know right away when you see the person you are waiting for even if you have never seen him before.

28 August Friday

It used to be easy to buy nice honey wherever we went while traveling. It was lovely to return home with honey from somewhere else.  Honey made by bees eating different things tastes very different.  I like to bring honey as a gift and I like to eat honey.  I like noticing the difference of honey made by bees eating lavender or heather or apple blossom. I have almost stopped looking for honey when I am away from here.  I read a lot about the dangerous disappearance of bees in the world.  Bees are dying everywhere. So far we are still surrounded by lots of bees and lots of honey, but not everyone is.  Those who have it are less apt to be selling what little they have.

Blue knot

29 August Saturday

Potatoes which fall apart when they are cooked will always fall apart when they are cooked.  These terrible potatoes cannot be trusted for making potato salad.   Potato salad made of cooked floury potatoes becomes a kind of cold mashed potato mush with some salad-ish seasoning.  Today I saw pots of it in the deli section of a shop.  It was labelled Smooth Potato Salad.  It is a shocking thing to receive this when anticipating potato salad.

30 August Sunday

I listened to Jimmie. He was giving out to anyone who would listen.  He said he had been on his way to Limerick.  He said he was not actually going to Limerick, he was going to a place well beyond Limerick.  He decided before he got to where he was going that it was always the same.  He said The more you go West you realize you should be going East.

31 August Monday

We have had no internet since Saturday.  Our signal comes off the roof of Michael Hickey’s house.  As always when there is a signal problem, we telephoned Michael. He told us that his own service is just fine.  We had to wait until today when the office in Waterford was open.  They sent up two Polish men with ladders and binoculars.  The men did things inside the house and they did things outside the house. We cut down a tree two weeks ago to clear the Line of Sight which makes the internet signal possible. For a while we had a signal, but then we did not. The tree could have stayed where it was. The men decided to hook up the signal box from one side of the chimney.  That did not work.  One man waved a receiving box in the air on the end of a long stick while the other kept an eye on his computer, and shouted back and forth in Polish.  Finally they found a spot one and a half metres above the flat kitchen roof. They put up the box on a bracket and a pipe.  It looks pretty awful.  We are trying to convince ourselves that it is not so bad.  We are trying to remind ourselves that we want the internet and that for now this is the only way we can have it down in this valley.  We are trying to convince ourselves that we will learn to love this box on a pole.   It looks like we are living in a submarine.

1 September Tuesday

The opticians has a sign saying that they open at 8.45.  Their website also says they open at 8.45.  When questioned about this, they said No, they actually open at 9.40.  They do not see any reason to change the listed information as everyone knows that they open at 9.40.

2 September Wednesday

The house on the hill opposite has been under construction all summer. We are increasingly aware of it.  The scaffolding has now been removed.  A red van has been parked in front for a few days now.  The van looks tiny from here but the red draws my eye.  The gap left by the tree which we removed for the internet signal makes the house more visible.  It was easier to ignore it before.  The house is big.  It is too big. It is annoyingly symmetrical.  It is at least three kilometres away as the crow flies and eight kilometres by road. I fear this house will be the kind of house which wants to show itself off.  It will be the kind of house which shines lights on itself at night so that any people passing will not be able to miss it. It is on a road with almost no traffic.  The blinds will be pulled down so the people inside will not be disturbed by the lights but for us far across the valley we will be constantly reminded of this house. I hope I am wrong about this.

3 September Thursday

Breda, Molly and I walked in the mountains this morning.  The sky was grey and heavy looking but we felt sure that it would not rain. It is always a pleasure to be in such a high and empty place with only a ten minute drive from home. The heather is in bloom.  From a distance it shows itself as a smudge of colour across the hills. Up close it is brilliant and reads as many different shades of pink and rose and purple. The sheep scattered around are all looking wretched.  They have been shorn.  Their skin looks scruffy and baggy.  The red or blue paint markings look more like bruises and wounds because of the lack of hair. The mountains are all commonage which means more than one farmer can feed sheep up there.  There are no fences.  The coloured markings are all that distinguish the sheep of one farmer from the sheep of another farmer. The sheep meander about in groups. They run away at the slightest provocation or sometimes for no reason at all. Many of them were interested in Molly but she is too well-behaved to chase them.  At times I think they set off running just to see if she will give chase.

We walked past a tree with a knot of blue rope hanging from a branch.  There was a piece of white plastic hanging beside the rope.  I did not pay much attention to either thing.  Breda told me that they had been put there to mark the way for the recent mass at the Mass Rock. I have never been to the yearly mass up there since I do not go to any mass ever except for the occasional Funeral Mass. Now I wish I had gone to this mass.  We saw tracks from a tractor. Breda told me the tractor pulled a trailer load of people up to the Mass Rock. The people were all standing up in the trailer.  There were no seats and anyway there was no room to sit.  The passengers were all people who would not walk or could not walk up to the rock. Most of the people in the trailer were older people. Maybe some mothers with small children were in the trailer too. Everyone was packed in upright and the number of bodies held up the rest of the bodies. Other people walked up from wherever they were able to park to get near to the Rock.  The little single track road was completely blocked by cars. The rope knot and the plastic were tied onto the branch just in case people lost their way on route through the boggy undergrowth.

Desirable parking positions

4 September Friday

I do not go to Dublin often.  I never want to go to Dublin.  I never have an urge to rush up to Dublin simply because I have not been there for a while.  I know Dublin is there but somehow I do not need it. It is not that I do not like cities.  I love cities and there are cities I look forward to visiting and re-visiting.  Dublin is not one of them.  For most people the capital city is the place to go because it is full of pleasures. I always feel disappointed after a trip to Dublin.

As a result of my foot-dragging relationship with this city, I have missed something I really wanted to do there.  Back in January, Donal told me about two short films which could be seen at the An Post Museum in the General Post Office.  One was of a postman in Donegal doing his rounds.  The other film was watching somebody sorting the post in the Athlone center. I put a reminder up on my wall.  I looked at it often. I have been to Dublin a few times but it was never the right time.  It was either a busy day for errands, or just passing through on the way to a plane or a ferry, or it was a Sunday.  For various reasons, I failed to get to the GPO during opening hours.

I finally got there this week. I finally made it a priority on my list of things to do. Unfortunately the museum has been closed.  It will not be re-opened until next year and then it will no longer be a museum but an Interpretive Center. The reason for the renovation and the re-naming is because of the anniversary of the 1916 Uprising.  Perhaps the museum will be exactly the same when it re-opens.  I will not know if it is the same.  The woman at the nearby Philatelic Counter could not tell me if the films will be included in the new Interpretive Center.  She was not even vaguely interested. Her job was selling stamps to collectors.  And because the museum had been closed she was required to sell a few of their souvenirs because her counter was nearest to the closed door.  I bought four postcards.  She was not happy with her added workload.

5 September Saturday

The big cow flap down near the stream has stayed in an unusually liquid state for a long time.  It was deposited by a cow during the break out or break in through the meadow.  That must be several weeks ago now.  Normally manure forms a crust over the top.  The underneath stuff remains wet and mushy but the top crust forms and then slowly the whole thing dries from the top down.  This manure has looked the same for all the time it has been there.  I think maybe the top crust has not formed because it is well shaded by the chestnut tree and other bushes.  I think there is not one bit of sun all day long in that spot.  I will continue to hop over it each time I walk the path but I will be glad when it has broken down into mud.

6 September Sunday

Heading to the village to get the papers this morning, I thought I was early enough to miss the crowd arriving for mass.   A short wait behind Tomas’ cows on the road meant that I arrived exactly at the time as many others were arriving.  The desirable parking positions in front of the shop were already filled.  Every single car had backed in so that they could easily drive out after mass. This is a way for the people in the cars to stay sitting in their seats so that they can watch everyone else arriving.  They can stay in their cars right up until the last minute. This is especially good on a wet day. People were walking toward the church from all directions.  It was a lovely morning so people stopped as they met one another and they chatted on the pavement. There was no reason why people could not talk while they walked but every single person stopped walking to talk.  Some cars halted to let out an older person and then the car went off to park.  No one parks directly in front of the church. That is one space always left open. A lot of men have the habit of dropping their wife off and then they go to find a parking spot. This way they arrive separately.  They do not go into the church together.  They just meet up again when it is all over. The men were all tidy in their new sweaters and most of the women wore cardigans. It was a lovely morning but still there was a chill in it.

7 September Monday

I was on the road returning home.  A car came around the far corner just as a small rabbit ran out and ran diagonally across the road.  The other car accelerated and aimed at the rabbit.  He was racing toward the rabbit and he was racing toward me.  The rabbit jumped into the bushes just at the last minute.  The rabbit escaped. The driver swerved at the last minute and did not smash into me.  He passed me with a big smile and a wave.  If he had been a young man I would have thought he was a creep.  But he was an older man with white hair and a round cheerful face.  I still thought badly of him, but my disgust was mixed with shock.

8 September Tuesday

SuperValu is having a French Food & Wine Sale. There is a large handwritten sign outside the shop.  Beside the sign is a mannequin dressed up to appear French.  It is wearing black trousers and a black and white horizontally striped shirt.  I think the striped shirt is supposed to look like a Breton shirt.  It looks more like a shirt worn by a gondolier in Venice.  The very white arms and feet of the mannequin are visible but it has no head.  A black beret rests on the neck, nearly hiding a jaunty red neckerchief.

Five men named John

9 September Wednesday

Someone is camping near the edge of the road as we drive through Marlfield. A brown and orange tent is set up just outside the big field on a small mown corner of grass. The tent is tidy and self-contained.  I have been noticing it for two or three weeks.  Today the man who lives in the tent was sitting on a lawn chair in the drizzle with a large umbrella.  He was facing out toward the hill.  Last week I saw him in the chair under the umbrella but that day he was facing the road.  When the man is not sitting in the chair the chair is put away inside the tent. There is not any of the stuff of camping visible.  There is neither a fire place nor a cooking stove. Nor is there a lot of passing traffic to watch.  There are no cattle in the field right now either.  The field was part of a big plan to turn the area around Marlfield House into a fancy golf course a few years ago.  The project ran out of money before it was finished.  Now all of the fields around the big house are back to being used for grazing cattle and for growing hay. It is an odd place to set up camp.  It is an empty and slightly lonely spot but it is not a very private spot.

10 September Thursday

The elderly lady at The Cross keeps an eye on the road.  I rarely see her.  I do not think she goes out often.  I saw her at the ceremony to install a commemorative stone for five local men named John who all fought and died in WWI. She was sitting in the front of the two short rows of chairs which had been set up for older people.  She was pleased to greet me.  She commented immediately that since we now drove only one car rather than two, it was easier for her to keep track of our movements.  I next saw her at her brother-in-law’s funeral.  She asked me why I do not wave to her as I pass the house.  She said that most people salute or sound their horn as they pass.  Now I wave each time I pass the house.  I do not know which window is the room where she sits.  Simon and I have decided that her room is the end room on the front of the house so I slow down and wave directly at that window no matter which direction I am coming from.  If it is late, we sometimes say to each other that she must have gone to bed so we need not wave.  We cannot see anyone through the window so I have no idea if she is waving back or if she is sitting there at all.  There is a fair chance that I am be waving at the wrong window. I just do not want to be reprimanded again.

12 September Saturday

There is stuff to collect. Apples have been disappointing.  I thought it was just our own trees, but I understand there are problems all around, even over at the Apple Farm.  Some varieties just fell off the trees early and unripe.  Others have ripened but lack flavour and texture. Our figs are doing remarkably well considering this is not really a fig-growing climate. I have to squeeze and test them at the end of the afternoon as the wasps are all over them in the daytime and birds get them in the early morning.  I do not like to compete with the wasps.  I gather most of the figs a little unripe and let them ripen inside the house.  The blotcheens are coming ripe but they are not plentiful.  Most plums have had a bad year.  The wild damsons sort of shriveled on the branches before they ripened. I marked three different puffballs with sticks in the ground and kept checking them every day.  They have shriveled up into nothing.  Raspberries and blackberries are rampant. I pick masses of them daily. And the Cavolo Nero, which is a glorious shade of green, just goes on and on.

13 September Sunday

Lambert’s garage has four floral displays on show.  The plants are each hanging out of a tyre.  The tyres have been painted different colours.  At intervals across the building the tyres are white, red, yellow and blue.  The paint does not work too well on the yellow one, but the idea is there.

Cluain Meala

14 September Monday

It poured with rain all night and all day.  Larry Doocey arrived in his red tractor and trailer bringing us a load of pebbles.  He was not bothered by the rain except that he had to take a different route to get here. He told us that he drove over to Silver Sands on the windy hilly road to Cahir but he drove back to us on the flatter route through Grange. He needed to compensate for the 6 ton of stone in his trailer and he needed to compensate for the slippery wet roads while towing such a weight. His journey was slow.  He was ready for a cup of tea when he got here. He had several cups of tea while he talked.  We all ate biscuits too.  We had always assumed that he was a native of Newcastle but he told us that he had moved down from Ballinamult to live in the village.  He said he did not miss it up there.  He said “There’s nothing exciting to me about a mountain.”

15 September Tuesday

The man who is camping beside the road in Marlfield is not camping for a holiday.  He is living in a tent because he has been evicted from his home in the village.  I am not sure why he was evicted.  His presence beside the road is a protest. As soon as I mentioned him, people have been telling me things about him.  His name is Tommy.  He has been living in the tent all summer but at first the tent was inside the gate and near to the boundary wall of the big house.  That is why I never noticed it.  Someone advised him to move out into this new and more prominent location so that people like me will wonder about him and wonder why he is there.  He is waiting to be re-housed by the council. The area around the tent is spotless.  I still wonder where and how he eats.  If he were to make a mess around the tent, I suppose he could be removed as a public nuisance.  He is so tidy that he is almost not there.  Maybe someone is feeding him at their house. There is neither a restaurant nor a shop in Marlfield.  Tommy has a long way to go to get anything at all, and he would have to go wherever he goes on foot. I do not see  a car or a bicycle near his tent.  As far as I can see there is only the aluminum lawn chair and his umbrella for equipment.

16 September Wednesday

I walked out into the darkness before bed. The sky was clear.  It is unusual for the sky to be so clear and perfectly cloudless.  There were millions of stars.  The large constellations were all easily visible and zillions of little tiny far away stars were visible too.  The sky was bright with stars but it was extremely dark on the ground.  I could not see my own hand.  I lay down on the bench in the meadow and looked at the stars until I got cold and I had to come in.

17 September Thursday

The fields are all full of stubble.  They have changed in the last week from golden stubble to just light brown stubble.  There is no longer a glow off the fields neither from a distance nor close up.  There are still a lot of hay in bales spread around and waiting for pick-up.  Some of the hay is in big round bales and some is in the big square bales.  Sometimes, in small fields, there are very compact rectangular bales which are leaned up against one another to let some air move through in between them.  There are also the black plastic bales from the second cutting of silage.  I keep thinking that we should be at the end of the season of dangerous driving and ferocious roaring farm machinery rushing up and down the roads.  There is always another enormous machine roaring toward me whether I am on foot or in the car.  The driver is always on the phone with his head bent sideways to keep the phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder.  The drivers are often smoking and drinking minerals from two litre plastic bottles and mostly they look very young. Mostly they look too young to be driving.

19 September Saturday

I passed a field with about fourteen cattle in it. Each one had a wide white stripe around its middle.  The rest of the animal was black. The hair was very fluffy.  It was almost more like sheep’s wool than the usual cow hair.  These are obviously some special breed.  Maybe they are not special at all but they are new for around here.  Maybe they are not new for around here but they are new for me. They were so odd to see that I had to turn around and go back to look at them again. One of these heifers alone looked odd but in a group they were difficult to read.

20 September Sunday

Today I am going to The Honey Show in Clonmel.   Clonmel, which is Cluain Meala in Irish, means Honey Vale.  I am not sure if the Honey Show is located in Clonmel because of this name or if Clonmel is simply a convenient and central location.  The Honey Show is organized each year by the South Tipperary Beekeepers Association.  It is a two day event.  I do not know exactly what happens at the Honey Show.  I assume that there are competitions for wax and honey and mead and other things.  Maybe there are discussions and presentations on all kinds of topics.  I cannot really say what the topics are as I have not been there yet.  No doubt one topic will be hives.  Every year I mark the show on my calendar and every year I miss it.  The paying public is allowed in to The Honey Show between 2 and 4 o’clock on the Sunday afternoon.  It is a narrow window.

Poison

21 September Monday

The Honey Fair was much as I expected.  It was a grand event and it was a disappointment.  The room it was held in was not large.  There were four rows of things on display with three aisles for walking up and down and looking.  The aisles were not wide but there were not too many people there anyway, so it was not difficult to walk up and down.  The day was wet and windy which kept people away.  The All-Ireland Final kept a lot of other people away.  I am not certain that there would have been much overlap in the  audiences.

In one corner of the room there were some women pouring tea and serving big platters of sandwiches and cakes.  Nothing they were serving had anything to do with honey.  There were tiered displays of honey in jars all up one side of the centre aisle and there were large flat cakes of wax, as well as candles and little decorative objects made of wax. There were bars of wax which had come out of moulds so that they had the words Bees Wax on them.    All of the different categories had names of the winners noted on pieces of paper on the tables.  All of the displays had signs saying Do Not Touch The Displays.  There were bottles of mead and there was a long row of trophies along the edge of the stage at the far end of the room. One trophy was in the shape of a bee hive.

The judges were wearing long white lab coats with STBA (South Tipperary Beekeepers Association) logos at the pocket.  Five of the judges were men and one was a woman. They walked about talking to people and pointing at things.  Their white coats made them stand out and kept them looking very official.  There were photographs of bees and beekeepers and of beehives out in fields.  There were some live bees crawling around in a honeycomb safely behind glass.  I had looked forward to seeing a lot of kinds and shapes of bee hives but there was only one hive on display and it looked flimsy and cheap.  It did not look like it would last long in this wet climate.  Still there was plenty to look at. Everything in the entire hall was presented with equal importance.

One category was honey cakes. There were many honey cakes on display for the competition.  All of the honey cakes were round and all of the honey cakes were the same size.  The color of the cakes varied from bright golden to deep brown.  There were also honey cakes for sale.  The tea ladies were not serving honey cakes.  We bought one, which we ate with a cup of tea when we got home. It was very dry.

22 September Tuesday

We have decided to stop buying potatoes.  We have decided to stop buying potatoes and to stop preparing potatoes.  If we are served potatoes elsewhere we will eat them but we are tired of buying potatoes because we are tired of being disappointed by potatoes. I heard on the radio that the government is thinking to offer an incentive for people to eat more potatoes.  I do not know why other people are eating fewer potatoes, but for myself I am just weary of floury, dusty, fall-apart in the water potatoes and I am tired of hard-as-rock salad potatoes.  The struggle does not seem worth the eating.

23 September Wednesday

Thor was collected on Sunday on the way to the Honey Show.  He has come to stay for a week.  It is good to have a dog in the house again.  It is good to have a dog to walk with.  He is quite demanding about heading off first thing in the morning.  He has met the local dogs and he enjoys the rushing and sniffing which they all do together.  Each dog must sniff and pee and examine everything that the other dog has sniffed and peed upon. There is nothing new about this but since everything is new and exciting for the dogs, I find it is new and exciting for me too.  Being with a dog is a reliable source of pleasure. Most days I go for several walks with Thor. He knows our routes now.  He loves the Mass Path with the smell of foxes and pheasants.  He just looks around to make sure that I am still with him when he is rushing off ahead. For an elderly deaf dog he has a lot of energy.

24 September Thursday

The tent is gone.  I am not certain if this means that Tommy has been been re-housed.  It might just mean that the recent nights of terrible torrential downpours were too much for him in his tent.  I hope that he is warm and snug in a new home of his own in the village.  There is nothing to show that anyone was ever there at all except for a slightly pale rectangle of flattened grass where his tent was.

25 September Friday

Joe has put up new signs at each of his gates.  The signs are white with printed black letters reading LANDS PRESERVED AND POISONED.  Preserved means that the lands are off-limits for any kind of hunting. I never really understand what poisoned means in this context.  I think there is law which says if poison is laid down on farm land it has to be a certain distance from a road so that dogs will not be killed by it. I do not know what kind of poison is being laid nor who the intended victims are.   Usually there is just a hand written sign which gets made with whatever is available around the place.  Joe’s signs are all new, all clear and easy to read and all very official looking. What they are not is friendly.

26 September Saturday

Every Saturday morning Simon eats a bowl of porridge in the cafe in Cahir.  Some mornings I join him for the porridge and some mornings I do not.   The porridge is so slow to arrive that it makes me cross.  I prefer to breakfast at home and have a walk down the river instead.  Since the porridge is so painfully slow to arrive, he is usually not finished by the time I get there.  I have a coffee. Every Saturday we see a couple who come in and always sit at the exact same table.  They arrive with photocopied crossword puzzles.  They work quietly and intensely on their crossword puzzles and then they switch pieces of paper.  There is very little conversation. They eat and drink but they never stop working on their puzzles.

Nor the sky over him

27 September Sunday

Jim announced that he is glad that the haying season is over so that he can stop Consulting the Glass. Consulting the Glass is often discussed as an essential activity before doing out of door jobs during hay and silage season. It is done at night and it is done in the morning.  I am pretty sure that what he calls the glass is a barometer.

28 September Monday

I went to visit Pam in the Knockmealdowns.  She lives in a castle which is full of home-made solutions.  When she was a young woman, her husband was in the British army.  They moved frequently around India and the Far East as his assignments changed.  She said that is how she learned to make do and to furnish a home with things that did not need to last forever.  She said her curtains were never hemmed up with proper sewing.  They were always pinned so that when she got to a new home she could just unpin them and then pin them again to fit the next set of windows. The castle is full of these solutions even though she has lived there for a great many years.  She pointed to a large pouffe or hassock in the middle of a room.  It was covered with chintz and made a nice wide low seat or footstool.  She giggled when she explained that underneath the chintz was a tractor tyre. The pelmets around the top edge of most rooms are made with plywood.  They are quite roughly cut and then painted a bright red or whatever the colour the room is. They sort of blend in.  One staircase was rotten so they had a new one cast from concrete.  That too is painted red.  Pam likes red.  At the age of 90 she finds it a cheerful colour.

29 September Tuesday

There was a radio announcement from the horse races. I think it was from Leopardstown but maybe it was somewhere else.  The man said “We have a change to the Going.  The Going is now soft.”  He seemed very pleased.

Thor went back to his own home yesterday.  We miss him.  The house seems empty and a little bit lonely.

30 September Wednesday

Mornings are cold and a little foggy and wet.  When the fog burns off we have hot summer days. We have hot summer days every day. We have summer days which are better than most of the days we had in the actual months of summer. Everyone is enjoying the weather but they are all making noises about how it cannot last.  There is an ominous tone. We are promised or threatened that we will pay for this good weather.

The barn has been emptied out.  We moved things to the sauna and to the print shed and to the upstairs room.  The barn is clear and clean and it looks like a new place.  The man who came to put down some carpet for us said that what we had planned will not work.  We thanked him for his time and we thanked him for his honesty.  I did not really want so much carpet down there anyway.  I did not want the wide boards covered up.  I do want a workshop where the cold does not come up through our legs while we work. Already we have found a more flexible solution. We feel like we have had a lucky escape.

1 October Thursday

Thick fog this morning.  We could not see beyond the fence until after eleven o’clock.  The grass was wet with heavy dew.  Even while wearing short rubber boots my socks got soaked, and my hands were frozen as I picked the morning raspberries.  The leaves were wet and it was hard not to get soaked all over just from reaching in among the canes.  It is time to start collecting our fruit for morning the night before.  The postman arrived down the boreen while I was picking berries.  He had his headlights on but he said they were not much help in the fog.  He was not surprised to see me picking raspberries in my dressing gown.  He said the first days of back to school waiting for the bus are over.  The children now go out and wait by themselves.  The mothers in their fluffy robes and slippers are no longer standing with the youngest children by the edge of the road making sure that they get on the bus okay.

2 October Friday

We have not missed potatoes on our plates.  I guess it has only been about a week.  Oddly, there is a large potato plant growing in the compost heap.  Strange to see it when we did not plant any potatoes this year and we do not care if any are growing.   I shall have to pull it out and see what kind of volunteers are growing there.  I am not averse to eating whatever is growing.  I am only against the buying of potatoes for now. Several people are shocked with our decision not to purchase or cook potatoes.  Some people are disgusted.  One man said “Sure all the meat in the world wouldn’t fill you unless you had a potato.”

3 October Saturday

Two women at the market were discussing someone who had returned after being away for a very long while.  They both agreed that this man had changed beyond all recognition.  To emphasize how different he was now from how he had been before, the older lady said, “I would not know him nor the sky over him.” The other woman said that she felt the same.

Washing the sugar bowl

4 October Sunday

Yesterday we visited the newly built extension to the SuperValu in Cahir.  It is not altogether complete but it is being shopped in as if it is complete.  A lot of areas are empty where the shelves have not been moved into them yet.  Other areas are crowded because there is such a large chaotic incomplete movement of boxes and products and shelving.  Every single person in the shop looked confused.  Nothing was where it used to be and some things were not anywhere to be seen at all. There was a man painting the outside doorways with bright red paint.  Another man was sweeping up the area just outside the doors.  His sweeping was sending great clouds of dust into the air.  The man painting the doors did not take any notice of the dust flying and floating and landing on his fresh paintwork.

5 October Monday

I should know better than to drive down to the village anytime after five o’clock.  There are bound to be cows on the road.  There are three farms to pass.  Sometimes everyone is moving their animals so I have to wait for first one herd and then another and then a third.  They will be being driven back from some fields to the barn for milking.  After that they will be on their way to another field.  Some of the cattle are just being moved from field to field.  It is a foolish time of day to be on the road.  When the animals bar my way I have nothing to do but to turn off the engine and to wait while they amble towards me or away from me.  Sometimes they jostle the car as they pass.  It is a good idea to fold in the side mirror so that the weight of a cow swaying by does not snap it off.  There is no way to hurry the movement of the group.  Today as I waited I watched a cow jumping up on a gate in an attempt to get into a field where there was a bull. I have never seen a cow jumping at a gate to get out of a field so it is even more peculiar to see one jumping to get into a field.

6 October Tuesday

A mean person is a stingy person.  A mean person is tight.  A mean person would not give you the steam off his porridge.

7 October Wednesday

When the sugar bowl is empty or almost empty there is the feeling that you should wash it.  There are always some clumpy bits of sugar at the bottom of the bowl.  Someone has always dipped a wet spoon into the sugar bowl.  There is sugar stuck to sugar and there is sugar stuck to the side of the sugar bowl.  It might always be like this but it is more noticeable when the bowl is nearly empty. So the normal thing is to wash your sugar bowl so that you can start fresh with a clump-free offering of sugar.  It is a known fact that if you wash your sugar bowl you will have visitors.

8 October Thursday

Jeri is making capes for his ducks.  He has a few capes left over from last year but he now has more ducks than he had last year so he needs more capes. The ducks are white and the capes are black.  Each cape has a ruffle at the neck and a bit of red edging on the top of the ruffle.  The capes are held onto each duck with a little piece of velcro at the neck fastening.  The ducks wear these capes for the evening of Jeri’s Halloween Scary Garden.  They make little swooping flights from here to there.  The whooshing of their wings and their capes both thrills and frightens the visiting children.  The children race about with torches in the darkness screaming and finding sweets.  Jeri’s ducks usually go to bed quite early but they  stay up later than usual on Halloween.  They seem to enjoy both their capes and the company.

9 October Friday

There are apple blossoms on three of our apple trees.  All three of the trees have apples ripening on their branches.  The same branches have both blossom and fruit.  I feel confused looking at them. I feel disturbed looking at them. What will these trees be doing in the spring if they are in blossom in October?

Just the right wood

10 October Saturday

A side plate is placed to the left of one’s dinner plate at the table.  The side plate is for potato skins.  Each person peels their own potatoes leaving the skins on the side plate.  Some men do not peel their own potatoes but wait for it to be done for them by their wife or mother.  The skinned potatoes are then ready to be eaten with butter and gravy.  No one seems interested that the skin is where the fiber and the vitamins are.  No one seems interested that the skins taste good.

11 October Sunday

Trying to remember when a death had occurred, I asked Tommie.  I said “Wasn’t it nearly a year and a half ago?”  He thought for a moment and said “No, it was last May twelve months.” However I think about it Last May Twelve Months is exactly eighteen months ago.  Tommie just said the same thing in a different way.

12 October Monday

Each time I walk up the mass path and around is a chance to collect a few more horse chestnuts.  I pick up at least one at the bottom near the stream and at least one at the top near Maisie’s old house.  Sometimes I collect four or five in each place but one is my minimum.  I think of it as a kind of toll.  There is a bowl by the back door.  I put my chestnuts into the bowl before I enter the house.  The bowl is filling up.  Soon I will need a bigger bowl.  No one but me knows that I am paying into the bowl with each circuit of the boreen.

13 October Tuesday

What brand of tea do you drink? This might be the question asked the very first time a cup of tea is drunk together.  Or it might not come up for a while. People are divided between being drinkers of Barry’s tea and being drinkers of Lyons tea. If you are one you rarely cross over.  If your family are all Barry’s drinkers you will be a Barry’s drinker too.  If your family have always been Lyons drinkers you will continue to be a Lyons drinker. The transition from loose tea in a pot to tea bags is not a much commented upon issue since almost everyone goes for the ease of tea bags these days.  Which tea you drink is always important.

14 October Wednesday

Another foggy morning.  Every morning is foggy.  It is no longer a surprise to not be able to see beyond the fence in the morning.  Every morning is the same.  Today there was bright sun.  It was bright and it got very high in the sky before it was able to burn off the fog. Through the white emptiness around us, we could hear cars on the Dungarvan Road.  It is rare to hear cars from such a distance.  The sound might have been from the Knocklofty Road.  The sound of cars on any road is not something we normally hear.  It might be the wet surface of the road but I think it is just the strangeness of the fog. It muffles and it amplifies at the same time.

15 October Thursday

I sat in the small narrow room where everyone sits while waiting for their car to be inspected.  Some people were waiting for their turn.  Some people had their cars in the inspection bay already.  Some were just there to keep other people company. There are ten seats in the room, eight along one wall and two at the end.  The seats are close together.  There are three doors as well as a little counter space. It is a cramped room. I read a book while I waited.  All of the other nine seats were taken and two people were standing.  Every single person in the room was talking.  The room was loud and cheerful with the noise.  People talked to the person next to them and they called down the line to others.  They spoke with people they knew and they spoke to the people they did not know.  My book was the wrong sort of book to be reading in such cacophony.  I struggled to keep my focus.  I was just about to give up on reading altogether when the older man in the next seat nudged me and said “So, have you nothing to say for yourself then?”

16 October Friday

A Garda was buried yesterday.  He was shot and killed while trying to calm a domestic dispute.  The country is in shock.  The media keep reporting details of the attack and details of the funeral.  They list the objects which were lined up on his coffin. Alongside a family portrait were the things that he loved to enjoy in his relaxing time.  They included a shirt from his local hurling club, the remote control for the television, a can of coke, a chocolate bar and a bag of Hunky Dory crisps.

17 October Saturday

Every one of these sunny afternoons is full of activity.  Cows are out in fields which have already been cut or chewed short.  Hundreds or maybe thousands of crows are gathered on a freshly ploughed up field.  I think they are eating worms. They lift and they land in huge crowds.  They are too many for me to call them a flock. Young heifers rush along beside the stonewall.  The field where they are grazing is just above the level of my head as I walk.  They race along in a group jostling and trying to get as close to me as they can. They push each other as they follow and look over the wall to make sure that I am still down below but just beside them. They seem to just want to be going somewhere and they want to be going in a big excitable group.  Wherever I am going is just somewhere to be going.

18 October Sunday

Simon’s  wooden gutters were taken down last year when the house got painted.  Slowly they have been getting re-used.  The treated Douglas Fir will last maybe forever, so it has been good for the wood to find new functions. It has been used to make new table tops on two outdoor tables and it has made a new bench just outside the sauna.  The props for the lean-to have been strengthened and replaced.  The broken fence where the cows broke through down below has been repaired with the gutter wood.  There is still more of the wood.  We are looking around not in any kind of a hurry but knowing that there will be another job needing to be done and knowing that this wood will be just the right wood when the time comes.

Six drops are hard.

19 October Monday

I have been moaning. I have been moaning a lot.  The cows up in Joe’s field are moaning and I have become obsessed with trying to make the same sound.  I started to think of it as lowing but now I am convinced it is just a moaning.  I moan when I am outside and I moan when I am walking.  I moan in the house.  It is a deep in the throat kind of sound. It is a drawn out kind of sound. I think I am sounding pretty good.  I am now trying to get a cow to respond to my moan. I do not know what their moan means so I do not know if answering is even an issue.

20 October Tuesday

I went to get my eye looked at yesterday. The specialist had a sign outside which announced her as a Medical Eye Doctor.  Her office was huge.  There were several different chairs in there as well as various stools on wheels and a bed.  There were many many different kinds of machines. There were many kinds of charts and posters about eyes and diagramming eyes. I had never seen so much eye-related paraphernalia.  I was in there for a long time so I had a lot of time to look around.  The doctor did lots of tests and when she was nearly done she asked if I had arrived by car.  I said that I had, so she asked where I lived.  She said that I should not be driving at all but since there were never more than a few tractors on that road, she would send me on my way without worry.

21 October Wednesday

Next week the country is getting rid of little coins.  It has been costing more to produce the small coins than they are worth. One and two cent coins will no longer be made and they will no longer be used.  When we pay for something the price will be rounded up to the nearest five cents.  Or it will be rounded down to the nearest five cents. Eighty-seven will be rounded to eighty-five.  Eighty-eight will be rounded to ninety. Everyone seems pleased with this development.  I find it a little sad but no doubt I will get used to it and forget that it was ever different.

22 October Thursday

I went back to the Medical Eye Doctor.  A woman in the waiting room spoke about the weather.  She said it was a lovely day.  She said it was unseasonably warm for the time of year.  She said the SuperValu in town was having a Gala Opening on Friday. I did not want to talk and she seemed to run out of things to say after these three things. She did not seem to mind that I was not responsive.  I held my book two inches from my face.  It was the only way for me to read but it was very dark with my book held so close. When another woman came in the first woman said the same three things and then she went silent again. It was more like a recitation than making conversation.

23 October Friday

Six drops are hard.  Six drops are a lot harder than four drops.  Four drops was easy.  Morning.  Lunchtime. Six o’clock. Bedtime.  Six drops spread through the day needs more attention and more remembering. I dot the back of my hand with a marker pen.  By bedtime I should have five dots. I have the shadow of yesterday’s drop dots on my hand too. It does not matter at what time I do them.  I just have to put drops into my eye six times during a day.  The last one never gets marked.  There is no reason for me to take a marking pen to bed with me.

24 October Saturday

David the Egg Man sold all of his eggs right away.  Once again his hens are suffering from the longer dark nights so they are not laying much.  He began to pack up his tiny table to put it into his motor and head home early.  His table was taken away from him and put into the exact center of the market.  A birthday cake was put on the table and he was given a card and a song.  Everyone was offered cake and everyone said Happy Birthday or Many Happy Returns.  David stood eating his cake and explaining again and again that he had been just about to go home because he had run out of eggs.  He was delighted to be the center of attention and everyone was delighted to help him to celebrate turning 84.

25 October Sunday

I have been struggling with my vision.  I am not allowed to wear my contact lenses. It has been a trying week. My ancient glasses are barely okay for distance but they are hopeless for anything close-up.  I have been wearing them for days now.  Yesterday I got an emergency pair of prescription glasses for close-up.  Taking one pair off and putting the other pair on has been a constant juggling act. That ended late afternoon when I sat down to put in my drops.  I stood up after I was finished and I stepped on the distance glasses.  They are completely broken. Now I can see up close but I cannot see anything in the distance. I will not be able to drive. I am not sure what I will be able to do.

26 October Monday Bank Holiday

I walked up the boreen in a hard drizzle without much vision.  I pretended that the rain was giving everything soft edges.  Everything was fuzzy but it was fine.  I could see the path because I know it so well.  I could see the path because the yellow leaves on the ground have made everything look bright. The crabapples were a bit deadly to walk through. It was like walking on ball-bearings. The fallen trees across the path looked more like graceful arches with my impaired vision and I liked the little nod of my head which was needed to pass underneath them.  Anyone taller would need to duck but for me it is a nod.  The nod is an acknowledging that the trees have re-defined the path. I did not see any people.  Oscar joined me for the second half of the walk.  I did not need to see any more than I saw.

Jeep

27 October Tuesday

This autumn is very yellow and very golden.  The wood road is lined with yellow leaves on the trees and yellow leaves along the edges of the road.  It looks and feels like there is special lighting in place.

28 October Wednesday

Kieran called out that he had put the box into the back of my Jeep.  I do not think of the motor I drive as a Jeep, but everyone else calls it a Jeep.  Any vehicle which is a little higher off the ground than a normal car is called a Jeep.  A People Carrier.  A Range Rover. An SUV.  A four-wheel drive.  There are a lot of names for these kinds of utilitarian vehicles.  Some of them are really working motors and some look like they are working motors when really they are just a version of a station wagon.  There are a lot of different brands and models of high up and off the ground vehicles.  There are many variations.  No matter. They are all called Jeep.

29 October Thursday

I walked into a shop at half ten this morning.  The door was wide open but the place was dark.  A boy of twelve was inside. All of the children are off school this week so I guess this boy was spending his day watching the shop.  He told me that the electricity had gone off. It was not off everywhere on the street but it had gone off in this shop.  I asked if his mother was there.  He said she would not be back until two.  I said “So she’s gone and left you here in the dark?”  He answered “Yes. But it’s okay. There is no fear in me.”

30 October Friday

This morning the world beyond our fence had disappeared, again.  I went down to the village and all of the mountains were gone.  The Galtees were gone.  The Knockmealdowns were gone and the Comeraghs were gone. Three mountain ranges completely disappeared in the mist.  It was a mist more than fog.  It was a wet mist.  It was almost rain but it was not rain.  It was just soaking wet air which could not be seen through.  Tommie shook his head as he told me “We are nearly lost in the wet.”

31 October Saturday

HIs nickname is Bapty.  I am desperate to know what Bapty is short for.  I may have to ask Bapty himself what his name is shortened from.  I do not feel familiar enough to make such a query.

Not Kevin

1 November Sunday

Not very long ago the naming of dogs was simple.  It was all names like Whitey and Blacky and Pal. Increasingly the names for dogs are the names of people but they are not the same names that people here would name their children.  It is fine to call a dog Max or Oscar or Bruno or Zeke.  These are not the names of any people that anyone knows.  There are people names for dogs and then there are people names for people.  There is no one calling their dog Michael or Paddy or Seamus.  No one would call their dog Kevin because they no doubt know a Kevin and they would not want that Kevin to come to their house and take offense that the dog has his own name.

2 November Monday

Margaret was out walking.  She was delighted with the warm bright day.  It was almost hot.   Her delight was over-shadowed by her feelings of depression about the early nightfall. She said she feels a terrible pressure to get jobs done before the dark.  There are jobs to be done before the dark and then there are the jobs to be put off and done after the darkness falls.  She complained that the darkness comes so early and there is so much dark that she cannot get enough jobs done in the light and then when it is dark she does not want to do the jobs that she would have done in the light.  She said she spends a lot of the day saying that she will wait and do that job after dark or this job after dark but then she leaves too many things to be done.  Or maybe it is not true that she leaves too many jobs it is just that the days are shorter and shorter.  Really she just cannot stand it.  She decided to take a walk out today because the sun was shining and she knew that a walk was a thing she would not and could not do after the darkness fell.

3 November Tuesday

Numbers have been sprayed onto the road with white paint.  100.  200.  300.  I am not sure why.  There might have been a race.  There might have been some digging to be done.  The numbers probably represent metres but I have not paid enough attention to the distance between them to know if that is the case.  They are far enough apart that I can forget about them and be reminded and then I can forget again.  They are not near to any buildings nor any gates. I have been waiting for their meaning to be revealed to me. I have been waiting but I have not done one single thing to find out what the numbers mean.  It is not pressing. They are no longer freshly painted.  The numbers appeared sometime in the spring. 200 is still clearly visible.  100 is faded and I can no longer locate 300.

The Last Apples of Tullaghmeelan

23 November Monday

Everyone was wearing new shoes.  A lot of the shoes did not look comfortable. Most of the shoes did not look comfortable.  The newness of the shoes was evident. Everyone was wearing new coats.  There were new scarves, new sweaters, new trousers and new hats. There were lots of new suitcases and every suitcase was loaded and heavy. One woman wore a bright orange coat and had a matching bright orange handbag and a small bright orange suitcase.  She wrestled two enormous bright orange suitcases off the luggage round-about.  It was a plane load of shoppers. They had flown off on Wednesday and caught their return flight on Sunday for a marathon of manic shopping in America.  Flights are cheap in November. What was saved in airfare was spent on shopping.  The entire journey was full of loud and boisterous discussion about who had shopped where and who had bought what.  The women, and it was mostly women, talked to the people they were traveling with and they talked to everyone else. There was a strong air of competition. When the duty-free cart rolled along, everyone did a little bit more shopping.  The frenzy and the excitement of so many new purchases was dampened as everyone walked out into the bleakness of Shannon Airport at 5.30 in the morning.  There was no one to admire all of the new stuff.  It was damp and dark outside and the terminal was devoid of people.

24 November Tuesday

I walked up the boreen noting the many branches blown down by recent winds.  There were a few new wiggly turns through narrow places where the places were not narrow before.  A length of the path up beside Johnnie’s orchard was full of large yellow apples.  They turned the path into the deadliest apple walk ever.  They have fallen into a sort of gully and the gully is the path. Or the path is a gully.  There was no where to put my feet down except on the apples as the undergrowth was thick on either side.  It was a matter of walking on the apples or turning around. I examined the apples which were some kind of mix from Johnnie’s  experiments with grafting.  These had a bit of russet mixed with whatever they were.  The majority of the apples were freshly fallen. They were not yet squashed or rotted or eaten by animals or insects. The taste was not great for eating but I knew they would be good for cooking. I picked up three apples and then I had to make a decision.  The apples were big and there was no way I could carry more than four using my coat pockets.  I could either walk back down and fetch a bag from home or I could continue on my walk and come back tomorrow.  The light was dropping by the minute.  I chose the walk hoping the apples would still be good for the gathering tomorrow.

25 November Wednesday

I went up and gathered The Last Apples of Tullaghmeelan.  I took a large backpack and a big bag.  I filled the bag and left it in the path.  I walked through the orchard thinking that there might be some other drops off other trees but there was not one entire apple left anywhere on the trees nor in the tall grass. There were some chewed and mushy ones, but not even many of those. I went back and filled the backpack and topped up my bag from the ones on the path.  There were still many left on the ground when my bag were full. I walked back down the path slowly.  I could hardly move with the weight. The backpack was far too big, far too full and far too heavy. I had to stop and rest five or six times. I have gone from feeling smug and pleased with myself for getting all of this free and unexpected bounty to a slight sinking feeling as I realize that I am now stuck with the job of doing something with it.

26 November Thursday

I asked for ten stamps.  The post mistress offered me the yearly Christmas bonus book of stamps.  For the price of 25 stamps I could receive 26 stamps. This extra stamp is our annual gift from the government.  I never refuse it.

27 November Friday

Today we are promised an end to this crazy balmy spring like weather.  I walked out early to miss the rain.  We are promised rain and wind and maybe even snow in high places. We are promised the low temperatures which are normal for this time of year. Knowing it is November while marveling at the small buds appearing on trees which have not even lost all of their leaves yet is unsettling. As I write, the winds are gusting.  The rain has begun. I have had to drop the latch on the top part of the kitchen door as it keeps blowing itself open.

Firelighters

28 November Saturday

Are You Feeling Alright in Yourself?  This is another way of asking How Are You?

29 November Sunday

Fiona told me that there used to be a Pet Mass each year.  People could bring their dogs and cats and even their birds in cages into the church and the priest would say a special group blessing for the animals. It was a day when the church would be full and every single person there would have a pet with them.  She told me that the animals were always well behaved and that everyone looked forward to that particular Sunday.  She could not remember when this special Mass stopped.

30 November Monday

Non-alcoholic beer is not sold before 10.30 in the morning because regular beer is not sold before 10.30 in the morning. They both come up as beer on the till even though one is not an alcoholic drink.  It is still called beer. There is no logic in this but it is not possible to challenge it.

1 December Tuesday

Yesterday Liam Harper phoned and asked for the electricity reading.  Simon was standing nearby so he went up on the step stool and shouted out the numbers to me.  I then repeated the numbers to Liam Harper. I guess I was sort of shouting because Simon was shouting so Liam shouted back to me.   He shouted thank you and then we shouted good bye.  Today he phoned back because he was worried.  He said our reading had gone up really fast in just 24 hours.  He was worried that something was wrong or why would we be going through so much power? We had no answer and neither did he so he said he would keep his eye on it.  Today Simon spoke in a normal voice so Liam did too.  There was no shouting.

2 December Wednesday

Will I put your name in the pot?  is the question, or I’ll put your name in the pot as a statement.  Both function as a way to know that one is being included and expected at the supper table.

3 December Thursday

The rain is lashing down.  It has been raining all night. The rain has pounded down without even a small break.  This rain is a steady beating rain.  There is no wind and there is no changing of direction.  It just rains, hard and without cease. There is a leak in the bathroom where we need to fix the flashing on the roof.  We have known about the need for this repair since last winter.  We have known about the need for this repair since the last installment of relentless rain. This is not the weather for climbing up on a roof to do it but it is certainly the weather for being reminded that it needs doing.

I drove to the village.  There are huge flooded sections of road everywhere. The grass that grows down the middle of the boreen is underwater. The river is overflowing in all directions.  There are lakes in the middle of fields. There are swans swimming in the lakes.  The entire landscape has changed. There is no place for the water to go. It is bucketing down from the sky too fast and too hard. When I returned from the shop, I thought to go for a walk just to be out in the weather rather than just continuing as a prisoner of it.  It was all so awful I kind of wanted to be outside with it.  I dressed in full waterproofs and got as far as the stream.  The stream had overflowed and there was now a large deep lake which I could not wade through.  I came back home and made a cup of tea. Probably it was a bad idea to go for a walk anyway.

4 December Friday

The woman ahead of me in the shop was old.  She was old and she was distressed.  The woman wanted to buy some firelighters.  She wanted to buy firelighters and she wanted to buy the kind of firelighters that are individually wrapped in paper.  She knew that they were a bit more expensive but she did not mind.  She explained that if she bought the unwrapped kind, she was then required to break off a piece from the big slab of firelighters and she always ended up dropping bits onto the floor while breaking off a piece that was too large.  If she broke off a piece that was too large, she then had to break it again. Her hands were swollen and stiff with arthritis. There was a good chance that she would end up with two pieces which were both too small rather than one the right size and one small one.  She wanted to buy the wrapped firelighters because with those she was able to start her fire without needing to go and wash her hands after touching the smelly firelighters.  She hated how the smell lingered on her hands for hours even after the washing.  She wanted to buy the wrapped firelighters and there was only one box on the shelf which had wrapped firelighters in it.  The box had been opened and some of the contents had been taken out.  The girl at the till offered to count what was left in the opened box and to then charge the woman only for the number remaining in the box.  The woman was frustrated with the effort of explaining and frustrated with the opened box. She became querulous. She was prepared to buy a box of wrapped firelighters which she needed and wanted.  She did not want to buy a partially full box of firelighters as then she would need to come back soon and buy another box.  She felt like she was being tricked and this made her angry.  I felt sorry for the woman.  I felt sorry for the girl behind the counter.  I left before the issue was resolved and now I find myself worrying about it.

6 December Sunday

Thursday was a terrible day and then Friday was fine.  The world was very squelchy underfoot but it was clear and even sunny for a while.  Friday night the winds started up again. Saturday was terrible.  The wind was fierce and the rain lashed and beat down for a straight 36 hours.  We were promised a months worth of rain in that 36 hours.  All of the places that were badly flooded on Thursday are now even more flooded. Flooded fields have joined with other flooded fields and the new lakes are enormous.  The landscape looks like it belongs somewhere else. We did not lose our power but a lot of people did.  After having the loud noise of wind in our ears all day and all night, today’s silence over the land is spooky.

Rain. More rain.

7 December Monday

More rain. More wind. More reports of disaster in all directions. The lakes around the village are getting bigger.  The lakes around the village look normal.  They look like they have always been there. The swans swimming around in the lakes look like they have always been there too.  Nothing is as it should be.  The day is mild and strange.  Roses are blooming. The blackcurrant bushes are sprouting buds.  Trees which should have lost all of their leaves by now are still covered with leaves. The grass is growing.  There are lots of flying and biting insects. December is rarely a month for insects.  The weather is the only topic of conversation.

8 December Tuesday

I walked into the hardware bit of the shop and asked Kieran a question. The fellow wearing a wooly hat much like Kieran’s wooly hat looked up at me said “I am Kieran but I fear I am not the Kieran you are looking for.” He was right.  He was the wrong Kieran.  He was only a customer like myself and his name happened to be Kieran. It took a while to get anything done while down there  today. The things I needed to buy were behind some plastic coal bunkers and some signs and a bunch of leaning Christmas trees.  There was a lot of lifting and moving around of things before anything could be reached and moved and carried into the back of my motor.  One of John’s daughters was behind the till. I think she is only 12 or maybe 11.  I asked why she was not in school today.  She said there was no school because there was some kind of religious thing going on. Outside there were a lot of cars arriving and turning and parking in lumbering kinds of ways.  None of the movements was fluid nor easy. Any vehicles passing up or down the road had to wait.  People were going in and out of the church. Most of them seemed to be elderly. I could not tell if they were settling in for a Mass or if they were just popping in and popping out. As I was leaving someone told me that today was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. I do not try to keep up with church activities but I was surprised to learn that this one was important enough for the schools to be closed for the day.

9 December Wednesday

I am certain it would be different to live in a house where we did not hear the rain.  We could live in a house which was well sound-proofed from above and we would not be aware of this endless beating down of rain. In most of the house the sound of the rain only comes in through an open window but in the big room, the sound is present all day.  When it rains all day long the rain is in our ears all day long. To go outside means the rain is on us and all around us but somehow it is quieter than being indoors with this desperate noise.

10 December Thursday

Oscar walked home with me as usual. He flushed seven pheasants just near the entrance to Scully’s wood. It was not a proper flushing. I think that would imply intent.  Oscar did not really know what he was doing.  He just walked close to where the pheasants were and they all fled. The woody clattering sound as they rushed up and into the air en masse startled us both. They were such a crowd.  They made such a racket as they lifted.  Oscar did not know where to go or what to do.  He stared at the place they had come out of and then dashed into the undergrowth as if perhaps there were more in there.

11 December Friday

On Friday nights bread is delivered to the bar.  Usually the two women who make it and deliver it arrive at about 5.  Tonight it was nearly 5.30 before several of the regular customers started to ask one another where the bread was and if it was coming tonight.  Finally somebody said that they thought that Carmel had a new job and that she did not get out of work until 6 so tonight the bread would arrive sometime after 6 o’clock.  This news made all the bread buyers relax and most of them opted for another drink as they waited.  Once the bread arrived, there was a feeling of calm in the bar.  One man left right away as soon as he received his loaf.  Otherwise the big dark loaves of soda bread wrapped in cling film sat on tables and on the counter right beside pint glasses. Each person seems to keep their loaf near.

12 December Saturday

We walked up the path, around and back down the boreen. We wore rubber boots as the bottom was flooded again. The little bridge made of a wooden pallet has been swept away by the rushing water. There has been astonishing force in the rushing water from the not very large stream overflowing.  The water was deep.  We walked very very slowly through the water so that it did not spill into our boots.  Moving in our boots was a sideways movement rather than an up and down movement. The mass path was full of mud.  Everything was slippery. Many things have died back but the ivy and the ferns and the Hart’s Tongue are rampant and lush.  I have never seen so much Hart’s Tongue.  I like it as a name and I like it as a plant and I like that it is taking over the path this year.

13 December Sunday

We walked in the mountains.  It was soggy underfoot but we were ready for the wet.  We were fully expecting rain but we went anyway.  And instead it was  wonderful to be out for a few hours without being rained upon. In some places, there were torrents of water running down off the tops.  The streams we crossed were full and fast moving. Breda has named this walk The Cottage Walk as we begin and end near an old cottage.  She likes giving each walk and each place a name. Anyone who walks with her is quick to take up the use of the name so that we all know exactly where we are talking about.  We used to go in the same vicinity for The Mass Rock Walk, but now we are hooked on The Cottage Walk.  Even though we start this walk quite high up, there is still a good climb in it and as usual we did not see a single human.  Even the sheep were absent today.

14 December Monday

Rain. More rain.  Rain all night.  Rain running down the wall in the bathroom again.  Water is rushing down the the boreen like a stream. Wind. Rain. It is desperate, this rain day after day.  The fields which have become lakes get bigger and bigger. The greyness never lifts.  There is barely any reason to get out of bed.  But I am out of bed and there are endless things to do.  All of them are connected to rain.

The Elements

15 December Tuesday

I sat in the waiting room with two extremely old people and one older man and a youngish man.  The five of us filled all of the chairs.  The older man was looking out the window and he commented on the big building across the road.  He asked the room at large if the nuns were still there and if the convent was going strong.  No one answered him, so I did.  I told him that the few remaining nuns had gone off to a convent in Carrick-on-Suir or to residential homes and that the building and land had been sold.  I told him an auction had been held and that the building had been bought by an order of Egyptian Coptics.  He listened carefully. He said nothing but he listened. The two very old people said nothing.  They were both badly bent over with some spinal deterioration but I could tell they were listening too. The younger man had drops in his eyes and had been told by the doctor to keep his head well back. When I finished telling all I knew about the former convent, the first man asked, “So, are you here on holiday then?”

16 December Wednesday

I could not get into the village yesterday.  The road beyond the bridge was completely flooded but that was not the reason.  There were cars parked all along that bit of road.  They were parked in the knee deep water. When I got close enough to see the church I could see that the road in front of the church was blocked by a hearse with a coffin being unloaded and dozens of umbrellas and lots of flowers.  A man in a reflective vest was signaling for me to turn and go away or to stop and just get out of my car.  He did not know if I wanted to attend the funeral or not. There was no traffic moving through the village.  I returned an hour later and there were still many cars.  The service had ended but the burial had been right there in the churchyard and now everyone was walking up to the hall for refreshments.  Cars were still parked everywhere. The cars were parked and they were double parked. I did not know the elderly woman who had been buried.  Pat said that the reason there was such a crowd was because she was being laid to rest in a fitting way by A Lifetime of Family and Neighbours.

17 December Thursday

She had to wait for her friend.  It was raining hard and she was in a town she did not know at all.  She said she needed to Put Down an Hour which was another way of saying that she needed to kill some time.

18 December Friday

Nora is outraged that those people in Paris think that they have the power to control the Elements.  She said there is no kind of agreement they can sign that will stop the rain and the flooding.  She said, “They can sign what they like but not one cow in the whole of Ireland will ever eat a single blade of grass off a field that has been flooded.  It is a known fact. But sure how would people in Paris know a thing like that?”

19 December Saturday

I locked Simon into the printing shed.  I did not plan on locking him in. It just happened.  It’s been another wild and blustery day. He was inside setting type for a small job and I went to ask him something before I left for the post office.  He had the bolt closed from the inside and he let me in when I shouted.  When I left I slid the other bolt from the outside. It was so windy that the door would not stay closed unless it was fastened from one side or the other. I went to the village and did my posting and bought the papers and dropped things off at one house and then at another house.  I refused cups of tea and kept moving as I felt rushed. The incessant noisy wind made everything out in the world seem imperative and slightly crazed.

Simon was not in the house when I returned.  Nor was he in the book barn.  I went to the print shed.  I saw his head through the small window.  Then I saw the closed bolt on the outside of the door.  I knew right away what had happened. He did not say a word.  The situation was grim. There is not much light in the shed nor is there any heat.  On a day as gloomy as today there would have been barely light enough to print.  But, of course, he could not print anyway because the things he wanted to print were down in the book barn.  He had the type set and the platen inked and ready but he was locked in.

The printing shed is about 6 x 10 feet and there is very little floor space inside.  There is a tall unit full of drawers of type, a big cast-iron folding machine, a counter with shelves underneath, another homemade set of shelves and a wooden unit holding the small press and more type and print furniture drawers. When we cleaned out the book barn early in the autumn, we filled the print shed with big boxes of old cardboard and paper, all for a big bonfire which we never got around to lighting.

With all of the things that are always there and then all the boxes of things to burn, there was barely enough room to stand and print. There was no room to sit. Simon spent a lot of time thinking about breaking the door down but he spent an equal amount of time thinking about having to replace the door himself.  He just did not feel like doing that. He spent a lot of time thinking about why he did not have a phone with him. He waited. He stood up and he waited. It was lucky for Simon that I was gone for less than two hours.  It was lucky for him that the day was windy but not cold.  I fear he has not yet had enough distance on the whole event to see either of these two things as lucky.

20 December Sunday

There is a green smudge down the center of the road. It’s there every winter.  Dampness makes a little low moss grow down the raised middle of the road.  Car tyres straddle the smudge because we all drive the narrow road as if the road was only ever meant to be a single lane. I love the smudge. I love how it glows from afar.  I enjoy the smudge as I am walking along.  It has one kind of brightness from a distance and another kind of brightness when I am just upon it.  The smudge cheers up the greyest of days.

Deemed Essential

22 December Tuesday

I stopped by to see Bea.  Her motor was parked very close to the house. There was an extension lead out the open window of the car and in through a window of the house. Bea came to the door and explained that she had taken the car to the car wash but she left the back windows open during the washing.  She now has a heater going in the back seat to dry it all out.  The heater was plugged in inside the house.  She explained the situation by saying that of course the car had to be washed before Christmas.  It is one of many things which are deemed essential to do before Christmas.

It is essential to have one’s hair cut before Christmas.  It is essential to go to the hygenist and have one’s teeth cleaned before Christmas.  It is essential to have the windows of the house washed, both inside and out, before Christmas.  It is essential to go to and tidy around the graves of family members before Christmas because other family members might be visiting from far away and they will of course make a visit to the graves and so the graves must be looking good. The people who live in the area are sort of responsible for the upkeep of the graves or at least they are the people who will be blamed if the graves are found to be in disarray.  Now I learn that going to the chiropodist and getting toenails clipped and any hard skin scraped off the feet is yet another job which must be done in anticipation of Christmas.

I would not have remembered this list nor its newest addition if Bea had not washed her car and left the windows open.

23 December Wednesday

The remains of one dead bird near the compost heap. Feathers are scattered in a tidy circle from a central point.  There is nothing left, not even any blood.  Small white feathers are in the center and longer grey feathers make a secondary circle. It was a pigeon.

24 December Thursday

The brother and sister have been spotted again.  I have not seen them for months and months. Someone told me they had seen them but I had not seen them myself. They are no longer parking on the road into the village.  The brother always stood leaning against his car in the tiny lay-by, smoking and saluting anyone who passed.  His sister walked on the narrow stretch of road with her dog on about two inches of lead all the while holding a huge fat stick just above his head ready to whack him if he made a wrong move.  It made me crazy to see them. I assumed the terrible choice of a place for walking a dog was just because the brother needed to be able to watch a bit of traffic while he waited for his sister. I thought that was why the location was chosen.  Now the brother is parking way up the mountain on the New Line.  He parks near The Boulders which is just about the only place to pull off. The sister walks along the road with the dog still held close to her body and still with the dreadful heavy cudgel hovering over his head. This spot cannot be chosen for waving at passers by.  It could easily be an hour between passing vehicles up there. I still wonder why the sister does not take the dog to walk on the mountain instead of on the hard road. Today the brother was not outside smoking and waving.  He was sitting inside the car smoking with the windows rolled up tight.  That might just be because of today’s soaking drizzle.

Open this Saturday?

4 January 2016 Monday

I have never lived anywhere else where it is normal to see young men drinking milk from bottles or cartons.  A street corner with four or six lads slugging down milk while laughing and talking is not an unusual sight.

5 January 2016 Tuesday

The woman on the bus spoke in a loud and constant ramble to the man next to her.  No one sitting nearby could fail to hear her. She said that her grandmother had taught her how to tell the weather and she reckoned it would be dry tomorrow even though the weather man had said it would rain.  She said I do not care if it rains because I am going to be at home anyway but my grandmother’s method tells me that it won’t rain.   She said I know how to tell but I won’t tell you because I do not know you. I am just sharing a seat on a crowded bus with you.  It is not like I know you.

6 January Wednesday

So many fields have been lakes for so long now that it is hard to look at them as anything but lakes. Will the rains never stop?

7 January Thursday

Simon and I walked up the Mass Path.  It was the first time in a long time that we could even get through.  The lake at the bottom remains huge.  We went around the edge but even then we were slogging in deep water and mud. The grasses are all flattened down where water has flooded over the top.  Trees and branches are down all the way along the path. We had to crawl under fallen trees on our hands and knees in two places.  Crawling on hands and knees meant we were very wet very early in the walk. We kept going even though there was a torrent of water right down the middle.  There has never been so much water.  The path was a river bed with the river flowing and the whole bottom was sandy.  We could not decide where the sand came from because usually the path is just muddy and rocky and mossy. Suddenly it has become a sandy bottomed river bed and even at the very top up near the orchard at Johnnie’s the bottom is sandy and still there is no logic nor understanding of where this sand has come from.

8 January Friday

I spent some hours down in the barn numbering my new book MY IRONMONGERY.  There are 100 books.  I wrote the numbers with a red Bingo pen.  I had never seen nor used a Bingo pen before.  The thick line was just right. After I wrote my numbers inside, I wrapped each book with paper and then I stuck on a red dot with the same number written on the wrapping. I do not know if Bingo pens come in other colours.  I wonder if everyone at a Bingo Hall brings a Bingo pen with them for an evening of Bingo. Does any old pen work just as well?  I had a lot of time to consider these questions as my work was slow and the barn was cold.  I had to interrupt myself often to go back up to the house to get warm.

9 January Saturday

Hi Erica.
Market restarts Sat 16th.
But egg man David O’Donnell started last Saturday.
I will start tomorrow.
Jim and Keith will start in Feb.
Pat.

10 January Sunday

We can hardly believe this bright light.  It seems like ages since we have seen such sun.  No doubt there has been sun here and there in recent weeks but it has been moments not hours.  We are unable to remember it because there was so much grey. Today is that wintery kind of crisp hard bright light.  There is snow on the mountains in all directions. We can see snow even while we walk through green fields. We walked the Long Field facing towards the Knockmealdowns and then we made a loop up and around by road which directed our eyes toward the Comeraghs and we ended by walking toward the Galtees. Everything looks better in the brightness, even though everything is still squelchy underfoot.

The market yesterday was just David and Pat, as promised in Pat’s email.  The two of them set up their stalls in the far corner of the car park.  They were probably trying to stay out of the wind.  David had his eggs and Pat had vegetables and jams and rape seed oil. They were both chilled to the bone. The wind was vicious. David said his hens have been laying like crazy.  He said that last week he had 90 dozen eggs.  Maybe I heard that wrong? 90 dozen is a lot of eggs. 90 dozen is 1080 eggs.  That is a LOT of eggs.  Maybe it was 90 dozen over a two week period.  That is still a lot of eggs.  Anyway, he had so many eggs that he had to give them away. He gave them to a man who raises greyhounds. The man was happy.  All the greyhounds had eggs to eat. I went away wondering how the eggs were served to the dogs.  Were they broken open and dropped into a dish raw, or were they lightly scrambled?  I have no idea how a greyhound eats an egg.

A Good Grubber

11 January Monday

I am not afraid of mice but they can make me jump.  They move quickly and so suddenly. Tonight I went out to the shed in the dark.  I was wearing my head torch.  I was carrying an enamel cup in order to bring back peas from the freezer.  It is easier to carry the cup to the shed rather than to bring the bag of peas into the house and pour some out and then return to the shed to put the rest of the peas back in the freezer.  Especially if it is raining. Tonight it was not really raining but it was drizzly and it was cold.  And it was very very dark. Just as I was pouring my peas into my cup a mouse rushed along by my feet.  I squealed in surprise and spilled a lot of peas. I left the peas on the floor and returned to the house with my cupful.  If the mice don’t eat them, I can sweep them up in the morning.  They will stay just as frozen on the floor as they were inside the freezer.

12 January Tuesday

An elderly man came into the barbershop and he told the girl that he wanted A Zero and A Close Shave. A Zero is a number on the scale of haircuts for men.  I think the numbers match settings on the cutting device. The man was very old.  The couple who run the shop are Serbian.  The girl was very nervous to cut the man’s hair because he was so old.  She was even more nervous to shave him. She cut his hair very short with the zero setting and then she gave him a shave with a cut-throat razor.  When she was finished he said the shave was not close enough. He insisted that she do it again. She was terrified to cut closer but she did it.  Everyone in the shop, which included the husband and three people, was watching. I was one of the people.  I had never been there before and I was only waiting so I was watching every single thing.  The old man announced that he was going to the Tropics.  He was going to Africa.   He said he was 94 years old and he wanted a short haircut and a close shave because it was going to be very hot where he was going. She asked which country he was going to but he would not say.  He said it was a secret.  After he left she laughed out loud nervously.  She announced to the shop that maybe he was like an elephant and he was going to Africa to die.

13 January Wednesday

There was a hard frost last night. Everything is white this morning.  The roof of the barn is completely white.  It is good to see the roof all coated with ice because that means it is well-insulated. If it were less well-insulated the heat inside would be making areas of slate look melty and unfrosted.  I suppose the fact that there is not much heat at all in the barn is another reason why the white stays white for so long.

The snowdrops are coming up. Most of them are only in bud now but there are two in full bloom beside Em’s stone. I am happy to see them. I like to think she would have been happy to see them but usually she just walked around them.  Oscar steps on flowers.  He never walks around them. I saw one primrose in flower in the boreen.

14 January Thursday

Is He A Good Grubber?  This was the question I overheard the pharmacist ask to find out if someone who was not well was taking his food in a normal and robust way.

Desperate

15 January Friday

An old man stood in the little entry porch of the shop.  His wool jacket was wet with rain but the rain mostly sat on top of the wool in drops.  The jacket had a lot of grease and lanolin on it, especially down the front where his hands had been wiped again and again.  It shone black with the oiliness of whatever was on it. There was no way water could seep into the wool.  The man did not lift his head.  He was very stooped over and his head looked down at the floor.  Each time someone walked in, he shook his head from left to right and intoned  ‘Desperate Day. A Desperate Day altogether.  Desperate.’  He repeated this in the direction of every single person who entered the shop, even though the rain was merely a drizzle and not at all desperate by local standards.  To each person leaving the shop he said ‘Mind How You Go’ and he nodded his head up and down while he said it. He repeated these two things again and again.  Desperate. Desperate Day. Mind How You Go.  Desperate Day Altogether.  Mind How You Go. Since there are never people going in nor leaving at the same time he did not get confused with his head wagging for one comment and nodding for the other.  Nor did he confuse the two greetings.

16 January Saturday

The one hundred year anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising has been discussed and planned for and anticipated for ages and ages now.  The whole of 2015 was a build-up to the events taking place this year to commemorate The Rising.  There are references to The Rising everywhere we go.  Jim said something to me today and then he saw my blank face.  I did not understand what he was saying. I did not understand at all.  He said “Sorry sorry— It’s okay.  I was only Rising you!”  Then I was even more confused.  I have gotten so used to The Rising being always and only about 1916 that I forgot about Rising being another word for teasing.

17 January Sunday

It is not uncommon to hold a funeral on a Sunday.  We were walking up from Molough when a car stopped.  A man rolled down the window and told us he was looking for the funeral of Betty Something.  We did not recognize the name. We knew of no one named Betty who had just died.  He gave us a second surname.  Maybe the second name was her married name or maybe the first name was her married name and the second one he told us was her maiden name.  Neither of the names meant anything to either of us. She was obviously local or had been from the area originally.  He was looking for the church where the funeral was being held.  He said it was the church at Knocklofty.  We knew there was no church at Knocklofty and we told him that.  Simon suggested Tullameghlan because there is a very small old graveyard there but no church.  The man was pleased.  He said ‘Yes that is the place. That is the name.  How can I get there?’  It was not easy to give directions from where we were standing.  I do not think I could have done it. Simon gave the man careful instructions.  A little while later we had finished our walk and we drove down to buy the newspapers.  We detoured around some tractor activity so we ended up on the Knocklofty road ourselves.  On passing the tiny Church of Ireland there were people were standing outside.  We saw the man who had asked for directions. We had not given him directions to that church which is called Tullameghlan Church because we had forgotten that it is spoken of as Tullameghlan Church or maybe we never knew that because the church is not anywhere near the Tullameghlan graveyard. There is no sign that says Tullameghlan Church. Had he said that Betty was a Protestant we would have known that the funeral must be at that church. It is the only Church of Ireland church in the area.  Since we did not know Betty, we had no way to know that she was a Protestant.

18 January Monday

I just cleared a blue tit off the step in front of my room.  They are flying in wild sweeps all over the place. The weather is confusing so maybe they think it is springtime in between the very cold nights and the rain.  Three times last week I picked up birds who had flown into windows and knocked themselves out.  I picked them up gently and placed each one in a sheltered spot under some leafy boughs or on top of a mossy rock.  When I checked later they were gone. They had simply been stunned by smashing themselves into glass at speed.  The one I gathered up today was dead.  There was no soft heartbeat to be felt, and its neck was bent at an impossible angle.

19 January Tuesday

It was a petrol station and like all petrol stations it now sells lots of things besides petrol.  Displayed outside along the windowsill were bags of potatoes.  There were ten bags all standing at an angle.  The bags were from several different producers but all of the potatoes were the same kind of potatoes. They were all Golden Wonders.  Only the colour of the bag and the name on the bag offered choice.

20 January Wednesday

The rock on the side of the pub has been painted a shiny black.  It is painted with the same enamel paint that is around the window frames and on the door. The rock is big.  It is about the height of my knee off the ground and as wide as it is tall.   It looks like it is growing out of the side of the building.  It might be that it was once part of the foundation.  Or maybe the building had another section built onto it at one time.  That does not really make sense because the road exactly there beside the pub and beside the rock.  Where could more of the building have been? Over the years the rock has been painted a different colour each time the pub has been repainted. This shiny black is very nice.

21 January Thursday

Tomorrow is the last day for the SuperValu in town. It is closing down for good. It has been closing down for several weeks now. Each time I have been in there were fewer and fewer things on the shelves. Then there were fewer and fewer shelves.  The top shelves were removed first and then the bottom shelves were removed.  Soon there were three and then only two shelves along a long row with the remaining products lined up.  There were large areas along the walls which were completely empty and all of the shelves taken away.  The shelves were being sent to another branch of the store in Dublin. We stopped in last Saturday for a few things and the place looked nearly empty and there was still a week to go.  The very few customers walked the aisles looking at the very few products for sale and we all commented to one another what a pity it was that the shop would be closed and that yet another shop in the town center would sit empty. Vegetables were spread out in a way to make them look appealing but there were so few of them that they all looked like leftovers.  Two older women stood in front of a display of two wheelbarrows which had been brought in to take up some of the empty space.  Each barrow was tilted at an angle and there were loose potatoes and some soil in the bottom of each.  Not many potatoes and not a lot of soil. The women were happily remembering themselves bringing in potatoes from the field when they were children.  After a bit of chat they both agreed that their families had never actually owned wheelbarrows and that the potatoes at home were carried in buckets or baskets but still it was nice to see the wheelbarrows in the shop. One man wandered around and around the aisles with his trolley. Each time he met another person he moaned “Oh, it is a sad day indeed.  It is our Last Saturday.”

Just After

23 January Saturday

The whole thing is made of heavy cardboard.  It had been part of the 2013 Gathering which was an attempt to bring increased tourism to the country.  It seemed to be a popular thing so it was left standing in Cork airport.  The front of the cardboard has a shiny photographic image of a girl in Irish dance costume and beside her a man sits on a stone wall holding a fiddle.  The colours suggest the bright sunlight of a John Hinde postcard. Neither the girl nor the man have heads.  The idea was for people to put their own heads on the neck position and then to have their photograph taken.  The whole thing is not very tall.  Children can easily stand up to be photographed.  Adults have to lean or squat down behind the cardboard. It has obviously been a popular as it is now 2016 and it is still there.   It has been moved all around inside the main hall of the airport.  The area around the necks of both the dancer and the musician are badly frayed.  The exposed grey cardboard looks shabby and distressed. Each time I see it I think it must be nearly time for it to be retired, or at least to be replaced with a new version.

27 January Wednesday

Vans and vehicles with the names and faces of politicians are appearing here and there.  Someone told me that these vehicles cannot be parked for more than two hours in any single location. After two hours the vehicle must be moved.  I am not sure if maybe this is just to give someone else a chance to use the spot, or maybe it is simply to stop one corner becoming the the Fine Gael corner or the Labour corner.  It would be easy to tow a non-functioning something to a spot and just leave it there for days or weeks on end. News and conversations about the upcoming elections are building up.  Posters are not allowed to be posted on trees or poles until thirty days before the actual day of the election.  These shifting vehicles as advertising remind people that even while everything is getting maneuvered into place, it is not really happening yet.

31 January Sunday

I am just after putting that in the oven.

I am just after getting that up on the screen.

I am just after visiting my grandmother in hospital.

I am still unable to use the word After like this.  And I am not fully able to understand the function of the After in the sentence.  In any of the sentences.

If it was any better it would be wrong

17 March Patrick’s Day

It was late afternoon when we stopped at the shop on our way to take a walk.  The village held the deep silence of a bank holiday. There was no one around but the shop was open. A table just inside the door had various Patrick’s Day decorations as well as thematic pies and cakes for sale.  Everything was green and orange. The table looked pretty well gone over. I think most everyone who wanted to buy something for the national day had already done so.  A plastic rectangular container was half full of water.  In the morning it must have been full of shamrock for people to pin on to a coat or a lapel. I do not know if the tiny shamrock bunches were being given away or if they were free.  At this end of the day, the remaining greenery was waterlogged and sitting under water in the bottom of the plastic container. It was not even floating.

21 March Monday

I have been up and down from my bed for the last three days. Mostly I have been sleeping.  This cold has completely knocked me out. It is a terrible one.  At one point this morning, I got up and walked through the house. I was only going to the bathroom and fetching more water for myself. There was a lot to see.  Joe’s cows were in the field. Looking out the kitchen door, I saw two pheasants pecking in the gravel.  Through another window, a young fox was up on the table eating stale bread with his head thrown back.  Out the big windows the robins and tits were clustered around eating peanuts from the hanging feeders. Just above them, the white farm cat was sunning herself on the Galtee tower. The birds did not know that the cat was so close and the cat did not know the birds were so close. They were all busy with their own activities.  It all seemed to be going on.  The sun was bright and daffodils are blooming. It is very cold but everything looks like spring. I was pleased to see all of the creatures out and about but I was most happy to crawl back into my bed.

22 March Tuesday

Ned was well pleased with his work.  He said “If it was any better it would be wrong.”

23 March Wednesday

A fox walked by the window this morning.  I was standing right there as he strolled along looking left and right.  I was only a few feet from him but he was oblivious. I was inside and he was outside. He was a big fox.  He was much bigger than the young one who was on the table the other day.  This fox was a deep dark red colour and his tail had a dark almost black tip at the end. This fox was big and muscular.  This fox sauntered.

24 March Thursday

My friend Marianne will celebrate her birthday on the 26th. Today is the 24th.  There is no way I can get a birthday card to her. Ordinarily something sent today should reach someone elsewhere in the Republic by the next day.  Tomorrow is Good Friday.  The country is closed for business on Good Friday.  The next day is Saturday. We never have postal deliveries on a Saturday. That has nothing to do with Easter.   Then there is Easter Sunday followed by Easter Monday, which is another holiday. If I rush to put a card into the post for Marianne today, she might receive it on Tuesday the 29th, but most likely, what with the holiday and all, it will not arrive in her post box until Wednesday which is the 30th. Wicklow is a two and three-quarter hour drive from here.  In the number of days it would take a card to get to her I could walk there and deliver it in person. I am still struggling with this cold.  I do not feel up to walking to Wicklow.  I do not even feel up to driving to Wicklow.  I do not even feel up to making a card. I think I shall simply make a phone call on the day.

She’s Happy Out

26 March Saturday

Empty Saturday.  I have never heard this expression before today. I do not know if it was made up by the man who I heard say it or if it is used every year. Maybe I am the only one who does not know it.  Today seems to be a gap in all of these days involved with Easter. They seem to fill the days of the week, even if not consecutively.  Fat Tuesday. Ash Wednesday. Maundy Thursday. Good Friday.  Easter Sunday.  Easter Monday.  Today is just a day when no religious events happen. I am not sure if the Empty means that it is simply a day without a definition in the Easter rituals.  I am not sure if the Empty is a good thing or if it implies a sense of something lacking.

27 March Easter Sunday

I feel depleted by this cold or virus or whatever it is.  Today the sun has been bright. The wind was cold but I decided I would feel better if I took a walk. I decided that I needed a walk in order to start feeling stronger.  By the time I struggled up the Mass Path and crawled under the tree which fell down and clambered over a few big branches which had blown down, I was already pretty tired.  The rocks were slippery with moss.  The walking was hard work. An abundance of wild garlic cheered me up and I picked as many leaves as I could hold in my hand.  By the time I reached the tarmacadam road I was exhausted and feeling dizzy.  That was the moment when I should have turned around and struggled back down the path and over and under the trees and branches and gone home.  But I did not do that.  I continued all the way Around.  By the time Oscar rushed out to meet me, I was considering ringing and asking for a lift home.  I was so very weak.  Oscar walked me the rest of the way.  He stayed close. He licked my hand, the one not holding the leaves. He knew I was not right.  I did not feel better for the fresh air and the walk.  I felt terrible. I arrived home still clutching my handful of wild garlic. I thanked Oscar at the door and I went inside, put my leaves into a pitcher of water, and fell back into bed.  I slept for three straight hours.

29 March Tuesday

Jim told me that he had cut a fine load of timber for this past winter. He had cut it and he had stacked it and he had it in the right order for use.  He had the oldest and driest wood ready in the easiest position to get at. But this was the winter when the price of oil was way down. It was well down. Jim’s job is delivering oil so he knows exactly when the price is good.  He did not allow his family one single wood fire all winter long. He did not even allow a fire at Christmas. His wife has not forgiven him for that. He kept the oil heat going. He swore that his wood would last to burn another winter but the price of oil would go up and up and it would not be low like this probably ever again. Already he is right. The price of the oil has risen and he still has near enough a full tank at the cheap price. Jim is feeling smug. I am not the first person who has been told about Jim’s oil and Jim’s firewood.

30 March Wednesday

She is Happy Out.  This is an everyday expression.  It means she is totally Happy.  She is as Happy as can be.  She is completely and utterly Happy.

31 March Thursday

I walked up the Mass Path and around today.  The trees and branches were still difficult both going over and under. I did more clambering and crawling and squeezing than I would have liked.  Simon came with me and he brought work gloves for the hands and knees part of the crawling. He is not fond of putting his hands into the mud just to go for a walk.  The moss on the rocks was still slippery.  The sun was out and the wind had dropped.  The radio is giving a straight nine days of rain so this sun felt like something we must savour. I felt as good to be walking as I felt awful the other day. We devoured that last batch of wild garlic immediately, I came home with another big bunch today.  My hands smell of the leaves now. Next time I shall carry a little bag so I can fetch a larger supply.

The First Swallow

1 April Friday

It was an early appointment.  I had to be at the surgeon’s for 8.30.  It meant leaving the house with enough time to allow for a 50 minute drive. Because it was so early, I did not bother about the Ten Minute Tractor Time which I usually plan for to accommodate the normal thing of coming up behind a tractor on a road and being able to do nothing but drive slowly behind it until either it turns off or until I can pass it.  I did not know where exactly I was going, so I did allow a little extra time for getting around and finding the unknown street.  Simon came with me as I was told I could not drive after the eye procedure.  He set the street address into his phone so it should have been simple.  What we did not know and we could not know was that the city of Kilkenny had changed the name of the street.  It was no good having Abbeybridge punched into the phone because the name of the street had been changed to Friar’s Bridge.  I was wandering around in what was supposedly the area looking for a street which no longer existed.   I was also looking for someone to ask but because it was early there was no one out and nothing was open. I found an elderly man who knew the neighbourhood and knew about the change of name. He told me that he is always out early because he got into the habit when he had a dog. The dog is dead six years now but he still favours an early walk. He walked me very slowly to the narrow street and pointed out the new name.  When I got into the surgery, I showed my letter with the wrong street name on the letterhead.  The receptionist said I was lucky indeed to have found that man.

2 April Saturday

David the Egg Man at the market is packing it in.  He is 84. He has decided to give up his hens which means giving up the market and egg selling.  Today was his last day.  There was a sign on the egg table offering Laying Hens for Sale.  He has a lot of hens.  He has so many hens that he was fussing recently about how many fewer eggs he seemed to be getting.  It took him a few days or maybe a week to realize that there had been a break in his fencing and a fox had been in and out several times over a week.  The fox had eaten 40 hens. If David did not even notice the absence of 40 hens, he must have a lot of hens.

It is a sorry thing to lose another stall at the market.  Each time we lose someone we do not seem to get a replacement. We still have no cheese seller. I spent years calling the Cheese Lady Kathleen. It was not until her very last day that she told me that her name was not Kathleen but Katherine. She said she did not mind at all that I had been calling her by the wrong name all along but since she was leaving she thought it a good time to set me straight.

3 April Sunday

The house is connected to the shop and the only way to know what is house and what is shop is that the colour of the walls and the window surrounds changes. This morning there was a push bike in a corner near to the division between house and shop.  The bicycle was standing on a little rug.  It was the kind of small rubber backed rug which is often right inside the door of a shop so that people will not slip on a wet floor.  The rug has rubber backing but some kind of man-made fibre top to collect mud and dirt and water. The bicycle was standing on exactly that sort of little rug.  It was not locked nor was it attached to anything.  After looking for a few minutes, I decided that the whole thing was inadvertent.  The rug was there for some unknown purpose and someone came along and placed their bike right on it.  The rug defined a place and as a result the bike, by being positioned on the rug, was in a place and not just leaning up against the building.

4 April Monday

Today we have a break in the nine days of promised rain. Everything looks fluorescent in this very welcome and brilliant sunlight. The grass gives off an eerie glow and the daffodils seem unnaturally yellow.  Nothing looks natural. Everything looks a little bit creepy. There is one gate in a low place which has a row of the brightest yellow across its opening. Each time I spot it from a distance I am convinced this yellow is the best  of daffodil displays and each time I get closer I see that it is not daffodils. It is a row of  bright yellow plastic bags which were filled with plaster but are now filled with sand.  They are blocking the gate from rushing flooding water.  The bright glow from within is exactly like the glow of the daffodils.

5 April Tuesday

The presentation started well. A woman sat right in the front row with an empty seat beside her. Her telephone rang and she answered it. I assumed that she would say quietly that she could not talk right now.  I was wrong. She settled into a conversation and her voice was not at all quiet.  Then she jumped up and walked to the back of the room and out the door, talking loudly all the way.  I tried to keep reading. I raised my voice a little. It was not easy to speak above her but I did not know what else to do. She returned a few minutes later still talking but no longer on the telephone. Now she was talking with the friend who had just been on the phone. They chatted as they walked up the central aisle. They sat down together in the front row and then the first woman said to her friend Hey, Now we have to shut up.

6 April Wednesday

Every single day is a wild and windy day. Everyday, there is rain and there is sun and today there was sleet and there was hail.  There are rainbows every time the sun comes out.  Every rainbow is a pleasure but on a day like today after a while it is just another rainbow and we know that it will be followed by more rain and maybe more sleet. The threat of what comes next sort of takes the element of excitement out of a rainbow. Something has to be good in the midst of such bitter cold. We managed a short walk. While sheltering from a heavy burst of hail, I spied a bunch of lichen on the ground.  I picked up as much as I could. Usually I find one small bit or a branch with a tiny piece stuck on it.  The scrabbling of birds on branches might have loosened all this lichen or maybe it was just the wind.  I filled two pockets with it.  By the time I was done with my gathering the hail had stopped and we set off again.

7 April Thursday

This is the time of year for the return of the swallows. Everyone is on the alert to see The First Swallow.  There are discussions as to where and when a swallow has been seen.  Breda saw one the other day.  This is the first sighting I have heard of.   She saw a swallow on the 3rd. She checked her calendar and saw that last year she saw The First Swallow on the 8th.  She is delighted with herself. She is delighted with the swallow.  I have yet to see a swallow myself. I am so bad at recognizing birds that I will probably see one and not be certain of it.  It will be best for me if I am with someone else who can be trusted to know.  There is always the first something to see. The first snowdrop, the first primrose, the first daffodil or bluebell or crocus or apple blossom. There is always a first something to anticipate and to celebrate but nothing excites quite so much as The First Swallow.

Wet Coffee Grounds

8 April Friday

Dead pigeon in the road down near the stream.  It had been freshly hit by a car not killed by a fox. There were a lot of feathers spread around.  There would not be so much bird left if a fox had killed it. There was that little bit of something bright red which is always near to a dead bird.  It is a wiggly bit of an organ. I do not know which one.  I decided that it is the spleen. I do not even know if birds have spleens.  I do not know what any spleen looks like. Whatever it is the fox rarely eats this organ. Dogs sniff it and leave it. I imagine it is bitter and not pleasant which is why it is always left. When the death is recent and the red thing has not had time to be run over or otherwise further destroyed or dirtied, the red is so bright it looks artificial.  It is what I always look for when I see a freshly dead bird.

9 April Saturday

There is not much to like about Limerick Bus and Train Station.  The old tobacco kiosk is about the only thing to look forward to. Usually I only see it from the bus on arrival or departure.  Today I walked out and took a photograph.  It is a busy spot with a lot of car movement.  A park spreads out green and lush behind the kiosk.  The opposite side of the street is full of boarded up buildings and trash and broken down fencing.  It is a grim neighbourhood. This little kiosk and its park are the only pleasant things to look at.  I had to return to the station quickly because it was cold and windy. The rain came in gusts.

Starbucks has taken over the café at the station.  We were a bit shocked to see this.  We never go into a Starbucks anywhere.  There is always somewhere else to go. But there is only the one café at the station.  There has always been only one café at the station.  Everyone goes in to sit down because it is the only place to sit and not be frozen.  The station waiting area is high-ceilinged and drafty and cold. There are birds swooping and pooping all the time.  There is a little news stand and there are a few rows of seats.  Basically the waiting area is outdoors.  Even on a warm day it is cold in the waiting area. Everyone goes into the café where there is a tall fireplace and chimney breast.  The fireplace is not lit.  I have never seen a fire in there but everyone wants to sit nearest to the fireplace as if it has heat to offer.  It is the idea of heat which makes them cluster close.  There are big armchairs near the fireplace as there always have been. The café is much the same as it always was before Starbucks took over.  The walls have been painted black and the armchairs are newer and less torn up.  There are fancy lights and there are a lot of pricey coffee related products on sale. Everything costs more than it did before.  Still, it is the only place to sit while waiting for a bus or train.  A lot of people are just there for the waiting. They are neither eating nor drinking. They are just sitting and they are waiting. It is not a lot warmer than the big waiting area but it has two doors which close so it is a little warmer.  And there are no birds.

There was a bin full of packages of wet coffee grounds. These three kilo packets were being offered free for people to put in their gardens.  The lad loading up the bin said he used to work for the council doing landscape work. He said snails hate coffee grounds so that alone is a good reason to share them around outside.  He liked the recycling and he liked the way it reduced the café’s waste. He spent a long time making the display look nice. He was proud of his display. He was proud that the system was working. He said people loved to take the bags home with them but he did not think many people got on a bus or train carrying a bag of the wet coffee grounds.  He assumed that the majority of people who took them must live nearby.

10 April Sunday

It has been lashing with rain for a solid 24 hours.  I have tried various things to ignore it. There is rain pouring in through the bathroom ceiling.  There is rain dripping off the edge of one velux window. There is rain coming through a crack over the window in the book barn. We have spent a lot of time moving things out of the way and putting towels and newspapers down.  We have spent a lot of time moving the wet newspapers and putting down more newspapers. We have spent a lot of time checking other places which might be leaking and which sometimes leak but so far are not leaking.  The wind is particularly wild and I think water is blowing in directions and crannies where it would never usually go. We have put on loud music to cover the sound of the wind and the rain. We have kept a fire going in the stove all day just to be rid of the sense of every single thing being damp. I cannot wait until this day is over.  I do not know why I think tomorrow will be any better.

11 April Monday

One of the side effects of all this rain is that the top of the plastic box which we use as our post box fills with water. It makes a rectangular lake of water about 2 inches deep. Today I went to lift the lid off the box to check for post. My scarf dipped into the little lake and immediately soaked up water.  Capillary action.  My scarf sucked up water so fast that it was already wet six inches up from the bottom by the time I got back into the house.

12 April Tuesday

Irish language news comes on the radio at half past the hour.  The news is read in Irish but as soon as it switches to sport everything goes back to English.

13 April Wednesday

There are the kind of daffodils which get planted out to bloom early. These are the ones which cheer people up after the long winter. The early-flowering daffodils are a great sign. The early-flowering daffodils are a sign of hope. The early daffodils are what most people plant. Then there are the late-flowering daffodils that keep the blooming going for a long time. There are also the sort of mid-season bulbs which again keep a display going. Most people are always eager for the earliest possible blooms so they put in the early-flowering bulbs and then they are always meaning to put in more to keep the blooming staggered and going for many weeks. Most people mean to put in more bulbs but by the time the autumn comes they forget that they meant to put more in and anyway in November they feel certain there will be plenty of daffodils in the spring.  in November, daffodils are not the main thing in anyone’s mind. This is what Marie explained to me in a big rush.  I have put more punctuation in than she said. She barely took a breath in the entire time she was speaking. I simply could not write what she said the way she said it.

Not to tell anyone anything

14 April Thursday

I have been called up for Jury Duty.  I had the letter some weeks ago but now the time is nearly here. I told this to the hairdresser while I was having my hair cut. I asked him if he had ever been on a jury.  He said he was called up once, but he got out of it.  He had his doctor write him a note. He said if he gets called again he will get out of it again. I told him I believed in the jury system as a way for everyone to get a fair trial. I said I was not very eager to do it but since I believed in it I guess I should be willing to do it.   I asked him why he would not to do it. He said he knows everyone in the town and he is related to most of them.  And on top of that, he works with the public everyday.   He whispered, “I am in a position to Overhear Things.”

15 April Friday

Geraldine had been away for a few years. When she returned she was no longer as chubby as she once was. The Parish Priest saw her and declared “You are nearly not yourself! You look like a Rasher!”

16 April Saturday

There was a bunch of keys left on the counter near where we were paying for our breakfast. I picked them up and handed them to the girl at the register.  She said, “Oh, they must belong to the couple who just went up stairs.” She threw the keys onto our tray. She said, “You’re going upstairs yourselves.  You take them.”

17 April Sunday

The boreen is a terrible mess.  The winter has been long and there has been so much rain. Huge holes have been gouged out by rushing water. Water poured off the fields and onto the track. Water poured downhill from wherever was above to wherever was lower.  Water poured out of the sky. There are deep holes and there are shallow holes. Some are long cracks and some are enormous and deep like sheep dips. It is not unusual for all four wheels of the car to be in holes at the same time. There are more than enough holes for there to be one for each tyre at any given stretch of the road. It is nearly impossible to swerve a little and avoid the ruts and the ripped out places as we drive in or out. This might well be the worst it has ever been. It is a new low in terms of road damage.

22 April Friday

I reported to Jury Duty on Monday.  I did not want to be chosen but I was indeed chosen and put onto a jury.   Several people were eliminated because they knew a witness. Eventually we had a complete jury all sworn in. Four men and eight women.  I was the only one who asked to be sworn in without the Bible. I was the only person without an Irish name.  The judge sent us into a room to choose a Foreman.  A Garda accompanied us to the room which had a long table and twelve chairs.  No one volunteered for the job of Foreman.  There were twelve spiral bound pads of paper and a plastic box of red pencils on the table. Most of the pencils were not very sharp. We folded little pieces of paper and wrote numbers. Someone emptied the box of pencils and we put the numbers into the box and a woman picked a number.  The woman who was that number in the order around the table shrieked and said she just could not do it. Another number was picked and the young man whose number that was said he would do it as someone had to do it.   We rang our bell which was behind the door and the Garda came to fetch us and lead us back into the courtroom.  The judge assured us that the case would be finished by Thursday afternoon at the latest.  We were instructed about the case and the charges and told not to tell anyone anything.

Then we were sent home and told to return in the morning.  We were told that we must enter and exit the courthouse by way of a back gate.  A buzzer was present to let us in and to let us out.  We were also told that lunch would be provided each day.

I met an older woman in the car park who recognized me from the jury selection. She had been there in the initial group but she had not been chosen. She was deeply disappointed.  She said she was envious that I had been chosen. We talked for a few minutes and then she wished me luck.  As she turned away she said, And You, you are not even Irish. I was not sure if that was simply an observation on her part or if she felt that someone born in the country should have priority in these situations.  I decided not to ask what she meant.

The next day we spent a lot of time in our room. We had tea-making facilities and a water cooler.  There was one loo for men and one for women. The smokers could step outside the door for a cigarette. We were called into the courtroom and then after a little while and a few questions to witnesses we would be asked to retire.  We spent more time in our room than in the courtroom.  At lunch time we were invited to choose between chicken and lamb. Four lamb, seven chicken and one vegetarian.  Our Garda had to swear on the Bible to take care of us and not to let us discuss the case with anyone. When lunch was ready, we were led across the street.

Lunch was upstairs in a building which is a learning centre for people with special needs.  There is a coffee shop on the street level run by the students.  I went there once and it seemed to serve a lot of cakes and things made with jello. We were led up a flight of stairs and deep into the back of the building.  We went into a room where two long tables had been pushed together to make a large square table.  Twelve places were laid on the oilcloth cover.  We sat down and one lady served us all from a big hot stainless steel tray thing on wheels.  The Garda had his own table and sat by himself and ate by himself.  There was an enormous amount of food and two kinds of potatoes and three kinds of vegetables which kept being replenished on big platters.  We ate and ate.  Then we had huge slabs of cake and coffee and tea and when we were finished we were led out and back across the street and in through the back gate.  This everyday food for the jury was as plentiful as though we were working hard out on the land.

We spent a lot of time getting to know one another and discussing the case and mostly discussing how little we knew. Each morning we all had theories about the things we did know. The accused was defending himself and never seemed to have more than one question for each witness. It was frustrating to spend so much time not in the courtroom. It was frustrating that the things happening in there were not things that we were being told .

By the time the defendant changed his plea from Not Guilty to Guilty and the judge dismissed us for the last time, we were exhausted from several days of so much waiting and hanging around.  We were exhausted from the limbo of it all.  We all shook hands and said good-bye.  Most of us will never see one another again.  We came from all over the county. There was one man from way up in Nenagh.  We might bump into one another somewhere but we might not. I do not know if the order for us not to tell anyone about the case is still in effect or if we are now free to tell whatever we want to tell about it.

Just inside the West Gate

23 April Saturday

Breda and I took buckets and gloves and a spade and walked up the path to Johnnie’s orchard. Trees and branches are still blocking the path. We had a bit of a wiggle getting underneath the biggest tree with our equipment. Each time I crawl underneath that tree I promise myself that I will return with a saw. Breda wanted to dig up some wild garlic to replant near her riding ring. The dogs trampled what she had put in before closer to the house. I bring some garlic down to plant every year.  It is now coming up all over the place and multiplying.  I do not really need to transplant more but it is a thing I do in the spring so I shall continue to do it.  I have put it under the apple trees and under the birch trees and under a willow and near the water butt by the barn and near the sauna and on the primrose wall and near the flowering currants.  Soon it will look like Johnnie’s orchard which is completely carpeted with wild garlic.  The white flowers are not in bloom yet up there but when they are the carpet will be complete.  It is beautiful with the leaves covering every inch of ground.  We filled our buckets and dragged them to the end where the track meets the tar road.  We walked back down and drove up to fetch our supplies and then drove straight up into the mountains with the whole van smelling of garlic.  We walked in the late sun and silence surrounded by bright yellow gorse and a few sheep. We drove home in a cloud of garlic.

24 April Sunday

Calves are in the field which is elevated above the track where I walk.  These are the calves who have just hit their teen-age years.  They are strong and feisty and they are always in a hurry. As I walk up the track, one calf runs over to see what I am doing.  Then they all rush to the side of the wall and they rush along beside me.  There is a lot of jostling to get closest to whatever might be happening. They do not want to miss anything. There is a place at the end of that field where wooden fencing comes together in a tight corner. It is the very last point at which the crowd can accompany me.  The only brown calf takes up position in that corner.  He does not rush with the others in the crowd. I guess I should call it a herd not a crowd but they make such a thing of pushing and jockeying for position I think of these calves as an unruly crowd not a herd. The brown one moves his head back and forth and back and forth.  Left to right and left to right as if he is saying no. No. No. No. I think probably he is just using the fence corner as a scratching place for his neck. The other calves ignore him and he ignores them and he ignores me.  He just keeps turning his head from left to right without a pause.

25 April Monday

The Wood Road has had two traffic lights moving along its length for two or three weeks now. The lights change the two-lane road into a one-lane road for a distance. I keep meaning not to use that road but I keep forgetting.  Each time the wait is as long as fifteen minutes. Each time I sit there with four or five other vehicles while we wait for the light to change and let us continue.  The radio is dead in the jeep so fifteen minutes is a long and quiet wait. The men and their digger are gouging, scraping and clearing out clay and undergrowth all along the edge of the road.  They are clearing a distance of a meter off the tarmac wherever they can. They are stopped going any further by stone walls or the ditch. The stuff that they dig out gets poured into a lorry and then taken and dumped somewhere down the road.  When the truck returns the digging and scraping begins again.  It is slow work.  The Wood Road is about four kilometers from Knocklofty Bridge to the Dungarvan Road turn-off.  At this rate, the work could go on for months.

26 April Tuesday

Johnnie Mackin was a man who knew how to do everything.  He is known locally as a man who could do anything. He knew how to do most things and he taught himself to do the things that he did not know how to do but that he wanted to know how to do. He invented a fair number of things that had already been invented. He invented a gun, and a record player, and he taught himself to paint and he built beehives out of cement. At some point he taught himself to carve letters into stone.  He made a tombstone for his mother and he made one for his sister.  He made one for himself too.  I am a little confused about this.  I think he must have made two for himself.  Anyway, he is the only dead person in the graveyard at Grange who has one tombstone at his head and one at his feet.

27 April Wednesday

The shop just inside the West Gate heading into Irish Town surprised me today. It has been brightly painted and it is now THE HOUSE OF LOURDES.  Or it was The House of Lourdes and now it is ready to be something else. There is a sign in the window offering the place To Let. I do not walk down that way often when I am in Clonmel so I do not know how long The House of Lourdes has been The House of Lourdes. The last I remember there was a Polish food shop in that building.  Many years before that there was a shop which sold clothes and boots and equipment for hill climbers and for fishermen. I think there were a few other businesses in between but I cannot remember what they were.

28 April Thursday

I have only been in the house for a matter of minutes.  I took old bread out to the table. Today is another cold and windy day.  We are promised sleet and hail and even thunder by afternoon. Each day is long and bright with interludes of precipitation.  Each day is cold. Except for occasional moments of bright sun, it is not warm. Spring is simply refusing to settle this year.  I broke the bread into crumbs and small pieces.  I wondered who would come for the bread. Would the fox arrive to eat it? Or would the birds get there first? I have only been in the house for a few minutes.  As I look out the young fox is already standing on the table eating the bread in yet another sudden downpour.

29 April Friday

Another packet of greeting cards has arrived from the Mouth and Foot Painters of Ireland.  Usually I receive these cards before Christmas.  I never really like them and I never want them but I always end up paying for those which have been sent.  It feels churlish to send them back.  This new group of six cards and envelopes arrived as a Spring Pack.  A hand-written letter by Steven Chambers (Mouth Painter) explains the seasonal selection. Of course, it is not a hand-written letter.  It is a mouth-written letter. There are pictures on the back of the letter of the various painters, all Mouth Painters. No Foot Painters. I think Foot Painters are more rare. Each person is described by how they came to have no hands or arms.  I see the term limb deficient for the first time. Some of the painters are described as having other hobbies besides painting.  One woman with no arms is also a keen ballet dancer.  Steven himself paints in watercolors but what he really likes is fishing. I know I will not send these cards back. I know I will send the money instead.

Dead Jackdaw

30 April Saturday

I had already decided that the last full bucket of nuts was the final bucket of nuts.  The cold and the bitterness is supposed to end.  They keep telling us that this cold cannot go on. The birds do not stop eating and eating.  As often as I fill the feeders they are empty again. This morning I felt mean when I looked out at the nearly empty feeders and all the birds waiting to get a turn.  I took the bucket down to the shop and filled it half-full. I decided that half-full was still a lot of feeding. It is a big bucket.  This time it really would be my last bucket of the year.  I was waiting to have it weighed.  There was no one in the shop except a man with a long white beard standing around.  He was waiting to be served too. While we waited I told him of my dilemma about not wanting to buy more bird nuts but buying more bird nuts anyway. We both waited and looked around. I saw a lovely soft brush with a wooden handle.  It was all by itself, not in any kind of group with other brushes. There were three sections of brush on the flat wood. Each one was complete in itself so it was three brushes on one handle. I picked it up.  I loved it and I wanted it but I did not need it. The man with the long beard saw me looking at it and he told me that it was a distemper brush. Then he told me how his mother and his grandmother used goose feathers for the same job because they were strong and long.  He said everyone had a theory and a method for applying distemper to their walls. When John came in and asked which of us was first the man with the long white beard pointed to me and said She’s in a hurry. She has birds needing feeding in this desperate cold.

1 May Sunday

I am sorry to learn that John has died. I thought of him as The Ancient Man for a long time before I knew his name. He died two weeks ago.  He had a fall and broke his pelvis and after a while they brought him back from hospital but he only lasted three weeks at home.  Anyone who walked the river path spoke with John over the years. He knew everyone and everyone knew him.  John walked with his old dog Sally and then he walked without her when she died some years ago. He said he could not start again with a young dog. All of his dogs had  been called Sally and at the age of 92 he forgot how many Sallys he had had. John walked five miles a day every day until last year when he reduced his walking to five days a week instead of seven days a week. Even with all that walking John looked much older than 92. He walked very very slowly and he stopped often for a lot of conversations. I knew quite a bit about John just from meeting once a week over the years, but I did not know his last name.  I did not know where he lived and I did not know his family. I would not even know that he had died if I had not met Dora, who also walks with her dog on the path.

2 May Monday Bank Holiday

I have been in and out and back and forth and in the barn sewing books and packing parcels all day long all the time dressed in my garden gear.  I have carried my grubby gloves in my pockets at all times. At one point I passed near the washing line, admired the flapping laundry and I thought that today was a perfect drying day and then I thought I must get to work out here in the sunshine and by the time I came out of my room a few minutes later, the rain was lashing down and it was cold and bitter and horrible.  Again.  In between attempts and downpours I have done a lot of other things but now at 5.30 I have changed out of my Welly boots and my wet soil encrusted trousers and I am no longer going to try to do anything out of doors, even if it stays perfectly sunny until 9 pm as it probably will do.  I am giving up.

3 May Tuesday

One day last week we drove up and walked in the mountains at five o’clock. It was too cold to stay long but the late light was beautiful. We lasted about forty minutes before the wind defeated us. We stopped in at Rose’s for a quick drink on the way home.  The bar smelled terrible.  We immediately started looking at the floor as it smelled like something rotten from a farmyard had come in on the bottom of someone’s boots.  We couldn’t see anything on the floor so we figured it must be on someone’s trousers. There were only four or five people in there. Perhaps someone was spreading slurry all day and had stopped for a drink before going home to change. We drank up quickly and did not stay for another.  Today I talked to Peter.  He had just come up from Rose’s. She had asked him to stop in before the bar was open and before the fire was lit to check out the smoking of her chimney and her woodstove. She did not mention a bad smell. What he found in the chimney was a dead jackdaw. The jackdaw was squished into the chimney in a nearly impossible position.  Peter could not figure how the bird could have squeezed herself in and out of the very small available space as many times as would have been needed to build a nest and then to sit on the nest and lay the eggs.  He said the nest was made of all kinds of stuff: beer mats and cigarette ends and string and rags as well as the usual plant stuff. The jackdaw was sitting on eight eggs. The eight eggs were stuck to the body of the dead jackdaw and the whole mess was now in a skip outside the bar for anyone to see. Quite a few people had been out to have a look.

5 May Thursday

I have never folded up an Irish flag. I have never watched anyone else fold up an Irish flag.  There are more flags around than usual which I think is a result of the 1916 Rising anniversary commemorations. Pat told me that the people of Ireland have recently taken back their flag. She said that the IRA had sort of co-opted the flag for many years so people did not want to fly it and to perhaps be misunderstood.  Flying the flag in all sorts of places and on private property has never been a habit. I was surprised to see there was not even a flag in the courtroom when I was there on jury duty.  Now there are more flags and people are okay about flying them.  This morning I overheard a conversation about folding the flag.  A man was telling a small boy that one must always fold the flag so that the orange does not touch the green. I gather the green can touch the white and the orange can touch the white, but the green and the orange cannot touch each other.  There must be a particular fold that makes all this happen. I do not know if this was the man’s own rule about flag folding or if it is fact.

6 May Friday

Pascal has six calendars hung up in the kitchen.  He has all six hanging up in a very tiny kitchen which has not much wall space. They are the only things on the walls and Pascal’s wife is not very happy about having so many of them. She agrees that it is a fine thing to have a calendar on the wall because you need to know the day and sometimes you need to know about a day a week from now, but one calendar is surely enough for that.  Six calendars do not tell you any more than one tells. Actually there is a seventh one.  Pascal’s wife says the seventh one is the most annoying one because it is right over the taps.  It is the kind with a bright red number and each day the number gets pulled off and that days date is exposed.  Pascal loves to pull yesterday’s number off each morning before he even drinks his tea.  He reprimands her for splashing water on the pages.  The whole year of little pages is swollen and looks much bigger and longer than a year really is.  She tells Pascal to put the little calendar somewhere else where it will not get wet but every year this is where he puts it.  They squabble about it week after week.  She pointed this out to me right away before she Wet The Tea in the pot. Wetting the Tea is how she describes the pouring of boiling water over the leaves to make a pot of tea. This morning is not the first time I have been told about their soggy year. It will not be the last time I am told about their soggy year.

The Teeth in the Shrine

7 May Saturday

The Emigrants Rest is painted in large letters on the the side of the building. The building is not attached to any other buildings and it is on a corner which forces a turn in the road.  The Emigrant’s Rest is the name of a bar.   The sign is visible while driving into town. If one is driving out of town on the same road the painted sign over the door on the front of the bar is Bernie Mac’s.  If a person is looking for Bernie Mac’s on the way into town that person will never find the place. If a person is driving out of town and looking for The Emigrants Rest that too will not be found. It is as if two different places exist in the same building. I cannot help but wonder if some of the customers go for a night out at Bernie Mac’s while others go to The Emigrants Rest.

8 May Sunday

Last week I went to Bob Fitzgerald’s.  It was just after nine o’clock. The outside shutters were still down. The door of the shop was open but there were no wheelbarrows or ladders or sacks of grass seed out on the pavement.  I was not sure if they were ready for business.  It was dark inside but the shop was full of tradesmen getting stuff for the day’s work.  There was a feeling of imperative and rushing in the place. That is why there was so little light.  Everyone was too busy to finish opening the shop.  They were too busy to open the shutters and they were too busy to turn on the lights.  I bought myself a pair of knee pads in the gloom. The knee pads are made of some heavy foam.  They are made for roofers and people who do jobs on their knees.  I felt very pleased with myself.  I wore my new knee pads around the house all day yesterday. The pads attached around the back of my legs with elastic straps and velcro. It rained all day so I did not even consider working outside for one minute but I wore the new knee pads just because I was so proud to own them. I only took them off when I went for a walk at the end of the afternoon.  I could not pull my waterproof trousers on over the new knee pads.

Today I strapped on the new knee pads and I went outside.  The morning was bright and sunny but that did not last. The rest of the day was overcast and balmy.  Even though it was grey, it was warm and after yesterday’s non-stop downpour, I can call today a fine day.  I worked away at this and that.  Clearing the scutch grass and the creeping buttercup from beds and edges is a thankless and never-ending job.  My new knee pads were a disaster.  They just kept slipping down my legs each time I walked.  I decided that they must be made for grown men.  I decided they must be made for grown men with thick legs.  I wondered about how to fix them. I wondered if perhaps I could make the elastic shorter.  I wondered if they were slipping down because my trousers were sort of slipping down.  I  wondered if I should just put the knee pads into the shed and pretend I never I bought them.  I adjusted them every so often and then they were great but they always slipped away again. I was disappointed and I was very very quiet about them. I had been so happy anticipating how good they were going to be.

Late afternoon, I went indoors to make a cup of tea.  I waited for the kettle to boil and I looked down.  I realized that I had been wearing the knee pads upside down, all day yesterday and all day today. I turned them around, re-attached the velcro and suddenly I had the knee pads I had been dreaming of.  I went back outside for a few more hours just to enjoy how well they worked.

9 May Monday

I drove down to the village just before noon.  Cars were parked everywhere.  Even as I crossed the bridge I could tell it was a funeral. Funerals are always held at eleven am.  This funeral had just finished.  Some people were disappearing around the corner on foot as they followed the hearse down the road to the graveyard.  I could not park. I could not stop because there was no where to stop without being in the way of  someone. The bread man had arrived to deliver bread to the shop. He parked in the only available spot which was directly in front of the church and which the hearse had just vacated. He was trying to unload his bread. There were people standing everywhere talking to one another. They were on the pavements and in the middle of the road. The day was warm and everyone was happy to be out and seeing one another for some conversation. No one looked sad.  Some cars were trying to pull out and some were trying to turn around. I could barely get through the cars and the people. I would not have driven to the village if I had known there was a funeral but I did not know there was a funeral, and I did not know the woman who had died even after I was told her name and where she lived.

10 May Tuesday

I was having a cup of coffee and reading after lunch when I heard crunching on the gravel. Then I heard tearing and snuffling.  I looked out the window and saw a young cow on the lawn. It was one of the frisky teenagers. I ran outside.  There were five more young ones with the first one. They ran when they saw me running.  Simon rushed out too.  We both shouted and waved sticks. The heifers ran around behind the barn in a tight group. Then they were stuck because behind the barn was a dead end. They clumped together and could not figure out how to escape. The stone wall, the fence and the building had them trapped. It is not easy to get cows to change direction if you are in a position behind them. I climbed the fence into the field to encourage them from the side while Simon hid behind a bush.  When they saw there was no longer anyone behind them, they rushed out from their entrapment to escape my noise and waving arms and waving stick.  Simon stopped them from running down into the meadow with his flapping arms and flapping stick.  We got them onto the boreen and chased them off in the direction of the farm.  They did not go very far before they were distracted by edible young green things around them. I got into the car and drove up the track slowly with them scurrying and bumping each other along in front of me. It was lucky for us that they were young and not too heavy. The damage to the soft wet lawn was not too bad.  It would have been much much worse if they had been full-grown adults.  My coffee was cold by the time I got back.

11 May Wednesday

Johnnie Mackin’s orchard is looking fine. The trees are full with apple and plum blossom. The ground is completely covered with the long leaves of wild garlic and the garlic flowers are all in bloom so there is a twinkling of the white star-like blossoms against the dark green.  And in between and around the edges there are masses of stitchwort.  More white flowers. It is a world of white polka dots on a green backdrop. It looks planned. Oscar wading through it all is so very big and black.  He is like a cut-out shape of dog amidst the green and white. He makes it all look greener and brighter and whiter.

12 May Thursday

I am curious about the Unemployed Workers Party.   I am not really curious enough to look it up nor to even ask anyone about it. I mostly just wonder if when a member gets a job does he or she have to leave the party?

13 May Friday

Sharon was outside.  She was outside wearing a fluffy pink bathrobe. Her two small dogs were on leads.  She never lets them run free because she knows they will take a scent and be off to who knows where.  The leads were the long kind which stretch as far as the dog wants to go.  Both animals were all tangled around her legs. She commented that I must be missing Em whenever I am out walking.  She told me how she still misses dogs from her past even thought she now has these two.  She told me that she has a small shrine on the wall in the house, one for each of the canine pets she has loved.  One includes the teeth of a particular dog.  She then told me that she and her sister are fostering a rescue dog which had been abused.  They took turns having him stay with them. She said he is a small Staffie. Horrific things had been done to him.  His feet are bent up in a forward direction. As a result, he can hardly walk but hobbles about and now seems to be in less pain and he is putting on weight and the terrible burns, probably from cigarettes, are healing.  She kept telling me more and more details about the abuse. I did not want to hear it but how could I not listen and anyway she barely took a breath in the telling.  It took me quite a while to realize that she was suggesting that I might want this dog to take the place of Em. I said that I was not ready to replace Em.  I said that I really did not think I could own a Staffordshire Bull Terrier no matter how desperately it needed a home.  I did not say that a dog who cannot walk is hardly the dog for me. I had said enough to refuse her kind offer. Oscar was waiting and we rushed off up the road together. I was happy to be with a dog who could run and jump with pleasure.  I have been thinking about the teeth in the shrine ever since.

Dusty Cards

14 May Saturday

I went into the shop in Cahir looking for a newspaper.  The English paper I wanted was not there.  It had not been in the other two other shops either.  Either it was already sold or it had never arrived today. I knew that meant there was not one to be found in the whole town. I stopped to look at the postcard rack on my way out.  When I rotated it a little bit to get a more complete viewing, three large folders fell down.  They were leaning up against the back of the rack. The man at the counter whom I assume is Mr. Sampson because the shop is called Sampsons and I have never seen anyone but himself in there, said that it did not matter. He said everything was always moving and falling in the shop. I chose two cards of a pony named Bridge Boy who was three times adjudged Champion Connemara Stallion.  The information on the card also told me that the Connemara Pony is the only indigenous breed of pony in the country.  He looked completely unreal against a bright blue sky which looked equally unreal. I took the two cards up to the counter and the man who might or might not be Mr. Sampson commented on how dusty they were.  He pulled out a rag and started to wipe them off but then he stopped because they were kind of sticky.  He said he was not any better at cleaning than he is at making displays and if the cards were too dusty for my taste I need not feel obligated to buy them. I told him I have no problem with dust and I purchased both cards.

15 May Sunday

Cleaning The House has taken on a new meaning. We got out an extendable mop thing which I believe is intended for washing windows but which we have never used for washing windows. This is the first time we have used it for anything.  One side of the house was completely splattered with white bird excrement.  The windows and the walls were covered with enormous white splashes. It was not just six or eight splashes.  It was more like sixty.  All of the splashes hit the wall at the same diagonal. It looked like an enormous flock was passing and the wind was blowing and they all let go at the exact same moment.  Actually the splattering splashes did not all appear at the same time. I think they built up over a week.  It just looks like it all happened at once. And since the house is painted this peculiar pinky-purple color, which would perhaps look normal at the seaside but here looks a little strange, the white splashes stood out as very loud.

16 May Monday

Nine Egg Morning.  Eggs have been broken open all along the path. They are pale blue.  Every day there are more. This morning is the first time I have counted while walking.  Nine eggs seems like a lot.  Some are Thrush eggs and some are Blue tits.  Or maybe they are all Blue tits or all Thrushes.  The shades of blue vary from very light almost white to bright almost aqua.  I am not any better at identifying eggs than I am at identifying birds. I am most excited if I find a really large portion of the egg shell unbroken, or broken into two tidy  parts.

17 May Tuesday

Tommie described the new car which Jack had bought. He was impressed and excited about the car.  He was as excited as if the car was his own car. He said it was a great bargain. It said it was old, but it was perfect. He explained its level of perfection by saying that it was A Woman’s Car before Jack got it.

Visiting Dogs

24 May Tuesday

Arriving back from away is always new. The arrival itself and the place itself are completely familiar. The familiarity is both comforting and comfortable. Things are always changing. Things are the same but they are never exactly the same. We got home late afternoon. Simon kept repeating: It is so quiet here. It is so quiet here. It is so quiet here. I though it a bit noisy myself as tractors were racing back and forth up in Joe’s fields getting silage in and some cows were bellowing in another field and the birds, well, the birds were making a racket. But he is right.  It is quiet here.

25 May Wednesday

I had a plastic container full of dog treats. It was labeled Visiting Dogs with thick black marker on brown paper tape.  It had all sorts of things in it.  Some were things that Em never liked and some were things she was unable to eat in her last months. There were sections of pig’s ears and rawhide chews and little straw-like things.  I kept the box around for a long time and whenever I remembered I would offer a treat to a Visiting Dog.   It took me forever to use up this mish-mosh of odd things because I usually just went directly to the big box of biscuits. I kept forgetting the plastic container. After a while I dumped the odd things in with the biscuits and that way whatever I pulled out for a dog is what he or she got offered. I removed the piece of brown tape from the empty container and stuck it up on a shelf.  The tape itself was not a reminder of Em. It was a reminder of life after Em. Now the tape is peeling off.  It is dry and the words Visiting Dogs are less and less visible as it curls up. The tape is peeling off the shelf and soon it will just drop.  I could pull it off and throw it away.  I should pull it off and throw it away.

26 May Thursday

Greg’s rubbery wet suit hung on a curtain rail suspended by two ropes from a tree in the rain.  It was flesh colored because it was turned inside out. The flesh color made it look exposed and very naked. It was sort of a surprise but not really a surprise.  Wet suits are everywhere on this island now.  Everyone can swim in the freezing cold sea or they can go kite surfing all year long because having a wet suit makes it possible. Not long ago it was unusual to see a wet suit anywhere at all.  Today wet suits are sold in supermarkets, which is the most surprising thing.

27 May Friday

Cow parsley is everywhere.  It is the time of year when every road and field is lined with it. Everything everywhere has frothy soft edges.  I struggled up the path through much too much of it. I am too short for the cow parsley.  It has grown up high.  It has grown up over my head. The only way I could keep going was to hold my arms up in front of my face.  My elbows were at chin level and my fingers were pointing straight up.  I was looking out through a narrow slit between my forearms which was just enough for me to see what was ahead but not wide enough to allow any of the blossoms and stems to slap me in the face.

When the animals bar my way

28 May Saturday

David the Egg Man made a visit to the market today.  Everyone was happy to see him. It is maybe two months since he gave up the market.  As always, his leather shoes were well polished.  His eyes were bright. He did not look like someone who had just come out of hospital. He did not look like someone who was almost 85 and just out of hospital.  He explained to each person who greeted him that he had found homes for all of the Laying Hens and he had only kept eight back for himself.  He was wondering if he had been a bit hasty as the eight he had kept did not even lay enough eggs for his own use.  Both of his sons stopped in nearly every day still expecting to find eggs to take home for their families.  Neither of them had adjusted to buying eggs in a shop.

29 May Sunday

I was sitting outside with a book and a cup of tea. It is too warm to do much except to enjoy this weather.  I looked up from the page and saw the fox standing a few feet from my chair. It was the young fox, the one with the bright red shiny coat.  He looked at me and I looked at him.  Neither of us moved. If I had stretched out my leg I could have touched him with my foot.   I went back to my book.  He sat down for a few minutes and then he got up and quietly continued off down the field.

30 May Monday

The heat continues. No one can believe it.  It goes on and and and it does not rain and everyone is happy although now they are starting to worry for the crops and if it might be getting too hot.  We cannot walk up the Mass Path because it is so overgrown with the cow parsley and other stuff and the only way to walk through all of that is to wear long trousers and long sleeves and since it is too hot for that much clothing we have to do our walking elsewhere.  We decided to meet and go up along the waterfall and then cross the river and cut back on the ridge, over the side of the mountain and then drop down the fields. It was a large loop and maybe a bit hot and exposed for the time of day. Breda had sort of invented this walk and she was eager to do it again.  This would be her fourth time and each time she was refining and varying the route a little bit.  I had done it with her the other day when it was equally hot so I knew I was foolish to do it again in the sun.

Before we set off we saw Michael Kennedy.  Breda called out to him Hello Michael to get his attention because when we had been out the other day we wanted to ask him about the nearby Holy Well.  He came over and I saw that it was not Michael Kennedy but Breda kept talking to him and using his name and he kept answering.  I was sure it was Jimmy Dunne but I could not say anything because I felt like I would be interrupting.  He went down the narrow path with the four of us.  He showed us that there were actually three wells in that place and he said that they were all considered Holy. He said that all the local babies had been dipped into that water no matter how cold it was nor what time of year.  He told us that the small field just beside was called a chapel even though there had never been a building built on it.  It was just a gathering place for any mass held at the holy well so the field got called The Chapel. We walked back to the starting place with the man who was not Michael.  Then we saw Michael himself walk down from his farmyard and Breda recognized her mistake. It was not Michael she had been talking to but his brother Jimmy.  It was not Jimmy Dunne but Jimmy Kennedy.  Jimmy did not mind being mistaken for Michael.  He did not mind being called Michael.  He had simply answered her questions the best he could.

31 May Tuesday

Tommie was told to drink more water.  He was told that he needs to hydrate himself.  He needs to hydrate himself on a regular basis but especially now that the days are warm and the sun is high.  Tommie was told that hot sweet milky tea is good but it is not the same as water.  He was told to drink water.  He complained about this to everyone he met. He asked me if I drank water myself.  He said he was too old to start drinking water. He said Why would anyone drink water? It Carries no Flavour.

1 June Wednesday

Paudie’s brother died four years ago. He remembers the date exactly but he told me that he himself does not actually need to remember the date. He knows that the anniversary of his brother’s death will be marked by his parents in the same way each year. The Mother will be wearing one of The Brother’s hoodies all day. The Father will walk the dog while wearing The Brother’s favorite track suit. No one will say a word about the clothes being worn. Just seeing them will be enough.

Paudie says that the second year was the worst because that was when they lost telephone contact with The Brother. Up until then they had his same phone number and they rang whenever there was something to tell. They reported births and deaths and marriages and new jobs and funny stories and christenings and just any old thing that they knew The Brother would want to know. Everyone in the family rang him. They rang and they heard The Brother’s voice telling them to leave a message so they always left him a message.  His parents and his cousins and his Nana as well as Paudie himself and The Young Fella.  Even some of The Brother’s friends called to let him know when there was to be a big party or when someone had passed their driving test. Everyone left a message. No one wrote a text.

It was a shock on the day when The Mother rang with some bit of something to tell and to leave on the answer phone and she was informed by a recording that the number was no longer in service.  It took them a while to get through to each other and then to the phone people who said that the money in the mobile phone had run out and there was a limit to how long a telephone could still be considered active if it was not active.  The Mother wept and explained that it was indeed active.  She explained that they spoke with The Brother every day or almost every day and she asked how could they take his voice away.  Well, they did and it was too late to connect that same number again and so they lost the voice of The Brother and Paudie said that was the hardest thing after having already lost him once.

2 June Thursday

When the animals bar my way, I turn off the engine and wait.  If I am not in a car but I am walking I hop up on a gate to be out of the way. It is silly to get impatient. Today there was a great waving of arms by the farmer on the road. I was driving so I pulled off a bit to the side and waited. The farmer had a huge smile on his face.  Within minutes I understood his amusement. It was not just the sunny day.  A crowd of very young calves were rushing behind him.  There were about thirty of them. They were sort of high stepping in their eagerness.  One of them would turn its head to look behind him and very soon he had changed direction.  His body had unexpectedly followed his head and he was crashing and bumping into the other calves.  Because one changed direction another one would change direction too. They were all stumbling and bouncing off one another.  It was a thrilling time for them to be themselves. They did not know where they were going and it was obvious that it was the first time they had gone anywhere in a group. They had very thin legs and they were wobbly. As always with very young heifers it is difficult to use the word herd.  Herd suggests a kind of group sense and a comprehension of group movement.  This was just chaotic bumbling exhilaration while running along.  The farmer’s wife came up in the rear flapping her arms up and down and smiling with the same big smile on her face. It was impossible not to smile. The thrill of this small movement from one field to another field in the sunshine was infectious.

a Relic

3 June Friday

Sewing books in the barn on a hot day is tricky.  I need to leave the door open for air but the birds are swooping and dashing around especially the swallows who are nesting in the roof.  They consider the entire area of the barn their own world both inside and out. Once they fly in it is hard to get them out again. It is hard to get them out and they poop on everything in their rush and panic to find an exit which is not glass. Sometimes they knock themselves out flying into the windows. At least then it is easy to pick them up and take them back outdoors. In the past three days I have had three swallows, a starling and a wren in the barn.  Two knocked themselves unconscious and two I captured in a colander. One found the door and flew out by herself.

4 June Saturday

TJ the blacksmith spoke about the apple tarts that his mother made.  There were a lot of children to feed so his mother never made a tart with a top crust. Instead she made her apple tart on a large rectangular baking sheet.  There was a crust on the bottom with sliced apples and sugar and butter spread over the top.  When the children saw that their mother was preparing a tart they tried hard to be helpful by setting the table or doing some small job that she would notice.  They were eagerly competing to be one of the four chosen to receive a corner piece.  The corners were the best and sweetest pieces. The children were convinced that the sugar oozed down into the corners. Unless the baking tray was quite misshapen I do not think that the corners would have more sugar in them than any other portion of the tart, but TJ was so happy remembering the sweet corners that I said nothing. Or perhaps his mother piled extra sugar in the corners just to maintain the excitement.

5 June Sunday

Yesterday TJ installed a hand rail on the side of the barn. We were not allowed to touch it while the paint was wet. Today I have been up and down dozens of times simply enjoying the fact that it is there.

6 June Monday

Andrzej was explaining some of the surgery his sister has been going through.  She had a tumour in one part of her head or neck which had grown quietly inside her ever since she was a child and the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl exploded.  Almost everyone in their part of Poland had been affected as children but only now are the problems manifesting. It took this long for the tumour to grow and become something which anyone could find and identify.  Andrzej was trying to explain the situation of his sister’s neck and her surgery but because his English is not great he often has to resort to peculiar uses of language.  Today he spoke of the doctor who is going to fix The Yoke in the neck of his sister. Yoke is a catch-all kind of word.  It is a word which is used to name something or anything instead of using its proper name.  Yoke is interchangeable with Thing. Yoke is a thoroughly Irish bit of slang. It was fine to hear it coming from Andrzej with his strong Polish accent because I am sure that even if he had known the correct word for the part that was being fixed in his sisters neck we would not have known what it was anyway.  We would not have known the word in English nor in Polish.  It was just fine for him to call it a Yoke and for us to think of it as a Yoke.

7 June Tuesday

John the Post arrived early.  He jumped out of his van in great excitement about the freshly repaired boreen.  He was so happy with the filling in of all of the terrible holes and gashes that he could not say enough.  He already knew who had done the work. The man who had done the work was known to him.  He said we had found the exact right man for the job. We could not possibly have had anyone better unless we had had that same man’s father-in-law who had taught him every single thing he knew about tarmacadam.  John was also thrilled with yesterday’s cutting back of all the drooping cow parsley. The cow parsley and all of the nettles and tall things growing with it had been making the track narrower and narrower almost by the hour. He said he would happily drive up and down our boreen all day long.

8 June Wednesday

The milk trucks are too big for the road.  It does not matter if the milk truck is a DairyGold truck or a Glanbia truck. They charge right down the middle of the road and the middle of the road is the whole road. There is no where to go to get out of their way when they are racing towards you. Even when I am on foot they seem to leave no space. To meet them in a car is terrifying.  Now the roads are full of more big things. Every turn is a confrontation with a tractor pulling some enormous machinery sticking out both behind it and above it.  Sometimes the tractors slow down because they are so high they can see over the ditch and they can tell if a car is coming but most times they just bomb along. Silage, haying, and any kind of harvesting activity that needs doing while the sun is shining is being done right now and it is all being done at top speed.  It is a good time to stay home.

9 June Thursday

I drove into Cahir and saw bright orange cones all along by the church and the playing field. There were about six men in reflective vests directing  a very few cars. No one was allowed to park on either side of the road for quite a distance.  On my way back out of town a man in a reflective vest directed me in to the second left.  I asked why and he shouted The Relic!  A little farther along another man in a reflective vest stopped me.  I asked what was going on.  He was very excited.  He stood very near to my open window and he shouted “We have A Relic of Saint Anthony of Padua here and we have it here all afternoon!  We have it here until 9.30 tonight!”

10 June Friday

We woke to the sound of rain.  It is at least three weeks since we have had any rain at all.  Maybe it has even been longer.  To live in this hot summery world has been wonderful but in the last week there has been increased grumblings about the need for rain. Now that we have rain, new complaints will start.  There will be a lamenting that our summer is over already and really it was not nearly long enough.  Meanwhile it is lovely to watch the world turning greener by the minute. Heavy rain on the roof is a good sound.

Not oats.

11 June Saturday

The two narrow strips where the tyres travel are indeed nicely tarred and patched but the grass down the middle of the boreen is growing like mad.  It is the combination of so much rain followed by hot sun.  The grass scrapes the bottom of the car when we drive up or down.  It is much too wet to mow. If the grass gets much longer we can hope that maybe it will weigh itself down and lie flat.

12 June Sunday

I picked my elderflowers on Wednesday evening in bright sun. It felt a bit early but I wanted sunshine for the picking and we are promised a continuation of rain and overcast weather in the coming week. There were thousands of the creamy flowers to be seen in every direction but it was not easy to find many that were low enough to pick from the ground.  I did a lot of struggling through nettles but finally got my forty or fifty blossoms.  I was aiming for forty but I lost count and I always think that more is better than too few. I made the cordial.  It is a light brew. I am wondering if it will get stronger and maybe a little darker as it ages.  Today I put my labels onto the twelve bottles. The label with my same drawing changes a bit every year.  I am not sure how much I like this label. It is so good it nearly looks like a commercial production.

13 June Monday

14 June Tuesday

There is a strange sort of kindness built into life here.  People seem eager to tell you the thing that you want to hear.  They will tell you that you can get a bus connection even if it is not true and if in fact the very bus you want will be leaving three minutes before your own bus arrives. Maybe they tell you this  because they do not want to disappoint you.  There is no thought that you will be disappointed later on when you understand that you missed a bus which you were never going to catch anyway.

Simon went into town early this morning.  He went into town to do a few errands.  He likes to eat breakfast out so he left even earlier than he needed to. The girl in the restaurant gave him a coffee and took his order.  He feared that because he was the first customer of the day he might have a long wait. He did have a long wait. It took twenty minutes for the cook to come out of the kitchen and serve him a big bowl of porridge that was dark and thick and had strawberries stirred into it. He began to eat and realized that what was in the bowl was not porridge.  It was not oats. What he was eating was a kind of bread flour stirred up and served as if it were porridge.  Perhaps the strawberries were added to distract him.  He called the girl over and explained that he had been given a bowl of partially cooked brown bread flour mixed with water and berries. She went into the kitchen and returned saying that the cook had no oatmeal yet as he was waiting for a delivery.  She said that the cook did not want to be the one to disappoint so he made the bread mix hoping that Simon might not notice that it was not oats. She offered something else to replace the lack of porridge. Simon asked for a croissant so she brought him two croissants.  Then she returned to his table with a huge handful of small change.  She apologized and said he must be refunded for his lack of porridge.

15 June Wednesday

Rain. Hail. Thunder. Sun. Rain. Hail. Thunder. Sun. The weather is completely exciting.  We just do not know what will happen next. The order changes but it all keeps happening.

The recipe for the elderflower cordial, as requested

17 June Friday

Joe’s cows eat the grass in the field but no matter how flattened it all is by their tearing, they always leave some tufts and thistles and things.  When they walk off the field to go for milking or just off to a different field, the crows come swarming in looking for worms  and other things that they might want to eat. I think the crows have easier access to these things because the grass is low. All of the recent rain can only make it easier to find the things they seek too.

18 June Saturday

I love to look into the eyes of dogs.  My preferred way to look into the eyes of a dog is to lie down on the floor.  Some dogs are uncomfortable with a human lying beside them.  Even if I am not touching them, some dogs do not feel happy. Some dogs get up, walk away and throw themselves back down onto the ground at a little distance.  Some dogs stay right where they are and they look right back into my eyes.  If the grass is wet or the area muddy I do not lie down with a dog.  In a house that is not my own, I try to pay attention to whose house it is and if it might seem rude to lie down with their dog. It is more often than not a bad idea.  I do like looking at another person’s home from down on the floor, looking up and seeing their world as I think their dog might see it.

20 June Monday.

The Longest Day. Full Moon. Lashing Rain.

ELDERFLOWER CORDIAL

20 large elderflower blossoms

(Best gathered in the sunshine, as if they are collected on an overcast day, your cordial may taste like cat pee.  I have never checked to see if this is true but I am not willing to take the chance.)

4 lb. (1.8 kg) sugar

2 ¾ oz. (75g) citric acid

2 lemons

Put the flowers into a large bowl (remove all leaves first)

In a saucepan, bring the sugar and 2 pints (a generous litre) of water to a boil, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Pour the liquid over the flowers and stir in the citric acid.   Add grated zest of lemons, then slice the lemons and add them to the bowl too.

Cover and leave for 24 hours.

Strain through double muslin.

Pour into sterilized bottles and make a label.

Store in a cool dark place.

Makes about 1 1/2 litres or 2 ½ pints.

Serve a small amount of the cordial with sparkling or still water, with or without or ice.

The Things We Want To Have

14 July Thursday

Two small boys were in the shop. They were together in the little toy section which is behind the vegetable section.  They were examining the bags of plastic farm animals and the fencing and the various tractors on display. They were looking at all the things that they see in their lives everyday.  In the toy section of the shop everything is the same as it is out of doors but it is all on a smaller scale.  One boy said: Here we have all the things we want to have.

15 July Friday

They say that the recession is over and that employment is picking up all over the country.  John told me that the truth is a different story. He told me that he does not need a bulletin off the radio to tell him how things are.  His voice while he spoke was loud as he got angrier with the telling. He told me that Gerry had a robbery in his workshop last week.  He said the only thing stolen from the workshop was some lengths of copper pipe.  John said copper is easy to resell.  He said that copper gets a good price.  A lot of Gerry’s tools were lying around but none of his tools were stolen. One of the drills was new and another nail gun kind of a thing was not only new but it was German.  John assured me that it was a good brand.  John said it had been Savage Dear to buy. He said he knew that For A Fact.  The tools were not stolen and John said that that tells him more about the lay of the land than any words the politicians are telling.  He said that no one is stealing tools because no one is buying tools.  No one is buying tools because there is no work.  He told me that if there is no work there is no need for tools.  He told me these were the facts. He told me not to waste my own time listening to any news off the radio or on the paper.

16 July Saturday

This might be the best ever year for figs.  The branches are heavy with them.  If the heat continues I think there will be loads.  I check them every day because I know the birds are checking too.

17 July Sunday

The dead bird is gone.  I saw him yesterday from inside the barn.  The long window is waist height for me, but it is on even level with the ground outside.  I was inside and the bird was just outside. We were very close to each other with just the glass between us. I was certain he was dead and not simply stunned from crashing into the glass. He had flies all over him.  He was lying face down so I could not tell what sort of bird he was.  This morning he was gone.  There were no feathers or boney bits to be seen.  Maybe he was indeed only knocked out and he recovered and flew away.  Maybe he was eaten.  I do not think foxes eat things that are already dead. They prefer to make the kill themselves.  Maybe it was a sparrowhawk.

18 July Monday

Silence hangs over the land.  I can hear tractors in a far field, but just barely.  Even from this distance, there is a sort of rushing intensity about the sound because there is the need to get the hay in. To get the silage in. To get the grass cut. Or the barley. Or the corn.  Sunshine brings imperatives.  Being a far off muttering of machinery, the sense of imperative is not my imperative. I scarcely hear these sounds unless I really really focus my attention in that direction. Everything close by is quiet and motionless. There is no reason for me to seek out noise and activity elsewhere, but I like to know that it is there.  There are few birds making any sounds at all.  Bees and flies are barely audible. The heat has silenced everything.

19 July Tuesday

The high temperatures continue.  Half the county is paralyzed by the heat. The other half rushed down to the sea.  They came home disgusted. The coast is completely fogged in and it is not warm.  It is chilly.  In the village, boys are jumping off the hump-back bridge and into the river.  After they come out of the water, they hobble over the rough field and onto the dirt path. They climb over the wall and out onto the road and up the hill that is the bridge to cheer on the next boys and then to do it themselves again. There might be girls down below but there are no girls on the bridge. I do not know if the water is deep enough to be jumped into from that height.  The current is fast. There are a lot of big rocks.  People often drown in this river but usually they drown at night and in winter and mostly after taking drink. Now it is as much summer as it ever is.  The boys are hopping up and down on the hot tar with their bare feet.  They are waiting for their turn.

Possibilities of a Lemon

20 July Wednesday

The lights went out at about ten o’clock last night. The lights went out and everything else went out too.  I used the mobile phone to ring the electricity company.  The first thing the woman wanted to know was where I was calling from.  Then she asked me to tell her the account number off our last electric bill.  I said that I could not look for a bill because there were no lights in the house.  The woman said okay and then she told explained that the power was down in Ardfinnan and it might be back on soon or it might not.  She thought it was something to do with a cow and a pole and a branch, but she was not certain. It was dark so we went to bed.

21 July Thursday

An Post raised the cost of postage today.  It went up in July last year.  It went up in July the year before too. I am not certain about the year before that.  The price of postage never goes down.

22 July Friday

They Have Skin in The Game.  I am guessing that this is a way to say that someone has a lot  invested in a project or a business so he cannot give up.  He cannot give up because he has too much to lose.

24 July Sunday

I made the mistake of rushing down to the village to buy a lemon. I thought I could get there and leave quickly just before everyone came out of Mass.  I was too late. The road was full of people leaving the church and talking to one another. The sun was out and no one was in a hurry. The shop was full of chattering people.  I found the only lemon available and I waited my turn and I bought it.  I left the shop with the lemon in my hand. I passed a man sitting on the ledge. I had passed him on the way in too.  I knew the man and he knew me. He shouted out Oh A Lemon!  You’ll be having a whiskey then!  I said There is more than one thing to do with a lemon and anyway it is kind of early in the day for whiskey, isn’t it? He said Whiskey is the only place I have ever had a lemon and that only when it was A Hot Whiskey. He said, I like A Hot Whiskey with lemon. I was in a rush so I did not stop to discuss the many other possibilities of a lemon. This man is a talented man with the spoons and with a mouth harp but he cannot read nor write and he cannot do numbers.  I decided that what he did not know about lemons was just another thing he did not know  What he did not know did not bother him.

25 July Monday

For walking up the mass path I wore two long-sleeved shirts and long trousers.  The morning was too warm for that much clothing. Everything was overgrown all the way up the path. No one has walked through in quite a while. I should have taken some clippers.  I should have taken a stick to beat some of the vegetation down.  I should have worn gloves. Both the brambles and the nettles got me right through my clothes. I got tangled in the sticky weeds.  It was a struggle from start to finish.  It was not really a walk, it was a battle. When I reached the open road at the top I felt like a survivor. I had many stings and I had ripped flesh. I enjoyed every minute of it.

26 July Tuesday

Peter ordered fresh mackerel. It was served with potatoes and a gooseberry sauce. Three potatoes arrived in a side dish which was placed to his right.  He took the potatoes off the small side dish and put them on his plate.  Then he took the skins off the potatoes. He moved the skins onto another small plate which was to the left of his main plate.  He enjoyed the potatoes so much that he asked the waitress for more.  She was neither surprised nor bothered by his request. She was happy to bring him three more potatoes. He performed the ritual of moving and skinning the potatoes and then moving the skins away again. The potatoes broke up as he removed the skins. He mashed them a bit with his fork. He added plenty of butter. He asked for the salt. I passed the salt and I offered him the pepper mill.  He looked at me in horror.  He said You do not put pepper on potatoes!  I said that I did put pepper on potatoes.  He said NO NO. Salt and butter are the only things to put on potatoes.  I keep thinking I know all there is to know about the Irish and their potatoes but it seems there is always more that I do not know.

27 July Wednesday

I am delighted with my lichen cards.  I have been collecting lichen on every walk up the mass path for years now.  Some days, like Monday when the walking was such hard work, I do not even think of lichen but most days my eye is drawn to the little pieces which get knocked off the branches by birds or wind or time. Every pocket of every jacket has been full of dried up crumbling pieces of lichen.  Sometimes I fill a bowl with the silvery green-ish pieces and enjoy having them in the house with me.  Now I have printed a folding card with a square in which to glue one piece of lichen.  I have been rushing up and down to the barn with my glueing and weighting down of the glued pieces and then the checking to make certain that the card with the weight upon it is not sticking to the lichen and ripping it off.  I glue up five cards at a time. It is slow work because the dried and pressed lichen is so brittle.  I am becoming skilled at judging the delicacy of each piece.  I thought I had an enormous supply saved under pressure but of course the old stuff in my pockets was useless.  Now I return from a walk and carefully place any new samples under a weight to flatten them for a few days. I do not leave any in my pockets.  I am nearly through with what I believed was an enormous cache of lichen.  Actually, it was not so much. Now I must plan walks for the hunting. Picking up scraps of lichen is no longer just a whim.  It is a job.  I have glued about thirty cards so far.

28 July Thursday

Joe’s cows are in the adjoining field.  They are unusually quiet today. There is no jostling or mooing or bellowing. They are standing and eating grass.  Quietly. The morning is sunny and windy and cloudy all at the same time. Clouds are racing across the sky.  At moments all goes dark and overcast and then the clouds keep moving and the day is all over bright again.  The only sounds are the wind in the branches, a far-away chain saw and the tearing of grass.

Quiet but Fruitful

29 July Friday

My Friday afternoon trip to Cork was a mistake. I did not think it through. I should have thought it through.  The Friday before a Bank Holiday.  Who would do that? The city was full of people arriving with suitcases.  The city was full of people departing with suitcases. Backpacks, rolling luggage, duffel bags, everyone was on the move with stuff and everyone else was in a mad shopping frenzy. The Gay Pride Parade Weekend was commencing. Some other festival was also cranking up.  All over the whole country things will be happening.  The August Bank Holiday is a big summer event.  Everything everywhere is planned for that one long weekend.  That is why everyone is on the move to somewhere. I made the trip to do one single thing and to settle my mind about that thing. Once I had done my errand, I walked through the English Market and bought an enormous bag of cherries.  I collected my car and headed home.  The traffic was terrible.  Everyone who had not specially gone to Cork for the weekend was trying to leave Cork. I ate cherries all the way home.  This is not a country where cherries are easily available. When they are available they are crazy expensive and often not very good.  These cherries were perfect. I love cherries. I kept saying to myself that I must stop eating the cherries while I was driving, but I never did.  I just kept eating them. They made the entire wretched journey worthwhile.

30 July Saturday

Laura and Richie have a new puppy. His name is Ted.  He arrived today from the dog shelter.  He is three months old and a mix of a sheep dog and a springer. He does not really have hair.  His black and white coat is a fuzzy surface.  His hair is more like a stuffed animal than like a sheep dog’s hair.  He looks like the sort of toy which might have a zip in the tummy for storing pajamas.  I am smitten.

31 July Sunday

I walked the Long Field at the end of the afternoon when there was a gap in the rain. I forgot what I had been told about a recent crow massacre up there.  Two men had been shooting crows.  I do not know why.  I quickly came across dozens of bodies and a lot of feathers.  Some dead crows were visible out in the middle of the yellow stubble of a field.  Most of them were on the dirt track where I was walking.  There were dozens. I could see the place where the two men had sat in long grass off to the right.  The grass was all flattened down. There were cigarette butts in the grass. There was a bad smell off the many corpses. It was more than bad. It was revolting. Some of the carcasses had been torn up while being eaten. In some places there were only wings left or some bits of boney stuff.  It was horrible but it was fascinating.  I could not stop checking each new body as I came upon it. I thought maybe I should turn around and go for a walk elsewhere but then I reached a clump of bushes and rounded a curve and there were no more bodies. I guess the men did not want to leave their shooting positions. I was relieved to be away from death and its thick smell. After a few minutes of walking and breathing fresh air, I came upon one more crow.  He was lying on his back.  He was a good distance from all of the other corpses and he had not been found by predators yet.  He was a dark profile in the grass which grew in the middle of the track. After all the wild carnage, this crow looked peaceful. He looked like he was just sleeping.

1 August Bank Holiday

Tommie told me about a man whose car failed the NCT test last week.  He said the car did not get far enough along the testing procedure for the inspectors to find out if anything was wrong with it. The car just failed because it stunk so badly of dog. The inspectors refused to get inside the car and since they could not test it, they were obliged to fail it. Tommie said he could not say the name of the man whose car had failed, but he was quick to assure me that it was not his own car which had failed because it smelled so bad.  He reminded me that he did not have a dog nor had he had a dog himself for many years now and certainly not since he has owned the car that he is driving today. And anyway he said that he himself had never been a man to take a dog out driving around the countryside.

3 August Wednesday

Every field in every direction all over the county is full of bales. There are round bales, and rectangular bales and round bales of silage wrapped up tight in black plastic.  Already the fields are going from yellow to a deep golden colour.  There are some fields that look nearly red in their goldenness. Today I saw a long trailer in the middle of a field.  The trailer was stacked high with square bales. The trailer was no longer attached to a tractor. All of the bales still on the ground in the field were round bales.  It looked like that trailer load of square bales had been driven to that field full of round bales for some purpose but it was hard to imagine what that purpose might be. There were so many round bales in the field it is difficult to know how the trailer load of square bales even got driven into that position. Another field had every bale collected except for one.  That single bale sat all alone in a large expanse of field.  I spend a lot of time trying to figure out the logic of these activities.

4 August Thursday

When people speak of The Small Paper they mean South Tipp Today.  South Tipp Today is a free weekly paper with lots of advertisements for builders and chimney sweeps and painters and window cleaners.  The advertisements listed by individuals are called the Small Ads. There is always a bit of news and some photographic coverage of local events but mostly the paper is a vehicle for the small ads. People looking for jobs and people looking to hire other people advertise. People offering garden work and applications for building permits are listed.  If people are selling a washing machine, a motorcar or a sofa, they take out a small ad. Agricultural contractors list their services, as do farmers selling hay or animals.  Today I noted a Bull being offered for his reproductive possibilities.  He was described as Quiet But Fruitful.

Old Slates

5 August Friday

I finally finished picking all of the black currants.  The bushes are stripped clean.  I have been picking them off and on in a desultory fashion. Some days it has been too windy and the bushes blew around a lot. Some days it was too hot and some days just too chilly to sit on a box and pick carefully under the leaves.  I filled a bag for the freezer, then I filled a bowl for us to eat. We made them into a thick sauce which was delicious on every single thing we poured it over. We have eaten this sauce on yoghurt, on ice cream, on Fromage Frais, and on porridge. We have eaten it with sour cream and pancakes. Every few days I filled another bag for the freezer.  Then we would make more sauce. This has gone on for weeks.  The supply seemed endless. Every time someone came to visit they looked at the bushes and told me that I must hurry and pick the currants before the birds eat them. The birds are not interested.  I have taken my time. The freezer now has a good supply of black currants in it and we are eating our way thorough yet another batch of the lovely lovely unctuous sauce.

6 August Saturday

For three mornings in a row, I have found a small dead rodent outside the kitchen door.  Each time I have nearly stepped on it.  I am not sure if the dead rodent is a shrew or a little mouse.  Actually I am pretty sure it is a shrew but it is difficult to be certain because in each case the head has been bitten off.

8 August Monday

He is a practicing solicitor but in this court he was being questioned in regards to a case.  He was in the box as a witness and not as a solicitor. The questions for the defense began with him being asked if his legal practice was located on Church Street.  He answered Yes. He said Yes, my firm has been in the Church Street premises for twenty years now.  Then he was asked if the address was No. 5 Church Street.  There was a long silence.  He said I really do not know.  He said We do not use a number.  He said We do not use a street number. We have no number on our door.  We have no number on our writing paper. We do not use a street number because everyone knows where we are.

9 August Tuesday

Over seven and a half thousand English people have made inquiries about applying for Irish passports since the Brexit vote. Nearly three thousand people from Northern Ireland have done the same.  If a person has an Irish grandparent, the application process is a mere formality.  The application will not be turned down. The government has already run out of passport application forms.

10 August Wednesday

The figs are ripening.  The tree is heavy with fruit but most of it is still very hard. I have picked and brought in three so far.  They are not really ready for eating but they are ready for baking.  I need to get at least eight or maybe ten more before we can make a tart so I bring them into the house to finish the ripening. If I hesitate the birds will tear into them. They have already started.  We are competing. It is an evening job. The honeysuckle in the ditches is really blossoming everywhere at once and the blackberries are starting to ripen. It seems early for the blackberries but I think I say that every year.  Each morning I go out and fill a bowl with raspberries for breakfast which is a good way to start the day. Fig collecting at night, raspberries in the morning.

11 August Thursday

Eventually everyone makes something with slates.  That’s because there are a lot of old slates around.  Most people buy new slates for a new roof.  Old slates have become expensive. They  come in many sizes and different shapes. We have one kind of very thick slate on one side of the barn roof and another smaller rectangle on the other side of the barn.  I think many of the new ones are made in China.  Left-over slates get used in lots of ways around a place.  We have a path made of broken ones which makes a nice sound when it is walked upon. I find them useful to put around the base of a plant to keep the weeds down while the plant gets established.  Some get cemented and used as edging. Some people just throw them away. I never throw any away.  Anyone who has the smallest artistic leanings tries to make slates into something special.  A lot of people paint on them. A slate might end up as a little chalk board with a painted floral edge painted.  Or it might have a pastoral scene painted upon it. Or a cow.  Or the name of a house. The most popular thing is that they get made into frames for pictures or for mirrors.   One woman asked for an angle grinder for her birthday so that she could shape her slates before she painted on them.  Tom Browne made me this mirror fifteen years ago. A nail wedged into a piece of wood was his primary tool, mainly for tapping the rectangular shape out of the center.  He ended up chipping and cleaning off the outer shape with a pair of tin snips. His idea was that it should look like a shamrock.

Clutches of Mist

13 August Saturday

Today was the day for the yearly celebration at the Mass Rock.  I had never attended so I decided that I really should see it for myself.  There was a lot of confusing information about the time but the place was fixed.  A Mass at the Mass Rock could only be held at the Mass Rock. Cars drove up into the Knockmealdowns as far as they could go and then people walked across the mountain for about 25 minutes to get to the Rock.  A few of the people setting off were wearing completely inappropriate shoes.  The day was dry and there was not much mud but little summery sandals did not seem like a good idea.

John and Brendan Condon had tractors and trailers at the ready. They drove across carrying the elderly and anyone who was in any way unable to walk. They made several trips back and forth. Larry Doocey said he had The Sciatica on him so he could not walk but claimed that they needed him up there for taking the photographs because that is what he does every year. John drove a blue tractor with a blue trailer. Brendan drove a red tractor and pulled a red trailer.  Both of the trailers had been fitted with padded benches which could be lifted in and out as people entered and exited the trailers.  Brendan’s trailer was lined with carpet and he had covered the side rails with pieces of carpet which he secured with blue baling twine. He provided cushions and an umbrella for his passengers. Both bothers had upside-down plastic crates to help people to step down off the trailers. Brendan wore a cowboy hat for the occasion. John wore no hat.

                                             

There were about 80 people at the service. Some people sat across the stream because the hill rose steeply up from there.  They were directly facing the Rock and the priest.  The priest wore a white robe and he held a microphone with an amplifying box at his feet. The amplifier looked like a yellow suitcase. The sound did not carry very well although it was probably better for those sitting across the stream. The steep hillside made it almost like they were on tiered seats.  Everyone else stood or sat along the edge of the escarpment. Some people had their backs to the priest.  It just had to do with what kind of rock could be found to sit upon. A few people sat on small folding stools. There was a little bit of music with both singing  and instruments.  The Mass did not last long and then everyone stood up and talked to one another for a while and then we all headed back across the mountain. By the time everyone had gotten back to their cars and we were leaving, a large bottle of whiskey appeared and several of the fiddles were tuning up again.

15 August Monday

This morning was completely white with fog.  We could see nothing beyond the fence.  A morning like this feels like the beginning of autumn, even though the calendar says August. By late morning the fog had all burned off.  The sky was blue and the sun was warm. After lunch the sun was hot. I lay down on the grass and fell asleep.  When I woke up I felt warm pressure on my back.  Oscar was stretched out beside me snoring heavily.  I never heard him arrive. He does not usually come down to visit unless he is walking along with a person.  He lives a kilometer away.  I got up from my nap and went on with my jobs.  He stayed where he was for another half hour and then he got up, had a drink of water and headed off in the direction of his home. He is an independant dog.

16 August Tuesday

We were given some Japanese geta sandals which are very nice but they are not exactly practical for life around here.  We hung them up on the wall in the entry to the sauna where they have been for seven years now.  Tom Browne’s slate mirror is wedged in up over the sauna door.  When I went to photograph it, I noticed that a swallow had made her nest on one of the shoes.  The mother was in the nest and she was agitated with my presence.  This morning both mother and babies are absent when I go to look. The nest is empty.  They might just be out for a flight around the place or they might be gone for good.

17 August Wednesday

I was in the supermarket. Among other things, I bought two long narrow red peppers. The girl at the till got flustered and asked me to wait a minute. She had to void something on the till and start again.  By the time she was finished, she tried to tell me what had happened. It looked like I had bought four Chicken Pot Pies when in fact I had not bought a single Chicken Pot Pie. The Pot Pies were listed and then voided and then listed again and voided again. My till receipt was long and confusing. The girl explained it as best she could because she said she did not want me to get home and think I had paid for a lot of Chicken Pot Pies when in fact I had none at all. She said that it was all because of the red peppers.

18 August Thursday

The radio weather man announced the presence of Clutches of Mist everywhere.

Ditch is the word

19 August Friday

The woman in the dentist waiting room came in and sat down and talked to me as if she knew me so I thought she must indeed know me. I thought that if I knew her I would remember her name or how I knew her within a few minutes of listening to her speak.  She never stopped talking. She did not take a breath. She told me that she had been in to the dentist yesterday and she had to return today to have something finished but she did not mind because she had read something in a magazine right here in the waiting room about a man who was at his daughters wedding and he did not walk the daughter down the aisle even though he could walk perfectly well.  He had both legs and he was fit and fine. She had been thinking about the article all night so she was delighted to come back and see what she thought about it all after thinking about it all night. She was not glad to be back to the dentist but she was glad to have another look at the magazine. She started to show me the photographs of the wedding but she did so really quickly as she was leafing though and she said she thought it such a terrible terrible shame that the father was not walking the daughter down the aisle and she had never in her whole life known such a sad thing. It turned out that the daughter was being walked up the aisle by Prince Charles instead of by her own father and the woman could not reconcile this in her own mind. Being escorted by a prince was of course special but a father is a father and there is no substitution for that.  She was still worrying about it all when I was called to go in.  By then I was certain that I had never met this woman before.

20 August Saturday

Brambles are extending by the minute. They are reaching out for the light and they grab at anything that passes. They scratch hard if they can. Cars and faces and clothing are all under attack. I have walked along the top part of the boreen a few times and clipped the longest branches with my secataurs but the big cutting back of the ditches with machinery cannot be done for at least another week. Officially the ditch is not to be trimmed between 1 March and 1 September. Some people insist it is from 28 February to 1 September. The idea behind this restriction is to allow for birds and animals to safely use the time for nesting. Heavy cutting can disturb them and maybe even destroy nests. By now, I am used to hearing the ditch being called the ditch but sometimes talking about trimming a ditch still surprises me and I wish the word hedge could be used. Hedge is not the word for the bushes that grow along the road. Ditch is the word.

21 August Sunday

The word Lashing is used often.  It is mostly to do with liquid.  Single or double cream can be applied with Lashings.  Rain is regularly described as Lashing.  Lashings of butter are essential for the eating of potatoes, but the butter is not liquid, or at least not till it melts.

23 August Tuesday

Our mobile phones are without signal since last week.  It was the night of the big winds.  I cannot remember which night that was.  When we got in touch with the network people they told us that a mast had fallen down and that it would be repaired quickly.  As soon as we leave this valley our phones function. It is just here that they do not.  Today we rang again.  The person on the line had no proper answer to give us. He tried to sound like he knew what was being done but he ended up bumbling his way through.  He said “It can take the amount of time up to the time it has taken.” We know no more than we knew before.

24 August Wednesday

Today is the second anniversary of the death of Em.  I miss her.

25 August Thursday

Competition for the figs is fierce with the local birds. I check them every day.  I compete with the birds. The birds are checking more than once a day.  They have the advantage of eating half a fig while it is still on the branch and then just leaving the it and maybe returning later.  I have the advantage of bringing the just barely squeezable ones inside for final ripening. The raspberries are coming on fast and furiously.  I pick a bowl full every morning and every evening and still I do not seem to get them all. The birds can be grateful for that.

Bags of Sandwiches

26 August Friday

The slugs are out.  They are out and they are in. It might be the cooler evenings.  I am finding slugs on the sink and slugs on the bathroom wall and slugs on the mirror and last night there was one tiny slug on my toothbrush. It is a good idea to close the windows early in the evening to avoid encouraging more slug traffic.

27 August Saturday

The old man walked with a lot of puffing and with a kind of twisting of his upper body up from the torso.  It was hard work for him to cover much distance even walking with a stick.   He carried a paper bag with handles which he plopped down onto Jim and Keith’s table at the market. The bag was full of sweet peas.  He said it was every last sweet pea from his garden because he liked to get them in before a frost so here they were all together in one place.  He told Keith to sell them or to give them away as he had no use for them at all and he did not want them dying anywhere where he could see them.  He did not want to have to cut them down when they were dead.  Keith knew that it was rather early to be worrying about a frost but he said nothing about that. He just said Thank You.  The man turned and left immediately. Keith knew that this was the first year ever that I have failed to plant sweet peas. He knows I love sweet peas and that I have been missing them.  He offered me the entire bag of blossoms.  I suggested that I take a few and leave some for other people.  Keith said that would not work and there would just be a mess.  He was right. When I got home and opened the paper bag there was then a plastic bag full of wads of wet paper towel.  The stems were very short. There were a few long stems but mostly they were cut too short to be of much use to anyone.  I managed to get all the flowers crammed into small jars and glasses of water. I now have ELEVEN containers full of sweet peas. The smell is too much. I shall have to move them all around the house.  I love the smell of sweet peas but this is an entire summer’s worth of sweet smell in one room at one time. As wonderful as it is, it is too much.

28 August Sunday

Nellie knew she did not have the whole story. She did not have the whole story but she was determined that she would have the whole story before long.  She kept muttering “I am looking for More Meat on this Stick.”

29 August Monday

In 2007 permission was granted to build a new runway at Dublin airport.  Nothing happened. Now it is being discussed again. They say building will begin next year and it will be up and running in 2020.  I am confused. I thought the runway had already been built. There was some excitement a few years ago. I thought it was because of a new runway. It must have been something else.  Whatever it was, the airport authorities decided that something needed celebrating. They accompanied the first plane to land, maybe from a new route(?), with several fire engines that raced along beside the plane with sirens screaming and lights flashing. The passengers inside the plane knew nothing of the celebration.  They were terrified.

Today the two brothers from Skibbereen who won silver medals at the Olympics flew home. The pilot invited them up into the cockpit for the landing in Dublin. He told them”It’s All Going To Be Massive, Lads!”  As the plane landed it was blasted with water cannons. That was the celebration. The airport itself was full of busloads of people who had been driven 4 1/2 hours up from Cork for the welcome.  The whole rowing club and loads of other people were there.  There was cheering and singing and applauding. Then everyone got back on the buses to head back to Skibbereen. The return would take them 4 1/2 hours again but they had bags of sandwiches on board and a huge party waiting when they arrived.

30 August Tuesday

Campbell’s Perfect Tea. The name says it all. It is a delicious tea which never tastes bitter and and it comes in a round tin which is yellow and short and fat.  I do not think anyone throws away a Campbell’s tin.  After the tea is used up, the tin can be used for pencils and pens, or nails or string or biscuits or any number of things. The lid fits tight. I have tins in the book barn and older, slightly rusty ones in the shed.  They are always useful. The tin can be used to hold a different brand of tea, or even tea bags. I have two tins in the kitchen. I always have two tins in the kitchen.  One sits on top of the other.   One is full of loose tea and one is full of coffee beans. When people ask if I prefer Lyons tea or Barry’s tea they never include Campbell’s in the question.  The question is an either or kind of question. I am not sure if that is only around here.  Maybe Campbell’s is more popular in other parts of the country.  I am noticing that it is more and more difficult to find and buy a tin of Campbell’s Perfect Tea than it used to be.

31 August Wednesday

The blackberries are slowing me down. There are so many coming ripe that even a short walk demands a lot of time for sampling and nibbling.  There are so many different varieties growing side by side.  I have not even started to walk with a bag or a container yet.  I just eat as I go.

1 September Thursday

The shoe shop had a special tiered round table with shoes on display. The shoes were displayed sitting on copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The volumes were used and a bit grubby.  They were not really old like antique old, they were just handled copies. I wonder if homes still have shelved sets of encyclopedias.  The woman in the shop told an admiring customer that it was her Back to School Display.

Loose Lichen Letting Go

2 September Friday

The word Fáilte is omnipresent.  It is in every single bit of advertising for the country and its tourism. The official expression is Céad Míle Fáilte which translates as A Hundred Thousand Welcomes.  Fáilte by itself is widely used too.  It is on doormats and flowerpots and little signs. Recently I saw a postbox with NO FÁILTE in small white vinyl letters.  I had to stop in order to look at it more closely because I thought that maybe some other letters had peeled off and the NO was not really NO but part of a bigger word.  But in this case No means No.  The man who lives inside the closed gate and up the steep drive is not very sociable. There is a long drive, many mature trees and heavy undergrowth which ensures that his house is not visible from the road. On a good day this man might be called morose. On other days he would be called A Very Private Person. I have not set eyes on him for years.  I am not sure I would recognize him.  He was never very friendly then and it seems he is even less interested in people now. The always closed gate would be enough to let people know that he welcomes no one but announcing NO FÁILTE like this means he really really really does not want visitors. A KEEP OUT sign would do the job. It might even be a little less harsh.

3 September Saturday

I continue to collect and dry and glue up my pieces of lichen.  Some days it is difficult to find any pieces at all. Some days I find a lot. I was certain that after last night’s wind and wild rain that the ground would be strewn with copious clumps of lichen in the undergrowth. I took a little bag ready to fill it with huge pickings. I  imagined the birds scrabbling away on the branches, trying to hold on tight to stop themselves from being blown away.  I imagined their feet loosening lots of lichen.  I imagined Masses of Loose Lichen Letting Go. As I walked up the path I got very excited about how much I would find.  If the winds and the birds did loosen lichen last night, the winds blew it far from the branches where it had been living.  I failed to find a single bit in the entire length of wooded area where I was expecting such bounty.  I put the little bag into my pocket and just went on with my walk.

4 September Sunday

The first Sunday in September is the traditional day for the All-Ireland Hurling Final.  This year the two teams playing were Kilkenny and Tipperary. They have been meeting each other in the finals for many years. The competition between the two counties is fierce. Everything everywhere is decorated with the respective team colours.  Bunting and flags, hats and shirts, cars and buildings. I think maybe the two teams have met for the finals six times in the last nine years.  Kilkenny has won six times. Some other counties have won in that time too but Tipperary has not won for nine years.  There was a deep silence everywhere in the county as people were either up in Dublin or in their homes watching the match.  Tipperary won.  There is wild joy among the fans. The Liam McCarthy Cup is the prize and now the cup will be traveling around the county for a year. It will go to schools and to shops and to small villages and to every sort of event.  It will be touched and rubbed and kissed.  Many many people will have their photograph taken with The Liam McCarthy. But first there will be a huge parade and welcoming party for the team on Monday night up in Thurles.  Everyone who went to the match will be there and everyone who did not get to go to the match will be there. It will be the middle of the week before things get back to normal in Tipperary.

5 September Monday

The bread man delivers bread from a small truck. He does not carry cakes or biscuits or anything else. He only delivers bread. Some of the loaves are sliced and wrapped in waxed paper.  Some of the loaves are just sitting on the floor or on a metal shelf.  The bread delivery man has a large wooden tray which he loads up with whatever bread the shop has requested.  He carries it across the street and into the shop. If it is raining there is no protection for the unwrapped bread.  Lucky for the bread, it is a short walk across the street.

6 September Tuesday

The girl was trying to be helpful.  When I asked if the eye drops were okay for people wearing contact lenses she said “Oh I am sure they are.”  She said “I am after using them myself and they are wonderful for dry eyes.”  I asked her if she wore contact lenses.  She said “No, but I wear glasses.”

Two week ago I was in a shop and I tried on a pair of shoes which were a kind of reddish brown leather.  The shoes did not fit.  The woman serving me went to the back room to see if there was another pair in the correct size.  She came back with an armful of boxes.  She could not find my size in that shoe style so instead she pulled out every pair of red shoes that she could find. She too was trying to be helpful.

7 September Wednesday

Breda and I walked in the mountains. The sky was white with moisture and with fog. We were sure it would rain so we wore full waterproofs but it never rained.  It just looked wet and it felt wet. We could not see any distance at all.  The mountains and the hills and the horizon completely disappeared. All we saw were lots of ghost-like sheep appearing and then disappearing in the whiteness.  Many had red paint on their backs but there were some with both red and blue markings. For the few minutes before the sheep disappeared in the mist, the colours looked really bright in the otherwise whited-out world. All was quiet and white and damp.

8 September Thursday

Nellie was speaking of a man.  She said he was Old and Short and Timid. She said that was enough.  She said that said it all.

Not a Bother.

7 October Friday

The girl in the supermarket had no place on the till to ring up the onions from France.  She suggested that perhaps I would prefer local onions?  I told her that I always have the local onions and that these French onions would be nice for a change.  I said that if I waited until the next time I was in the shop the French onions might be gone so today I wanted to buy French onions because they were there and available for the buying. The girl was flustered.  Then she asked if it was okay if she charged them as bread.  She said that it would appear on my receipt as if I had bought bread when really I would have bought onions. She worried that I might mind. She worried that I might be confused when I got home. We finally agreed that I understood fully that there would be no onions listed on the till receipt but that did not mean I had not bought onions. The girl was reassured that it would not worry me at all.

8 October Saturday

The morning fog is white and thick.  I could not see beyond the fence when I woke up.  I could not see the fence.  As the morning went on and the sun slowly burned off the fog, things appeared. Fence. Field. Cows.  I was surprised to see Joe’s cows in the near field.  They had been so quiet and invisible that I had no idea they were out there. I still cannot see the hills yet but I suppose they will appear in the next hour or so.

9 October Sunday

The walk up the path is clearing.  Much of the vegetation is dying back so there is less of a thorny grab on clothes and skin as I walk.  One tree which fell across the path has dropped lower.  Now I need to bend deeply from the waist to get under it where as a month ago I could just bend my head a bit.  Crab apples are falling off the trees and that part of the track is deadly.  The small hard apples fall on this same length of path every year but I never get any better at walking over them. It is like walking uphill on ball bearings.

10 October Monday

Dilly has taken to announcing each job that comes along as one that she can do or one that she cannot do.  She prefaces each observation with either the sentence:  This is something I Can do. or This is something I Cannot do.  She is not complaining.  She is simply maintaining a running commentary on herself as she gets older. If she is asked how she is getting on, she always answers: Not a Bother. Not a Bother.

11 October Tuesday

I heard voices.  I went outside and saw three men and a long narrow truck.  It was an odd looking vehicle. They were from the council and repairing holes in the road.  I was pleased to see them. They commented on how narrow the boreen was and how their truck had been scraped on both sides by brambles and branches.  They had been nervous as they drove down that they might be unable to find a place to turn around. They were worried about having to back the truck all the way up to the farm. I was happy to see them and happy to know the new holes were getting filled. They were happy to see space to turn the truck.  I said I was surprised that they were here at all as I had been told again and again by the council that the trucks that did the sort of repairs we needed doing were all too big to drive down the boreen.  This excuse has been given to me for several years now.  The men said that this truck is a new truck. It is only a few weeks old.  They said their job now is to go around to all of the impossible small roads with this new long narrow vehicle to repair places which have not been repaired for years and years. They are proud of the new truck and they were pleased to have me appreciating it.  They kept pointing out features so that I could continue admiring the truck for longer.

12 October Wednesday

Mornings are wet with dew and heavy mist.  Leaving the washing out on the line over night guarantees that it will be wetter in the morning than it was at the end of the previous afternoon.  I am not averse to leaving the washing hanging for a few days.  Margaret says that if it gets wet again it is just a second rinse. Or a third rinse.  The problem arises when one Joe or the other Joe is spreading slurry.  Then the washing takes on the smell of the decomposing excrement sprayed over near fields.  The slurry does not have to touch the clothes or even come anywhere close to them. The strong smell permeates everything.  If I bring wet clothes into the house they carry the stench with them.  Once a nearby field has been sprayed with slurry it is best to leave everything out on the washing line for a few more days.

All Milk to Cheese

13 October Thursday

More and more women are using the large clicking stove lighters for lighting a cigarette.  It is startling to see a woman whip this long thing out of her purse and light her cigarette with a flourish of huge flame before shoving it back in the bag.  These lighters are at least ten times bigger than a normal lighter.  I have not seen any men using these things to light their cigarettes but that may just be because they are too big to carry easily in a pocket.  And no one anywhere seems to use matches anymore.

14 October Friday

Mick often prefaces what he says by saying “Now, I am not going to lie to you.” I can never decide if this is a way to ensure the veracity of what he is saying or if maybe when he does not say this he might actually be lying.  I think I have come to believe that it means he is very serious about the thing he is telling and therefore it is important that one believes him.

15 October Saturday

I recognized the man.  He was discussing lead flashing with someone who worked in the store. He wanted to fold the flashing into a join between two roof sections to ensure that there was no way for rain water to leak in. The man who worked in the store was telling him again and again that this was not the best solution.  I recognized the man but I could not place why I recognized him.  I could not locate him.  I thought if I listened to his voice I might remember.  That is why I learned so much about the roofing job he needed to do. I walked up and down the aisle where he was talking.  I thought if I could get a good look at his face I might be reminded of who he was or why he seemed so familiar.  At a certain moment something clicked.  I remembered Toss and Walt.  I did not know if this man was Toss or if this man was Walt. Whoever he was, he was an older version of himself.

It was 1997 when I last saw him.  We had a desperate need for windows to be installed in the house.  The old wooden frames were rotten.  Sometimes a pane of glass just fell into the house.  Sometimes a pane of glass fell out and onto the ground outside.  The frames were rotten and rotting and the soft old wood was just giving up.  We spoke with several people about installing new windows.  When we finally decided on a solution, the man who did the measuring and the estimating told us that the windows would be made rapidly.  He said that Toss and Walt would arrive in two weeks to do the installation. We were pleased with the speed.  Living without glass was draughty and living with pieces of wood in place of missing glass was gloomy.  Anyway, winter was coming. The house needed to be secured from the weather.

Toss is one of those names that evolved out of Thomas. There are a lot of men named Thomas.  Some become Tom or Tommy or Tommie. Some remain Thomas. Some use the Irish Tomás. I think Toss as a short version comes from Thos. as written on gravestones, in bibles and in the phone directory. It is just another shortening.  And Toss said is more literal than Thos. I had never met a man called Toss.

Toss and Walt arrived with half of the windows and began installing.  They worked over a few days. They returned with the rest of the windows and finished the job.  They were quiet and efficient and they were funny when I made them cups of tea.  Everything in the house was in chaos with all of the building work.  I kept moving piles of stuff and pieces of furniture out of the way of the windows when Toss and Walt were heading for those windows.  They needed space to work from both inside and outside. As workmen go they were easy to have around.

A few months later I developed several rolls of film. I had an old Minolta camera.  I used it to try to keep a rough record of how some parts of the house looked before we did work. Eventually I wanted to be able to compare how it all ended up. I kept the camera around all the time to remind myself to keep documenting our progress. Instead I got so used to seeing the camera lying around that I rarely picked it up.

When I brought the batch of photographs home, I found a picture of Toss or Walt.  One day while doing the window installation, Toss had picked up the camera and taken a photograph of Walt or Walt had taken a photograph of Toss.  I was more than a little surprised to find a photograph of one of these two men in among my snapshots. The man in the photograph was not smiling but he was looking straight into the camera.

The man I recognized in the store was Toss or maybe he was Walt.  I did not need to stick around any longer because now I knew who he was. I did not need to wait to find out how he resolved his roof problem. I did not need to say hello.  I very much doubted that he would remember me and anyway it did not matter one bit if he did.  I remember him whether I want to or not because I have a photograph of him.

16 October Sunday

Maud sent me the photo of a sign from the Dairygold Plant in Mitchelstown.  Big shiny stainless steel Dairygold tanker trucks drive around the countryside filling up with milk.  The trucks are big.  They are too big and they go too fast on these narrow roads. They terrorize everyone.  If you are walking or if you are driving, you know that the Dairygold trucks will not make space for anyone.  The Glanbia trucks are just as big and just as scary. Lucky for us they only come around a few times a week.  At least they do not come every day. The milk at each farm gets stored in coolers awaiting pick up.  When a tank is full, the truck heads to the Mitchelstown co-operative plant.  The ALL MILK TO CHEESE sign must be directing drivers to deliver milk to that part of the plant which turns it into processed cheese.

17 October Monday

The woman was from Dingle and she was just visiting the area. She stopped at the craft shop and bought a walking stick made of ash.  The word ASH was carved in capital letters into the wood up near the top. The woman walked down the street with her new stick and turned to enter the Lazy Bean for a cup of coffee. A man sitting outside yelled across to her.  He shouted: “Where did you get that stick?”  She said she bought it.  He said, “Well I made it!  I am the man who makes those sticks.”  She was pleased to meet him and he was pleased that she had bought one of his sticks. She was so pleased with the whole thing that after she drank her coffee she went back to the craft shop to tell the lady there that she had met the very man who made her stick.

18 October Tuesday

Fruit continues to grow.  The raspberries look good but most of them are soggy from the wetness of the night and the morning.  To gather a few freshly ripened ones at the end of a warm afternoon is okay.  The blackberries are the same. The bushes along every field and every bit of road are heavy with berries but the berries are wet and many are inedible. They squish between my fingers when I try to pick them. It is a deceptive time.  Some apples are still on the trees.  It is time to drag a ladder down into the meadow to collect the last of them.  There are figs too, which keep growing but they will never be ready to eat or to bake. The rose hips were unused this year. They just sit on the bushes looking lovely and bright. They too are soggy. The birds are happy to have them. Roses and sedums and daisies and poppies keep flowering.  Everything looks good and in today’s bright sunlight, it looks like full summer plenty.

20 October Thursday

Pat was delighted to eat the marrow out of the bone and to eat the beef around the bone and when she was finished, she asked if she could take her bone home.  She said she had made a similar bone into a necklace when she was at school. The other girls made fun of her. They said her necklace looked like a soggy cardboard loo roll on a string. Now she is not bothered what people think. In all she took six bones away in a plastic bag.  They were each one and a half or two inches long. Fitted together they had been the entire shin bone of a small cow. Pat took them home and put them in a basin of water.  After a few days she will put them into salty water. I do not know how long it will take for her bones to be ready to be made into a necklace.  She loves the sound the bones make when they collide.  She calls it a kind of klick-klack. When the necklace is finished, we will hear her coming.

A Real Dote.

21 October Friday

In my vocabulary, dote has always been a verb. Someone who is doting upon another person lavishes them with love and uncritical attention.  The person doing the doting usually choses not to see any fault whatsoever in the object of their affection. The one doting can dote with infinite adoration upon their treasured person.  Around here, the word Dote is more commonly used as a noun.  A cute person is A Dote.  Someone sweet and adorable is called A Dote.  Or they might be called A Real Dote.  A Dote can be a grown person or a child, or it can just as easily be a dog.

24 October Monday

It is one of those mornings where it might remain grey and white and shadowless all day but it might burst out and become a bright sunny afternoon which means it will be nearly impossible to stay indoors even while almost of the things to be done are all needing doing indoors. How the days weather evolves affects everything.  It is an issue for today and for every recent day. With the shorter hours of light and the colder mornings, it is difficult not to be seduced by these unseasonably mild afternoons. Suddenly emptying the compost or picking apples or even loading up for a trip to the dump are all pleasant chores.  Moving old branches or cutting back the willow herb, whatever the job, everything is pleasant.  Chores are still chores but it is 24 October and if the morning clears it may again be good to be outside doing one thing while looking around at everything and anything else that might need doing.  Tommie told me that people in the town go out for drives on a good day as they do not want to be inside and they have no outside to be out in unless they are out for a drive, but then they are not really outside because they are inside a motorcar.  He said they are not outside anyway. They are only out of the house.

25 October Tuesday

It is now common knowledge. Everyone repeats it. Everyone repeats it as if it has always been a fact but I do not know if it was always such an irrefutable fact.  Everyone says that it is imperative to eat honey which has been produced as near to your own home as is possible. It is important if one is ill with cancer or with a cold, or recovering from surgery.  It is important to eat local honey as one is aging.  It might have indeed always been true but I do not think every single person knew it and repeated it and believed it. Mrs. Hally is one person who does not subscribe to this theory. For as many years as anyone can remember she has been eating Manuka Honey from New Zealand at 40 euro for a small jar.  She eats it daily.  I do not know how much Maunuka Honey she eats.  It might be a tablespoon full or it might be more than that. Mrs. Hally is 98 years old.  She is known to be A Fresh Woman. Especially for her age.  She looks well.  Each week, the pharmacist asks her for the secret of her glowing skin. The pharmacist wants to know whether it is the Manuka Honey or the Lancôme Face Cream which keeps Mrs. Hally looking so fresh.

26 October Wednesday

Last October we were presented with The Rounding Off.  The government decided that the costs involved in producing 1 and 2 cent coins exceeded their value. It was decided that prices and change would henceforth be rounded to the nearest 5 cent. There would still be some 1 and 2 cent coins floating around and people could still use them.  They could still request their proper change not rounded off to the nearest 5 cent.  Most people were happy to see the end of the small coins. This summer the cost of a postage stamp for an inland letter went up to 72 cent.  This price presents an ongoing dilemma at the post office counter.  The post mistress cannot charge 75 cent for a 72 cent stamp.  Giving change which no one wants or simply giving away the 72 cent stamp for 70 cent makes the raising of the price completely redundant.  I am most bothered by the use of the word cent in the singular. I would be happier for it to be plural, when it is anything other than 1 cent.

27 October Thursday

There is a new book.  The cover of the book is taped up in the window of the shop along with a telephone number to ring if we want to buy a copy. The title of the book is The Rabbit Industry in Ireland.  I did not have my glasses with me so I could not read the short descriptive text about it but I shall be sure to take my glasses with me the next time I go to the shop. There are plenty of rabbits here but I never knew they were abundant enough to constitute an industry.

Taking the Bloods

28 October Friday

Simon had a morning appointment with the nurse to Take His Bloods. It is usually not possible to Take Bloods on a Friday because of the weekend.  He offered to deliver his own blood to the hospital so they said okay and had him come in at 9 am.  While the nurse was labeling his tube and putting it into a bag, she asked if he would mind also taking the bloods of the Lithuanian woman who had been in just before him.  The woman had to rush off to her job and anyway she did not have a car so she was not able to take her own blood up to the hospital. Simon was hungry.  He had been fasting since the night before.  He asked the nurse if he had time to have some breakfast before going to the hospital.  She said No Problem. She told him to just be sure to deliver the bloods to the lab before midday.  At the hospital he was directed to walk down several long corridors to drop his own blood and the blood of the Lithuanian woman into a hatch cut into some hard plastic.

29 October Saturday

Dilly is insisting that the little shrubs on her banking get cut back almost to the wood.  Some of them she wants pulled or dug right out of the ground.  She is adamant that these things get done before the winter comes on.  She cannot do these jobs herself as she keeps telling anyone who will listen but even if she is not Able For It herself she wants it done her own way. She cannot bear for two plants to be touching one another.  Dilly likes to see a lot of nice cleared and clean weed free soil in between each plant. She cannot cut these plants back and she cannot dig them up and out of the ground and she certainly cannot bend down to pull the weeds and rake the soil clean, but she is determined that all of these things be done. She is instructing John to do all of these jobs and she insists he do the jobs her way.  He is grumbling about her demands but he is allowed no say in the matter. She says The Bare Look is the only way to give a plant the attention it deserves.

30 October Sunday

There are lots of brown crunchy leaves underfoot and there is no mud.  Every walk up the track is noisy with the leaves underfoot.  As soon as I write this, I am reminded that there are stretches with lots of yellow not yet crunchy leaves too so the contrast between walking noise and walking silence is great.  I was walking the Long Field today and saw some garish orange pellet stuff spilled onto the soil.  At first I thought it must be some kind of poison. Then I decided it might be seed.  Some farmers have planted winter wheat so the fresh new green shoots give a sense of springtime in this peculiar autumn. We have had day after day of mild, bright days with no rain.  Birds are singing like crazy.  The birds are behaving like it is spring. None of them seem to be flying south. The cows are out in their fields all day. Nothing feels right or normal. Nothing feels like it is almost November. Last night we changed the clocks so as of today darkness will fall earlier. The weather may or may not change.

31 October Monday

Taking Care of Your Own is the term used for the duty towards anyone who is elderly or sick.  It is one thing to give care if someone is your own blood relation but if the ailing person is only related by marriage it is something altogether different.  Responsibility apppears to have limits.

1 November Tuesday

Condon’s, the undertakers in Cahir, have repainted their premises.  The front of the building is now glossy black with enamel paint.  The windows have been edged with bright red. On a sunny day like today the shine off the black paint is blinding.

2 November Wednesday

Yesterday I saw two vehicles with small dog trailers parked down by Cooney’s wood.  Later I heard gunshots.  November 1st marks the start of shooting season for pheasants and woodcock and wood pigeons. If I had heard the gunshots earlier I might have been startled but the little trailers that the dogs get transported around in gave me the warning.  There are never more than one or two hunters who wander around these woods but it is a good idea to start wearing reflective vests when we walk out just so we do not get shot. At about nine o’clock last night I heard a thumping at the kitchen door.  I looked out and there was Oscar pushing and turning to make himself comfortable as close up to the door as possible.  He had knocked down the walking sticks in the corner so he was having an awkward time getting settled with sticks all over the place. It is unprecedented for Oscar to come down here at night and especially to come down without a person.  I tried to send him home but he ignored me. I rang June and she was puzzled too.  She was puzzled but she was fearful to drive down our boreen at night so I offered to take him home.  Oscar is a big black Labrador.  With age, he has gotten fat.  He could not jump up and into the jeep so I had to ask Simon to help me to hoist him up and in.  I drove the mile up to Oscar’s house with his head jutting out between the seats and resting on my shoulder.  He was happy to be home and jumped out easily.  He did not return again last night but I still do not know why he arrived in the first place. I wonder if the days shooting disturbed him.

Always Home

22 November Tuesday

I was tired coming off the plane.  I was tired and I was not yet awake.  It was 5.30 in the morning.  One line of passengers waiting to go through passport control was long. That line was long and disheveled and there were a lot of cranky children in it. I was glad that my passport allowed me to pass quickly through the other line.  The EU line was short.  The man at the high desk looked down and asked me how I was.  I told him I was tired.  I said I am tired or maybe I am just sleepy because I have not really woken up yet.  His voice dropped and it became very soft.  He said ‘It’s Okay. Everything is Fine. You are Home now.’

Home is a big thing here. Home is a place and Home is an idea. At Cork Airport there is a little fireplace with a gas fire burning and a little one-person sized bench just after you come through passport control.  It would be easy to smack your shins against the stone bench because it is so suddenly there in front of you.  The fire in the fireplace serves as the symbol of a being welcomed home.  There is Home and there is Home Place.  There is a lot about both Home and Home Place which makes me feel a little confused. As someone from somewhere else, I think I shall never fully understand it. But no matter what else it is, a fire is essential to the idea of Home.  Shannon Airport does not have a fireplace nor a little bench, but the soft dropping of the man’s voice and the kindness in his welcome made me pleased to be home.

24 November Thursday

I was wide awake in the night.  I finally got out of bed and went out into the big room. I was too tired to do anything.  I did not want to read nor to watch television. I did not want to turn on the computer.  I made a cup of tea and found a deck of cards. I played solitaire.  I was really cold even with pyjamas, a bathrobe, a shawl and a pair of heavy socks inside my slippers.  I did not want to turn on the heat.   I thought about Jack London’s story To Build A Fire.  People dying of the cold usually fall asleep before they freeze to death. I wanted to fall asleep.  I thought about other Jack London stories. I continued playing solitaire. I kept score with myself on a piece of paper, buying the deck for each game with an imaginary 52 euro.  I lost hundreds of euro. I did not care about the winning or the losing. I enjoyed shuffling the cards.  I am good at shuffling cards. The deck was old and soft and did not really shuffle as sharply and snappily as I would have liked.  I made another cup of tea. It was chamomile tea but it failed to make me sleepy.  I started to get tired of playing solitaire. I wondered what I might do next. I needed to engage myself but slightly bore myself at the same time. After two or three hours, I heard a cow bellowing up the hill.  It was the only sound I had heard except for my cards on the table.  The cow sounded like it was up the steep hill on one of Johnnie’s fields. It was too dark to look out a window. The cow moaned and gasped.  It is hard to describe the noise. Maybe it was more like a sort of honking.  After about twenty minutes, the cow stopped.  I listened for her to start up again.  When she did not, I went back to my cards.  Eventually boredom and the cold sent me back to bed.

26 November Saturday

This is the third day in a row of deep impenetrable white fog. On Thursday the heavy fog was burned away by sun in the middle of the afternoon.  On Friday and today there has been no sun.  There has been no burning off.  Just a deep cold silence all wrapped in whiteness. We cannot see any distance at all.  We drive with headlights which do not make what is up ahead any more visible. The headlights are mostly so we might be seen by another car.  It feels best to just stay home but even while here we cannot even see across to the barn.

27 November Sunday

Each time I step out the back door I see a mouse.  It has been three or five times now.  I am not sure if it is the same mouse each time or a different mouse.  I am not sure where exactly the mouse I see is going but I am fairly certain it is hoping to come inside for the winter.

28 November Monday

The bright light across the fields has been disturbing.  It is an odd kind of light. It is a different kind of bright.  There are house lights in the far distance but they are nothing like this raw harsh light.  At first I thought this light was a light in someone’s farmyard.  I could not tell from this distance whose farmyard it might be.  I thought the light itself might even always be there but that I was only noticing it now maybe because leaves had fallen off the trees between here and wherever it is. Maybe I am only seeing it because it has been freshly exposed.   In a straight line – as the crow flies – the light is probably two kilometres away.  It is some kind of terrible bright halogen bulb. It is bright white.  From here we cannot see any of the area it illuminates.  We only see the small stabbing glow.  After only a few nights of seeing this light I was already depressed. I felt sad that I might be seeing this ugly light every single night from now on.

Last night we suddenly figured out that the light was down on the Dungarvon road. It was standing on a dangerous corner where a road crew are now working.  We had noted the work the other day. When finished, the road in that spot will be straight or at least it will be straighter.  Darkness falls early so this light might help the workmen at the end of their work day.  It warns the drivers who all travel too fast on that stretch.  The workers go home at the end of the day, but the light stays on all night. It is now a comfort to know that when the road work is eventually finished, and the corner is straightened, the light will be removed.  Our thick dark night will return.

A Post Box Named Stanley

29 November Tuesday

I brought in the remaining little chilies off the plant.  I am amazed at how many were left and that they did not seem to suffer in that hard crunchy cold last week.  They are hot and delicious.

30 November Wednesday

Everyone exclaims—-The cows are still out!  It has been so unseasonably mild and now it is cold.  For a while it was frosty and freezing, but it continues dry so it is fine for the cows to be out in the fields and not shut up in their winter barns. There is not much grass for them to eat. The fields are all bright green to look at but still there is not much grass for the cows to eat. They mostly get fed on nuts or on hay delivered to their fields by the farmers. The thing being remarked upon again and again is that it is December and the cows are still out.

1 December Thursday

I made a cake.  It is not often that I bake. We had friends coming for tea. We have a lot of apples stored but they are starting to go soft, so I made a Dutch Apple Cake.  We have three kinds of ovens but they are all complicated. None are any good for baking.  My cake took hours to make as I had many many interruptions. As well as several phone calls, Ned came to deliver heating oil.  He cannot deliver oil unless we are at home because he needs to plug the generator on the back of his truck  into our electricity mains. We have to pull an extension lead in through a window to plug it in. Normal oil trucks are too big to drive down the boreen. This system with the electric generator allows us to get oil.  Since someone has to be here whenever Ned comes, he always has a cup of tea and we have a discussion of the world at large.  Today he kept repeating: We have to stop voting for what we are voting for.  After Ned left but before my cake could be finished and lunch could be eaten, the gas bottle ran out.  That meant unhooking it and loading it into the car and taking it to the village to get a replacement bottle.  I had to wait for awhile outside Teddie O’Keefe’s because there was a big lorry blocking the road.  I tried to fill the car with petrol while I was in the village but Seamus had run out of petrol in his pump.  He has one pump for petrol, one for diesel and one for agricultural diesel.  He was waiting for the man to arrive to refill the petrol one. The road on the way home was busy with tractors.  One tractor hit my side mirror because it was so big and it was going so fast and the road was just not wide enough. There were other interruptions both before Ned arrived and after I got the new gas bottle but the cake was finally baked.  It was delicious, but I do not feel I shall be baking again soon.

2 December Friday

Another post box has been retired. The plastic has perished with the weather and with the weight of the stone that I kept inside the box to keep it from blowing away and from the second stone on the top.   Lifting the lid without removing the stone means that the sides of the lid are always getting strained, so then the lid cracks and then I tape up the cracks and then it cracks some more and then finally it is time to give up on that box because one day we go out to get the post and the box has three inches of water in the bottom of it and the post might be floating in the water. If we are lucky the envelopes are resting on the stone and the stone is not yet fully submerged.  Simon got annoyed with the broken box full of water and he went off looking for a new post box. The boxes that we have been using are large storage boxes which people fill and then store under their bed or in the attic or the shed. We receive a lot of awkward parcels so a small postbox is not an option. Simon came home with a fancy toolbox which cost far too much.  He put a weight in the bottom which now takes up half of the not very copious space inside the box.  John the Post is not impressed with the new box.  Neither am I.  I have no doubt this box will be stolen someday soon.  It might even be put into a workman’s van by mistake. The old postbox just looked like plastic box with a rock on top sitting outside near a bush. This one looks like it could be full of expensive tools.  Simon is the only one who likes it.  He is delighted with himself.  He thinks of it as A Post Box Named Stanley.

3 December Saturday

When I went down for bottled gas on Thursday I met Tommie Hally in front of the shop. He had walked from his house using a stick. He had just arrived as I was ready to leave. He does not normally walk with a stick. He does not normally walk to the shop either.  I think driving is becoming difficult for him. I admired his sturdy stick.  He said it was made of elm and that was why it was not very straight. He told me that he is not fond of the kind of walking sticks that can be purchased. He prefers this one because he made it for himself some years ago knowing that it was something he might need one day. He was prepared to settle in for a chat.  Indeed that was why he had walked to the shop. He was planning to have a few conversations along the way. We spoke for a few minutes. He reported that Margaret is not at all well. She cannot see and her hip has never stopped being a problem since her fall a few years ago.  He is having a difficult time taking care of her and she will not allow anyone from the outside to come in to help.  I was freezing and he should have been freezing too. It was too cold to be standing and talking outdoors. I told him that I had to go home with the gas bottle so that I could finish making my cake.  I told him I would bring him some of the cake later.  Tommie loves apples and he loves cake.  Today I delivered some slices of cake along with a pot of cream.  He was delighted to have the cake. He did not know that it was not the same cake that I had promised to bring.  We ate all of that first cake before I delivered any.  Simon made a second cake. It was not the same kind of cake but it did have apples in it. Tommie said they would eat it tonight when they returned from 6.30 Mass.

5 December Monday

We pass the little bungalow all the time.  It was flooded inside a few years ago. The damage was extreme because no one was living there at the time. The pipes froze in the cold of winter.  They burst when they thawed and they just kept pumping out water. There was no one there to notice. The bungalow has sat empty ever since. A few months ago some men began to tear it down.   Then work stopped and the place was left standing without doors or windows or roof. After another month or so the bungalow is being worked upon again.  A new house is being built onto the walls and the foundation of what was left.  It is a peculiar looking operation. The house is not any bigger on the ground but it is a little bit taller.  I do not know if the additional height is enough to provide a second floor.

Little Cups and Saucers

6 December Tuesday

A totally gloomy day all day.  The light never changed. At any moment, it might have been dawn or it might have been dusk.  The sky was heavy and grey.  The sky stayed heavy and grey.  Sometimes it rained a little and sometimes it did not rain. In the early afternoon, I took a walk up the boreen and around.  I felt I could not wait any later to walk as it might not be any better later and there was a good chance it might be worse. It was difficult to focus on anything because of the uncertain quality of the light.  It made me feel like there was something wrong with my eyes.  It started to drizzle as I left the house and it kept drizzling all the way around.  It was never proper rain. It was soft. It did not feel like rain. When I reached home I was soaking wet.

7 December Wednesday

The days continue mild.  Ever since the recent spate of frosty frozen bitter days, I feel I have had my warning.  I am now saving and filling water bottles.  Water pipes are not buried very deeply here.  A week of freezing temperatures mean that the outdoor water pipes might well freeze.  Each winter I fill water bottles Just In Case.  Sometimes we never need the bottles of water but sometimes we do and then we are glad to have them.  I fill each bottle as we empty one.  We buy bottled water for drinking.  We do not buy bottled water as a fashion choice. I would prefer not to buy bottled water.  We buy it in big five litre containers.  We use our well water for cooking and making tea and for everything else but for drinking a glass of water we drink bottled water.  We need to have the well tested again.  We probably need to have the well cleaned again. Last time we were told the e coli content of our water was a bit high. We were advised not to drink the water. So as well as filling water bottles to guard against the possibility of frozen pipes I must also buy extra bottles of drinking water to have on hand.  I am not doing too well. I have only 25 litres, three large bottles, stored so far.

8 December Thursday

It is slippery and dangerous walking over the last of the apples falling off Johnnie’s trees and onto the path. The apples which fall on that side sort of roll into the gully which is the path.  Or the path is a gully and it is where we walk. Every day I tell myself I should use a walking stick for walking through the rolling apples and the slimy mud but every day I forget to take one along with me.  Rats or mice are eating out the flesh of the apples and leaving the tough skins spread around like delicate little cups and saucers.  I slipped and  landed hard on my hands and knees today which gave me a good chance to examine the tidy nibbling and the fragile remains. I am hoping the rats hurry up and eat the rest of the apple flesh or at least that everything rots down into moosh before I take another tumble.

9 December Friday

This is the message received on Text Alert today:

Please be mindful of Elderly Friends and Neighbours who today may be receiving double Christmas payments from the Post Office and report any Suspicious Activity.

The elderly and any other people on benefits receive extra money to help them get through the holiday period.  It helps them to purchase special things as well.  To announce it like this might be a good thing or a bad thing.  Everyone knows the extra payments are made and in rural areas there are no banks.  People can only take their money home and hide it.  Any robber would know this and any robber will know there are just so many places that cash can be hidden. I am sure the Garda mean this alert as a good thing but it seems like it might be a bad thing.

10 December Saturday

The barber poles were not made of plastic nor of glass. They were not rounded.  They were not lit from within.  These barber poles were simply painted red and white stripes on two inch by four inch planks. They were planks not poles.  There was one nailed flat onto the wall just beside the door so that it was visible head on and especially from across the road.  On the other side of the door there was another board mounted on its narrow side.  I guess that one was to attract passing trade.  There was a third one which was about one and a half inches by one and half inches square right over the door. It was long and it sort of stuck out at a bit of an angle.  The word barber was not visible anywhere but the red and white stripes did the full job of advertising.

11 December Sunday

Mardhea is the spelling.

I think.

It is pronounced Mah-re-Ah.

I think.

Someone might say Mardhea, I was watering the flowers.  What they mean is AS IF I was watering the flowers.  To preface an action with the word Mardhea means to say that you are doing one thing in order to find out something or to be on the watch for something happening or something which might have happened.  You are not really watering the flowers because they need watering.  You are watering the flowers so that you can keep an eye on the activity next door or down the road. It is basically a way to admit to being nosy. I do not think I can incorporate this expression into my daily conversation, because few Irish words sit easily in my mouth, but I am quite pleased to know what it means. I am glad to be able to listen for it.  When I next hear it said I will know that it is a kind of code and I will feel included.

Brown Coins

12 December Monday

Annie told me that she was going to be an artist when she got older. She said her mother was certain that she would be a very good artist. Annie said, “She says she knows that I will be a good artist because I am easily distracted and because I like to glue pom-poms onto pencils.”

13 December Tuesday

No one wants the Brown Coins.  Stella said that her house had been burgled. The robbers had come in and made a mess. They did not take much. They ripped into the airing press in hopes of finding a hidden safe.  They threw a lot of things around. They found the jar of small coins.  The jar was full of the 1 cent, 2 cent and 5 cent coins that no one uses anymore.  The coins are made of some sort of alloy.  Maybe it is copper and nickel. They do not look especially brown but they are spoken of as the Brown Coins.  No one wants the Brown Coins.  Children do not stoop to pick them up in the street.  Most of us save the Brown Coins in jars and eventually we cash them in somewhere. The Brown Coins may not be used much as currency but they cannot be refused. The robbers could have left the Brown Coins sitting in their jar.  They could have ignored them. Instead, they took the jar of Brown Coins and scattered them around the house in disgust.

15 December Thursday

There is now a bus service called the AirCoach which goes back and forth between Cork to Dublin Airport. It only makes a few stops so it is efficient and fast. Each place where the AirCoach stops is well marked with an orange sign.  The sign now tells us where we have always been stopping on the regular bus but we did not know the name of the place.  It was always just The Bus Stop, which was outside a particular bar or a shop in a particular town or village.  When the Bus Eireann bus stopped today in Mitchelstown I noticed the AirCoach sign said it was Mitchelstown New Square. I never knew the big square was called New Square.  Thursday is market day in Mitchelstown.  The square which I now know to call New Square was busy and full of stalls and people. Unusually, a huge crowd was waiting to board our bus. There were at least thirty people.  Everyone who was already on the bus got very excited.  They discussed amongst themselves that this was the most people they had ever seen boarding the bus in Mitchelstown.  Everyone worried that they might not all fit onto our bus.  The driver worried out loud that it was all taking too long to get them loaded. Some did not have the right money and others had awkward bundles or baby buggies.  He feared he might be late for his arrival in Cork.

16 December Friday

Up Yourself is an insult.  To be told that you are Up Yourself is a kind of a warning. To describe a person as being Up Himself is to imply that he is taking on airs and graces. It suggests that someone is stepping outside of their place.  Or the place that others think that person should stay in.  The man in Cahir who was not allowed to carry a small back pack when he was out walking was told by his wife that if he went about wearing a pack on his back people would think he was Up Himself.  It was okay for him to carry a back pack when on holiday because then the people who saw him would not be the people who usually saw him.  Anyone who saw him while he was on holiday would not be anyone who might know what place he was supposed to be kept in.

17 December Saturday

It was cold.  The morning had been white with frost. The hard cold lasted all day.  I stopped in Ballyporeen where there was some kind of Christmas party or maybe a wedding and a lot of people rushing around in fancy clothing.  People were in and out of the nearby pub. The church was close by.  I could not tell where they were going as everyone seemed to be on the move all the time.  The young women and some of the not so young women were all dressed in skimpy dresses.  Many of the dresses were sparkly. There seems to be an agreed upon behavior that women take off their coats before going indoors to an event like a night in a pub or a disco or a wedding.  I do not know if it is because a coat might ruin the look of a fancy outfit or if the women fear that things will get so exciting and out of control that they might forget their coat later. Coats get left in the car. These women and girls all had bare legs and little high-heeled strappy sandals to go with their flimsy dresses. They all had fake tans to make their legs look glamourous rather than white and goose-pimply.  As I walked out of the shop an old man in a tweed suit and a heavy jumper and wearing a wool cap pulled down low on his head stood in the doorway watching the chaos in the street and shaking his head .  He said “Just look at them. They’ve Nothing On Them, and it’s Gone Freezing Out and their legs are All Orange.”

18 December Sunday

Three hunters were out in the Long Field today.  They were all three dressed in camouflaged clothing and they had four dogs with them.  The Long Field is long and it is also wide. It is a result of many walls and ditches being broken down over the years.  We call it the Long Field but really it is two fields. Over time all the fields were combined to make two enormous fields with a rough track separating them. There is one place kind of in the center where the land dips before it climbs up again. There is a large outcrop of rocks and stones and growth in the dip.  More stones and rocks get dumped there as the farmer finds them in his ploughing.   The edges of the fields on both sides of the track are a long way from the middle. The three camouflaged men were walking up the dirt track.  There was not much chance that there would be any birds anywhere nearby for them to startle much less to shoot. Just as we began our walk downwards they veered off to the left around the rocky place and they headed for the edges in the hopes  of flushing some pheasants.  The area of fields is so large we were able to walk without ever getting near to them, nor them to us.

19 December Monday

Another grey and gloomy morning.  The grey sky is heavy.  I cannot animate myself.  I should not complain.  The weather continues to be unseasonably mild.  Some days are bright and crisp. Some are drizzly and wet and grey.  Day after day the temperatures are higher than normal. It is cold but it does not feel one little bit like December. Today the birds are all over the feeders.  They are lining up and waiting for their turn to eat nuts.  Most days they have been racing around without much interest in stopping to sample whatever is on offer in the feeders. There has been no desperation in the bird population yet.

Holly Not Holly

20 December Tuesday

Early afternoon broke through bright and sunny.  The whole day looked different. It was suddenly cheerful.  I walked up the mass path to enjoy it.  Sometimes it is gloomy walking through the wooded path. I like all of the mossy rocks and fern and the secret quality of the shaded rocky trail.  I even like the dangerous rotting rolling apples.  Little rays of sunshine through the trees are a bonus. There were views across Cooney’s fields where a fox has broken through  making his path.  I knew that arriving into full sunshine up on the road would be a fine thing. And it was. It was a fine thing.  I pretended that I actually could feel heat from the sun but really it was the heat of my up hill exertion.  It remained a cold day.

Before I got very far along the road an enormous dog came rushing out of Carbuncle’s yard and lunged at me.  It was a scary dog.  It was big and it was scary and it was barking and growling and baring its teeth at me.  It was either a Bull Mastiff or a Rottweiler.  I know very little about these dogs.  Carbuncle always has two large guard dogs inside the fenced in area behind his house.  When he built his house the land he bought was advertised as having panoramic views. It was true. The aspect across to the Knockmealdowns was spectacular.  It turns out he neither needed nor wanted a panoramic view as he quickly built high fences and filled his yard with cars.  Smashed up cars are piled high.  Some cars are not smashed but they are not visible over the fence. These get worked upon, repaired and sold. He keeps two dogs in the fenced in area all the time. They prowl around and bark when someone walks by the house.  They are protecting the good cars and the smashed cars and all of the tools and machinery which I assume must be in there. One is a big Alsatian and the other must be this monster on the road.  I do not know how he escaped.  I do not think he was supposed to be out. I tried to speak sweetly to the dog.  I used a gentle voice and I said nice things quietly.  I told him he was a good dog even though I was certain he was not a good dog.  I was terrified.  After several attempts at stepping along the road I gave up and turned around.  I walked slowly away from the snarling dog. I went back down the muddy path looking behind me every few steps.  I feared he might rush after me.  I had no doubt that he could tear me to shreds. There was no one around.  No one would hear if he tore me to shreds.  No one would know.

I was still shaking when I arrived home. I went over the fence and made a perimeter walk through some of Joe’s fields. I needed to calm myself and I still wanted to be outside in the sun. I tried to remember when was the last time I had met a dog that scared me.  Most of the dogs I see daily are walking free with or without a person. They are friendly gentle dogs.  They are simply going about their business.  They are as happy to see me as I am to see them and if the dog I see is a stranger I can always speak kindly and the dog will respond with a wagging tail.  I am shaken by this aggressive dog in my day.  I am nervous about my next walk up the path.  I am never happy for dogs to be locked up but I am really frightened by this dog being out on the roam.

21 December Wednesday. Winter Solstice.

Today is the shortest day.  Today is the day which brings with it the promise of longer days. I kept meaning to go for a walk and I kept putting it off as I found other things to do. In the back of my mind was the apprehension about the big dog.  I worried that he might be out again. I rang PJ Shine who is the neighbour up there.  He said the dog should not be out.  He was surprised and not happy to hear the dog was loose but he felt it was probably not too serious. He told me not to worry myself.  PJ only passes by in the safety of his tractor so he did not feel particularly threatened.  Then I saw the other PJ who said he had walked up by there the day before I did. He said he had been shocked to see the dog in the front yard.  It was barking and snarling but it did not come out on the road.  He felt unnerved by the dog.  I decided to go down and walk the Abbey walk. I decided to do the Abbey walk to avoid any chance of meeting the dog.   I parked at the cemetery and noticed that I had left it all a bit late. The light was really dropping.  I walked as far as the ruins of the Abbey and then I told myself I would just walk to the farm gate.  Then I said I would walk the track to the first barn.  Then I walked on to the lower gate. But the time I got there the sun had dropped behind the mountains and it was dusk.  I walked up hill with the light dropping by the minute. There were no lights anywhere.  No street lights of course. No house lights. No houses.  I walked the last part with a sense that the road was there. I could kind of see it but it was more about feeling it.  I was not afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of.  The dog was far away and on another road. There was nothing else to be afraid of.  By the time I reached my car at the top it was fully dark. If anyone had asked I could have answered There is No Fear in Me.

22 December Thursday

I bought the bunches of holly from the man at the market last Saturday even though I knew the bunches of holly were not holly.  He knew that I knew so neither of us used the word holly. We just made our little transaction.  He was selling the bunches of greenery strapped together with black tape as a bit of something extra and seasonal along with the wooden bowls and egg cups which he usually has for sale. I knew the holly was not holly but I was pleased to see red berries in such abundance.  I can step into the woods and cut loads of holly but there are never any berries on any of the holly I have ever found.  Maybe it is the particular breed that grows here.  I brought the holly which was not holly home and left it on the table outside the kitchen while I decided what to do with it.  In the day or two of lying around the birds have eaten every one of the red berries. If the holly I purchased had been real holly the birds would not have touched those berries and if they had eaten them they would be dead.   So now I have some shiny green leaves which are not holly leaves waiting to be used in some kind of seasonal way.  I have no red berries. I should have just gone out and cut some real holly and tied little red ribbons on to it which is what I usually do.

23 December Friday

The Farmers Market took place today instead of on Saturday because they thought people would not want to come out on Christmas Eve. It was too windy for the market. A sign had been put up near to the entry with the single word TODAY.  It was early when we arrived but TODAY had already been destroyed by the wind. The threatened storm named Barbara was encroaching. Very few tent stalls were in place.  Stella was selling her bread and cakes out of the back of the car.  Jim was packing up and leaving. He had only a few turnips to sell anyway and he had no patience with the wind.  He was worried and he wanted to go home. Everyone was sort of frantic. They wanted to get their food stuffs and go.  The girl from the Apple Farm was happy. She was in the back of a horse trailer with her apples and juices and vinegars and ciders.  She was out of the wind. Her feet were warm for the first time in weeks and weeks of market days. The rain was coming from several directions at once.  Everyone spoke of Barabara as if she was someone they knew.  There was the very real worry that we all might lose power. We had a quick coffee before heading home. Someone had wrapped fairy lights all around the railing on the stairs at the cafe. It was not possible to walk up or down the stairs without grabbing onto wires and lights.  Electrocution by Fairy Lights seemed a very real possibility.  It added to the manic feeling of the day.

24 December Saturday

I am avoiding the Mass Path. I am worried about the killer dog. I do not like having him control my movements. I do not like this fearfulness. John told me that I am Planking It.  I think Planking It is a way of saying that one is very nervous. Or maybe it means one is terrified.

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.

A Crest of Moss

30 December Saturday

There was another big wedding in the village yesterday.  Weddings often get scheduled near to Christmas when people have the time off so that families do not have to make a repeat trip to come home for the event. Once again, there were loads of summer frocks, bare legs, fake tans and strappy high-heeled sandals. Once again, it was far too cold for such flimsy clothing.  I knew that Treasa was going to be dancing later at the wedding party. It was her cousin getting married. She would be doing Irish dancing along with some others.  When she told me about it, I was reminded to ask her about Dancing on a Barrel.  I had been meaning to ask for ages.  Treasa came to fill in at the Post Office when Helen, the post mistress, went into hospital.  She took on the job for three months after finishing university, but she has now been there for a year, or more. She has played on a Gaelic football team, performed in a play and done Irish dancing professionally, all while working at the Post Office. She does not intend to be staying there forever. Earlier in the year she auditioned to represent Tipperary in the Rose of Tralee competition, but she did not win. She was disappointed as she felt she had done a grand job.  She had Danced on a Barrel for three minutes. The image of dancing on a barrel stayed in my head.  I could barely think about it as it seemed so dangerous. She explained that the barrel works as a percussion instrument.  The sound of  tapping shoes is amplified. She said that in the competition she got her heel stuck once on the edge of the barrel, but luckily she did not fall. She also said that sometimes the barrel is cut so that the top is only a few inches off the floor instead of being full barrel height off the floor.  There would be no dancing on the barrel at her cousins wedding.

31 December Sunday

In the autumn, the McCarras built a long narrow outdoor/indoor porch place on the side of the shop. There is a bench along one wall and some chairs and tables. It is a place for cyclists and walkers to go in and sit down for a rest and a drink and maybe something to eat. This is a popular spot with the cyclists.  Laurence told me that Nicolas Roche stopped by recently. Everyone in cycling knows Nicolas Roche.  Long distance cyclists often stop in the village before climbing up into the Knockmealdowns. The porch room is light and it provides a sitting place out of the rain or wind. Suddenly today there is a big round clock in there too. Catherine said the clock was a problem as it was just too bold for anywhere else so this is where it will stay for now.

1 January 2018 Monday

We met Peter and Rachel at 10 this morning for a walk to Molough Abbey and down into the valley to where the rivers Suir and the Nire meet.  It seemed a fine way to start the year. Simon mentioned that Edmund Spenser wrote about the rivers of Ireland in The Faerie Queene. Everything was familiar to us because we walk there often but in showing things to others, everything became new.  Each time I visit the Abbey, I seem to focus on different features. I like to point out the two places for the bells, one of which would ring the time in Rome while the other would ring the local time.  The two dogs, Milo and Betty, were not much interested in facts. They ran a lot and they sniffed a lot.  I have never had much fondness for tiny dogs.  And I have never known a dog named Betty. But I have become fond of Betty. Holding her in my arms is like holding a cat.  She weighs very little.  I have known heavier cats. I am not sure what kind of dog she is. She is light brown and disheveled looking. I think she is some kind of terrier. After seeing the end of the year newspapers full of memorable photographs of the year, with lots of attention given to the horrific and widespread destruction of Hurricane Ophelia, I felt like there should be a photo of brave little Betty.  She walked into a branch or a fallen thing the day after the storm and injured her eye.  She had to have the eye removed. The vet sewed up the place where it had been.  Being a one-eyed dog does not stop her from keeping up with Milo, nor does it dampen her enthusiasm for exploring.

2 January Tuesday

Rain was promised for the entire day and night.  I rushed out for a quick walk around the mass path, the road, the boreen and home.  I managed to do it all just before the deluge began.  As I raced along the road at speed trying to beat the rain, I did enjoy the smudge of bright green moss down the center of the road.  It is that place where the tyres never touch because we all drive down the middle of the road. Since I returned there has not been one minute since eleven o’clock this morning without rain lashing and wind roaring.  Fields were already flooded before this rain began. Roads were awash with big puddles. The water across the roads is bigger than puddles. It is lake-like.  The mud on the path and in the boreen has been deep and squishy all week. There will be more flooding. I do sometimes wonder why I live here.

3 January Wednesday

Simon went to the dentist. He had a wiggly tooth. The tooth was right in the middle on his bottom row of teeth.  It was making him feel nervous to bite. Daniel, the dentist, looked at it and told him that the tooth was barely holding on. He said it could fall out any minute.  He said it would be a pity to take it out or to let it fall out as it would leave an unsightly gap.  Daniel suggested that he attach the tooth to the strong tooth beside it in order to hold it in place.  So that is what he did. The top of Simon’s tooth is now cemented to the top front and the top back of the neighbouring tooth.  A space remains between the two teeth lower down to allow for little flossing brushes to slip in and out.  Everything has been thought of.

4 January Thursday

We walked around in wild, wild winds.  The wind has been blowing ferociously since last night. It feels like the wind has been blowing forever. We are not getting the heavy damage that they are getting in the west of the country. One tree fell down and across the road right near the corner where Tom Cooney has been stacking his timber from the cleared forest. An electrical or maybe a telephone wire was drooping too. As we passed, we hoped our own electricity had not gone.  Someone with a chain saw had already moved the tree off the road. The wind is a drying wind. It is drying the sodden land.  A little rain has fallen but mostly it is just wind endless wind noisy wind which is in our ears.  It is impossible to get away from the sound of the wind.  Along the way I found three blue tits. They were all dead. Three dead blue tits. Each of them was lying on his or her back with legs in the air. They did not have any visible wounds. I guess they were caught by the wind and blown along until they were smashed into something and died.  I moved each one to a sheltered spot on a rock or under a branch so they would not get stepped upon.

We Have Enough Rain Got.

6 January Saturday

Billy had heard about the new flights flying from Cork to the USA. The flights are cheap. The price of the flights are almost half of what they usually are. He liked the idea of maybe going on such a flight but he was nervous. He had been told that a lot of people on the plane take their own lunch because the airline charges so much for food. He likes the idea of the cheap flight but he is disturbed about the idea of taking his own lunch. He said he would not want to be the only one. He worried because he would not want people to think that he was Skint. He said if he knew that everyone else was doing it, it would be alright then.

7 January Sunday

Snow on the Galtees.  Green fields. Sunshine. Cold but dry.

8 January Monday

Simon is still discussing his tooth gluing repair. He is delighted with it and with his new ability to bite things. He has already located another tooth which he thinks might be a candidate to be attached to the one beside it. He discusses the repair job with anyone who shows the slightest interest. He is happy to add the fact that in addition to the cementing job, Daniel also gave him a full cleaning of his teeth. And then he was only charged fifty euro for everything. While speaking about his repair work, he never mentions that Daniel uses old souvenir tea towels around the neck of his patients. He has been going there long enough that he now considers a tea towel bib as normal dental practice.

9 January Tuesday

Donal sent me his CD. It is called Dead Air. It was a strange time for it to arrive. Our ancient CD player continues to act up and the one in the car does too. The car engine itself is also acting up. I hear an unsettling droning sound when I drive uphill. Mike, my regular mechanic, is in the hospital. I spoke to him on the phone but he will not be out and working again for a long while. I went down to Noel O’Keeffe in the village. His mechanic Noel Hackett and I drove up into the mountains. We both listened to the droning sound of the car as we climbed. I had not seen this Noel for a long time so we chatted about a lot of things as we drove along. He told me about his family. We noted new houses along the way and he told me who was living in them or who planned to live in them once there was enough money to finish building. I had not been up that particular road in a year or more.  I was distracted thinking about the number of new houses while all the time Noel continued paying attention to the droning. He had me listen to understand that the car made the same noise going downhill as it had been making going uphill. That helped him to recognize the problem. In between the strange moaning of the car and the distortions of the CD players, I eventually listened to Dead Air on my lap top. I cannot really say what I think of it except that everything kind of fits together.

10 January Wednesday

There were 12 square red buckets spread about in the field. It seemed a lot of buckets for not very many sheep. The sheep wandered back and forth eating out of different buckets but I am sure that whatever was in the red buckets was all the same kind of food. There was one green bucket. That was probably the same too.

11 January Thursday

Marian was telling me about a woman. She felt certain that I must know her too. She could not remember the woman’s name so she did a fair job describing her, even telling me the road where the woman lived. She said,“You would know her by sight sure you would.” She said, “You can’t miss her. She looks like an Uncooked Pastry.” Now each time I go to the village I am looking for this woman. There cannot be more than one who fits this description.

12 January Friday

There is a regular robin at the outdoor table. Actually there are several regular robins. None of the robins are Michael. I know I shall never see my Michael again but I enjoy imagining that I might. I am surprised at how different each robin looks from every other robin. I do wonder and ask the robins if one of them might be a brother or sister or aunt of Michael. I do not expect an answer but I ask anyway. I keep the feeders full and some crumbs out on the table. There are so many Michaels. It is one of those names which is used again and again and again. Not for robins but for people. I wonder why I even chose the name Michael for my robin when there are already so many Michaels. I could easily write a story with every single person in it named Michael. Every person would be a different Michael but they would all be Michael. I saw one Michael this morning who said he was pleased that the day was starting dry. He said, “We have enough rain got.” I have been thinking about his phrasing all day.

13 January Saturday

We see the people every Saturday when we go for breakfast in Cahir. We have gotten to know them in a particular kind of a way. We always sit in the upstairs and so do they. They come in and have coffee and breakfast and they do a crossword puzzle.  The woman told us that it is the same one that used to be in a newspaper to buy but now they can get it for free in the Farmer’s Weekly. They bring a duplicate copy and they each start the puzzle at the same time. It is a Saturday morning competition. She said that he usually wins but she says she is better on certain kinds of clues. Over the months we have learned where they live and we know that she is not local but comes from Carlow. And we know some others things about them. And they know things about us.  We always chat and say morning things to one another. We do not know their names. Between ourselves we call them The Crosswords. We do not know how they speak of us. I am not sure that they know that we always have porridge. This morning Simon went into the men’s toilets. He saw the Crossword Man standing by the sink speaking to someone on his mobile phone about one of the clues. The man winked at Simon and put his finger to his lips. Every week we learn more about The Crosswords. The secret of the Crossword Cheat has taken things to a whole new level.

15 January Monday

Margaret had been at Ardkeen in Waterford since the 17th of December, but the doctors said they could not operate on her leg until after Christmas. And then they wanted to do the surgery in Cork and not in Waterford. Tommie has been distraught. He had hoped she would be taken care of immediately in Waterford and then sent up to Clogheen for recovery. He was hoping she was going to be brought nearer to home, not further away. By the time she went to Cork and had her operation and skin grafts, several more weeks passed. Tommie has been impatient for her to be closer to home so that he can go to visit her without asking someone to drive him. He spoke of going to Cork on the bus with his Senior Bus Pass but really, he was a bit nervous about doing that. Today Margaret has finally been moved to St Theresa’s in Clogheen.  She will stay there for as long as it takes her to heal.  Tommie will be able to drive himself to visit her every day.  After an entire month of depending upon others, he is nearly overcome with relief.

16 January Tuesday

A glove in the mud.  A glove in the mud is a welcome distraction from just mud. I am obsessed by the marks on the glove.  They look like they have been painted by hand with paint and a paintbrush. They look far more expressive than the usual marks on work gloves. They appear to be more than just grips to ensure that tools and blocks and bricks do not slip while work is being done. And again, the seemingly hand-painted glove is a good distraction from the endless mud.

The Pump Is Gone on the Central Heating.

15 March Thursday

I had looked ahead at the weather report. I knew there was a lot of rain falling. I knew that copious amounts had fallen throughout the night. Even with this knowledge I was not ready for the reality of so much rain. It is easy to forget how much rain can fall in Ireland if one is away from it for a short time. As we neared the area close to home, all of the roads were flooded. There was water rushing off the fields as though they were always fast running rivers and they were never fields. The gashes that the council digs out of the sides of any road in preparation for exactly this kind of thing were all full and overflowing. The dikes along the road were also deep and fast running.

Peter was driving us from the airport. He was shocked and worried about his car. He was worried about so much deep rushing water. We were not worried as we have seen it so often before. We knew that it could be much much worse than what we were seeing. At one point I got out of the car and walked through a large lake of water which covered the road in order to let him know how deep it was before he drove through it. It looked deeper than it was. I was glad that it did not come up past the top of my boots. My boots are only ankle boots and they are made of leather. It is not really a good idea to wade through water in leather boots. If I had not done it, he would not have dared drive any further, so there was not much choice.

He told us how he and Maud had returned from a winter holiday in the south of France where they had suffered badly from the dry air. He said the aridity day after day hurt their lungs. He said that it was just Too Dry. When they stepped off their plane in Cork, they were glad to be back in the dampness. He said they felt the moisture wrapping itself around them and then they knew they were home. Immediately, their lungs and their bodies felt better.

I listened as he spoke.  I knew that no matter how long I live in this country, I will never feel good about being damp. I was even more certain about this as I surveyed the rain water pouring down our bathroom wall and into the cupboard in the big room and in the little passageway. I have become very efficient at mopping up water with towels and newspapers. I am good at drying things out over as many days as it takes. I know that I will never fully belong here unless I learn to accept all this dampness. That will never happen.

17 March Saturday

The market was quiet today. There were only eight stalls. The weather did not help. It was cold and sleety and horrible. The big field behind the castle was completely covered with water. If you did not know that it was usually a field, you would believe that it was always a lake. There were few customers. The good news is that Maria, who makes the pates and terrines and wild garlic pesto is now selling cheese. She had five kinds of cheese on one end of her table. They were all Irish cheeses I had not seen before. One was a smoked cheese and one was a hard sheep cheese and the other three were made of cows milk. We have not had a cheese seller at the market since Katherine left to enjoy her retirement and to play more golf. That must be at least four years ago. Maybe five. We bought three kinds of cheese.

Keith was selling long stemmed daffodils. The stems were 24 inches (62 cm long). I measured them when I got home. I have never seen such tall daffodils. He said he grew them in the poly-tunnel. That explains the height. Our own daffodils get knocked down by the wind. Today they are lying flat under yesterday’s surprise snow, but I know they will stand back up again as the few inches of snow melts. They will never grow as tall as Keith’s daffodils. Our daffodils fight the weather so they will always be stunted.

The Apple Farm had Elstars on offer which made me happy. I know they keep the apples in a cooler over the winter, but still, I marvel that last autumn’s apples can taste so sharp and sweet and crunchy in March. Pat had homemade butter from Tinnock Farms in Wexford along with plenty of fresh fish. We complained together about how buttermilk is being mixed in with a lot of commercial butter these days. It is a way to lower production costs. It makes the butter do funny things in a pan. The new egg woman, who is Australian, had two goats in a pen beside her table. They were young goats rescued from an elderly neighbour who could no longer care for them. Their names are Jim and Debbie. I hope they return next Saturday.

20 March Tuesday

After the torrential rain. After the snow. This morning, I spent half an hour outside on the bench. I sat with my back against the wall feeling sun on my face. With coffee. Out of the wind, the sun was hot and lovely. The first primroses are showing in the boreen. It has been a week of high contrasts. Big holes out on the tar roads remain treacherous. The road drops away in chunks. The tar and everything supporting the tar just drops down to somewhere deep. The holes are big and flat, when they are full of water. If they are filled with water there is no way to know if the hole is an extremely deep hole or a shallow puddle. If there is a really large hole, big enough for one or more car tyres to drop into, we might call it a pot hole but more often it is spoken of as a sheep dip.

21 March Wednesday

The pump is gone on the central heating. We think it is the pump. We hope it is the pump. It might be something more. We are lucky it is not too cold today. No snow. No sleet. No rain. No wind.  We have kept the wood stove going all day. Sadly, that heat does not reach everywhere. Niall, the plumber, cannot come until tomorrow evening. That means anytime after dinner (lunch) and before about six o’clock. All we can do is wait.

Water Dog under the Woodpile

22 March Thursday

I admired his fancy designer spectacles. I could see they were new. Since I had never seen him wearing any glasses at all before this, I asked if he had always worn them. In fact, he said he had never worn glasses, but he had been instructed to wear them twenty years ago. He said it was hard enough being gay in school. He said that wearing glasses would have finished him off. I asked what wearing the new glasses did for his vision. He claimed that the world was a new place. When I suggested that poor vision was a liability in his line of work, he looked at me in the mirror and we both fell about  laughing. He said that every head of hair he cuts now is a brand new head of hair even if it is a head of hair he has been working on every week for the last fifteen years.

23 March Friday

Simon shouted for me to come outside. He said he’d seen the biggest stoat ever and it was under our wood pile. The stoat stuck his head out and looked at us both and then it went back in. It looked too big to be a stoat. We did not know what it was. It went in and out, and around the back, and in and out again, and it studied us without fear and with a lot of interest. It had a nice face. I took a few photographs as it took off and ran across the grass. When it ran it moved low along the ground with large elongated flexing and bouncing movements, sort of like a hare. It was black and sleek and long. A little later we were down at the shop. I asked the blonde woman behind the counter if she knew her animals. She said she did. She looked and said that she did not know what it was but that it was Not a stoat. She called Marian over and Marian said it looked like a stoat but it was too big for a stoat. My phone was being passed around. I thought it looked like a mink but I did not know if minks were native. Marie had a look and said it is more mink than stoat. There were six people discussing the animal now with each other and with Simon and I. My phone kept being grabbed and the photos studied and enlarged as everyone tried to solve it. Someone suggested a pine marten but others put that idea down scornfully. It was too sleek and too thin to be a pine marten. Without exception everyone disliked the pine marten as a possibility and as an animal. John Condon walked into the shop and Marie said “Here’s the man to sort this!” Someone handed my phone to John. He recoiled from it and said he did not have his glasses. The photos were enlarged yet again and shown to him. We all said what we thought it was or was not. Everyone was talking at the same time. John looked at the phone with care and shouted, “It’s a Water Dog!” There was a group sigh of agreement. Of course, a water dog! I had no idea what a water dog was. They all agreed it needed water nearby and Simon mentioned the stream at the bottom of our meadow. John made a flexing movement with his body and his back. He said, “It moves like this.” He imitated the movement exactly right. I looked up water dog when I got home and found all kinds of dogs, mostly Portuguese, which were called Water Dogs but not one of them looked like our animal. Eventually I found a picture of what we had seen and it was indeed a mink.

24 March Saturday

The path is wet and there is water running down it and there are lots of rocks covered with moss. The winter has been long and wet.  The moss is everywhere. But the big branches and the brambles are cut back. It is easy to walk without getting entangled or ducking down low, as long as I look carefully at the mud and the slippery stones.  Up near the top the mud dries up and there is so much wild garlic growing along the way that garlic is the only smell. I cannot smell the mud nor any of the other young green things.  The entire length of the path smells like garlic.

25 March Sunday

The older woman was shorter than me and she was badly bent over. She asked me to lift a box of porridge oats down from a high shelf. She said, “I don’t like To Put In On You but I cannot reach that high.” I did not know the expression but I understood the need for help. I mentioned it to Breda and she defined it exactly in the way I had understood it. To Put In On Someone is to impose upon them. There is always another way to say the exact things that I think I already know.

26 March Monday

Niall came to look at the heating system. With a bit of fiddling, he was able to get it all working again. The pump was not gone after all. We were relieved. We feared we might be needing a new stove and the amount of money to be spent would be huge. The hardship of a few days without heat are already forgotten in our relief. Then Ned Coady came down with his plug-in generator to fill the fuel tank. As we drank tea together afterwards he joked that Simon was off his mark. Usually Simon calls the oil company and asks for 720 litres or 680 litres or whatever amount is needed. He is always spot-on with his order. He has no gauge on the tank. He only uses a long piece of wood that he sticks into the tank and from that he makes his estimate of the volume required. He climbs up a ladder and stands on the edge of the wall beside the tank to make his calculation. It is a joke with Ned and a joke with the men at the yard and and a joke with Simon and himself that Simon is always correct. He never orders more fuel than can be fit into the tank.  The tank fills to within a few centimetres with the amount he orders. The men at the yard cannot figure out how he does it. Today’s estimate was a bit off. He had ordered 650 litres and the fuel filled the tank about 250 centimetres below the top. Ned was not going to let this be forgotten. He was not interested in our days without heat and the almost broken heating system. He acted like he had won a wager. He was still chuckling when he left the house.

27 March Tuesday

Sean arrived to collect his daughter to go and visit the mother in hospital, but he was thirty minutes early. She was not home yet.  He went next door to chat with Greg just To Put Down The Time .

Wine in the Teapot

28 March Wednesday

Peter Ryan was on the roof both in the rain and not in the rain. He was spraying water from the hose into the place where the roof meets the other part of the roof. I ran in and out of the house while Simon checked on the walls in three leaking locations. Simon shouted to me and then I shouted up to Peter. We were waiting for the water to drip and to leak and to puddle into the places where we have learned to expect leaking and puddling. Peter was on the roof for more than an hour. It might have been two hours. The ladder fell down twice. The sun came out and there was a huge rainbow visible over the foot hills. Then it rained again. The rain did not fall for long nor heavily. It just rained and stopped and rained again. Finally the probable leak was found and understood. The water was running UP the galvanized metal in and underneath the roof join. It must have been a combination of rain and wind over time and maybe there is an old nail hole or several old nail holes that rusted and made an opening for the rain to enter. There is a big section of the ceiling ripped out and plaster skim everywhere in the kitchen and in the bathroom. The plan is that this will all be repaired on Friday.

29 March Thursday

It is a tight time of year. Tight is the expression being used and used often. A few weeks ago the cows were out in the fields. Now a lot of them are back in the barns and under cover. The animals are building up in the sheds. The winter feed is running low. Some of the farmers let the animals out for the day and then bring them back inside at night. Nothing is growing anyway. The cows are in a field to eat grass but there is not much grass growing. There is not much to be eaten. Everyone is tired of the cold and of the long long winter which just refuses to go away. The light has changed but the temperatures remain low. This morning I saw a few sheep wandering around in a big field nibbling and pulling at last seasons stubble. There was not much there for them to eat. Tight. It is a tight time of year.

30 March Good Friday

For the first time in 91 years it is legal to serve and to buy alcohol on Good Friday. The law was changed in January. Restaurants and bars now have the option to open or not to open. They can choose to respect the old ways or they can get on with the new. We stopped in at Rose’s last night. The Thursday before Good Friday was traditionally a wildly busy night with everyone who wanted to drink trying hard to drink enough for two nights in the one night. This year, early evening on Thursday was just early evening on Thursday. Most people have outgrown the manic behaviour that demanded that one had to drink just because one was not allowed to drink. Someone said that it used to be normal for restaurants to serve wine in a teapot just to get around the law. I had not heard that before. I wish I had seen it. I suppose the wine would have been poured from the teapot into a teacup. All very hard to think about. Of course, today people drink at home without a worry or fear of judgement anyway. Brendan seemed to be the only one who had a problem with the relaxing of the old law. He was reprimanding Rose and insisting that she should not open and that she should not be serving drink on Good Friday. John muttered, “No fear, Brendan will be the first one in the door when she opens. And he will be the last one out.”

31 March Saturday

Debbie and Jim, the goats, were back at the market.  This time they were secured both by generous ropes and within a small fenced area.  There was no chance that Jim could escape this week. A large group of people walked through the market coming off the river path into the car park and then they  loaded themselves onto four waiting buses. They were walking in twos and threes and they were all wearing walking boots and most carried walking poles.  The line of people seemed to be endless.  I asked one of the bus drivers what was going on.  He said they were the Active Knockmealdown Group. He said there were about 300 people in total and that they were going to Cashel by bus and then returning to Cahir on foot  via the St. Declan’s Way. I do not know if that meant they were finished with the entire walk then or if they would be continuing the walk all the way to Ardmore on another day. Or maybe they had already come from Ardmore. The driver did not know. Most of the people walked in a straight line through the market as if they did not notice it was there. A few stopped and filled their pockets with cheese or cakes or apples. There were two tiny lambs in a hay-filled pen. They were exactly to the right of the walking line of people but not one person looked down to notice them. No one looked at Debbie and Jim either.

1 April Sunday

The ceiling has been repaired and the roof was all sealed up in the appropriate places.  Everything has been cleaned and put away. The rain started mid-afternoon and it has been coming down off and on since.  I am discouraged to see the bathroom ceiling leaking in its usual way as if all of that analysis, discussion, diagnosis and work had not been done. I am not looking forward to telling Peter that everything that was done has solved nothing.

Warble Fly Eradication

2 April Monday

Sister Carmel went to along to celebrate the birthday of another nun who was extremely old. She lamented that it was a pity that there were not many close family members present. She said, “First Cousins are very rare when you are at the age of 100.”

3 April Tuesday

Simon bought a pair of boots. He had seen them in the window of the shop. They were on sale. He walked in and he asked to try them on. The man in the shop was a very serious white haired man. He was staidly dressed in a well fitting suit, a white shirt and a tie. The man spoke highly of the brand of boots. He said they were extremely well made and he pointed out the fine leather and various features. Simon felt happy with the fit, so he bought the boots and he came home. Later he tried on the boots just to walk around in the house and get comfortable with them. The boots did not feel right. They did not feel as good as they had felt inside in the shop. He took them off and looked carefully at the boots. He saw that one boot was size 42 and one boot was size 43. He called the shop and spoke to the man who had sold him the boots. The man burst out laughing. He laughed long and hard and when he could finally speak again, he gasped while he said, “Oh dear! It is not the first time I have done this!” He told Simon to come in and make the exchange for the correct size. When Simon returned for the exchange, the man got the giggles again. He said “Now let us hope I am not after sending you home with the opposite pair of wrong ones.”

4 April Wednesday

The rain is not stopping. The farmers are getting more and more worried. They are running out of fodder for the cattle. The Tipperary farmers cannot help out the farmers in the midlands and in the west as they usually do in a crisis. They cannot help because they need help themselves.
We all need help. All of the repairing of our roof and our leaks has become something much worse than it was before. There is water flowing through the fuse box and down the wall in the kitchen. I have moved every single thing off the coat hooks and off the little racks down below. There was a row of seven small framed things above the coat hooks. The frames are soaked and the things in them are soaked. I enjoyed studying the wet things as I tried to dry them and to save them. It is easy to stop looking at things when they become familiar. Moving a thing from one place to another makes it new again. Which is nice. The warble fly certificate and a small envelope addressed to Kattie and Willie is among the things that I am drying out. The seven frames are lined up underneath a radiator.
Kattie’s name was not Kattie. Her name was Kathleen or maybe Katherine but everyone called her Kattie. Probably Kattie was a pet name which began when she was a child and it just stuck. Maybe the family thought of her as a little kitten kind of person. Kittie. Kattie. Maybe indeed it was supposed to be Kattie but there is an ongoing problem here with the pronunciation of TH. TH often sounds like TT. When I first came here, if I mentioned Kattie, I would automatically adjust it to say Kathie. If I said Kathie someone would always correct me. The correction would be gentle because I am From Away and because of course I never actually knew Kattie. Kattie English lived in what is now our house with her brother Willie English. At one time, there were two older siblings, Frederick and Elisabeth, living here too. Frederick and Elisabeth died years before Willie and Kattie. But they all died well before we came here. Increasingly the people who knew Kattie and Willie themselves are dying or have already died. There are few people now who would notice if I called Kattie Kathie. Even so my correction of her name to be what I think it should be rather than what everyone knew it to be is a little bit arrogant. If I speak of Kattie at all I should use the name that she was known by, not the name I think it started from.

5 April Thursday

Two women were in the baking section of the market. They both had several kinds of flour, ground almonds and other cake making things in their baskets. One of them mentioned the fact that the Protestants are very competitive about their cakes. It was a known fact. The other woman felt no need to question or to disagree. It was just a truth and everyone knew it. The one woman said, “Sure they only make us feel bad.”

6 April Friday

Last night there was an AMBER warning for weather. I was not sure what that meant but the non-stop torrential, lashing rain and the wild gusting winds might be the most wretched rain I have ever experienced.  I have been in a lot of rain. I am sure that I have been in worse rain but this felt bad enough. Now I have spent all morning moving more things out the way way of fresh drips and and puddles. Nothing can be done to solve the leaking in this weather. We can only wait. It is good that the floors are made of stone. The ceilings are another matter. It is good that we read a lot of newspapers. It is not good that I delivered nine big bundles to the dog sanctuary last week. I am going through the remaining supply of paper for soaking up the water fast. I hope the rain stops before I run out.  I have every straight edged container I own snicked up tight against walls wherever there is a leak.  It is time to stop talking about this. I cannot stop living with it but I can stop pretending that my descriptions will help in any way.

Stuck in Inchicore.

22 April Sunday

The cows are in the upper field. They are looking into our windows which means they are looking down and into our windows and watching us from an elevated position. It is not often that cows are in that field and when they are they are not always so interested in what we are doing. This group seem determined to catch our attention. They seem determined to want us to look back at them. This group is very interested in us. There might be one or there might be two or three or four and then they run off and away together and then two more come. I am always facing them from my seat at the table. I wave. I smile. I nod. I have no idea if any of this registers with them. We cannot eat breakfast, lunch or dinner without attracting an audience.

23 April Monday

A blue security van arrived while we waited at the station in Cork. The man driving it made a careful backing up to the door on the side of the station. It took him two or three tries to get into the exact right position. When he finished he was perfectly in line with the door so I assumed he would rush out of his van, do some efficient moves and take money in containers into or out of the station and then quickly drive away again. He got out of the van and took two small silver suitcases out of the special door. He also removed two pouches which he put under his arm. He walked around the van towards the station and then he met a man he knew. He put the two cases down on the back bumper of the van. It was a flat bumper and it easily held the two silver suitcases. The two men shook hands and then they both lit cigarettes. As they talked a third man came along. They all shook hands again and then they moved about ten steps away from the van until they were standing in the sunshine. The sun was warm on an otherwise cold day. It was warm in the sun and very cold in the shade. The driver kept the two pouches under his arm while he talked for about 20 minutes. He had his back to the van and the suitcases. The silver suitcases seemed to be forgotten. Two small boys came along. They each picked up a suitcase. One of the men saw the boys and nudged the driver. He turned his head and said, “Go away, Lads and leave my cases where they are.” The boys put the suitcases back on to the bumper and they wandered off. The driver stood in the sun for another 10 minutes and then he said good-bye to the two men. He went into the station with the pouches and the silver suitcases. He came out with some different things and he drove away. None of his activity seemed as imperative as getting the vehicle in an exact straight line with the door.

24 April Tuesday

Celly Ryan was the name on the small van. It was a private bus service. The driver was standing near the van with the door open. He was waiting for his passengers to return. I think the vehicle could seat 6 or maybe 8 people. I wish I had stopped to ask the man what Celly was short for. Celestine? Celeste? I cannot think of a man’s name that might be shortened to Celly, but I am trying.

25 April Wednesday

The swallows nest in the corner by my door is still in position from last year. The birds left and the nest remains. I have gotten used to it being there. I do not really see it anymore. But now there are birds everywhere. They are all flying around with bits of sticks and moss in their beaks. Nest building activity is manic even though the weather is colder than it should be. The weather is horrible. I think I should remove the nest from the wall before anyone decides to use it again. I do not know if swallows use a nest for a second time. Nor if other birds move into any old nest just for the convenience of not having to build their own. It was interesting to have the mother and the chicks in the corner for a while, but then I had to give up my room. I was driven away by the mother trying to protect her young. I would rather not go through all that again. By the time everyone had learned to fly there was crunchy excrement all over the door and the door handle and the step. I thought I could just pull the nest off today in passing but I think I will need a chisel. It is tightly welded to the wall with mud and bird spit. And since it is now raining and the rain is lashing sideways, I shall do it later.

28 April Saturday

Leaving Dublin on the bus with a man shouting into his phone. No one could read or sleep. No one could not listen.

“The bitch yeah you heard about it? Yeah she had her head out the window. She loved doing that she did but we went through a skinny bit of the alley backing down and her head hit a pole. Yeah yeah dead right away. Not even a bark. Hey who is this anyway? Paddy? Paddy Dorman? Who the hell gave you my number? Who do you think you are ringing me? Paddy Gorman or Paddy Dorman? Oh you’re that Paddy. Oh Sorry Paddy I thought you were the other Paddy. You know him yourself. He’s a a nuisance that one. 
We’re stuck in Inchicore. I’m on the bus and we’re stuck in Inchicore. We’re going off to Tipp to see The Wife’s mother. She’s down there already with The Mother. I’m with the The Son. On the bus yeah. She’s not well. Yeah I’ve got the grapes for the gift. Yeah Paddy we’re on the bus but we’re only in Inchicore. We’re going nowhere Paddy. We paid to go to Tipp but we haven’t got far. I’m in the bus now. Yeah we got on at BusAras. That’s where it starts but at this rate we won’t get to Tipp till Tuesday. You know yourself Paddy. Once you’re on the bus it’s like a trap . You can’t get off. You’ve got to go where you paid to go. It was 28 euro for the both of us Paddy. That’s what we paid and we’re only in Inchicore so in that kind of a way it’s an expensive trip but if we ever get to Tipp we’ll feel sure we’ve had our value for the money we will. We’ll feel glad Paddy to be somewhere else.”

30 April Monday

I dropped some carrots on the floor. They snapped into pieces. Carrots are usually a bit bouncy. I think of carrots as rubbery rather than brittle. The floor in the kitchen is a stone floor. Most things break when they hit a stone floor. But it seemed odd to have carrots snap into clean halves like these did. I grated a few of the carrots for a salad at lunch. They were watery and completely without taste. I wish I could remember where I got these carrots because I do not want to buy them again.

1 May Tuesday

This May Day is gloomy and cold and rainy. It is a desperate day. I walked up the path and I was reminded that it is still wild garlic season. Every stage of wild garlic season is a pleasure. First there are the little shoots coming up and the bright fresh green colour is full of promise. Then the leaves push all the way up and they are a shiny darker green. That is when I think both the smell and the taste are the strongest and the best. Then the buds appear and the leaves lose a bit of their shininess. Slowly, the star-like flowers start appearing like little explosions. The leaves look duller but the flowers make it all look exciting. It tastes and smells good at every stage. I like walking up the boreen and stepping on it and smashing some down with my boots just so that I can walk in a cloud of the smell. There is nothing that is not good about the wild garlic season.

Repeal the Eighth

3 April Thursday

We climbed the stile and walked over Joe’s fields. From a distance, they looked green and grassy and inviting. It had not rained for a few days but the ground was all churned up from the cows being in those fields in recent weeks. The holes were big. It would have been easy to break an ankle. Some of the holes were just empty. Some of the holes are just firm mud mashed down in the shape of a heavy hoof. Some are full of pee. At first I thought the wet holes were just muddy water but the cow urine mixed with mud and rainwater makes a different colour. It was not easy to walk across the fields. We lurched from lump to lump and hole to hole. It made for a clumsy and rollicking kind of walking. Simon took a stick. I would have been wise to take a stick too. When we reached the last hill up the track to the farm, the ground underfoot got worse. The dirt track was covered in manure. It was slippery and deep and it was hard to get footing. Luckily the distance was not great and the cows were not yet starting to walk down while we walked up. Joe had 10 new troughs piled up in his yard. They are cast from concrete and will soon be distributed out in the fields for drinking water. They are the newest thing. I have been seeing them appearing in the fields of other farmers. I guess this is a new development from the big black plastic ones which have been used for years.

5 April Saturday

Stella told me that the usual place for a safe is inside in the Hot Press. If a person is going to install a safe in their house for important things like papers and money and jewellery, the place where they always put the safe is in the floor of the Hot Press. The Hot Press is the airing cupboard. It is the place where the hot water tank is located. Most people have some shelves built into the Hot Press. If you have shelves in the Hot Press you can put sheets and towels and clothing in there when they come in from the washing line. Things can be put inside the Hot Press until they are thoroughly dry or maybe until they are ironed. The sheets and towels may never go any further. The Hot Press often becomes the permanent storage place for these things. The trouble is that the burglars know that if a household has installed a safe anywhere, then the Hot Press is the place to find it. If a burglar locates the Hot Press, he will locate the safe. Stella said of course not every house has a safe but a burglar won’t know that until all of the clean and dry folded towels and sheets have been pulled out and thrown onto the floor and probably stepped upon. Stella said this is almost the worst thing about having your house broken into. She said the things that get damaged in the looking and looting are the real pity. The things that are gone are just gone. She said that it is a sad job to wash a bunch of sheets and towels all over again just because someone stepped on them.

7 April Bank Holiday Monday

There is blossom everywhere. Stitchwort. Forget-me-not. Primrose. Hawthorn. Gorse. Bluebell. It seemed like spring would never come but now that it is here, it is everywhere.

9 April Wednesday

I took fresh rhubarb and custard down to Tommie and Margaret. It was not stewed rhubarb. The pieces were still firm and they were gently cooked with a bit of molasses. Tommie was in hospital for 6 days. He has been back home for a week now. Yesterday he had his stitches removed. He was disturbed that he had thought there were eleven stitches but the doctor told him there were actually twelve stitches. He said they were small and his eyes are not so good but still he did not like to have it wrong. He was upset to have learned that Ian had sold the house. The house was on what had been Tommie’s land where his old house had been. The new house was not his house and the land was not his land anymore, but he had been up and down feeding the cats for years and years whenever he was asked to do it and a lot of times when no one asked but he worried anyway about the cats starving. It was still his place even though it was not his place anymore. He has had an emotional tie for too long to not be considered in any changes. He said that he felt Aggrieved that he had not even been told that the house was sold. He was Aggrieved about the miscount of his stitches. He was Aggrieved about no one telling him about the new residents in the house. He was also Aggrieved that he was not allowed to drive for another 6 weeks. Once he started to say the word Aggrieved he could not say it often enough. He was glad to see the rhubarb. Tommie loves rhubarb. He was glad for the distraction.

10 April Thursday

Treasa was sort of singing today but it was not singing with words it was singing a tune with some syllables. She said she was only Lilting. Lilting being just that: singing without words but singing a tune nonetheless. Maybe this is a normal expression. Maybe it is just a word I have not heard used quite like this. Maybe it is just herself that calls it that.

11 April Friday

I am wearing my Repeal the Eighth badge wherever I go. I wear it out walking in the fields when there is no one to see except the birds and the cows. I wear it to the shop and the post office and to anywhere I go. I wear it to town and I wear it to the market. I wear it up the boreen and down the boreen. Actually we have five or six different badges.  We both make sure we never leave the house without one. Most people never say a word about it either way.  Most people never say a word but I see that their eyes notice the badge.  My position is registered.  The Eighth Amendment is being discussed everywhere on the radio, TV and in the papers but in the country, people are reluctant to speak about it out loud.

The Dog on the White Line.

13 April Sunday

I have some tiny plastic tubes with one open end. They come with the little flossing brushes. They are for protecting the little brushes. If I go somewhere I can slide the brushes into the the tubes and then they will not get bent in transit. I rarely put the brushes into the tubes at home. I just line up the different sized brushes on the shelf. This morning I picked up one of the tubes which looked different than the other two or three. There was something in it. I banged it on the side of the sink. A little tiny slug had worked its way into the tube and could not reverse out. It was stuck. Most of the slug came out. Part of what I think was the head remained inside. I was busily trying to flush it out with water for several minutes before I questioned why I was doing it.  I did not want to re-use the tube that the slug had been in. I threw it away.
Even with the erratic weather and the cold nights, I could tell that winter was finally over. Things in the bathroom are sort of protected by the cold weather but nothing is ever completely safe. Once the slugs have made their way back in there is nothing that they won’t ooze and creep over on their way to somewhere else. Nothing is safe. On the whole I would rather not know where they have been.

14 April Monday

A few good days of sun or even just one good day of sun and all of the summer clothes come out. Even if the next day is cold and wet and howling with wind, the summer clothes do not disappear. Or they do not disappear completely. This morning was warm. It was almost hot. But by afternoon it was raining and cold. The only people I saw in the shop were wearing rain jackets over heavy fleeces and sweaters. But they were wearing sandals with bare feet. Two women were admiring the brand new sandals worn by one of them. The one not wearing the new sandals said, “I know they would fit me. I know they would look well on me.” They laughed together and the one who was wearing the sandals looked pleased to be the one with the desirable new footwear. As the other one turned to leave the shop, she shouted, “I hope they’ll cut into you, so. Then you’ll have to give them to me!”

15 April Tuesday

It is more than ten years since someone started to paint the house in Irishtown. Maybe it is more than twelve years. It might even be longer ago than that. For as long as I can remember the house has had just this amount of blue paint on it. Someone started in the upper left corner and continued as far as the paint went and then they took a break and no one ever returned to finish the job. Painting this kind of pebble-dashed surface uses up a lot of paint. It demands a lot more paint than a regular wall. Maybe the person who began the painting thought he had enough paint for the whole house. Maybe he was not able to get the exact same colour mixed again. The person who began painting has not returned to finish it. Nor has anyone else. Now the house is empty. It is boarded up. Somehow there is still a freshness to the blue paint. It looks like the paint job might be completed any day now.

16 April Wednesday

The old dog was outside the community hall. I was pleased to see him. He looked healthy and bright-eyed although he could certainly use a good brushing. His hair is coming out in huge clumps. He is scruffy.  He greeted each car as it drove up and he greeted each person as they got out of their car or as they left the hall.  He was not aggressive nor was he begging. He was just interested. He is the same old dog who used to come up to visit Frank at the shop every morning.  Frank would give him cake or some other treat that had reached its sell-by date or had just gone stale. Then the dog would sleep for a while. He always walked home in the middle of the road right along the white line until he reached his house.  Since Frank has been ill and the shop has been closed, maybe the dog has decided that evenings are a more sociable time for visiting the shop even if it is not open. Or maybe he comes in the morning and also in the evening. The section of the road with the white line is not a long stretch of road but it is long enough that anyone who drives it regularly knows that the dog on the white line has priority.

The New Immersion.

17 May Thursday

They are back.  The season is on for the Sticky Back weeds. Sticky Back.  Sticky Jack. Cleavers. Sticky Willy. Robin-run-the-hedge. They are everywhere.  They run up anything that is growing. They tangle in and out between anything that is growing.  Because they are covered with things that make them stick to whatever they touch there is not much need to worry about what or where they go. They stick onto animals and clothes as well as plants.  These weeds are so fast growing and so busy that they look like they are strangling anything they touch.  In fact the growth is more like a fishing net that is thrown over things.  One good grab and the whole clump comes away in the hand.  Of course a good pull does not remove the roots.  The plant just breaks off at the bottom.  I do not really care.  If they are pulled away from things they do not seem to grow back immediately. They will return next year no matter what.  It is a seasonal thing and the season does not last long.  While it is happening the Sticky Backs are everywhere.  I love pulling them off things.  If I am passing in a car I get the urge to just stop and get out to pull the big clumps off the ditches. Sometimes I do it.  When I am walking, I keep slowing down and pulling and slowing down and pulling.  I can grab an armful without even coming to a full stop. Of course there is the good chance that I might grab a stinging nettle or a thorny bramble. Sadly, I do that often.  Stings and stabs do not stop me from this obsessive pulling.  It is the most satisfying kind of weeding work ever.  I seem to have the urge to pull it all down from everywhere in the world which is, of course, not even vaguely possible.

18 May Friday

We have had a week without hot water. Niall the plumber came today. He apologized.  He kept promising to come each day but then each day he never arrived. He said he had been Dead Busy.  He said it’s always the same with the work: Famine or Feast. Famine or Feast. Famine or Feast. He said it three times and then he went to work. He installed a new immersion unit. He showed us the old one. It was covered with lime. This is a terrible area for lime in the water. It coats and cakes onto everything and eventually destroys machinery. He was smitten with the date notations I have made on the wall each time we have had to replace the heater.  He was surprised with how long the previous unit had lasted.  He said he hoped that this new one would last as long as the old one. As he left he instructed us to be sure to mark today’s date up on the wall.

19 May Saturday

A tree fell down in Joe’s field.  We have not had great winds. We have not even had heavy rain. It looks completely wrong to see this tree lying down. The tree is on a low bit of the field. It is often squishy and muddy down there.  All I can think of is that the roots got wet and wetter and stayed wet and finally rotted. I have never lived anywhere where trees fall down so frequently. The mass path is blocked by fallen trees several times a year. Sometimes I think it is to do with the kind of trees. Maybe these trees have shallow roots. Most of the time I think it is to do with just too much water.

20 May Sunday

The bench in Ardfinnan gets repainted in the spring. First it was blue and then it was red and now it is blue again. There is not a lot of room to sit as the home-made corner structure does not allow for a lot of knee room.  Two people can happily sit and chat but anymore than that will feel a bit squished.

Fisherman’s Friend

31 May Thursday

The cows are bellowing in the fields in two directions so it is a little bit like several radios on, but it is not exactly stereo. It is always just a few beats off. Anthony Keating’s cows are up in the very steep pasture which used to be Johnnie Mackin’s field. Or maybe they are Donal Keating’s cows not Anthony Keating’s cows. I keep an eye on any cows when they are there because the field is too straight up and down to be fully believable. I fear they will fall off and roll right down if they put a foot wrong. Joe Keating’s cows are in the near field and Joe Casey’s cows are in the field directly above the house. We cannot see Joe Casey’s cows but we can hear them. They are extremely close but the ditch has grown up so it is like while they are the nearest, they are also invisible. There is a bull or a cow who is moaning and bellowing up there. It is making the cows over on Mackin’s field bellow back. Sometimes Joe Keating’s herd joins in. It is a loud and all day kind of noise. It is rare to have cows in all three of these fields at the same time. Usually if a herd is in one field there are no cows in any of the other fields immediately around us. I like to think that all the noise has to do with various kinds of greetings and a shared delight in this glorious weather as well as the proximity. Between all the cows and all the Keatings and the two Joes it is a distracting kind of day with nothing but birdsong to interrupt all the bellowing.

2 June Saturday

They are still working on the new public toilets in Cahir. It has been months now. There was a lot of digging and pipe laying which went on for ages. And that was after the toilets had already been closed for a year or so. The little temporary toilets are still down in the car park which is convenient for the stall owners at the market. It means they do not have so far to go if they need to use the loo. The new toilets are the talk of the town. They are modern and shiny and sort of glamorous in a crazy way. The castle is in sight, just down the hill on the other side of the river. Cahir is a heritage town. It was once a stagecoach stop and it is full of traditional  buildings. Suddenly there is this silvery grey pointed thing popping up in between other things and right near the bus stop. There are four doors which I assume means four toilets. Today a man was putting some coin machines into the walls. It will cost 40 cents to use a toilet. Some people think this is an outrageous price. Some people think this is a bargain. No one can decide what all the space at the top of the pointy building is for. It is being widely discussed. People worry that it seems like a lot of material and space for not much function. There is more discussion about the shape of the building that there is about the 40 cent charge.

3 June Sunday

A sparrow hawk smashed into the window and lay stunned on the ground just long enough for me to get a quick photograph of him through the glass. After a five minutes he was up and away again .

4 June Monday

Tommie was happy to get the cake. He is always happy to get cake. He told us that he is in a lot of pain. He woke up twice in the night to take more pain killers. He said he never wakes up in the night not for anything. He knows the pain is bad if it is waking him up. Margaret would know what to tell him to do because she used to be a nurse. She knows things. He cannot ask Margaret for advice now because she cannot hear and she cannot see and she sits in her chair all the day and mostly she sleeps. He does not want to go to the doctor because he does not want to be sent back to the hospital. I offered to take him to the doctor or even to the out of office CareDoc facility. He said no to everything. His excuse is that today is a Bank Holiday so he cannot go to the doctor anyway until tomorrow at the earliest. He promised that he will go to the doctors if he is still in pain in the morning. He has started to drive again even though he is not supposed to be driving yet. He will drive himself over to the doctors office. He said he could walk but he would rather drive.  He tested Simon’s stick which is a hill walking stick with a bit of spring in it.  He liked the bounce. He has a sturdy stick which he finds good for The Balance. He said that A Good Stick Gives Him Courage.

5 June Tuesday

Andrzej has been repairing the strimmer again and again. Simon has been fiddling with it for years too. The strimmer is now twenty years old. It is a heavy-duty model which is perfect for the rough stuff up and down the boreen. It is also a physically heavy machine. Andrzej says it is the best he has ever used  and he likes to keep it going. His last repairs were finally not enough. The three of us went through every container we could find in any of the barns and the house and the workshop. We could not find a cap to replace the gas cap which finally cracked off. The gas cap was kind of the final straw. Andrzej stuck an old and too big sort of cap on it and then wound some plastic sheeting and a rubber band in order to be able to finish the job he was doing. The gas was still leaking and the engine was making a grinding noise. After that we took the strimmer to O’Brien’s to repair. The younger O’Brien found a new cap to fit. He was pleased that it was even  orange to match the machine even though he knew that of course the colour did not matter.  He did various other tuning things. He said the engine is great and strong and that the machine should last for another twenty years. He was full of admiration for the repair that Andrzej had done by taping on the metal top from a tin of Fisherman’s Friend lozenges to repair the carburetor. The O’Brien said, “I could not have done it any better myself, so I just made it a better shape.”

Sheep on a Lump

9 June Saturday

Jim and Keith had some beautiful fat Egyptian garlics on their stand today. The garlics themselves are lovely and plump but the way that the green tops are woven together is what is really lovely. Every single person who sees the garlics reaches out to touch them and to comment upon them. The garlics are grown locally by one of the members of the Egyptian Coptic church which is located in what used to be a Catholic convent. The nuns lived there for years and they ran a school for girls. The nuns have mostly died off. Now the convent is the home for an order of Coptic monks. The garlics are grown by the monks or maybe by just one monk who brings them to the market and gives them to Jim and Keith to sell. I think he just gives them the garlics and he does not even ask for any money in return. Perhaps he has so many garlics that he just wants to share them. They are bigger than most garlic we ever get around here. The bulbs are more purple and they are milder. Every single person comments on the garlics and some people buy them saying that they never buy garlic but they feel that they need to buy this garlic. All of this enthusiasm annoys Keith. Sometimes he announces that Jim grows garlic too. It is like he is defending Jim’s garlic even though it is not really the same thing. Jim’s garlics taste good but they never look like a gift. They never appear with such presentation. They arrive in a jumble in a box and we buy them and we eat them and we enjoy them. The Egyptian garlic gets a lot of attention which is not solely about the eating.

10 June Sunday

Day after day of sun and heat. It feels like we are living somewhere else. It is impossible to walk up the mass path as it is too hot to wear long trousers and long sleeves and there are too many nettles and brambles along the way to grab and rip at any unprotected skin. Walking must be done in other directions. And it has been dry for so long now that it is not just the farmers who are wishing for rain. The haying is getting done which is good but lawns are brown and the grass is not growing which is not good. I cannot believe that I am hoping for rain. The leaks in the roof have not been fixed yet although we do have a plan ready for the fixing.  Why do I want to battle with rain running down the walls when I can have day after day of sun?  The hedgerows are full of the cow parsley skeletons, the sticky weed is dying back and the wild honeysuckle is blooming.

11 June Monday

I overheard the woman in the shop saying that Shay had been Off Dagging. She said it again and again. She said that Shay had been Dagging Again. I feel I know a lot of local vocabulary and that even if I do not know exactly what a word means I usually know enough to be able to unearth its meaning. I think that context is enough for clues. I think that if I focus on the context I am certain to arrive at the correct definition. Knowing that Shay was Dagging Again just left me in quiet confusion. I had no idea what Dagging was nor where to begin in knowing what it was describing. I did not even know who the Shay that the woman was talking about was, so the fact that Shay was Off Dagging Again was an impossible thing to solve all by myself. I could not ask the woman because that would suggest that I had been eavesdropping which of course I was doing but I was not eavesdropping in a nosy kind of way. I was just standing behind the woman as I waited in the shop and she was talking loudly and for a long time. How could I not listen and how could I not pay attention? I could not leave the shop until she stopped talking and moved from the counter. I could only hope that the mystery of Shay and his Dagging would get solved before she left. I could not interrupt and ask what Dagging meant. Later I asked Breda for an explanation. She told me that Dagging was the same as Mitching. As a word, Mitching left me just as confused as Dagging. Eventually I learned that it was all about not going to school when one was supposed to be attending school. The English called it Skiving. We called it Playing Hooky or Skipping School. At least with Skipping School, the word School was included and that gave a major clue. Skipping attached to the word school made it obvious, at least to me. Dagging and Mitching and Skiving sound dangerous and exotic in comparison.

12 June Tuesday

Rhododendrons are in bloom all the way up into the mountains. They are late this year but they are as beautiful as ever. I am glad we remembered to drive up to see them. It is easy to wait a little while and then suddenly it is too late. The blossom do not last long. Shades of pink and lavender and purple line roads and paths. The sides of the hills glow with the soft colours. The rhododendrons in the Knockmealdowns are a much maligned pest. They have invaded and grown like weeds spreading everywhere and choking out a lot of other more indigenous plants. People speak in despair about these enormous invasive shrubs or trees. Some of them really are trees. They are big enough to be trees. Sheep farmers curse them. But for two weeks every year the rhododendrons are adored. Festivals are organized to go walking among the rhododendrons and millions of photographs are taken. When the two weeks are over we can return to worrying about how they are running rampant and taking over all of the other vegetation. And I shall not have to struggle with spelling the word rhododendron for another year.

13 June Wednesday

The roses on the side of the grass-roofed shed are better and more plentiful than they have ever been. We have never had so many in bloom all at the same time. The smell makes me dizzy when I walk past to my room. This is Kattie English’s Albertine rose. It is the only plant remaining from her life here, so I feel it is important to take good care of it and to keep it healthy. It is barely possible to cut these roses and to bring them into the house. They last a few hours and make a thick perfume in a room, and then they droop and die. They are best enjoyed where they grow.

15 June Friday

The Irish flag down in the village near to the bottle bank looks like it is blowing in the breeze.  It looks like it is blowing in the breeze all the time.  Yesterday was a wildly gusty day and the edge of the flag got caught on a branch.  Now the wind is no longer blowing but the flag is still in blowing position.

The Postman’s Party

16 June Saturday

On entering Cahir for the Farmers Market the road is often full of parked cars. Every Saturday there is some kind of game being played by the children in the sports field. The cars of the parents are parked all along on both sides of the road. With cars parked along both sides the road becomes a single lane road. Some Saturdays there is also a funeral at the church. The church is across from the playing fields. Once the car park is full the cars spill out onto the road for a long way in either direction. One can tell how big a funeral is by the number of cars. If the road is really blocked up we know that the family was well-known in town and maybe related to a lot of people. Today there was a huge event following the death of a woman named Mary. I know very little about this Mary, but I know a little. She was the receptionist at the Surgery. The eye doctor and her husband both have their practices in a bungalow on the edge of town. There are two doors to enter the two surgeries and inside in the centre is one desk. Mary took care of the patients who entered in the left hand door for Dr John and his practice as a General Practitioner. She also took care of the patients who entered from the right hand door for Dr. Bernie who is an Eye Specialist. She was completely efficient and she never forgot anyone’s name. She had an exuberance which made you feel that no one had a more fun or happy job. Between endless phone calls and the patients coming in and going out of the two doors she made everyone feel that they were lucky to be there and that she was lucky too. Mary was in her early fifties. She was walking down a road on Wednesday with her niece, or maybe it was a nephew, who was on a bicycle. The road is a very long and very straight stretch of road. It used to a be the busy main road on the way to Mitchellstown and Cork, but since the motorway was built, it is an extremely quiet road. Anyone going in either direction on the road can see for a mile up the road. There is a wide space along the road for people to walk safely or for tractors and slow moving vehicles. Mary was hit by a car. No doubt it was the only car on the road. Whenever I am on that road I am always the only car on the road. The road is never busy. The car hit Mary but it did not hit the child. Mary was killed. The community is shocked. The funeral this morning was packed. Death in a small community affects so many people. Even if one does not know the family there is always a connection no matter how small. We all feel a need to show our shock and sadness. The word tragedy is used again and again.

17 June Sunday

I took fresh strawberries to Tommie and Margaret. As I stood at the door I looked down and saw a white envelope from Lourdes addressed to Tommie and Mgt. Hally in blue biro. On top of the envelope was a small bottle of Holy Water. I picked the two things up off the ground just as Tommie opened the door. I handed him the Holy Water and the envelope with one hand and the strawberries with the other. It was a confusing moment. He was thrilled with the strawberries and he was thrilled by the Holy Water. He barely knew which to deal with first. He whispered “Oh, They went to Lourdes and now they are back.” I do not know who the They were, the people who had gone to Lourdes and so kindly brought back the Holy Water. I was pleased to see how happy he was about the gifts. I was interested in Mgt. as an abbreviation for Margaret.

18 June Monday

Forty large elderflower blossoms took no time to collect. The countryside is covered with the creamy blossoms. Sometimes they all look easily available but in fact they are too high and way to get near to them is surrounded by nettles. Today was easy. I needed twenty blossoms for a batch of cordial and I planned to make two batches. Forty blossoms plus a few extra. I cut off all the leaves and most of the thick stems. The mixture is now out on the table in a covered pan. It needs to sit and steep for twenty fours hours. Tomorrow I shall bottle it.

19 June Tuesday

There were four little girls standing outside the stone wall. I was just walking along the road. I did not recognize any of the girls. Three of them were holding hands and singing sweetly over the wall to a cluster of wobbly young calves. The calves looked interested and excited to have this performance. Probably they were confused. The one girl who was not singing shushed me with her finger on her lips. She told me that we must be very quiet because baby calves prefer music to talking.

20 June Wednesday

The Elderflower Cordial has been strained and decanted into bottles. Twelve and a half bottles is this years supply. The bottles have been labelled. Simon thought he was doing me a great favour by cutting out the labels and gluing them onto the bottles. Labelling the bottles is my favourite part of the making. I felt a bit disappointed but I did not tell him that. I just said thank you.

21 June The Solstice

I took the car to Mike for some work. He told me that we are promised a heat wave today. People are ready for it or at least some people are ready for it. Some people are wearing shorts and t-shirts while others are wearing wind-proof jackets all zipped-up. I saw one woman wearing an enormous white fur hat with sparkly things sewn into it. She looked hot but she also looked very proud of her hat. Mike told me that the heat wave will begin at half two. He said it will be over by tea time. This was his joke.

Mike has bee hives on the top of four wrecked cars in his yard. The cars have one, two or three hives on their roofs. Each hive has a bit of metal something from a car to weight the tops down. All of the hives are homemade and they are painted in different colours. My favourite is the pale yellow one. An 83-year old friend brought the hives and a few queens over from Burncourt to attract fresh workers to his community of bees. The man has already taken two hives away and there are lots of bees swarming around the remaining hives. The four cars are all Saabs. Mike loves Saabs. They are his preferred car to work on. He is saving these old cars for parts. When there is not much work, he rebuilds old Saabs and makes them good and then he sells them and rebuilds another. Right now he needs a piece out of one of the Saabs but he thinks he will have to wait till the bees have been taken away. Mike has learned a lot about bees because the bee-keeping friend tells him things and then people like me come along and ask a lot of questions and he is able to pass on the new knowledge. He said that most bees in America are African bees and that they are very aggressive. The strains here came from other places and they are more relaxed. I believe him, but I still prefer not to go too close.

22 June Friday

We went to John the Post’s retirement party. John has not been well for several years now. We kept hoping that he would get better and that he would return to work. He has not been able to drive because of his neck and his throat and his head, so he waited and waited thinking that the various treatments would allow him to begin driving again. Now he has accepted that  the various treatments are not going to get him back behind the wheel, so he has officially retired. The little group around John was all postmen. A few of them had themselves retired in the last few years. Others were still working. They were all wearing cotton short-sleeved shirts of a particular summery type. They almost looked like they were wearing an official off-duty uniform. The bar was covered with dark wood inside and it was very quiet and cool. We were the only people, except for John’s sister, who were not postmen. There were no postwomen. No doubt some other people arrived after we left. I enjoyed talking with the postmen. Tom was there.  He had been John’s substitute for a while but now he has his own route. He is now up and down in the Nire Valley, in the Comeraghs and almost all the way to Dungarvan. His route covers an enormous area. Most of the postman do not want this winding, climbing, difficult route, especially in winter. Tom is happy to do it and happy too because his grandfather used to do the exact same route but on a bicycle. He knows delivering the post in his van is easy in comparison. Besides the difficult driving, the other postmen do not like this route because there are so many people on it who are related to each other. Tom said that there are a tremendous number of Ryans in the Nire and several are brothers who do not speak to one another so if the simple mistake is made that the wrong letter gets delivered to the wrong Ryan all hell breaks loose. Another postman told us about a different postman who did that route for a while. The man only used four tyres a year while all of the other postmen used at least twelve tyres a year. This postman only did about 20,000 miles a year on his van while everyone else did 60 or 70,000. The man was eventually called in for some questioning by the administration. The man had figured out a system to make his work life easier. He would go to the creamery and wait around while the farmers came to drop in their milk or to pick up supplies. He would hand-deliver the post to whoever arrived and then he would ask people to drop things off at their neighbours on their way home. He also went to any and all funerals in the area and did his deliveries by hand from outside the church, after giving his condolences to the bereaved.

23 June Saturday

The heat is extraordinary. They are giving more heat and higher and higher temperatures for the coming week.  The temperatures are bigger than any we can usually expect.  Haying is being done everywhere. Haying is the only thing being done with a sense of frenzy.  Except for the sounds of those machines, the countryside is quiet. Even the birds seem to be resting somewhere in the shade.

One plastic barrel cut in half makes a fine feeding place. The barrels used like this are always bright blue. I do not know what came in the barrels originally, but I love them in the fields for as long as they last. The cows bump into them in their eagerness to eat and eventually the plastic cracks and the whole thing falls to the ground.

24 June Sunday

I found an envelope on the road. It is printed bright yellow and white and is for the Building Fund of the two churches of Newcastle and Fourmilewater. They are two separate churches but they are joined as a parish. If there is a mass at one of the churches on a Sunday there will not be a mass at the other. I think there is only one priest between them. I do not know which building is being worked on. Maybe it is both. The date 31 March 2019 suggests that there is no rush to turn in one’s envelope.

In the Low Countries by Stuart Mills

26 June Tuesday

Yesterday at about seven o’clock, I went up to a gun range in the Knockmealdowns. I have never before been to a gun range. I have never fired a gun. I have no interest in guns. Breda and Greg had rounded up a group of walkers complete with boots and walking poles and backpacks to walk some of the trails and over the river while a photographer took some pictures. I was there out of sheer nosiness, as were several of the other friends. I filled my backpack with bubble wrap. There was no need to carry anything useful or important. It was just an evening stroll. Tommie O’Donnell runs the gun range on part of his eighty acres. He also has sheep and fields of hay. Maybe he has cows too. There are some good walking trails that climb through the forests. He is happy to have walkers going through his land to get access to the mountains beyond. He has set up a bar and function room so that people can have parties with music and dancing. There is plenty of parking. I assume no one would be shooting when the walkers are about but I do not really know. The shooting areas are very carefully divided up and off in special areas. We were shown the target shooting places and some hides as well as a dug-out which hid men like de Valera and Collins during the uprising. We stood around on some slippery stones in the middle of the river pretending to study a map while the photographer took photos. The map was a map of Wicklow but the photographer was not close enough to be able to see that. The photographer told us that he was not a professional anyway. He was only a hobbyist photographer. In his real life, he is a paramedic and he trains other people to be paramedics. He was helping Tommie with the photographs as he is a member of the gun club himself.  He enjoys coming out to do target practice with one of his several guns. The photos were for a brochure which is being made to publicize the whole place.  We were served tea in the function room before we left as if we had just had a real walk and had worked up real thirsts.

27 June Wednesday

A Community Alert text came through saying that someone had broken into the Grange National School over the weekend. The Garda were asking for anyone with information about the break-in to be in touch with them. The vandal or vandals used a big thick black marking pen to draw large pictures of bulls with enormous erect penises. There has been a lot of discussion about the break-in and the vandalism. Mostly people feel sad and disgusted by the damage to the windows and the general lack of respect. But within the discussions there are people who are impressed and maybe a bit proud of the careful and anatomically correct drawings. This is an agricultural community. People feel it would somehow be much worse if the kids with the markers did not even know the difference between a bull and a cow.

28 June Thursday

A victualler is a butcher. I love this word. It is specific and mysterious and old-fashioned all at the same time. I never get used to seeing it. I never hear anyone saying it out loud but some butcher shops have the name carved in stone on the front of the shop.

29 June Friday

There is an active and busy wren’s nest right beside the kitchen door. It is well camouflaged with moss and built right into the ivy. It would be invisible if there was not such a lot of rushing and zooming in and out. I am spending a lot of time watching, but all the time that I am watching, I try not to look like I am watching. I am being watched at least as much as I am watching.

30 June Saturday

As we were leaving Dungarvan, I saw a boat in someone’s front yard.  It was not a big yard so the boat was, by necessity, close to the house.  It was raised up high and surrounded by scaffolding.  It did not look like anyone had been working on it for quite a long time. Both the scaffolding and the boat were rusting. I could not help but be reminded of this wonderful poem (written in the early sixties, I think) by our late friend Stuart Mills:

In the Low Countries

 

They are building a ship

in a field

much bigger than I should have thought

sensible.

When it is finished

there will never be enough of them

to carry it to the sea

and already it is turning

rusty.

Put a Smile On It.

18 July Wednesday

We boarded the ferry and walked up from the car deck on level 5 to level 7 where there were seats and tables and toilets and the shop and food, etc. The first thing we saw as we came out of the stairwell was an elderly lady sitting exactly opposite the door. She had fluffy white hair and a round pink face. I could not see her face completely because she was holding a book right up in front and close to her eyes. The name of the book was TIBET IS MY COUNTRY. The woman was reading with complete concentration.  She was not paying any attention at all to the people arriving out of the stairs and off the lift with bags and books and pillows brought from their cars for the four hour journey across the Irish Sea. She was oblivious to all of the people and the bustle. She looked like she had been sitting there all day which she could not have been because the boarding had not been going on for too long. I think she must have gotten off the lift and sat on the bench in exactly that position so that she would not have far to go when it was time to disembark. Perhaps the people she was traveling with placed her exactly there for that very reason. We wandered off and found our own place to read and sleep and pass the journey. When the announcement came for the car drivers and passengers to return to the car deck and to their cars we saw her again. She was in exactly the same spot and the book was still held up close to her face. Another woman who was waiting to go down the stairs said in a kindly voice: “It must be a savage good book? You have scarcely looked away since you got on board.” The reading woman said “Yes. It is a fine book. I am obliged to return it to the library tomorrow morning but I will never finish it in time if I am forced to stop and speak with strangers.”

20 July Friday

The dry weather continues. The land is bleached out. There is a lack of green everywhere. There is a sense of desperation. There is no grass growing so the cows who should be eating off the fields are eating nuts and feeds that they would usually be eating in the winter. There is worry about what they will be eating in the winter. Everyone likes the warm days but there are all kinds of conversations constructed around the idea of rainfall at night. Many people favour the time between 12 and 6. Or between 2 and 6. Or between 3 and 5. Everyone has a theory for the time they think a nightly rain will do the most good for the land and the least disruption for the summery weather. Everyone has a theory about how very good it would be for everyone and how it would solve the problems of drought but still leave us living in this holiday climate. Farmers and gardeners and cows are all suffering from the heat. Such heat is nearly unheard of. They are saying that it has been fifty days now. I have heard fifty days repeated several times. Surely it should be fifty-two days now. Or fifty-three.

21 July Saturday

The three children often play their instruments and some music at the Farmer’s Market. They are all about twelve. There is a box on the ground for people to toss in money.  The money is being collected for the hospice. The girl and one of the boys nod and smile at people as they play their tunes and they nod when people throw coins into the box. The other boy sits straight and plays his banjo with skill but he never acknowledges the audience or anyone at all. His face is serious and sort of miserable. Glum. I thought perhaps I was maybe the only one who noticed it. Today the mother of the banjo playing boy was despairing.  She was at the Apple Farm stand. She said “How I wish he would smile. The very least he could do is Put A Smile On It, but he just cannot.”

22 July Sunday

People look for the ways to describe the damage being done by the ongoing drought. It is a variation of grumbling. Our little concrete water trough is empty. It was made by Johnnie Mackin and rolled down the Mass Path from his house to ours. Nigel Browne rolled it down the hill through the mud and over rocks and branches and holes.  He offered to do it but later he wished that he had not offered as it was a difficult job to get it from there to here. He rolled it three-quarters of a kilometer.  It has been sitting where it is for at least twenty years.  It is empty for the first time in all those years.  The trough is not deep. The whole thing only comes up to below my knee but it has always been full of water. Rain water collects in it. Dogs drink out of it. Sometimes I use it to water nearby plants. Now it is empty. It is devoid of water. The bright green moss around the top edge has turned to brown. There was an inch of scummy muck in the bottom of the trough but already that is drying out and getting crunchy. It is as good a time as any to clean out the drying muck.

23 July Monday

Pa is not Dad. Pa is never Dad. Pa is short for the name Pascal. It is never used by a child as a name for a father.

24 July Tuesday

Yesterday Peter Ryan came to remove the side of the roof where the leak has been confusing us for two years. He removed all the slates. He said the roofing felt was so old that it was like lace. There was scarcely anything to it but anyway he left the felt on for overnight just so that we were not completely exposed to the sky. At 9.30 we got an unexpected heavy burst of rain. Rain poured into the kitchen. It was not so bad in the bathroom and not too bad in the big room. We still had all the water catching devices in place there. The kitchen leak was the worst. By the time we went to bed it had mostly stopped. Lucky for us it was not the proper all night rain which everyone has been longing for. In the morning, the floor was soaked and the newspapers were sodden. The buckets were full. Peter sent me to Clogheen to get the lead flashing from Corbett’s Hardware Shop. Then I was sent to the dump with the load of old roofing felt. He cannot put that in Joe Keating’s rubble hole, wherever that is. Peter will return with Joe’s tractor when the work is all done to scoop all the remaining roof rubble and old slates off the flat roof. In between my errands I have made endless cups of strong tea as well as lunch for Peter and Mark. There is not much time in a day in between my jobs. The heat is exhausting.

25 July Wednesday

The work goes on. Yesterday I found a strange curl of something on the floor. It looked like an enormous toenail. That is not possible. There is no animal with such a large toenail around here. Today a knot of wood fell to the floor. It appears that the toenail was a bit of bark from around the knot. Lots of things are falling from the ceiling. This will not stop until the banging and tapping and activity stops. Most of the time the radio inside the work van is on and loud so that Peter and Mark can hear it above the noise. With windows and doors all flung open we cannot escape. Indoors and out the noise of the work is everywhere.

Fodder Shortage

27 July Friday

The yearly National Tidy Towns competition is underway. Some places get really busy with their floral displays and presentations. Some towns just ignore the whole thing. This year is proving tough for everyone because it is so hot. Everything is dry. Things like hanging baskets need a designated person with water standing beside them nearly all day long. As a village, Ardfinnan always takes its place in the competition quite seriously. There is a painted boat at a jaunty angle full of flowers on the green. Lambert’s garage has their usual painted tyres mounted on the wall with flowers tumbling out of them.

I am not sure if the painted cart is a new addition or just one I might have missed in recent years. In addition to the floral arrangements the cart has two milk churns, one inside with the foliage and one on the ground beside it. Both of the milk churns are chained to the cart and the one placed inside is full with a cement block and some  rubble just to make sure that the display position stays fixed.

29 July Sunday

I drive past three farms on the way to the village. Only one has the flattened sheep dog. He is at the last farm on the way down. He is at the first farm on the way back. He lies on the road as flat as he can make himself. He sticks out quite far into the single lane road. He is black and white. He thinks he is making himself invisible but he is completely visible on the grey road. He waits until the car is almost beside him and then he rushes out as if he is going to bite the tyres. He never does more than a quick dash and then he gets back in ready position to await his next victim on wheels. He does not want to bite a tyre. He does not want to catch a motorcar. I always slow for him and his almost attack. It is a game we play together. There is so little traffic on the road he does much more anticipating than dashing.

30 July Monday

It seemed an auspicious way to begin the week. I trapped one of the enormous house spiders in the bathtub. It might have been a Cardinal Spider. Or just a Giant House Spider. I took it outside and a long way from the house. I am certain these spiders come back and crawling up the drain pipe and back in the tub. The spiders are everywhere especially at this time of year. The spiders make lots of cobwebs and the cobwebs get full of sticky dust and I feel the house is always in the process of being taken over. I never see so many spiders nor webs nor so much dust in other houses.

3 August Friday

Replacing the roof was one thing. Clearing up after two years of leaks was another. Every time a new place flowed with rainwater, we gathered things into boxes or piles and pushed them somewhere just to get them out of the way quickly. Every time a solution came along we assumed it was the final one and that the dripping walls would end. The leaks moved along the seam between the fold where the two roofs joined together. The bathroom leak was a constant and always in the exact same section of wall. Except for the one time when it took over the ceiling and then the water came in everywhere. The kitchen leaks were in several places and they moved back and forth.The most worrying leak was the one that made its way through the fuse box and continued straight down to the floor. The kitchen ceiling flooded too. Both ceilings have big stains which are yet to be fixed. One part of the ceiling was ripped open and closed up again. That place is a large raw plaster area waiting for paint. It has been easy to condition myself not to look up.

In the big room, the three meter long shelves above the cupboard and the six shelves inside the cupboard, also three meters long, will no longer be soaked in the next rain. We cleaned and oiled the shelves.  We cleaned and coated the wall behind them with stain-covering paint. I was amazed at how black even the very bottom shelves were. Water damage is pervasive. The pans and plastic containers and newspapers and towels catching the rain water were never enough. After cleaning and painting, I began collecting the bags and boxes of stuff which had been spread around the house and down into the barn. Things just kept appearing. Books had been lined up on the floor and piled up on other parts of the floor. The trouble with it all was that the books had been rushed away from pouring water. They had not been examined. They had been moved in a state of panic and with great speed. Many cookbooks were completely destroyed. The pages were rippled with moisture and sometimes stuck together. Things had been moved and then they were moved again. There was no sorting.

With this dry weather, I moved chairs and rugs out doors while I struggled to regain order. Flashlights which had been on the shelves inside the cupboard and then moved out of the way were useless. The batteries and innards were full of rust. Some were still wet inside. They are good for nothing. Several old dog collars belonging to Emily had been saved. Why I do not know. They are now mouldy, but how can I throw them away? A dog whistle on a white string that never worked anyway but that someone gave me when Em was first going deaf. It is not water damaged but should I throw it out or shall I just move it somewhere else? Bowls and cups full of silvery lichen gathered on various walks. The big bowl of lavender from last years garden, or maybe from two years ago. Innumerable stones from various beaches. Every single thing in the room and from the shelves and on the windowsills came under scrutiny. Pine cones. Everything is precious. But a clean-up is a clean-up. Everything that I look at in the entire room demands a decision. I am no longer restricting the purge to the shelves that got wet. Usefulness is not always the best way to decide things. Do we need this stone which looks exactly like Prince Charles’ ear?

It has taken all week to get to the end of this indoor work. The roof is finished. The out of doors is cleaned up. The indoors is now cleaned up too.

There are now boxes full of stuff up in the barn. They are ready to take to sell at the Car Boot Sale in Fethard. I shall probably never get around to doing the Car Boot. Maybe Pat Looby wants them to sell at her weekly table.

4 August Saturday

Tipp FM announced the winner of last nights lottery as someone from Waterford. Actually, they are not sure that the winner is from Waterford but they know where the winning ticket was sold. The ticket was sold from a shop in Waterford. This makes everyone happy. The radio announcer named the shop and said there was no doubt that having a winning ticket sold right there in that shop for a win of one million euro would provide a great cheering boost to the people of Waterford on this Bank Holiday Weekend.

5 August Sunday

There is much talk of Fodder Shortage. The things that cattle are eating now are the things that they should be eating in the winter. What will they be eating in the winter? Some hay fields are being baled up. I do not think any of whatever is done is can be enough at this late stage. We are not finished hearing the term Fodder Shortage. I think I just like the word Fodder.  Silage Widow is another favorite seasonal expression.

Em & me

7 August Tuesday

I am thrilled to have my new book EM & ME here. It is beautiful. I am happy to see it and to hold it. I am happy again and again. I move the copies around the house so that I can be surprised and delighted each time I come across it. I like to pretend that I do not know that the book is in the spot where I find it. I try to startle myself with each next appearance. I pretend that I do not know that I placed it wherever I placed it. I pick the book up to open it and to look forward to reading it as if I have never before read any of it. As if I had not written it. There is plenty of opportunity to discover the book freshly again and again. It is not at all the same as coming around a corner and seeing Em herself again. That is never going to happen. Seeing her on the cover walking down the boreen through the cow parsley is pretty wonderful.

Simon has taken some copies down to the shop so they are available for sale in among the magazines about farming and fishing and knitting. I am sort of shyly pleased to spy it there when I go to buy milk. I look at it from the corner of my eye. I do not really want anyone to see me admiring and leafing through my own book.  I cannot imagine that there is anyone anywhere who does not want or need a copy of this book.

For those who cannot get to McCarra’s shop, it is already available at other shops like bookartbookshop in London, Boekie Woekie in Amsterdam, The Glucksman gallery in Cork, The Book Hive in Norwich, as well at other places I am not able to list here. Of course, it is also available directly from the Coracle website:

http://www.coracle.ie/em-me/

8 August Wednesday

Everyone is now required to get a Public Services Card. It is a new card and it will be necessary for many things whenever identification is required. If you want to get one or you do not want to get one, it does not matter. We will all end up with one. I went today and sat in a little booth with a woman behind the glass on her own side. I could stretch my arms out on each side and touch the walls. It was a spacious booth. At one point the woman pressed a button and a hard wall came down behind me. It was also about an arm’s length away. The wall was pale grey. It was not claustrophobic. It was just a rigid screen providing even light for taking my photograph while I staying sitting in the chair. The woman asked me if I was frightened. She told me that I was not really locked in. Then she said: “Well, you are locked in but you are only locked in for a minute or so.  No bother. It is no bother. As long as you are not frightened, it will be no bother. It will all be over soon.”

9 August Thursday

I have been driving around with a large stone behind the driver’s seat. It was in the boreen and I stopped to move it out of the way. It had a nasty sharp looking edge and it was big enough that I did not want to be driving over it. It looked like the kind of rock that could do damage to a tyre. The place where I stopped was too narrow for me to open the door all the way. I could not get out. All I could do was to open the door a tiny bit and to lower my arm down and grab the stone. I could barely lift it with one hand but I did it and I sort of swung and sort of hefted it into the car behind me. I have been driving it around like a passenger ever since.

10 August Friday

The figs are enormous. The figs have never been so big, but the figs are as hard as rocks. Not one fig is ripening. Not one bird is eating the figs. They probably do not want to hurt their beaks. Apples are falling on the ground. They are not fully ripe but they are falling off the trees. There are no plums. We do not have plums and no one else has plums. Wild or otherwise, all plums have suffered from the lack of water this summer. The raspberries are doing alright. Every morning I can pick a handful so we have between 5 and 8 raspberries each for breakfast. I will be happier when there are more than I can be bothered to count. There are plenty more berries ripening but I eat quite a few in the day each time I pass by the bushes. Blackberries are also coming ripe. They do not seem to mind the lack of rain.

11 August Saturday

A soft drizzle. The cows are gone from the near field. All day they were out there as a noisy and excitable presence. They were happy to be eating the grass even though it is not as long and green and plentiful as they might like. There was jostling and chasing and bellowing. The entire herd disappeared just before the rain began. Joe rounded them up with his tractor. Their departure was not a long orderly line. They frolicked and raced over the fields until they were out of sight. I think today was a real outing for them. They were a bit silly with it. The rain is a quiet rain. There is just enough sound on the roof for me to know while sitting in here that it is raining out there. It is a comfortable sound. And at least now I know there is no need for buckets and towels and odd shaped containers to catch the rain. The new roof inspires confidence. We are not so far removed from those endless days of drought. The grass roof still looks burned up and terrible. This is not the kind of rain to solve the farmers’ problems but it is pleasant. And it is a kind of relief to be enveloped in an indistinct view. The hills across the valley are reduced to shadowy shapes when seen through the wet.

 

Dirty Carrots in Kanturk

15 August Wednesday

The drive back from Kerry was scary. A soft drizzle had come down. It became a fog. It was impossible to see a thing. The road was winding and narrow with steep drop-offs into the sea. There were a few tour buses crawling along full of passengers who could not see a single bit of the Ring of Kerry which is what they had come for. The drive was slow and the drive was difficult.

We reached Kenmare where we planned to have a good lunch to reward ourselves for the terrifying journey. Cars were parked all along the road entering the town. A cattle market was in full swing right in the centre. There were trailers and tractors and cows and bulls and farmers everywhere. There were a lot of tweed jackets and caps and there were a lot of rain jackets. Some sections of the streets were completely closed off. They had been transformed into big holding pens for the cattle. There were deviations added on to deviations. It was not possible to stop the car. There was no where to park anyway. Hundreds of people plus all the animals and everything under a steady downpour. We escaped as best we could which was slow. We ended up in Kanturk which is a good name but the lunch we found was dreary.

There was a man on the corner near the restaurant with a small blue car. Four young children were squeezed into the back of the car. The children were tight in and screaming and making a lot of noise. They might have been happy or they might have been miserable. It was hard to tell. A woman stood quietly near the man. He had three bunches of Dirty Carrots on the bonnet of the car. He was a huge and loud man.  He kept banging the bonnet and shouting that he only had three bunches of his delicious Dirty Carrots left. He shouted that when he sold these last ones he would be able to go home and eat The Dinner. Each time he banged the bonnet more muddy soil fell off the carrots. There was no one about. It was not a busy location. I did not buy any of the carrots. I would have liked to have made a photograph of the man and his family and the carrots but I knew that if I took a photo I would be expressing more interest than I had. The man would certainly have pushed me to buy his carrots. It would have been difficult to refuse. I have marveled before about this love for Dirty Carrots. Somehow the heavy clumps of soil coated on the carrots hold great promise.  The promise is that they will taste better than another carrot which is just carrying a thin easily washable amount of soil.  I have never found this to be so. I find cleaning the Dirty Carrots much more work than they are worth. The sink is always full of mud and stones after the washing. A normal unwashed carrot is fine. A Dirty Carrot is not. When we left the restaurant, the car and the man and the family were gone so I assume somebody else came along and bought the remaining Dirty Carrots.

16 August Thursday

I took a full load of stuff to the dump. As I was moving back and forth between the recycling bins and my car, a woman came over to me. She told me that I looked well. I thanked her. I wondered if I knew her. I did not think I knew her.  But I knew that being told I looked well had nothing to do with my health. She was telling me that I looked nice.  She was telling me that I was well presented. She said she herself never knew exactly how to dress for the dump. She said the gathering up of stuff to load into the motorcar was a certain kind of activity as was the unloading. It could get a little messy. If she chose to go into town for some messages after the dump-run she liked to look maybe a bit nicer than she would if she was only going to the dump. She did not like to waste a trip to the dump without going to town too. What with the price of petrol and everything. She liked to look carefully to see what other women were wearing at the dump to help her to decide exactly how to find the balance.

17 August Friday

The fox came running around the corner of the shed. He was moving at speed. I was sitting on the bench with a cup of tea. He saw me at exactly the same moment that I saw him. He skidded in the dirt and gravel and changed direction while he skidded. There was hardly a wasted movement except maybe a little bit while his legs found their place on the ground. He was gone in seconds.

18 August Saturday

Today is the beginning of Heritage Week. There are activities and tours and free access to buildings and monuments all over the country. There seems to be a lot of storytelling. In Clonmel, they are combining Heritage Week with the 50 year anniversary of STAG. STAG is the South Tipperary Art Group. The idea they came up with for the day is to set up four age groups from young children to adults and a list of locations. Any amateur painter is invited to go out to one of the assigned locations to paint a picture. They are invited to create A Brand New Original Piece Of Art From Scratch In One Day between the hours of 8 am and 5.30. The paintings must be turned into the art centre by 5.30. Winners from each category will be announced next week.

19 August Sunday

There is always another Tractor Run. It is a guaranteed way to earn money for a worthy cause. A long slow parade of tractors rolling through narrow lanes is a reliable draw. There are always some men happy to bring out their vintage machinery to show it off and give it a trip out in the air. It does seem an odd time of year for a Tractor Run as the farm workers are all so busy with haying and silage. The roads are already full of slow moving vehicles and machinery. The slow ones are not a problem.  It is the speeding ones that are frightening. This Tractor Run is advertised to benefit a man called Haulie Murphy. I do not know Haulie Murphy, but I like his name. I like names that tell you what job a person does. Whoever Haulie Murphy is, he is obviously someone who moves a lot of things around with his tractor and trailer or with his truck. Larry Doocey could be nicknamed Haulie what with all the runs he does with his small tractor. He delivers gravel and topsoil or whatever else people need. But he is not called Haulie.  He is always Larry Doocey.  No nickname. And never just Larry. He is always and only Larry Doocey For years we assumed that Christy Driver was the actual name of Christy Driver.  Christy was down at the bar every day occupying the exact same corner seat. But Christy Driver’s name was not Driver.  We missed a party celebrating his 60th birthday. We had been invited but because we did not realize that his real name was Christy Cullinan, we did not go. We did not know whose party we had been invited to and so it was easy to forget all about it. Christy Driver is only spoken of as Christy Driver.

20 August Monday

I have stopped counting raspberries. It was a ridiculous thing to do anyway. It was easy to fall into when there were so few coming ripe. They are coming far too fast for counting now.  Every morning I pick some and every evening I pick more. We eat loads. I put some in the freezer. I take them to neighbours. The figs too are ripening at a rapid rate. They are ripe and unctuous and without doubt the best figs we have ever grown. They are not at all woody. They went from rock hard to squishy and wonderful within a week. There are plenty for the birds and there are plenty for us.

21 August Tuesday

I went to an emergency meeting in the village hall last night. The meeting was called because the post office in Newcastle is threatened with closure. As is the post office in Clogheen. Hundreds of post offices in small places all over the country are closing down. There are so many closure issues affecting rural villages, not only with the post offices though they are a huge part of life. . An older person going to the post office to collect their pension is bound to meet someone they know in the shop. They might buy milk or they might buy a paper while they are there. They might not buy anything. But they will have a conversation. They cannot go to the post office without having a conversation. And by the time that person gets home they will know the story of the whole town-land. Every one of us needs our post office for all kinds of reasons. We are going to fight this. I am now on the committee.

The Bottoms

23 August Thursday

Last night our Post Office committee met for the first time. I rushed off to the meeting with a pad of yellow paper and three pens (one a green Sharpie for the colour of An Post) and an initial list of nine ideas for publicising the campaign. I had a plastic folder to carry all my things in. I was ready. Simon and I designed a badge and we researched where to get badges produced inexpensively. I had all the information. I could not wait to get going on turning this closure decision around. I came home completely depressed. I could barely speak. Apparently local attitude is very negative and the committee did not feel it worth while to go forward without a meeting with John. The post office is located inside the shop so apparently there is a feeling locally that the family are getting something out of the deal. There is resentment and distrust. I have been told about the Irish problem of begrudging any good fortune of a neighbour. This is a really ugly example. I am stunned. It seems that few care about the Post Office. One committee member said that no one his age uses the post office. He could think of no reason to go to it ever. I wondered why he had volunteered to be on the committee. Suggestions to put things in the newspapers were met with the same kind of dismissal from him. No one who is young reads a newspaper. We know that we need to use social media in all of its forms but no one wants to start anything until we know where we stand with the local opinion. Our petition is printed up in multiple copies and ready to go. No one wants to distribute them nor go door to door with them until we have answers to the questions that we will be asked while asking for signatures. There is also the problem that if you write your name on a petition everyone else will see it and know that you have written your name on that petition.
Ger told us that the 18 September, the day for the Big National Protest March in Dublin against all of the Post Office closings, is exactly when the National Ploughing Competitions will be taking place. Rural Ireland will all be at the Ploughing. They will not be in Dublin marching to save their Post Offices.
I loaned Mairéad a pen to take a few notes. Everyone had their phones on the table in front of them. I was the only one with a pen. That was the least of the problems. I came home depressed. I went to bed depressed. I woke up depressed.

24 August Friday

An elderly couple came into the shop. The girl at the counter ran around the place and collected the things they needed. The woman announced each item one at a time. Both the man and the woman were badly bent over. They both leaned heavily on their sticks. The woman was the worst. Her head was bent down well into her chest and her back was bent over too. Without the help of her stick, she would be unable to stand. She would just fall over. It was difficult to hear her voice because she was sort of talking down into herself. She could not project her voice any better. She said something into her chest and then the man repeated it. He said, “Did you say you wanted The Milk, Mary?” And then he repeated that to the girl at the counter. He said, “Mary wants The Milk so.” The girl ran to collect it. It was taking a long time to get all of the things but the girl was willing and eager to help. She was cheerful the whole while. When they finished with the edible items, the man said that Mary wanted a mop. The girl asked Mary if she wanted the Hairy One or the Spongy One. The man repeated the question to Mary who gave her muffled answer. The man said that Mary wanted the Hairy One. I was ready to leave the shop but I had to wait to see what kind of mop the Hairy One was. It was the old-fashioned kind of mop made of long stringy pieces of white rope. It is the kind of mop that is very heavy when it is wet. It is difficult to squeeze out and it is hard work to use. The white rope turns to grey after the very first use. Hairy was the perfect way to describe it.

25 August Saturday

The hedgerows are heavy blackberries. They are full of blackberries and full of honeysuckle. The blackberries do not seem to have slowed down with the lack of water this summer. Long tendrils of brambles reach out and grab at me when I walk or drive by. I spent an hour walking up one side of the boreen and down the other side. I clipped off the long thorny bushes which were the grabbing ones. In between clipping I ate a lot of berries. There are many different kinds. Someone told me that we have 30 different kinds of blackberry variations growing. I do not know if there really are that many but there are a lot. Most of them are plump and sweet. Every so often I eat a desperately sour one by mistake. I was happily picking and eating and clipping when I heard a terrible screech just on the other side of the ditch. One of the scruffy farm cats came bursting through the bushes and smashed into me. She was startled and I was startled. We both made squawking noises at the moment of impact. She took off at speed. I continued picking and eating and clipping my way towards home.

26 August Sunday

I have always called the Keatings’ pasture the low meadow or the water meadow because it is the lowest piece of land in our immediate view. It has the stream running along one side of it. In very wet seasons the whole place is soggy because water runs downhill from both sides and it all settles there. Now I am told this is not called a water meadow. Nor is it a low meadow. This kind of field is called The Bottoms.

27 August Monday

The Post Office committee is silent. I had a long talk with John. He explained the path of closures: Tooraneena is to close. Ballymacarbery is to stay open. Newcastle is to close. Ardfinnan is to stay open. Clogheen is to close and Ballyporeen is to stay open. It is a straight but wiggly line. It continues throughout the entire country like this. There are 400 post offices slated for closure. If the postmistress or postmaster retires or dies there is an immediate death sentence for that Post Office. No one is allowed to take over a Post Office. No rescues are considered.The couple in Tooraneena who have been running both the post office and the pub out of their house are now 70 years old. They want to retire. No one in their family wants to take over the job anyway. The village is tiny. No post office in any of these villages means quite a drive for anyone who lives there to get their pension or dog license or to pay their bills or anything else. This is a huge problem for people who do not drive. There is little or no public transportation to accommodate this problem.

29 August Wednesday

It is still August but already the mornings are wet. The evenings are cool and the nights are cold so the mornings are wet with dew. Stepping outside to collect the breakfast raspberries is a different job than it was even a few days ago. Every morning I slip on my Wellington boots and go out with my bowl. Sometimes I take a cup of tea with me. Each time I reach in and underneath the leaves to take a berry my sleeve gets wet. Then the sleeve gets wetter. My dressing gown soaks up the water like a sponge.
I could gather my breakfast fruit in the evening or afternoon. I could collect a bowl of both raspberries and blackberries and they would be dry and I would be dry and breakfast would be a different breakfast.

30 August Thursday

I am wrong again. I was certain that the name Haulie was the nickname for a man who moved whatever people needed moved.  He moved things like hay, silage, topsoil or stones with his tractor or his truck. I had no doubt that Haulie’s name came from his occupation. Peter has now informed me that Haulie is a nickname that comes from the Irish name Mícheál. The name is pronounced MEE-HAUL. MEE-HAUL to Haulie a logical development.

Post Office Petitions

31 August Friday

The Eircom man came down into the yard in a big white van. He stayed in the van and talked down to me out the window. He said he was out testing the poles. He was surprised to find us at the end of the boreen. He had no idea that there was a house down here and he had no idea there were so many more poles that would need to be tested. What he thought might be a morning job was now an all day job or maybe a two day job. While he was talking to me he saw a movement on the stone wall. His voice dropped to a whisper and he asked “What is that? Over there on the wall —What is it?” It was the mink rushing and leaping across the wall with its very fluid body movements. The man was not breathing. He was excited. He said he had never seen such a thing.

1 September Saturday

I am a naturally parsimonious person. I do not like waste. When the toothpaste is getting difficult to squeeze out of the toothpaste tube, I cut the tube off with a pair of scissors. I cut close to the end with the screw top. I then scrape any remaining toothpaste into that end. I stand the cut-off tube on its top and I place a water glass over the whole thing. The glass keeps out any dust and insects. When we want some toothpaste we dip the bristles of the toothbrush into the remaining paste. There is usually at least a week’s worth of toothpaste for two people still in the tube. I like making this little apparatus for using up all of the toothpaste. I like using the dipping method. It is just as well that I did not mention that the glass over the top is also a way to ensure the slugs cannot get in. Last night I found a slug under the glass. It was not in the toothpaste but it was curled around the screw top. I am now in the position of having to reconsider this method.

2 September Sunday

There are grain spills everywhere. There are big grain spills and there are small grain spills. Tractors rush around trying to bring in as much of the harvest from this difficult dry season as they can.  The roads are dangerous with the speed and the size of the machinery. The spilled grain always looks good in sunlight.

3 September Monday

The man working in the grounds of the church offered to show me around. He said he had just started to work for the church the week before. He was proud of the small church. He found it very special and beautiful. The church was a Church of Ireland which he reminded me was for Protestants. He said that he himself was a Catholic but he said the people in charge did not seem to mind about that since they gave him the job anyway.

4 September Tuesday

Every time I leave the Post Office petitions somewhere I get into conversations about the difficulties and possibilities and practicalities of saving our Post Office. Several times every day I am told yet another version of the man down in County Cork who runs a tiny post office in a tiny tiny village. Sometimes as the story is repeated, the man is 82 and sometimes he is 85. Once he was 87. He is determined to keep his post office open even though he is too old for the job. He would like to retire but he knows An Post will use his retirement as an excuse to close the post office. He is a national hero. Each time the story is retold, people feel more and more proud of this stubborn elderly Postmaster.

6 September Thursday

Walking in the same tracks and fields every day offers a restful quality. There is plenty to observe in small changes. There is  plenty of time to think. I find it a surprise and a delight to find language in the landscape. There is a sign in the ditch on the way home. It is a notice for planning permission. Joe is seeking permission to build an underpass for his cows so that they can cross the road by themselves when they have been milked and they are on the way back to their current grazing place. Most of Joe’s fields are on the other side of the road from where his barns and his milking set-up are. The cows can only go so far and then they have to wait for him to finish the milking and come out to get them and open the gates so that they can cross the road. This underpass system for the cows is new to me. Apparently it is becoming very popular with farmers. The little notice for planning permission was not only a little something to read in the landscape but it is a whole new concept.  It is something to look forward to.

Almost all of the fields around have new concrete watering troughs scattered about in them. It looks like every farmer has these new troughs which are much heavier than the usual blue or black plastic ones of recent years. Maybe these last longer. Joe Keating is the only one whose new troughs have language on them. The name of the firm who makes and sells them and their phone number is spray stenciled on the side of each trough with red paint. It is an exciting thing to see and to read in the middle of green pastures.

7 September Friday

I am still dropping petitions in to various places. The conversations with each drop-off are animated. Today I attempted to leave some at the house of the hairdresser in Goatenbridge. She has no sign at her house but I was told that her name is Colette and that her house is the last one on the right before the duck pond. I could not find anyone at home nor anyone to ask so I went for a walk around the duck pond. It is a short circuit. Then I went off climbing the forestry paths for an hour and a half. On my return, there was still no one at the hairdresser’s house, if the house I had located was indeed the correct house. I went to the Glenview Lounge which is the only other business with a public face in Goatenbridge. The car park there has a glorious view over the valley and straight up the mountains and the glen. I could not believe how stunning it was. I could not believe I had never been there before. As soon as you enter the bar there is no view of the mountains. The outside does not exist when you are inside. There were two doors to enter. One door was labeled Lounge and the other door had no sign. I went into the Lounge. I was greeted by an older woman who was sitting at a table having a cup of tea from one of those shiny metal teapots. I explained my mission and she said that many people from Newcastle come over to Goatenbridge regularly to play cards. She said the villages have close connections. She called to a man behind the bar to take some petitions from me. He might have been her son. The bar was in the center so he could serve both the lounge and the other room from the one location. The woman said the post office in Newcastle was especially important since Goatenbridge has no post office itself. No post office. No shop. Just the bar. I wanted to tell them that Rose in the bar in Newcastle has been asking people to sign the petition before she will even serve them a drink. But I did not mention that. I just thanked them both and went back out to the amazing view.

8 September Saturday

It was lovely to wake up this morning after the heavy all night rain. The fields have that glowing almost florescent green colour that is nearly garish. It is a bright bright green that I never see anywhere else. We have not seen it for months and months. We have not seen it all summer.

9 September Sunday

A Church Gate Collection is a frequent event. Ordinarily two people station themselves at both entrances to a church yard or they have one person standing on either side of the gate if there is just one entry gate. These people are collecting for some worthy event or charity. This morning I went alone to Grange church to collect signatures for the Newcastle Post Office petition. I was not collecting money but names. I had never done this before. I got there early to be ready. I arrived at 9.30 for the 10 o’clock mass. The first person to arrive was the priest. I introduced myself and explained to him that I had rung the office on Friday to get permission to be there. My committee insisted that it is was only right to ask permission from the priest. He asked what I was collecting for and when I explained, he waved his hand in the air and said he was fine with All That. The person in the parish office had told me that he is a temporary priest while the regular priest is on sabbatical. The priest did not sign my petition. It was silly for me to attempt this job by myself. Everyone arrived sort of at the same time but by two different gates. I was running back and forth trying to catch everyone. I had four clipboards. Each one had a pen attached to it with red garden twine. I had a little table with another pen and more pages. I had a small sign on the table. My sign kept blowing over as it was a breezy morning. One woman said she would think about it, but everyone else signed with alacrity, if not with much hope. Grange has not had a post office for several years already ever since the branch in Frank’s shop closed. Everyone feels the absence of both the post office and of Frank’s shop. I got a lot of signatures but I did not get every single person. Some headed straight for the side doors. Apparently everyone has a regular route into the church and a regular place where they sit every week. By the time everyone arrived and entered the church there was nothing left for me to do. There were no more people. Everyone who wanted to attend mass was inside the church. Everyone else was at home. I loaded my table and my clipboards into the car. From my arrival to my departure, it was all over in 40 minutes.

 

Squaring A Pusher

15 September Saturday

I am not much of a fan of ironing. Neither is Simon. We do not own an ironing board. My version of ironing is to hang out the washing on a windy day. Or to leave it hanging for an extra day or two until a good breeze comes along. When I do need to iron something, I put a towel down on the table. It is never a very satisfactory way to work because when I iron the one side of a garment I am inevitably ironing creases into the other side. Simon has taken to having his shirts washed and ironed by a lady in Cahir. She is Lithuanian and her name is Regina. Regina and her daughters do a lovely job. The daughters insist on carrying the ironed shirts out to the car and laying them down gently and carefully in the back. We know that the woman’s name is Regina but she never remembers our names. The finished ironing is labelled with a handwritten piece of paper: ENGLISH MAN.

17 September Monday

Kitty wiggled her bottom. She moved the chair cushion. She pushed the cushion around again and again to make herself comfortable. She looked over at me watching her. She is a small woman. She reminded me of a dog or a cat getting herself settled. She said, “I am fond of myself.” This is what people say as they try to get settled on a chair.

18 September Tuesday

The left rear tyre had been losing air. I filled it. It was fine for a few days or for half a day. Then it went squishy again so I filled it again and then it was fine for three days. Then I filled it and it went squishy in an hour. This went on for a week or so. I went down to Anthony yesterday to get it checked. He promised to look at it while I went for a walk.  I only went as far as the Holy Well. The wind was strong and wild. I struggled to stay upright in the open gaps between trees. The sheep and the cows were all pressed tight against bushes and along the edges of fields. Anthony’s son found a screw embedded in the tyre. The screw was causing a slow leak. He removed it and patched the hole. Hopefully this patch will last for a while. As I left the village a man in a high visibility vest stopped me and pointed to a tree that was cracking and making terrible noises. He said it was going to come down with the wind. He said it could come down at any minute. He said I could make a run for it.  I could race along hoping that it did not fall while I am underneath it or I could drive away and around one very long circuitous route or another. I asked him what I should do. I asked him what he would do. He said he would Put The Boot In and Go For It. He said that even if he got hit by the tree it would be worth it for the Craic. I was not sure I agreed with his logic. I was not interested to be killed in my car by a falling tree just for an adventure. But I Put the Boot in and rushed past the tree. I immediately felt smug to have escaped unscathed. It was probably stupid. Today I see that the tree has indeed fallen down. It has already been cut up and cleared from the road. The wind is up all over the country. Things are falling and breaking and blowing everywhere. There is damage and there are huge numbers of people without electricity. I think if it were today I would not feel so brave about driving under the breaking tree but yesterday it felt like an exciting option.

20 September Thursday

The terrible winds continue. The winds are constant and noisy. Today rain is lashing down. As the wind changes direction, the rain changes direction. It is impossible not to get wet. It is not easy to keep a hat on. Cows broke in from somewhere. Or cows broke out from somewhere. They must have come and gone in the night. They were all over the yard and all over the car parking area. It was not possible to step out of the car without stepping in a dollop of manure. Manure was everywhere. As soon as it was stepped in, it was tracked around everywhere else. I got a shovel and tried to move it out of the way of the workmen’s boots in order to keep it out of the house. There is enough mess and dust in the house. Shoveling heavy clumps of manure and gravel in the bucketing rain was difficult. I could only toss my shovel loads onto the side of the gravel parking place. If I threw it into the grass the gravel would play havoc later with the lawnmower blades. It was lucky for me that the cows that invaded were young. They must have been young. The cow flaps were not big. There were a lot of them but they were not huge ones and the holes in the grass from the hooves were not too big either. The cows knocked down garden chairs and made a general mess but then they went away. I do not know whether they went up the boreen or up the Mass Path. I do not even know whose cattle they are. I did not even ask. I do not care. I am just glad that they went away.

23 September Sunday

Everything has been chaotic. The bathroom has been torn apart. The bathroom has been unusable. The bathroom has been remade and put back together again. The kitchen has been full of tools and materials. The kitchen has also been unusable. Nothing could be piled nor left outside the door because the weather was so bad. The entire house has been uninhabitable. In addition to the manure and rain and the wind, it has been unseasonably cold, but the door has been wide open all day every day. I have had to sleep at Joan’s house but I have returned each day to witness the progress and to run errands for Peter while he worked. And to shovel manure. Simon left the country. He left me with all of this mess. It was clever of him to leave. When all of this is done it will be the end of the two years of leaking and indoor puddles and black-stained walls and repaired ceilings and all of it. Repairing the roof was just one thing. The World’s Largest Spice Rack has been screwed back onto the freshly painted wall.  I hope this will be the last thing. I have had a wretched time.

24 September Monday

The holes in the road in front of O’Dwyer’s farm have been filled in and repaired by the council. I have been swerving around them for several weeks now. We have all been swerving around them. There are different movements for when I am driving down the road and for when I am driving up the road. It has been terrible to forget sometimes and to drive right through them as the holes were deep. Slamming down into them is not good for the tyres nor for the axle. Seamus told me he had filled the holes up with gravel twice but of course that only worked until the next heavy rain. Then all the gravel got washed out. We spoke about these holes before they got repaired. Now that the job has been done we are still talking about them. Not having to swerve around the holes is as big a shock as falling into them by accident.

26 September Wednesday

The letter of appeal concerning the closure of the Newcastle Post Office has been completed and sent to the Independent Reviewer at An Post. All of the petitions have been collected and sent along with the letter. We were thrilled that more than eight hundred people have signed the petition. Letters from various small businesses and civic organisations have been written and included as support materials. Our committee will hear something back in 28 days. The Post Office is scheduled to be closed at the end of December. We did not have very much time to appeal nor to research and publicise our plight. We only had a few weeks. If we were to begin now we would all know so much better how to do this. I hope we have done enough.

27 September Thursday

Jim invited me to do a reading for a local group of retired business people. I was happy to oblige. Today was the day. I went to Raheen House at 10.30 in the morning. The group gathered and drank coffee and ate biscuits and chatted with one another for about half an hour. I was introduced to several of the members. I drank coffee and chatted too. There were about eighteen men and two women there. All of the men wore clean pullover sweaters over freshly ironed shirt collars. One man wore a tie and a jacket. I was glad I had worn my blue dress. After the coffee time, I did my reading. There were lots of questions and comments afterwords. Jim told me afterwards that usually no one says a word except thank you when the speaker is finished. People were eager to tell me expressions that I might not have heard yet. They were also pleased to hear these expressions used again themselves. One man said that his uncle had taken him to Tipperary town and to Limerick Junction when he was thirteen. This was a far distance and a big outing for him. The journey was memorable. He saw a young man talking to a pretty girl on the pavement in Tipp Town. His uncle explained that the man was Squaring a Pusher.  That meant that he was courting the girl. A Pusher was an term from the dance halls. It was only used about females.

30 September Sunday

There were five small pheasants on the lawn this morning. I did not see the mother. They stayed for a long time rushing back and forth in a group not really going anywhere. There are raspberries still to pick, but not so many now. It is best to pick in late afternoon. I can collect enough to provide two good bowls full for breakfast. The days are warm again. The raspberries ripen as the day heats up. The figs are long gone. Blackberries are not gone but they are almost gone. Apples are everywhere but they are not the best apples ever. The drought has made for disappointing dry apples. We have walked up through the Mass Path several times. The Mass Path has been impassable all summer. Now the brambles and things are dying back. We can trample on some of the stuff still in the way.  Waving a heavy stick is helpful too. It is a completely new place to walk after so many months. The best blackberries are up at the top by Johnnie’s orchard. Crab apples are all over one section of the path and they make for deadly walking. This happens every year and it is always treacherous.  No amount of experience can make walking on the hard little apples easier. It is like walking on ball bearings.

2 October Tuesday

While working to appeal the Post Office closure, I was told about one man who lives alone way up the mountain. He buys one stamp each week when he comes down to the village to get his messages. He buys a single stamp and he posts a card to himself. I do not know if it is a post card or a folded card in an envelope. I do not know what he writes on the card. Maybe he does not write anything on it. The post man delivers the card to the man’s house the next day or the day after that. This means that at least one day a week the man has someone call to his house which means that he is not always alone. The postman of course would notice if he is not there to receive his post. Hopefully the postmistress too will have noticed if he has not arrived to buy his weekly stamp.

A Dead Fox.

3 October Wednesday

I was interested in the yellow and grey paint job. I took a photograph just to think about the colours. Since I have had the photograph to look at I am more interested in the two doors side by side. It is a tiny house. I have a lot of questions about the doors. I have no answers.

4 October Thursday

The woman at the counter was grumbling. She said, “Sure, we still have plenty of tourists about. The coaches arrive several times a day to drop them off to see the castle. The trouble is that at this time of year, they are all the ones on the budget tours. It’s always the same with them. They say ‘We’ll have one scone and we’ll share a cup of coffee.’ And that is when you realise there are three of them doing the sharing.”
She kept grumbling and repeating to herself: “It is not my idea of a holiday, I can tell you that.”

5 October Friday

It has been a Two Wake Week. Two people died. They were both elderly and they were both members of large farming families. In both cases, a field was mown and cleared and ropes were put up to define the area. Neighbours were out on the road in High-Visibility vests directing cars through and into the parking field. The entire community turns up on these occasions. The deceased is Reposing At Home. We each walk into the house and we shake hands with all of the members of the immediate family. I am sorry for your loss. Or -I am sorry for your troubles. We repeat these phases again and again. In one house the man was laid out in a coffin. In the other house, the woman was in her bed. They both looked peaceful. People cross themselves or bow their head for a few moments in front of the deceased. The person is at home surrounded by their families and now there are these 5 or 6 hours for the neighbours and friends and relations to come to pay their respects and to provide a special kind of respectful company. There are pots of tea and there are sandwiches and cakes. Visitors can choose to have a cup of tea or they can just continue on out of the house. They can continue with their day. There is a steady flow of people arriving and leaving. We all nod and acknowledge one another. We see people we have not seen for a long time. We also see the people we see every single day. Sometimes the deceased is removed to the church at the end of the wake for a mass and then they spend the night alone in the church. Sometimes they stay in their own house for one last night and then they are taken to the church in the morning in time for the funeral. This journey to the church is often full of small detours as the person who has died is slowly driven over the familiar roads which have been a part of their everyday life and landscape for a long time or forever. Each family makes their choices about these beautiful and quiet rituals.

6 October Saturday

A person stepping off a curb unexpectedly flails about to hold themselves up. Or someone falling in a hole and losing their balance catches themselves after a few wild steps and does not fall. That is what I was thinking as I saw the cow. I was driving down the road and Tomás’s cows were ahead of me. They took up the whole road. I slowed to a roll and watched them. There was nothing else I could do anyway. They had been milked and they were on the way to their next pasture. Suddenly one cow made the kind of wild struggle to stand up that I just tried to describe in human terms. She nearly fell but caught herself before she slammed into the stone wall. I assumed she had caught her hoof in a hole. Then she did it again. And again. The young helper who was driving the quad bike behind the herd to keep the cows moving. Tomás himself was up ahead in his truck. The boy must have phoned him. Within seconds he was there and out of the truck and moving toward the cow. He separated her from the rest of the herd, but it was not easy. She jerked away from him and fell to her knees. She could not get up but then she did get up and fell sort of sideways again. It was dreadful to watch. I had tears pouring down my face. It was awful to see her helplessness and confusion. The car stalled out. I could do nothing but watch. Tomás came near to the car. He looked like he wanted to cry too. He said “Meningitis.” He said it quietly. He said, “Her mind cannot tell her body what to do.” He said, “I must get her to the vet.” He followed while the cow staggered and fell and staggered and fell all the way up the road toward his farm buildings. I watched their slow progress in my rear view mirror while I waited for the rest of the herd to plod along until they got to where they were going. I wept as I watched. I weep again every time I think about it.

7 October Sunday

Oscar walks with me every day now. He walks with me every day that I use the Mass Path. He meets me two thirds of the way around. He meets me just as I pass Sharon’s cottage. The cottage Sharon lived in was The Murder Cottage but since she lived there, she gently made us all adjust to calling it The White Cottage. She painted several small signs to get everyone used to the new name. Sharon has moved away because the cottage was put up for sale and her lease was up. I think she was not offered the option of staying. She was sad to leave. She has gone to live with her mother which is hard for her but good for her mother. Her mother is not at all well and her father died recently. Oscar still spends a lot of time at Sharon’s house. He is waiting for Sharon to come back. He is waiting for her two dogs to come back. One of Sharon’s dogs died suddenly just after she moved but of course Oscar does not know that. He is waiting for both Emma and Shay. He lies down across the road and he waits. Some cars do not know that this is his regular resting and waiting place. He is not quick to move off the road. I worry that he will be killed but so far he does what he wants and all vehicles accommodate him. He is happy to see me on foot and then he is happy to walk up the road and down the boreen with me. Oscar is always happy. He wheezes a lot when he walks now. Maybe he has asthma. Maybe it is not asthma. Maybe it is just age.
Today we were both startled by the bull in Joe’s field. The bull is a different bull than the one that was in the field for most of the summer. That one was brown and white. This one is big and black. This one was rushing back and forth and stopping suddenly with a sort of skid and turning around and then racing off in the opposite direction. He bellowed and he roared and then he ran back again. He criss-crossed the field over and over at a frightening speed. He threw his head down in a charge and then he tossed his head way back. He looked like he could easily jump over the wall if he wanted to and since it was in a downhill direction to where we were, I felt it was a real and frightening possibility. Once he saw Oscar he stopped running abruptly and walked over to the wall. He stood completely still and stared at us.

8 October Monday

There are fewer raspberries everyday. I can no longer fill a big bowl but I can fill a small bowl. Some days I can only fill a cup. It is best if I pick every other day. For some reason the sorrel is growing like crazy. It is going mad. It is more plentiful that it has been all summer.

10 October Wednesday

The man did a fast U-turn in front of the church. The turn was too fast to be safe. At the same time as he made the scary turn he was crossing himself: Head.Tummy.Left.Right. and at the same time as he was crossing himself and making the turn he was talking into his phone which was squished between his shoulder and his ear.

11 October Thursday

It was first thing I saw as I came out of the undergrowth and reached the tarmacadam road. Dead fox. He must have been hit by a car. There were no obvious injuries. He looked perfect. A small amount of blood was coming from his mouth. He looked like he was resting. Part of me felt that I should move the fox off the road so that he would not be run over and squished by the next car or tractor that came along. Part of me just wanted to go away.

12 October Friday

Wild lashing rain.  Incessant beating winds all night and all day — so far.  The rain is so heavy and noisy it is difficult to think.  The roof of the big room is being pounded. After such a long dry summer, it is thrilling to hear this sound. It is exciting to hear the rain and to know that we do not have to line up the buckets and throw down the towels.  The leaks are not leaking.  I can still barely believe it.

Milky Tea

13 October Saturday

It rained all night and it has been raining all day. I took off for a walk in a gap between showers. I thought it was a gap but it was not. The rain just went from hard downpour to steady soft drizzle. I started up the mass path in the few minutes when I believed the rain had ceased. About halfway up, a tree limb had fallen from the left and it blocked my way. It was tangled with another big branch that had fallen from the right. I think these were branches that had been cut or broken earlier and last weeks wind just knocked them around. They were too entangled and too heavy for me to move, so I began to push and struggle through them. I broke off bits and pushed my way through. When I was right in the middle of the two branches I realised that I was caught. I could not go forward and I could not go backwards and the brambles had grabbed onto my jacket too and the rain was falling harder. I stood for a while at a funny bent-over angle and wondered what to do. I was sort of resting. I listened to the rain on my jacket. After a little while, I continued with my struggle. Eventually, I broke more branches and dropped to the ground. I crawled out of the mess through the mud and the moss on my hands and knees and continued up the path in the rain.

14 October Sunday

After all of my despair about our apples ripening too early and falling off the trees and about the apples ripening early but not ripening sufficiently and being all dry and too tasteless to eat, the Bloody Butchers have come good. They are delicious and plentiful and huge and falling off the tree by the bushel. I cannot collect enough of them. The ground underneath the tree is a mass of apples. I have filled boxes and buckets and bags and I have given many apples away. The leaves are falling off the tree and there are still more apples.

15 October Monday

The morning is full of mist. We cannot see the fields nor the hills. We cannot even see the fence. There is a cold whiteness over everything. The sun is going to break through. There is a bright white glow in the midst of the dull white mist. The combination of the bright sun and the dull mist makes everywhere that is near and visible look creepy. The out of doors is full of spider webs all being caught by the strange light. The hedge looks like it is wearing a hairnet. The rosemary looks like something captured.

17 October Wednesday

There is a new system for checked out books in the library. Maybe it is not new. I do not know how long it has been in effect. It can all be done with computers, so it is considered good for the library. No doubt anyone in a branch library all the way up in the north of Tipperary can know when my book is due back. Everyone can know when my book is due back except for me. The book still has its usual lined piece of paper stuck into the front of it. There are three columns printed on the piece of paper. Each column is headed with DATE DUE. DATE DUE. DATE DUE. All of the columns are empty. The paper tells me that I will be charged 5 cents per day if my books are late but that never happens. Even if my books are late, I am not charged. I am told by the librarian that my books are due three weeks after I take them home. Why must I be the one remember when I took the books? Sometimes they stick a sort of receipt that is like the long thing from a cash register into the front of one book. Sometimes they do not include this slip. I cannot decide how a piece of paper which is not physically connected to the book is an improvement on a date rubber- stamped into the waiting column. With this new system, I rarely have any idea when my books are due.

18 October Thursday

Simon rushed off to have the National Car Test done this morning.  We had done all of the various things to prepare for the test. The last thing was to have the car washed by the lad at the petrol station. It is important to catch him in between his other job which is delivering things for the motor factors shop next door to the station. It is imperative for us to have to have the car washed underneath with a power hose as the daily driving in and out through the farm means that there is a lot of muck caked up under the wheel wells.  We would fail the test immediately if heavy clumpy chunks of manure and mud fell down on the men while they were testing the car. Town people have it easy.  These are not problems for them. Luckily all of our preparation paid off. The car passed the test. The officials are trying hard to get twenty year old vehicles off the road, but we have been spared for another year.

19 October Friday

A man sat down beside me on the bus. I was trapped between him and the window. I always sit near the window if I can because I like to look out. I sit by the window but I always hope the aisle seat will not be occupied. Today this man sat beside me. He was a large man. I was trapped. There was no where to go anyway except where the bus was taking us but having such a sizeable presence so close made me feel trapped. He flipped out the little tray table on the seat in front of him. The table pressed into his tummy. He placed two enormous cups of tea on the tray. He was lucky that there was a tray table for his two cups. Some of the new buses have little tray tables and some of the old buses have little tray tables. But not all of any of the buses have the little pull down tray tables. I would say maybe one bus in six has them. The man was lucky. I am not sure what he would have done with two cups of tea without a place to put them. The man’s name was Tim. His friend sat a few seats up ahead and he shouted down to the man calling the name Tim and Tim answered so I knew he was Tim. He chatted away to me as he settled in. I could not understand what he had said or what he was saying, but he said it all with a Cork accent. He sipped his tea quietly for a while and then he started to lick his arms. Tim had terrible flaking skin on his forearms. He had dry flaking skin and where the skin was not flaking or where it had already flaked off his arms were raw and red. They looked painful. Tim began to lick his forearms methodically. Up and down. Up and down. It took me a while to realise that before each long careful licking, he filled his mouth with milky tea. Tim was using the tea to sooth his painful arms. In between the licking he stopped and looked across me and out the window at the passing scenery. Sometimes he shouted something up the aisle to his friend. Sometimes he just stared straight ahead while he drank tea from one of his big cups.

20 October Saturday

The one woman said to the other woman: “I believe it because I was told it by my cousin who is related to me.”

21 October Sunday

Walker hates Tom Cooney. Tom Cooney does not like Walker.  It might have to do with the fact that Tom Cooney always wears a big black hat.  Maybe there was a bad or violent person in Walker’s past who wore a similar hat.  No one knows what Walker experienced in his life before he was rescued. He found a good home with Fiona and PJ, but he does have a tendency to take against certain people. He can be a vicious and scary dog. Mostly he is a gentle and friendly dog. Tonight I saw a sign on the gate into one of Tom Cooney’s fields. It is on the gate exactly opposite Fiona and PJ’s gate.  I assumed it meant that the field had been freshly planted or maybe that poison had been put down. I assumed that the person who made the sign forgot to put an S on the end of DOG when he or she wrote KEEP DOG OUT. Then I realized that the sign is meant just for Walker. Any other dog is welcome.

24 October Wednesday

Friday is voting day. We have two things on the ballot. The Referendum on Blasphemy is being offered to the people to decide if it should be struck off the books.  It is basically an out-of-date law on censorship.  There is not a lot of discussion about it either way.  I should think many people will arrive in the voting booth still not sure if they should vote with a Yes or a No. This is the 21st century, so I hope people will vote Yes. Until this referendum came along, Blasphemy was a word rarely used on a daily basis. It sounds both old-fashioned and important at the same time. I have enjoyed hearing it said out loud again and again.  On the same day, we will be voting for the President. There are six candidates running. Michael D. Higgins, the current President, is miles ahead of anyone else. We all speak of him as Michael D.  No one ever bothers with his last name. And we do not expect anyone else to win.

Pinhead Oatmeal.

25 October Thursday

I went into a small shop in town to buy some Pinhead Oatmeal. The woman at the counter told me that Pinhead Oatmeal is very old-fashioned. She was scornful that I was even asking for it. She told me that absolutely no one eats Pinhead Oats anymore.  What they eat is Pinhead Buckwheat. She asked if I had ever eaten Buckwheat. I said, Yes I have eaten Buckwheat but what I want is Oatmeal. They are not at all the same thing. I told her that I was not interested in fashion when it came to breakfast. She herself is interested in being With The Fashion, so she no longer carries Pinhead Oatmeal in her shop. I purchased my oats elsewhere.

26 October Friday

We have a new postman. We have had several temporary postmen in recent years ever since John became ill. Once John retired, we had Lee. Lee has been the most constant of all the substitutes. We assumed that he was our permanent postman now. A few weeks ago he started driving down with Derek. He was showing Derek the route so that Derek could take over. Lee himself has been given a new route. We thought he was going to Kilsheelan but it turns out he is doing Marlfield. He had the choice of a town route with a bicycle or being out of town in a van. Derek said it was no contest. Lee took the van. Lee always arrived with the post very early. Usually he was here and gone by 7 or 7.30 in the morning. He had a speedy manner in all things. Talking. Walking. Driving. Delivering the post. Derek said that Lee was always in a rush because he always wanted to be back in town for his elderly Nana. She made him his dinner every day and he hated to disappoint her by being late. Derek does not come early. He arrives any time between 8.00 and 10.30. This lack of certainty makes driving out the boreen in the morning a little scary for us. It is terrible to meet anyone because if we do, one driver must back up for as far as it takes. We got spoiled by Lee and his early delivery. Derek ends every sentence with the word Girl. This is a very Clonmel way of speaking. It does not matter if the person being addressed is a man or a woman. The sentence still ends with the word Girl.

27 October Saturday

TJ has a lovely new sign. I think of him as a blacksmith. This sign offers his services as a welder. A welder with a bright attention-grabbing sign. Once again I find myself pleased with this new bit of language in my landscape.

28 October Sunday

There is always another version of a stile. There is always another way to climb into a field which provides easy access for people but allows no escape for animals.

29 October Monday.

Bank Holiday. It was frosty this morning. There was ice in the water butts. The water is frozen solid in the butts while roses are still blooming. It is much too early for such deep cold. The frozen water feels wrong. The roses are in the right.

30 October Tuesday

The flattened dog maintains his position and his watch on the road. This has been going on for months now. Sometimes I do not see him for four or five days. Then he is back again. He does not chase the car when it is going downhill. He only chases on the return trip when the car is going uphill. It is as if he knows that when I drive down to the village I will certainly be driving back up. He watches the motor and his head wiggles back and forth as I pass. His back and white sheep dog colours are crisp and bright against the sand and the drab grey tarmac. He lies a flat as he can. He thinks he is invisible. His chasing does not amount to much. It is all in the planning.

31 October Wednesday

It was a Mart Morning. Every Wednesday is a Mart Morning in Cahir. Intake begins from 8.30 am. The farmers are all out with trailers full of animals. If we do not remember that it is Wednesday and if we do not remember that Wednesday is the day for the mart in Cahir we might be confused by the extra number of trailers being towed around and into the town. The approach roads are all a little slower than usual. Today it seemed like all of the trailers were full of sheep. Sheep are auctioned at 11. Cattle and calves are auctioned at 11.30. Some of the sales are from Farm to Farm. Other sales are from Farm to Factory. There used to be a hall with a kitchen and a canteen at the Mart. Joan Looby cooked a big hot dinner for all of the farmers who wanted to eat before they left for home. It was a big part of the day and almost everybody sat down to eat. It was the time for the farmers to chat. There was a fire a few years ago and the building burned down. Now there are no more cooked dinners. A decision was made not to rebuild the kitchen. There is a snack wagon that parks near the intake gate but most people ignore it. Snacks are not proper food. The farmers now go home for their dinner, with or without animals in their trailers.

1 November Thursday

I heard gun shots up the hill and from the woods this morning, but there were never enough shots to make me think about what I was hearing. Later Siobhan and I went for a walk. On her way to meet me, she said she saw the Long Field being paced out by several men in camouflage clothing. Their guns were broken over their arms. The first of November is the start of bird shooting season. I forget it every year. It always comes as a surprise.  Pheasants and partridges are the birds in danger. We were glad that we had decided to walk down by the Abbey and by the river. No men. No guns.

2 November Friday

There are three dead leaves hanging outside the window. I see them each time I sit at the table. They have been there for ten days. The one dangling from the top of the window twirls in the breeze. The two on the left side of the window are held firmly in place by cobwebs. From where I sit the cobwebs are invisible. Every day I think that I should maybe go out and brush them away. Every day I do not do it. I have become fond of how firmly they maintain these incidental positions.

Eleven Geese from Galway

13 November Tuesday

We were surprised that the bus from Dublin airport was such an old bus. It was a town bus. It was a double-decker and not the usual type to drive distances. The X8 buses are normally high and modern and they have large automatic doors on the side to slide luggage into. This bus was so low to the ground that we each had to take our bags into the bus and try to find a place for them in between seats. The driver told us not to go upstairs. He said that we could go up there if we wanted but he recommended that we not go upstairs. He said it was roasting hot up there. He said he had No Knowledge of how to turn off the heat. This was not his usual bus. This was not his usual route. He said there was No Luck in this bus. He did not know what he had done to be given this bus for the day. He told an Indian lad who got on that he might enjoy the heat upstairs but he said no one else will like it. He told the lad that no matter where he sat he himself would wake him up in Cork. He said it will be at least four hours until we get there but No Worries, he said, I will wake you up. The bus was old and wobbly and as soon as we started off the rain began. The downstairs of the bus was freezing cold. The bus was not made for motorway speed. We did not go as fast as the bus was schedualed to go. We just puttered along.  The windscreen wipers were squeaky and loud. It was dark. There was nothing to be seen outside the bus. There were no lights anywhere. Cashel was the first stop out of Dublin. That took us more than three hours. By the time we got there, we were well late. A young woman told the driver she was desperate for the loo. Our bus was too old to have a toilet on board. The driver told her to run across the road to Feehan’s Bar. She left her belongings on the bus. He promised that we would wait for her. The driver sang us a song while we waited. He had a fine voice. It was not a song that I recognised. He sang it with a strong Cork accent. We all applauded when he finished. He did not sing a second song. Water was running down the aisle. The man behind me was going through his bag of groceries trying to find what was leaking. He announced each item as he pulled it out of the bag. He decided it must be a bottle of water at the bottom of the bag. He said he usually packs carefully so that nothing leaks. When the woman finally returned from the loo, she looked dreadful. She went upstairs. We set off again. The Indian lad was sitting beside the man with the leaking bag. He announced that he needed to get off in Fermoy not in Cork. The man with the leaking bag explained that after Cahir and after Mitchelstown, the very next stop would be Fermoy. The woman across the aisle said that she herself was getting off at Fermoy so she said she would alert the man from India when to get off. The driver heard all this and he shouted down the aisle that he would be calling out Good and Noisy-Like when the bus reaches Fermoy. We got off in Cahir. With so much help I have no doubt the Indian lad got off in Fermoy okay. Everyone was eager to make him feel welcome because he was so far from his home.

Train. Plane. Bus. A lift from Breda and home. London to Ballybeg was a ten and a half hour journey.

14 November Wednesday

TOO RAUCOUS FOR A CHORUS is the title. I am thrilled with my new book.  I cannot stop looking at it. As usual, I have been moving it around the house to surprise myself with its presence.  The blue cover glows from across the room.  I have one copy here and Laurie has one copy in Scotland. We are waiting for Stuart to finish binding some more.  All we can do is to wait.  We can hardly be impatient now. I think it took us ten years to make this book.  We always wanted to make a book about birds together but neither of us never knew what the book might be. My knowledge of birds is so paltry. Finally these texts came together celebrating bird life, marking both small observations and small disasters. Laurie’s drawings could not be more perfect.

http://www.coracle.ie/too-raucous-for-a-chorus/

15 November Thursday

No one knew where they went. It was a matter of huge discussion for weeks. One after another the geese in Ardfinnan went missing. One goose at a time. There have always been geese on the green and in the river. The playing field gets slippery with goose droppings but no one ever objects because there have always been geese on the green in Ardfinnan. It is as if the geese have the right of way. Ten or twelve geese disappeared over a two week period. There were no feathers and no signs of struggle. They did not fly away. They could not fly away. Their wings had been clipped. Everyone believed that a Two-Legged Someone took the geese. In the butcher shop, they said no one could eat the geese because they would be much too tough. One goose was left behind. It mourned and became very sad. Another goose was brought in from somewhere to keep the single goose company. Today there is great excitement in Ardfinnan. Someone, it might have been Tommie Myles the butcher, drove all the way to Galway and came back with eleven geese. A small crowd gathered to see them unloaded. Since then everyone has been down to the river to look at them. Now there are thirteen geese on the green in Ardfinnan. The village feels complete again. There is the small worry that these geese might disappear too. For the moment everyone is delighted.

16 November Friday

Walking with a dog who turns his head and looks back to make sure that you are turning the corner when he thinks you should be turning the corner or just checking that you are not lagging too far behind is good. It means you are not walking alone. Oscar has been leading me out on every walk he can. He continues to wheeze like an old tractor but he is willing and eager to rush along ahead of me. He hops off the ground with all four feet when we meet. As we dropped down and out of the field to meet the road today, I saw two small flashing blue lights in a place where I have never seen blue lights. It was a place where I have never seen any lights. Daylight was dropping fast. It was dusk or it was almost dusk. Oscar and I ran over to the flashing blue lights. They were two small strips laying on the road edge calling attention to a sign with an arrow. The sign said FUNERAL. There is no church nearby. I had not heard of any one dying in the area. Either the signs were directing people to a wake at a house or there had been a burial up in the old graveyard at Tullaghmelan. A burial up there is a rare event. The only people who get buried up in that graveyard are very old. I think they have to have a family plot already set aside. The road is too narrow to allow two-way traffic especially for people who are not in the habit of such roads. Especially in the dark. Breda told me that the Guards had directed the traffic to go away from Grange Cross but still we had no idea who had died. I found the blue lights exotic. Oscar did not care. He waited down the track for me to catch up with him.

17 November Saturday

I have laid poison in both barns. I do not like to kill mice but I do not like living with mice either. In the house, I set traps. I can never decide if it is worse to find a poisoned mouse staggering about in agony and in death throes after being poisoned or to find a small body squished in a trap mixed up with the peanut butter that lured her there. This morning the lower barn smells like a dead mouse but I cannot locate the corpse. The upper barn does not smell of death but there are several large fat flies flying around lethargically. The weather is unseasonably mild so there are more insects than usual for the time of year. These obese flies are probably blue-bottles.  They are usually a sign that there is a dead something nearby.

18 November Sunday

It does not matter if a bale of silage is at the bottom of the pile with lots of bales on top of it or if it is resting all by itself. The meeting of the bale with the hard ground always pushes the bottom of the bale flat.  What is inside the plastic wrapping is rotting down. Without the plastic keeping it in its bale shape, it would just be a puddle of mush. No, that is not right. Without the plastic wrapping it would not be closed in and rotting. It would not be silage. It would be a bale of something but it would not be silage. It would just be a bale of straw. Or a bale of hay.

Between Him and His Sleep.

4 December Tuesday

There was a sparrow swooping and flying around in the food court at Dublin airport. Everyone was delighted to see it. One table had been set aside with some crumbs and a bowl of water for the bird. The name of the cafe was Warbler + Wren.

6 December Thursday

At this time of year, there is a man who parks his lorry in various locations in order to sell firewood. Usually he is in Clonmel. Sometimes he comes to the market in Cahir on a Saturday but he always parks well away from the actual market. He parks at the far side of the car park so that he does not have to pay for a place in the market. His intention is to get the customers from the market but without putting out any money. He has a young boy working with him. The boy stays up on the truck and hands bags down to the man. Bags of kindling cost 1.50 each. Five euro buys four bags. One day I bought four bags. The man had the boy hand the bags down to him and then he tossed them onto his shoulder and he asked me where my car was. We walked together to my car with him chatting and asking questions all the while. He loaded the bags into the back of the car, complimented me on my accent and went back to his truck. It was not until I got home that I noticed how small the bags were. The bags on display and the bags which the boy handed to the man were not the same sized bag. It was a clever trick. I wonder how many customers go back for a second purchase.

7 December Friday

The supermarket seemed full of elderly people this morning. It made moving around the narrow aisles a little awkward. One woman came up and grabbed my arm. She said, “I am Loving Your Hat!” She repeated this several times in a loud voice. Then she said it to another shopper who was passing. She said, “I am Loving Her Hat!” She said it two or three times. The other woman just smiled and walked on. I do not think she heard a thing.

8 December Saturday

We went to the Farmers Market. There were eleven stalls today. There is a new one preparing and selling Fish & Chips or Sausage & Chips. Since we had just had our porridge at the cafe, we did not partake but we received a little coupon to give us a special price in case we changed our minds. I think everyone gets this same special price. It makes everyone feel special, so why not? A few years ago there was a couple cooking and selling Boerewors, a South African sausage. Those were a bit hefty and rich to be eating in the morning, but many people seemed to like them. Some people made a special trip to the Market just to eat one of these sausages. The smell took over the whole area. I am not sure how long ago those people stopped coming to the market. I cannot remember when I last saw them. The geese came out of the river and up onto the Castle car park because people were throwing them chips. They might have come out of the river because it is so swollen and high. There is so much water that it is easy for the geese to just walk straight out onto the car park without even climbing up the bankings.

9 December Sunday

There is rain and more rain. It is getting to that point where it is no longer interesting to speak of it. Everyone is tired of talking about the rain. The path is slippery and rocks are covered with moss. The fields are squelching. Walking anywhere is a wet event. There are lakes and ponds and rivers where there are usually fields.  Every river and every stream is overflowing. It is not easy to remember where the river used to end and where the fields begin.

10 December Monday

Our Post Office is doomed. It will be closed at the end of January. All of the efforts of our committee and our community have come to nothing. The population in the village is not close enough to the 500 mark. We needed 500 people within a one kilometre radius. People in the countryside live in the countryside. We do not live all crunched together in the village even though we consider this village our village. The fact that there are plenty more people in the five and ten kilometre radius does not count. Or it does count, but it counts against us.

11 December Tuesday

The morning started grey and gloomy. The thick cloud cover has not lifted all day. It is impossible to know what time it is by observing the light. I kept thinking the sun might break through but it never happened. It is unseasonably mild. When it is not raining it is mild. Even when it is raining it is mild. These warm temperatures are not normal. There are mosquitoes and all sorts of small bugs that should not be flying around in December. Today I found a bee in a tea towel. I shook the towel out the door and the bee plopped to the ground. It walked away. It did not fly. It walked. There are cows in the fields. That is a good thing for the cows and for the farmers. It is good that the cows can be out eating grass when the fodder shortage still has its grip on things. It is a good thing but it is not a normal thing for this time of year.

12 December Wednesday

Michael reported that he had just seen Robert with a chain saw. He was speaking down from high up in his tractor to Geraldine who was standing on the ground. They were discussing a tree that was hanging down over the road in an unnatural and dangerous way. The tree looked ready to tumble. The ground is so wet and so very sodden after all the weeks of rain. Some roots cannot hold on to the earth anymore. If the tree tumbles in the upcoming promised gusts of wild wind, it will block the farm gate and the road and it will take an electricity cable down with it. Robert is Geraldine’s partner. She knew exactly which tree was being discussed.
She said, “That tree is getting between him and his sleep.”

15 December Saturday

About four or maybe five years ago—the last time I was in hospital, the surgeon came to collect me when he was ready for me. I was wearing my hospital gown, with little paper elasticized slippers and a little paper hat. The hat was like a shower cap. The surgeon and I walked down to the operating theatre together. We chatted about this and that as we walked. This time I was in the bed and ready to go when a man came to collect me. He was not the surgeon. He was a Porter. I did not have to walk to the operating theatre. The Porter pushed me and my bed though the maze of corridors. Before we left, he raised the bed so that I was sitting upright. I assumed he was doing that so that I could see where we were going. He said, “I know you will want to look around. Well anyone would, wouldn’t they? And no doubt you will see someone you know along the way.”

16 December Sunday

Anthony has brought out his Christmas Tree made of tyres. This is the third year for this tree. He keeps it on a pallet out in his yard. It is there all year to be seen at any time if anyone walks out back where all the machinery and used tyres are kept. At this time of year, he brings the pallet with the tree on it out near the road with a small forklift and he places it near to the petrol pumps. He adds a few bits of fresh greenery. Now we know it is Christmas.

Woodworm

17 December Monday

There is woodworm in the type drawers. The type is kept out in the little print shed in a tall unit with shallow drawers. The drawers are divided up as California Job Cases. Each drawer holds a specific type in a particular size. Someone who knows how to set type can reach across a drawer and find a letter without looking. The letters are always in the exact same position in every drawer. If one does not know the lay-out of a California case, finding each letter is a long and laborious job. Actually if one does not know the lay-out of the 89 compartments, each compartment a place for an upper-case or a lower-case letter or an element of punctuation, it is impossible to set type for letterpress printing. Now we have woodworm in the drawers. We can see the little piles of wood dust that they leave behind as they burrow. If we do not do something the drawers will begin to fall to bits and one alphabet will be mixed in with the alphabet just below it. Sorting them out will be impossible. Or if not impossible it will be such hard work that I doubt we will ever do it.

18 December Tuesday

The road has gouges all along one side. Not all roads have these gouges but the very narrow tar lanes have them. They have been dug out by a digger. About every 6 metres. I am not sure what to call them. Gashes. Channels. Gouges. Sluices. Their function is to direct excess rain water to rush off the road and into the ditch. I am not sure who has dug these gashes. It might be the council or it might just be a neighbour with a tractor. Whoever has done it with the digger has ripped out a fair amount of tarmacadam at the same time as they made each gash. This happens every year. It contributes to the narrowing of the road.

20 December Thursday

I have been speaking on the telephone with Martina at the council. We have had the same conversations several times in recent months. She has promised to have someone come and look at the boreen. The holes are bad. The holes are very bad and they are getting worse. Derek the postman is not complaining about the holes, but he is commenting on the holes. Complaining will be the next thing after the comments. We know that the heavy rains have ripped out the tar and gravel and dirt. The patches have been patched and then they have been patched again. Everything has been washed away with the rain. Today Martina told me that Walter, who is in charge of the road repair crew, will come by to take a look in the next three days. Tomorrow is Friday. Walter might come on Friday. He will not come on Saturday nor will he come on Sunday. He will not come on Christmas Eve nor will he come on Christmas Day. And he will not come on Stephen’s Day. I shall ring Martina again in the New Year and we can start again with the promises.

21 December Friday Solstice

The woman was in front of me in the shop. She was grumbling about the many pre-Christmas jobs and pressures. She was grumbling about getting the car washed and the windows washed and the gravestones washed and about cleaning the entire house. She said: “I also do not like Christmas. I dislike everything about it, except the cookies.”

22 December Saturday

We have a new walk. I took Simon and Breda on it today. I was nervous because I was hoping it was as wonderful a walk for them as it had been for me a few days ago. I was hoping I had not exaggerated it too much, first in my mind and then in the re-telling of it. I had been describing it again and again. I urged them both to come for this walk with me as soon as possible. So they did. They loved it. I loved it again. It was just as wonderful as I had found it the first time. There is a lot of climbing which affords fine views. I do not know what to call this walk. For the moment, it is The New Walk.

The Long Field is the name for one walk. We need names to explain where we are going or where we will meet. We have The Abbey Walk. The Des Dillon. The Mattie Loop. The Gate to Gate. The Virgil. The Poets Walk. The Waterfall Walk. The Boulders. The Cottage Loop. The Mass Rock. The Lumpy Fields. The Mass Path. Around. The Reg and Dedge. Neddins. The Perimeter. Murphy’s Lane. The Duck Pond. The Forestry.

These are not the old names of the meadows or the lands we are walking through. These are our names given so we know which walk we are going on or thinking of going on. It also suggests time. The Gate to Gate is a very short walk through the fields that are part of the Abbey Walk. This walk is especially useful right before sunset. It is a tidy little walk mostly for stretching one’s legs or for letting dogs go for a rush about.

It is usually Breda and I who give names to our walking places. We share this need to identify. Other people who we walk with quickly use the names too. The names become the walks. Every walk finds the name that is right for it. Proper local names for fields and places are important but sometimes they are difficult to learn. Our names become the walking route name which most likely incorporates several fields. If each field has a name we cannot list all the names when we want to walk there. The Lumpy Fields, as a walk, goes through nine or eleven fields. Each field has a name for the farmer who owns it, but to us the fields join to become a single walk, unless one field has cows in in it and then we detour around that one. We only need one shorthand name to identify a walk. We need to pick one name that sums it up. The name for The New Walk will find itself. It will not be The New Walk forever. It will find its name and then there will be another walk that is The New Walk.

24 December. Monday. Christmas Eve

It is too warm. The rain has finally stopped but temperatures are much higher than they should be at this time of year. The days are mild and the nights are mild. There are buds on my black currant bushes. The Lenten Rose is blooming. Daffodils are pushing up out of the soil. Some are as much as two inches in the green. Today I saw snowdrops in bloom beside Em’s stone. There are loads more snowdrops pushing up through the grass everywhere. This is not right.

25 December Tuesday Christmas

I now have a little lichen collection up the boreen. Each time I pass I add a few more pieces of lichen or else I add a stick that has some lichen attached to it. The lichen is falling off branches because of the wind or because the birds scrape it off with their feet. I have only been depositing my pieces of lichens there for a few times now but already I think of it as a kind of toll. It is a duty. I must add to the little place each time I walk up the mass path. I think about this little spot as I lie in bed at night. I now want to walk that way more often just so that I can make the little pile into a bigger pile.

26 December Stephen’s Day

We walked The New Walk again today. The sun was out for part of the time. I am learning the names of the places we pass through. We begin just off the New Line at Barnacullia, and then we turn into Fitz’s Boreen. I have already heard two names for this same boreen. One is Fitz’s Boreen as Jim Fitzpatrick, or Fitzgerald?, has a farm just nearby. The boreen used to be called Paul’s Boreen because of Tommie Paul Hally who lived nearby. Since there was another Tommie Hally in the area, Tommie Paul was called Tommie Paul rather than just plain Tommie and the boreen got shortened to Paul’s Boreen to differentiate it from the other boreen called Hally’s Boreen further down the New Line. I am not yet certain which name is the correct name but I love this green road. Back on the climbing road we are at Knockperry, and then we circle Garryduff and come back down the New Line. No doubt there are a few more place names in between that we do not know yet.

28 December Friday

June and Mark came down the boreen. They were looking for Oscar. He has not been seen since Stephen’s Day. June was in tears. She was hoping we had seen him. She was hoping anyone had seen him. He has been gone for two days. They have been walking and driving around always looking on the verges and in the dikes in case he might have been hit by a car. He might be lying somewhere hurt or he might be dead. We wished we could say something positive. The thing that we did not say and that they did not say is that there is always a particular worry when an elderly dog disappears. There are rough people around and about who steal old dogs. They prey upon dogs who have never known anything but kindness. These people run dog fights which are illegal. They organise the dog fights in out of the way locations. Spectators bet on the dogs. The dogs fight to the death. To get the fighting dogs in the mood and to give them a taste of blood their owners provide them with an old dog. The old dog will be attacked and killed by the fighters to encourage viciousness and a taste for blood. I hate to think about this. When any dog, especially an elderly dog, goes missing, people think about this possibility, but it is rarely discussed out loud. We all hate to think of such a cruel nightmare scenario, but we know that it does happen.

Before darkness fell, Oscar was found staggering across a field. His back legs kept giving out. It took him a very long time to get home from wherever he had been. We will never know where he was for two whole days. June and Mark took him to the vet who said he had had a stroke. We are all relieved to know that Oscar is back at home. Now we must wait patiently to see how he recovers. The vet said that it might take weeks.

Discoloured Water

31 December Monday

At the end of my walk I detoured to visit Oscar. He is weak and wobbly. He is really really weak and really really wobbly, and his eyes are glazed over, but he is alive. He is on steroids and some other tablets. Mark and June are trying to get him to eat regularly and often. They are trying to get him to take water. June said he has never had the habit to drink fresh water from a bowl. He has preferred to drink from puddles. Now they are trying to discolour the water in his bowl to convince him to drink it. The vet said that if he does not eat and drink to build up his strength he will not recover from his stroke. I was longing to ask what they are using to discolour his water.

2 January 2019 Wednesday

The Christmas Nativity Scene that gets set up every year is called The Crib. People go to view The Crib. They ask if you have seen The Crib. They comment on how well The Crib is looking. They mourn the occasional theft or random destruction of The Crib by Bad Lads. It took some years before I understood what was being discussed.
When our currency here was Pounds and Pence, a Pound was always called a Quid. We have been using the Euro since 2002, but people still speak of something costing A Quid. Or of being paid 10 Quid. Quid is still the slang for money even though the actual currency has changed.

I find the Christmas period complicated because the talk of Quids and Cribs gets confusing. Now that January has begun there will still be Quids but no more Cribs.

3 January Thursday

Catherine McCarra, the postmistress, has taken back her resignation. In doing so she gave up the financial package which was on offer. AnPost made this back-handedly generous one-time offer to try to close 400 post offices. Since Catherine decided not to take the package and not to retire at the end of this month, our post office can stay open. Our committee tried all kinds of things but no half-way solution would do. As a last-ditch attempt, and at great personal sacrifice, Catherine wrote and rescinded her resignation, and forfeited the money, even though she is not a well woman. If she collapses tomorrow, our post office may well be closed down immediately. We called a general meeting to announce the turn around and because our only hope now is to increase the transactions which take place at the counter. I was fearful that only 10 people might turn up, but the Community Hall was packed. Everyone seems eager to work to double our transactions in the next six months. One suggestion was that someone with a post office savings book could put 2 euro into their account one day and then they could take it out again the next day. This would count as two transactions. It might drive Rosie, behind the counter, crazy. But at least she would have a job. Unfortunately we do not seem to have a number of how many transactions are currently being done, so it is hard to know how many we will need to double the number.

4 January Friday

Another mild day. I was walking Around alone. I did not see one car nor one person the entire way. When I entered the boreen and reached the top of the first slope, I heard footsteps and heavy breathing. Oscar came staggering up behind me. I could not believe my eyes nor my ears. He was wheezing and gasping like an old tractor, as he has in recent months. The back of him is still not functioning very well but the front of him was delighted to be on the way to anywhere. As happy as I was to see him, I knew he should not be out on his own. Just a few days ago he was almost dead. He was already a kilometre from home when he caught up with me.  I had no idea if he would have the strength to walk back. I walked him home slowly. I wondered if I should have rung June to come to fetch him. She was shocked to learn that he had gone so far. As we stood talking, Oscar lifted his leg for a pee and he fell over. His back legs have lost all their power but already he is a changed dog from a few days ago.

5 January Saturday

Living Locally No.30

Letterpress card 2015

6 January Epiphany.

Today is Little Christmas. Little Christmas is short for Women’s Little Christmas—Nollaig na mBan. This is the day when all of the holiday decorations come down and get stored away. Holiday cards get filed or recycled, and the tree is removed. On Little Christmas, the tradition is that women are supposed to be free from All Household Duties. Probably this release is only after they have finished putting all of the decorating stuff away. Husbands and partners are left to take care of children and cleaning and pets and preparation for back to school and whatever else needs doing. The women go out with their friends in the evening and have dinner with other women. In Cork city, I understand that the restaurants are packed full of women and that there is rarely a man in sight.
Officially, Christmas is over. Tomorrow the world will go back to normal. Children and teachers will return to school. The post office will return to its usual hours and deliveries. It will be almost as if the last two weeks never happened. Except that everyone will continue to say Happy New Year to one another again and again and again until we are all certain that we have not missed anyone. This will go on for at least one more week. Maybe two.

7 January Monday

Yesterday we walked the New Walk in glorious sunshine. I am already calling this walk The KnockPerry. The walk has found its name. Rachel and Peter joined us. A crowd of sheep were rushing from one field down the road to another field. They had a man and a dog and a girl on a bicycle behind them. When they saw us in their path they tried to look busy and to pretend they were turning but there was a stone wall in their way. There was no where to go.

————

One. At. A.Time

9 January Wednesday

Em and me has been available for sale at the shop in the village for a few months now. As the copies dwindled to just one, I noticed that some days the final copy would be there among the farm magazines and children’s comics and some days it would be gone. The next day it would reappear.  People are delighted to tell me that they have read the book. More people have read it than have bought it. It seems the books on the shelf are not just for buying and browsing but they are for borrowing.

This lovely review from Maurice Scully:

This is a book centred on the relationship of the author & her dog. It is composed from blogs during her dog’s life & so has an episodic & almost poetically repetitive form. A pet’s life is of course an accelerated & condensed version of a human life, of all animal life & its phases, & so tracks the arc from exuberance of youth to the pathos of old age.  Such a theme can lend itself to sentimentality, but Van Horn is the opposite of a sentimental writer: she writes of what-is with clarity & intelligence & lets the given speak for her beloved animal, without enlargement, just as her pet’s acuity is a given of nature, beyond adumbration.

Okay then if you want a cosy, warm, lovey-dovey pet book, this is not it. If on the other hand you want a penetrating portrait of a pet & its ‘mistress’ this is for you.

Em & Me is an unfussy, tasteful production, as one takes for granted from Coracle Press, with good paper, good margins, clear font, pleasantly pocket-sized dimensions, attractive matt wrap-round cover & a good all-over feel to it in the hand.

There are four protagonists in Em & Me: the dog, its owner, the countryside, & the owner’s human partner, Simon, this latter a shadowy but significant presence. Simon’s making a gravestone for the dog at the end & speaking to the dog’s spirit at her graveside could be mawkish, but it isn’t. Van Horn’s gift for presenting human feeling, human affection, love & sadness, without sentimentality is exceptional.

Em & Me is about attachment ultimately: to a pet, to a locale, to art, to a life lived with alertness. An exceptional book. Coming from an exceptionally gifted partnership, whose lifelong project is Coracle Press: Erica Van Horn & Simon Cutts. Em & Me is forever, not just for Xmas.

10 January Thursday

Dr Bernie told me that I need some glasses, just for The Driving. I was stunned. I thought my repaired eyes would need no help for years and years. She said that this is a Normal Post-Cataract Kind of A Thing. She said that once the spectacles are made up, I can leave them in the car and never wear them anywhere else. She said I would not even need them anywhere else. She said it is not imperative at all but by summer I will surely be wishing I had them. She wants to give me the kind of lenses that become sunglasses when it is bright outside. She suggested that I look around at home for some old glasses frames. She said, “Sure, there is no reason to pay money for frames when you already have some old ones that will work perfectly well.”

11 January Friday

Doing extra transactions at the Post Office has become a challenge. I have been busily posting parcels and depositing money into my Post Office account book. On Wednesday, I also paid our house insurance there. I was proud to tell Rosie that I had made Seven Transactions in three days. I was sort of bragging. She was not overly impressed. She told me that a woman from Greenmount had just been in.  She had done Eleven Transactions in the same number of days. I felt both deflated and envious. It is perhaps good that we begin to feel competitive. That means we will all be using the post office more and more. By today I was happy to have done Eleven Transactions. I wondered how many the woman from Greenmount had done. Mairead reported that she had just come from the Post Office and she had done Five Transactions in one visit. She paid two bills and bought Three Stamps. One. At. A.Time.

12 January Saturday

The Farmer’s Market was sort of back in action today. There were only about half of the usual stalls there. Keith had no vegetables at all on his table. He had very little to sell. He had apples and eggs and he had buckets full of freakishly long stemmed daffodils. The stems were two feet long. These were not daffodils that had just poked their heads a tiny bit above ground because of the too the mild weather. Daffodils in January is not right, but they looked wonderful.  We came home with some just to make ourselves feel more cheerful on such a gloomy grey day.

13 January Sunday

An overweight yellow Labrador comes across the fields and visits every morning. He arrives at around 9.30 and wanders around and drinks water and sniffs in a lot of places. He is old but he is able and he rushes around doing his investigations in a friendly way. I am always happy to see him and he seems happy to see me. When he decides his visit is finished he heads off over the fields. I do not know his name. I am not certain where he lives. He might be called Zack and he might belong to the Slatterys on the Knocklofty road at Clonacoady, but I might be wrong. He might have a different name and belong to someone else altogether.

14 January Monday

I was trying to leave the grade school in Grange but I could not open the door. Then I saw that there was a buzzer high up to press in order to release the door. I buzzed and pushed just as the door was pulled hard from the outside. The woman on the other side and I both made startled shrieks of surprise and then we burst out laughing. She laughed so hard that she fell to her knees. In between laughing gasps, she said, “Well, we are awake NOW!”

 

A Rib of Hair.

15 January Tuesday

Helen said, “He hasn’t a RIB of hair!” I knew that the man was bald but I could not see the word Rib having any connection to anything else in the sentence. She told me that the word Rib came from the Irish.  Rib means a Strand. She said Rib was so completely incorporated into speech that few people even knew they were using an Irish word in the middle of an English sentence. She said that no one around here would ever say Strand. They would say Rib and everyone, except for me, would know what was meant.

16 January Wednesday

String storage is a common sight. When a farmer moves cows from field to field or out of one field and down a road and into another field, he stretches a length of string or plastic tape across from a gate post or tree or bush to another post or tree or bush. The thin white line of string is enough to let the cows know that they cannot go that way. Any cow that wanted to could barge right through such an insubstantial bit of droopy string, but somehow they rarely do. I am not sure if this is because some sorts of string have a filament wire and an electric current through them. Wire, which probably looks like string to a cow, can also be electrified. So in the mind of a cow the line drawn in their path might or might not have a little charge in it, so it is best to be avoided. The strings used for road crossings are usually left looped in place right where they will be needed again. They are carefully hung up in readiness for their next job.

17 January Thursday

The Irish language TV people -TG4 – were in the village this morning. A man and a woman filmed and took photographs to do a report on the fact that our Post Office has been saved. Or spared. Our committee sat around a table having a fake meeting for them and we posted some fake parcels. Any real customers who came into the shop rushed out again saying they did not want to be on TV. Treasa has been the substitute post mistress for about 18 months. She is fluent in Irish, so she did the interview. She was all dressed up and wearing bright red trousers which unfortunately will probably not be seen as the camera only framed her head and her shoulders. Catherine was inside the Post Office booth being interviewed through her window. The TG4 woman held up a big piece of paper with Catherine’s answers in Irish written on it. She had written them down last night because she was terrified she would forget them or pronounce them poorly. The shop was full of chatter and excitement. I learned that the Irish word for this kind of chat is COONSHEE.  No doubt there is a proper way to spell it and this is not it. After it was over, I walked the three miles home in bright sun and cold wind. I was smiling the whole way.

18 January Friday

The old sand-cast aluminum letters do not always make for even letter spacing.

19 January Saturday

For at least a week, the air has been full of the stench of slurry. The smell is everywhere. All of the farmers are at it. Sometimes it is so bad that it makes my eyes sting and my throat burn. Lately it has not been that bad. I think the cold keeps the smell down. Joe has a lot of fields on the other side of the road from his farm and his slurry pit. For the last four days he has had a long heavy hose connected to his spreader as it moves over and back on the far fields. The big hose crosses the tar road. When the slurry is pumping through it there are little ramps to make it safe to drive over the hose. The hose is under a lot of pressure. When the ramps are in place there is Joe or a young lad waiting nearby to tell any driver to travel carefully over the ramps. The boy who was there today told me that the hose is probably 850 metres long. Maybe he was only guessing at the length. I love the ramps. I love aiming the car in just the right way so that all four wheels bounce up and over.

20 January Sunday

There are things to do After Dark and things to do Before Dark. At this time of year the days are short. The days are getting longer but they are still short. I go for walks and I hang the washing in the light. I prefer to empty the compost in the light but I can do it in the dark if I use a head torch. The light fixture in the tool shed is broken so getting things out of the freezer is best done before dark. I make phone calls and I write emails and letters when daylight is gone and darkness has fallen. Sometimes I say it aloud to people. I say that I will ring them After Dark. They do not register what and why I am saying this. I try to divide the activities of my day by Before Dark and After Dark. This is only an issue in the winter. There is no reason to even consider it during the rest of the year.

21 January Monday

George Mason died in October. It was sudden and shocking. He was a young man. He was not yet fifty. I did not really know him but he generously allowed us to walk the track through his fields. When we saw him in the distance we waved to him in his tractor and he waved back. The rare time we spoke with him it was about the weather. If his herd was not grazing in the lower meadow we walked right through it to the special place where the Nire River runs into the Suir. George Mason raised cattle for beef. His brother is a dairy farmer. The brother has taken over the fields for planting and harvesting since George’s untimely death. If we did not already know that there was someone else working the land we would know it anyway by the completely new way that the round bales are stacked in the shed.

Buns for Norman Chicken.

22 January Tuesday

My collection of lichen up the boreen is getting bigger but not as quickly as I had hoped. I think I thought it expected that it would grow and grow. I think I hoped it would be so large that it would need to be detoured around.  That it would be impossible not to see it as one walked along. It is still quite a small amount. I am surprised that neither the wind nor a dog or a boot has displaced the little pile. I showed it to PJ one day when I met him and his dog Walker. I suggested that if he finds any clumps of lichen, he is more than welcome to add to the collection. I was trying to let him know that it was not just my pile. Anyone else could add lichen. I do not think he was very interested but he was polite about it.

23 January Wednesday

I spent two hours in the cold barn undoing clumps of bubble wrap this afternoon. I collect it from the vet’s office in Cahir. They keep it crammed behind a shelving unit until it gets to be too much. When I need a fresh supply for wrapping book parcels, I ring and they tell me if they have any or not. Sometimes it has already gone off to the recycling. Two weeks ago, I got a three enormous rubbish bags crammed full. The vet’s office is happy to pass the bubble on to me as they consider that recycling it via me is superior to recycling it to the council. Today I spent the time pulling off strips of sello tape and flattening out the pieces. It is a job I avoid for as long as possible. There is always something more interesting to do. Sometimes the tape rips the plastic but sometimes I can get it off smoothly and I end up with huge great pieces to fold up and put away for use later. I listened to the radio while I was working which distracted me from the cold. As always, I marveled that a veterinary practice receives so many things in bottles and containers that need careful padding with bubble wrap. I did not get through all three of the bags before the cold in the barn drove me back up to the house. A good supply is now ready for use so I feel wealthy and ready for any package that might need to be packed.

24 January Thursday

Some people do it and some people do not do it. It does not seem to be a spoken quirk from one specific county.  Or I cannot tell if it is something that belongs to a particular place. I just hear it sometimes and sometimes I do not hear it. I think it is more like a kind of a lisp or speech defect. Or maybe it is a pronunciation thing from the Irish language. It is the saying of a T instead of a TH, usually at the beginning of a word. When people say T instead of TH, the entire meaning of the word they are saying can be different.

The two lads were sitting behind me on the bus. We were going to Cork and they were going to Cork. One of them spoke of TICK TIES. He said it once and then he said it again. I had not been listening to their conversation but these two words were repeated again and again. I could not understand the words so I had to listen in order to put them into context. It was a bit like hearing a few words that I do understand in the midst of a sentence in a foreign language. The familiar words make the rest of the conversation kind of public business. I think this was the same kind of situation.

Eventually I understood that TICK TIES was actually THICK THIGHS. It was THICK THIGHS with the T sound replacing the TH sound. The lad doing most of the talking was discussing his three years in Australia. The other lad was on his way to Australia so the first one was telling him what to expect and what problems might be encountered. Apparently a major issue down there is that the legs of Irish men are not like the legs of Australian men. The buying of a new pair of jeans is a real and pressing problem if you are the kind of lad with Thick Thighs. Apparently these two lads are both the kind of lads with Thick Thighs. Many Irish lads have Thick Thighs and the Australians do not have the same kind of leg shape so their blue jeans are made to fit their body type. These jeans are not comfortable for an Irish lad’s legs. In fact they are impossible for the majority of Irish legs.

And anyway, the Australian jeans are too long. Even the shortest length is too long. The first fellow had located a website that sold blue jeans for the Irish expatriate audience. The jeans were cut wider in the thighs and shorter in the leg and they were just as good as what you could buy right here at home. It was easier to use the website than it was to ask your mother to go and shop for you and post you a pair of jeans. The instructing lad ended this portion of the conversation by saying, “After all, she is your Mam. She would only be after thinking that you could not take care of yourself without her help.”

26 January Saturday

The clock on the library building in Cahir has been repaired and replaced. For about a year or maybe longer there has been a piece of black plastic in the rectangular space where the clock used to be. I wondered if the clock would ever return. I worried about it. Now it is back. I do not know exactly when it disappeared and I do not know exactly when it returned.

28 January Monday

I was not sitting very near to the door, but I was sitting near enough to the door to be visible to anyone going out or coming in. As I looked up from my coffee, I saw Paul on his way out the door. He was chatting with another man and he left without me saying hello to him nor him saying hello to me. A few seconds after the door closed, he opened it again, and stuck his head in.  He said, “Hello there! I didn’t see you till I saw you!”

29 January Tuesday

I am always pleased to find a lost shopping list. I like the sort of eavesdropping effect of reading what somebody else intends to purchase.
Yesterday I found a small piece of cardboard.  The list read:

Rolls/TV Guide
Buns for
Norman.
Chicken.

I spent the rest of the day speaking about Buns For Norman Chicken. I repeated it over and over again. It became a little chant. Buns for Norman Chicken! I was delighted with the name Norman Chicken. I woke up happy with the name Norman Chicken on my tongue. Now I see that Norman Chicken is neither a person nor a recipe. Buns For Norman was one thing. And then there was Chicken.

31 January Thursday

The days are getting longer. They are getting longer and lighter. It is a constant topic of conversation. We no long speak of the longer days by saying that there is A Stretch In It. We are well past that. The first of February is considered the first day of spring even though in my mind it is not really spring. Weather-wise it is not even vaguely spring, but here it is the day that is officially considered the First Day of Spring. Every year this surprises me. It should not surprise me any longer. The first of February is the First Day of Spring. Every single year, the first day of February is the First Day of Spring. This morning Johnnie reminded me that tomorrow is the First Day of Spring. He said, “It won’t be long before you can eat your dinner by the light of day.”

Daily Bread.

20 February Wednesday

Oscar took a turn in the night. He was taken to the vet but it was all too late. I was saddened, but not surprised to receive this news. I am more  surprised that he lasted so long after his stroke. I feel so lucky to have had the chance to know dear Oscar. To have walked with him and to have had him visiting on his own irregular regular basis. He was gentle and loyal and undemanding. His absence is a loss for the whole neighborhood.

This particular kind of dog is disappearing from the lanes of the countryside. These are the dogs who walk out and visit somewhere maybe several miles away and maybe for all day, but they always go home again because they know where they belong and they know where they are fed.  These are the dogs who walk only along the very edge of the road where the grass and the soil meet the tarmac. They do not walk in the middle of the road. It is no doubt a little softer for their feet just there along the verge and, anyway, they are well aware that they need to be safely out of the way of motorcars and tractors. Oscar did have an unusual habit of stetching out across the road in one particular place in front of The White Cottage, but even if he was sound asleep he could be seen by anyone driving along from either direction. His death was not a result of being run over. He died because he was old and tired and unwell.

———————

19 March Tuesday

The smell of slurry is everywhere. The acrid burning smell makes me gag.  Lingering outside is not pleasant. Lingering outside is not possible. Daffodils are in bloom. There are primroses all down the boreen. I want to be looking at everything and savoring the springtime but I shall have to wait for another day.

21 March Thursday

Ned arrived early and un-announced with a delivery of heating fuel. He usually rings to say that he is coming. He needs to let us know because someone needs to be at home when he comes so that he can plug the generator in through the window. A regular oil truck will not deliver down this boreen. A normal oil truck is too large to drive down here. We have to have our fuel delivered in a small truck with its own generator for pumping. If no one is here when he arrives, Ned’s trip is wasted and he has to take his fuel all the way back to Piltown.

He quickly explained that the reason that he was so early and un-announced was because he had had to rush into Lidl right away this morning. They were having a special on protective helmets with drop-down face visors and sound-muffling ear protectors. The price was only 20 euro and he knew full well they would be popular. He knew they would be Flying Out The Door.  The advertisement had said the helmets would be in-store from Monday morning, so he rushed along in order not to miss getting one. The store opened at 8 am and he was there waiting, with our oil in a big plastic tank on his truck, at a quarter to eight. He was not the only one. There were six or seven other men waiting. They were all waiting for the helmets.  The men stood at the door and discussed the high quality of these German tools and work products. They all agreed it would be a crime to miss out on such a bargain. Ned was so impressed with the helmets when he saw them that he bought three instead of the one he had come for. He pointed into his truck window to show them to me. There were two on the floor and one on the seat beside him.

I was still wearing my bathrobe when he arrived, so he told me to give him my car keys so that he could move the car and get his truck into position near to the oil tank. When the tank was full, we all had tea and biscuits while Ned further explained the various merits of the new helmets for outdoor work. Before he left, he loaded up the old cast-iron bathtub that we had moved outdoors in September. It has been siting out there ever since. The oil truck had a hydraulic lift on the back. That made it possible for him to get the tub up and into the truck.  I was sorry to see it go but glad it has found a new function. He was taking it for his brother to use as a watering trough for the cows.

Before he drove away, Ned patted the boxed helmet on the seat beside him. He said, “It has been a grand day already and it is early yet.”

22 March Friday

Yesterday was the vernal equinox and we were promised a full moon. Before bed, I went out out to look at the moon. There was no moon to be seen. Solid cloud cover blocked out all the stars and the moon. I walked down through the meadow taking the route I always used to walk with Em. I did not feel frightened to be walking alone in the dark, but I did wish that Em were with me or at least that she was off barking in the darkness and that she would be back beside me soon. I did not feel frightened but I felt lonely. I felt my isolation. I felt the deep silence surrounding me. The darkness was complete. I could just barely discern the whiteness of the birch trees at the bottom of the path. When a moon is full and bright there are usually shadows on the land. Last night there were no shadows.

23 March Saturday

We had porridge in the café. We were sitting upstairs where there was only one other woman sitting at the far end by herself. Other than that the place was empty. A second woman came heavily up the stairs with a cup and saucer rattling in her hand.
She shouted across the room, “Oh, Margaret! It is good to see you!” Actually she did not shout, she just used her voice in what was probably her normal way which was extremely loud. Her voice boomed. She made the entire upstairs of the café into her own place. We immediately felt like extras as she and Margaret settled in to talk and catch up on things.

24 March Sunday

Breda announced that she was a real Go The Road.  I was not exactly sure what she meant. I felt I had to ask. She told me that it just meant she was busy all the time and all of her busy-ness involved Going. She was always going somewhere by car and never ever staying home. I liked the fact that a Go The Road was a name for a person and not simply an action.

25 March Monday

The bread man was delivering at O’Dwyers. Both of the back doors were open. There was plywood fitted inside the back windows with charts telling how to store and to locate the bread in the back of the van. I guess each side of the van demands a separate stocking system.

A Low-Sized Woman

27 March Wednesday

Annie shouted hello across the wall. She declared that she was far too busy from one end of the day to the other. She blamed the longer days and the extra light. She said, “I haven’t the time to bless myself!

28 March Thursday

I needed to get the saw and cut some branches down near the stream before I could walk up the path. A few trees and branches had toppled in and over the stream and over the path. I was not in the mood to crawl through the mud to go underneath them. It was the cutting of the timber in Tom Cooney’s forestry that had caused the trees to fall into one another and knock some others down. The men who were doing the felling had come down the Mass Path from the top on a Quad bike. The normal single track now looks like a road. A muddy road. The men are not just cutting trees for firewood, they are felling ash trees for hurleys. PJ explained part of it to me. The trees are cut about one and a half metres from the ground. In order to do that other trees have to be cleared all around the desired ash tree. Then the bottom of the tree is cut as low into the roots as possible. This cutting is done with a series of cuts to allow for the curve. The cutting goes almost under the ground. The strange looking stump left after the felling is called a hurley butt. A finished hurley has a curve at the end of it and the curve has to already be a part of the natural flare at the bottom of the tree. First a curve and then straight up. The stick is kind of like a hockey stick but it is rounder, maybe fatter, and shorter. Ash wood is both strong and flexible and apparently it is the only wood that makes a proper hurley. I understand very little about hurleys. I understand very little about the game of hurling. The game is so popular that there is a need for at least 400,000 new hurleys each year. The rest of the ground around where these trees have been carved out looks like a massacre.

29 March Friday

The wild garlic is everywhere. It tastes like spring and it smells like spring when I walk through it.

30 March Saturday

I saw Mary at the market. I had not seen her since before Christmas. She was looking distressed and confused and then she straightened up and announced to no one in particular because no one was standing very near to her, “It’s in the car. I left my stick in the car. It is okay. I have not lost it. My stick is in the motor.” I offered to go and collect her stick for her but she declined. She was happy enough just to know where it was. Mary’s husband never gets out of the car. He drives as close to the market stalls as he can get and he sits in the car and waits for Mary to do her shopping and have her conversations. He never seems impatient. He just waits for Mary while he stares straight ahead through the windscreen. Maybe he is listening the radio. As for Mary, she was looking well. She looked like herself only much thinner. I think perhaps the winter has been hard on her. Her coat was the same winter coat as she always wears. It is the very end of March but it is still cold enough to need a winter coat. The coat looked enormous on Mary, but the coat is the same size as it always was. The coat is big and she is not.

31 March Sunday

It is a small field with ten or twelve sheep in it. The lower half of the gate is cluttered with clumps of wool. The gate has a wire mesh fence attached to it so that the sheep cannot slip underneath. It looks as if some of the sheep tried to squeeze through the fence and their wool was pulled off them by the wires. Or it is as if the wool has blown off the sheep and the wind has dashed it all against the fence and the gate. Only one of the sheep looks scruffy as though she has lost clumps of wool. The others are fat and fluffy and do not look like anything is missing.

1 April Monday

Two older women were talking. The first woman was a little confused. She could not remember the name of a lady she was making reference to so she attempted to describe the woman’s appearance. She hoped if she could describe the woman well enough the woman she was talking to would recognise her and provide her with the name she had forgotten. She was unable to offer much by way of description. She said, “You’d know her yourself. She is A Low-Sized Woman.”

2 April Tuesday

I set off for a walk this afternoon in the bright cold. There was a sharp wind. It felt chilly for April. I was not worried about the wind because I knew that once I started to move I would warm myself. Nor was I bothered about the wind because I was wearing a wool hat, gloves and a jacket. I was surprised to see snow across the tops of the Knockmealdowns. After less than a kilometre, clouds appeared and the sky went completely dark. Sleet lashed down on me. I turned around, walking straight into the downpour heading for home. I was frozen solid by the time I arrived and by then the sun was back out and the sky was blue.

The Borrowing Days

3 April Wednesday

I attended the coffee morning at the Community Hall in Grange. It is a newish event planned to take place on the first Wednesday of each month. Since Frank’s shop closed down there is less and less opportunity for people who live in Grange to ever catch sight of one another. The entire hall was set up with tables and chairs in little groups. It looked like they might be expecting as many as 60 or 80 people. There was easily enough food for 60 people. There were heaped up plates of scones and there were seven different kinds of jam, along with butter and margarine, and brownies and biscuits and flapjacks and all kinds of home-baked goods. For 2 euro you could eat as much as you liked and you could drink coffee and tea for the whole two hours if you wanted to. There were not 60 people in the hall. There were more like 16, not counting the ones who had done the work of setting it up. I saw some people I knew and I met a few people I had never met before. The older people were firstly interested to know where anyone they were introduced to lived. They needed to locate the person in the landscape of the townland. I explained to one elderly man that I lived in Willie English’s old cottage, just down the boreen from Johnny Mackin. He was delighted at the information that I lived below the late Johnny Mackin. He was not interested to know another thing about me. He was happy to tell me what he knew. He said Johnny was not like any other man in all of Tipperary. He said that to have been Johnny’s neighbour was a good bit of luck.  He told the small group of people near to the cake table where we were standing several stories about Johnny. He said it was a known fact that The Man Had Buckets of Brains.

4 April Thursday

The Skinning of The Old Cow. The Irish expression for this is Seannrioch or Seanriabhach. It is used to describe these first seven or ten days of April. Some people say seven days while others swear that it is always ten days. The expression comes from the idea that everyone expects April to be warmer and good and nurturing but in fact it rarely is. It is more normal for April to have borrowed some days from March to continue with the bitter, wild and harsh weather.  These days are also called The Borrowing Days. Hay supplies have run down in the sheds and some of hay barns are completely empty, while the grass in the fields is not really long enough to feed the cattle. There has been no rain. The word April implies springtime but the actuality is much more haphazard. There is wind and there is the sharp, desperate chill. These are thin days for eating and they are colder than any of us would like.

5 April Friday

The starlings are back and they are busy building nests in the roof of the book barn. A wren is building a nest in the yew hedge. We watch her from the kitchen window. She is busily taking twigs and things into the private place she has found. All of her movements are full of purpose. We cannot see the nest but we can see that she is very busy. I have been busy too. I am sewing up the sections of a book with red thread. This morning I noticed that the wren has collected my tiny off-cuts of red thread from the compost heap to use in her nest. She dropped a few strands on her way into the hedge. Now her entrance is brightly signposted.

6 April Saturday

A busload of German tourists arrived at Cahir Castle. They walked over to the gate but they were not allowed to go in. There were security men at the gate. This is not normal. There were more security men around the back in Inch Field. The men were wearing high visibility jackets and they were turning away anyone who approached the castle. The tourists were confused and some were a little angry. They all took photographs of themselves in front of the castle. They took photographs of themselves with the geese and without the geese. They wandered around for a little while and then they all got back on the bus. They were all grumbling. No one at the farmers market seemed certain about what was going on at the Castle. Someone said that maybe there was an important dignitary inside and they needed protection. Someone else said they were in there filming an advertisement for a car. I walked over to one of the security men and asked. He said that they were filming a scene for a movie. He said that they needed a castle and this castle was as good as any and better than most for the purpose. He said it might be Walt Disney who was making the movie or it might be someone else.

7 April Sunday

Dead shrew on the mat outside the kitchen door. Dead bird outside the door of the book barn. At first look, the bird seemed like it might be simply stunned, but it was dead.  The shrew had a big bite taken out of its side.

8 April Monday

The two woodcutters who have been felling the ash trees for hurleys were back at the edge of Cooney’s wood today. They were loading up some of the sections they had cut. They put a few into the front end of their van and when I walked by they were putting a few more into the back of the van. I did not stay long enough to see if they would fill up the entire space. One man had a long beard and he did not talk at all. The other man talked enough for the both of them. He told me that some trees are thick enough to make as many as five hurleys, but that two per tree is more normal. This man had been to cut ash trees in Romania and Massachusetts and England. He said that ash trees everywhere have been hit by a disease and soon there will be no more of them to harvest. He does not know where future hurleys will come from when all of the ash trees are dead. He said he is worried for the future of hurleys but at least he won’t be out of a job because by then he will be sitting at home and collecting his pension. The job ahead of the men in the next days and weeks is to slowly drag out the rest of the hurley wood, and then get back into the forest to cut everything else up for firewood.

10 April Wednesday

The doorway at Clonfert Cathedral was well worth the detour. It is not a large building but nevertheless it is called a cathedral.  It is more like a small chapel with an amazing entrance. The Romanesque carving offers an fine variety of animal heads, motifs, foliage and human heads. We were unable to go inside as a woman in the nearby house holds the key and she had gone out to do her shopping.  The farmer in an adjoining field directed us to her door but he said that he had no way of knowing when she might return.

Raggy Trees appear here and there around the country. They are also called Wishing Trees.  There is always more than one name for anything. People use the trees to make wishes or as a form of prayer to get something they need or want. They make an offering in order to pass an exam, to get a job, to regain health or just generally to ask for good fortune. The tradition is that one should return to the tree three times with a request to ensure that the wish or prayer will come to pass.  I do not know what makes one tree into a Raggy Tree and another nearby tree just a regular tree. How does its power become established?  St Brendan’s Tree, just through the little gate beside the cathedral, is a horse chestnut tree. Maybe proximity to the cathedral is enough to have given this tree it’s magic. It is a real mess. Perhaps it is a mess because a lot of the offerings have been there all winter. They have been rained upon and the wind has beaten them. There are coins hammered sideways into the bark of the tree and lots of rosary beads and caps and photographs and toys and packets of pills and bits of fabric. Things are hanging off the tree and things are strewn all over the ground. For some reason there are a lot of socks. A LOT of socks. Pairs of socks and single socks. Maybe socks are the easiest thing to tie onto the tree.

.

11 April Thursday

The woman was clutching a piece of paper in her hand. It was windy. She was holding it tight so that it would not blow away. She was a bit bent over and moving in a sideways direction even while she was going straight ahead. She walked over to me on the pavement in Thurles. I assumed she was going to ask me how to get somewhere. I do not know Thurles well so I was prepared to tell her that I could not direct her to wherever she was going. She did not ask for directions. Instead she stood up tall right in front of me and said, “I’d be very short of The Money.” I watched her continuing around the square approaching various people. Each time she said the exact same words: “I’d be very short of The Money.”  She kept the piece of paper in her hand. I guess it was a prop so that each person would think that she was in need of directions, and not just asking for The Money.

12 April Friday

The weather continues to be changeable. It should not be a surprise anymore but it is. Each morning starts cold and bright and bitter. It might rain. It might get warm. There might be sleet. The winds are ferocious in turns. Then there will be something else or there will be a repeat of some sort of weather that occurred earlier. There is no way to be prepared for what might come next. Tommie says that the weather is In And Out Faster Than A Fiddlers Elbow.

13 April Saturday

The wind is brutal.  The wind is unrelenting. Every time I think of something that I might do out of doors, I change my mind. Instead I find myself something more to do in the house.  I do not want to even walk across to the barns. The light is inviting but the wind is wicked. The birds have disappeared. They cannot land on the feeders. The wind gusts and drops and gusts and drops. The sounds of buffeting and blowing are constant. It is difficult to remember life without this wind.

A Roundy Birthday

16 April Tuesday

Today was the first day this year that the cows arrived in the near field. Maybe it was not the first day but it was the first time I have seen them in this field so for me it was the first day. I was in the book barn when they came rushing over the hill. They ran and jostled one another. The long winter days and weeks under cover mean that each new field marks a joyful adventure. They have been out in some other pastures before today, but today was the first day in this particular field which is their geographically-furthest-from-the-farm field. The cows pushed and rushed at each other and ate bits of grass erratically from all over the place and they lined up and looked in the window at me and then they all lay down at the same time. They stayed laying down for about twenty minutes and then they all got up and ran back over the hill and out of sight.

17 April Wednesday

Any birthday that ends in a zero is called A Roundy Birthday.

18 April Thursday

The waitress told the people at the next table that they did not take any credit cards in the restaurant and that they would need to pay for their lunch with cash. She thought she should warn them before they ordered their food. The man was foreign. Maybe he was Dutch. He said he had no cash. The woman with him had no cash either. The man said he would go immediately to find a cash machine. The waitress said, Oh, there is no rush for money. Order your food and have yourself a good feed and then you can go out and look for some cash. There is a machine out on the main street. She said, Why they might even give you some money up at the petrol station.

19 April Friday

Niamh explained The Nun’s Embrace to me. Or she tried to explain it but then she had to do it to me to show me because she could not explain it and now I can not explain it either but it is a kind of gently pulling the person with one arm while pulling stronger with the other arm. It is not a hug and not an embrace but it is a two-armed pull not really a hug and traditionally a way for the person being embraced by the nun to have no doubt that the nun is the one is charge.

20 April Saturday

Ter is a common nickname. It might be short for Teresa, or it might be for Terence.

Ger might be short for Geraldine, or for Gerard or for Gerald. It might even be for Jerome, but then it would be spelled with a J even though the pronunciation would be the same.

Phil can be short for Philomena or it might be for Philip.

Pa is shortened from Pascal, or sometimes from Patrick.

Pa is never used as a name for Father.

21 April Easter Sunday

We met Tommie outside the shop. I thought he would be going to an Easter Mass either in the village or in Fourmilewater, but he said he was going into town to visit Margaret in hospital. He said that she has been there for three weeks already. The doctors cannot determine what is wrong with her. She felt dizzy while she was having her hair done at The Hair Den. The hairdresser called the ambulance and Margaret was taken away and ever since then he has been visiting her every day. He did not seem unduly upset. He has had a difficult time taking care of her at home because she is blind and mostly deaf and she cannot move around easily. She had a broken hip and even though the hip is healed, it has never been right. He said that it will never be right. Tommie says that he spends a lot of time shouting at Margaret when they are at home together but since she cannot hear much of what he says she does not notice that he is shouting and he just gets more and more angry. These three weeks have been like a holiday for him. He was in cheerful mood this morning. He was wearing a sweater tucked into his high belted trousers. The sweater and the trousers were covered in food spills. He looked down and said that if he were going to Mass he might change his clothes and put on a jacket but he said Margaret will not see what he is wearing and anyway he will be sitting down all the time that he is in the hospital visiting her. He lowered his voice when he told us that each day they give him his dinner on a tray while Margaret gets her dinner. He was looking forward to a special feed today since it is Easter.

22 April Bank Holiday Monday

The fox was zig-zagging up the field. He wandered a bit to the left and then he wandered a bit to the right. He was always heading uphill but he did so in a desultory manner. He was in no rush to get anywhere. He moved slowly while looking around. He did not notice me beside the fence or maybe he did notice me but he did not worry about me because he had the advantage of four legs. I was close but not close enough to be a threat. This is the same fox I have seen every single day this week. Most days I have come upon him when walking down the boreen. I always see him at the same corner. He sees me and he jumps up the banking and away into Scully’s wood when I approach. This fox is young and shiny with a dark orangey-brown coat and a dark brown tail. I have no proof but I feel certain that this fox is a male fox.

Passing Blustery Showers

23 April Tuesday

It is sometimes hard to tell people who do not live in the country how much death there is out here. Last night I woke to the sounds of a screaming struggle just under the bedroom window. There was a final high-pitched shriek followed by complete silence. A fox had killed a rabbit. These are familiar noises. I am sorry that I know these sounds so well. The shrieking makes my heart race with fear and with helplessness. The rabbit cannot help what is happening to her and I can do nothing at all to help. Even hearing the sounds means that it is already too late. There was no sign of the struggle in the morning. Instead, I found a dead mouse in the book barn. He was caught in a trap under the table. His body was swollen and smelly. This was not a recent death. Just outside and near the door I found a dead bird. Some other creature had torn the front of the bird open and ripped out his organs. There were feathers everywhere. I walked up the path later and found a tiny rabbit with its head bitten off. I expected to see the head further along the path but I did not. There is not always so much death visible in one day. In between all the corpses, I am finding many broken eggs of varying shades of blue. Thrush eggs  and blackbird eggs and probably others I am not able to name. Young birds are popping out everywhere. The pieces of shell and the sky filled with birdsong make all of the death seem less grim.

24 April Wednesday

There is a grey squirrel at the bird feeder. As a result the birds hardly have a chance to get at the nuts. This squirrel has found a way to crawl out onto a thin branch and to balance himself upside down while gnawing at the side of the feeder. This is a new thing. We have never seen grey squirrels here. I thought maybe it was just me who had not noticed them but everyone says the same. And now that we acknowledge them we understand that this is not good news.  It is bad news. The grey squirrel is an invasive species that pushes out the native red squirrels by eating the same things as the red squirrels but eating them before the red squirrels can digest them properly and by bringing diseases which eventually kill off the red squirrel population. Grey squirrels are not native. They were brought to Ireland from England and have spread slowly throughout the entire country. They are almost everywhere but not quite everywhere yet. 100 years ago, six pairs of grey squirrels were brought to a castle in County Longford as a wedding gift. It is difficult to imagine someone thinking that twelve grey squirrels would make the perfect wedding present.

25 April Thursday

It is a fact that when any workman comes to wash his hands at the kitchen sink, he always reaches for the washing-up liquid. The washing-up liquid can be sitting exactly beside the bar of soap but no one ever uses the hand soap.

26 April Friday

The young man told Anthony: “I gave him a Crossbar!” I heard this and I imagined a great whack with an iron bar. I imagined violence and blood. I imagined a hearty beating. I was relieved to be told that Giving A Crossbar was nothing more than providing someone with a sideways seat on the crossbar of a bicycle.

27 April Saturday

Friday was really cold. We spent the entire day anticipating the arrival of Storm Hannah. The winds were ferocious well before anything  had even started. The radio advised everyone to stay at home for six hours starting from 6 o’clock. We were also told to stay well out of the way of power lines and falling trees. Some places were given an Amber Warning. Western parts of the country were given a Red Warning. We knew there was a good chance that we would probably lose our electricity. It was a good night to be going nowhere.

By this morning the worst of the storm was over.  The sun was out and it was bright and cold. The winds were still wild. As expected, the west of the country got hit badly as Hannah blew in off the Atlantic. Our local damages were small in comparison. It took us a lot of driving and detouring and backing up and turning around to get to Cahir but we were determined to get to the market. There was a large tree down on the Ardfinnan road. We were told that the tree knocked down the power lines and took out the electricity for most of the village. Big branches and small branches were strewn everywhere. Flower pots and buckets and garden furniture have been blown all over the place. The Castle car park was littered with geraniums and other bedding plants that had blown right out of the soil. Everyone was discussing who had power and who did not have power.  The market stalls were all pushed up against the wall for protection from the wind.

Jim started to tell me about Speedy and Rattles, two brothers who live close to him. Their elderly mother lives not far from the brothers and she lost her electricity last night. Speedy works for the ESB so he knew just where to go and what to do to get his mother’s power back on. He jumped on his bike and sped off into the wind. Jim never finished the story because one of the market tables full of scones and bread and cakes blew down and we all rushed to help to set it back upright and to save the baked goods. I would like to hear the end of the story but until I do I have been enjoying the names Speedy and Rattles in between the Passing Blustery Showers which we were promised.

28 April Sunday

Large piles of grey stuff have been dumped in various fields. Every time that I see these piles I am startled and I worry that cement has been dumped in someone’s field. I think it is cement because it looks like cement but it is not cement. It is agricultural lime for spreading over pasture fields.

29 April Monday

I am distracted just now by Simon on the phone to FedEx about a parcel pick-up. The person on the other end of the line is somewhere in England. The person does not know where Tipperary is. Simon explains to him or her that Tipperary is in the Republic of Ireland. That does not seem to help. He cannot believe that this person has never heard of Tipperary. He explains that there is even a song about it. He asks if the person has never even heard this song. Now he is singing the song. Simon is singing Its a Long Way to Tipperary over the telephone to the FedEx person in England. I doubt it will help.

30 April Tuesday

Hay barns everywhere are empty or they are nearly empty. There is not much left to offer to hungry cows. The cattle are mostly out in the fields but when the weather gets bad they disappear back into barns and under the roof for a day or two. It is like this spring cannot decide to settle.

Old Linoleum

1 May Wednesday

It is the first day of May but the nights are still cold. It does not feel like May. I brought in several wheelbarrow loads of firewood just to be ready. I hope we do not need a fire in the evening but the probability is that we will need a fire. My new method for unloading the wheelbarrow is to wheel it right into the house. The old system of armloads or baskets or buckets full from the doorway seems silly now. I wish I had been doing it this way for years.

3 May Friday

Tiny calves cluster together in the fields. They are so small that their legs wobble. Their legs are not yet strong. They tumble into one another. They seem too young to be away from their mothers. When Joe arrives with the teat trailer full of their formula they rush and jostle to get a suck. The once bright red teat trailer is now a faded pink. It looks like a miniature fairground carousel. With rubber teats.

4 May Saturday

Tom used to come to the Farmers Market every Saturday. He did not buy anything at the market but he stood around for an hour or more talking with the various people who had stalls or with the other people who were there for the shopping. He spent most of his time talking with Ned Lonergan who makes things out of wood. Ned makes fine bowls and egg cups and walking sticks from local timber. He and Tom would usually discuss where a tree had fallen recently and who Ned might have to approach to get access to some of the wood. Today we met Tom in the SuperValu car park. We talked for a few minutes and mentioned that we missed seeing him at the market. He said he had stopped going to the market because Eileen does not care to shop at the market. She thinks it is certain to be too dear and that it is a kind of exclusive affair altogether. She says that if you begin to buy from one person you will have to buy from everyone or else you will make enemies. She says the market itself is nothing but a problem and a way to be forced to spend money that you do not have anyway. Eileen never did come to the market for her shopping and Tom only came to meet people and to have some conversation. She has told Tom that it is not right to go there if he is not there to buy things. So now he does not go at all, but he wishes he did.

5 May Sunday

The black and white farm cat ran across the path in front of me. She had something in her mouth. At first I thought it was a small rabbit. It might have been a shrew but it was big enough to be a rat. Whatever it was, it was not dead. It was struggling hard to be released.

6 May Monday

Election posters have appeared everywhere. I like the variety of suddenly having language in the landscape. The posters are tied onto trees, fences and telephone poles. Some of the posters have the words RECYCLED POSTER along the bottom edge. I assume this means that the candidate has run for office before. It does not look like a new head has been struck onto an old one. Almost every poster has a photograph of a head on it. That is how we know who is who. There are small mobile units with a poster on each side which get moved around the area. Just as we get used to seeing somebody’s face on the little tent device on a particular corner or stretch of road the whole display disappears and is driven off to another location. We might see it in a new place but we might not. We may not drive that way so we may never see it again. I love the element of surprise as these trailers move around the countryside.

7 May Tuesday

There is a fine looking triangle in the long field. The triangle was dug out and filled with gravel. I guess it is for drainage.

8 May Wednesday

The rain bucketed down all night and well into this morning. This soaking is much needed by the farmers and much appreciated by me. It has been cleansing and cleansing is what we need. It is that time of year again. I do not know what causes it or who is the culprit. Is it one type of bird? Or is it all of the birds? Once again the house is covered with lashings of excrement. The car is covered with excrement. Every piece of washing that goes out to the clothesline gets hit. The birds must be flying extremely fast so every splash is long and diagonal and white. What are they eating to make such milky white liquid poop? How fast are they flying to make it all land with such splatter? And why does this last for a few weeks and then, as abruptly as it began, it stops. It just stops. Every year it is like this. It starts and then after about ten days or two weeks, it stops. I have theories about young birds and young digestive systems but these theories are not based on facts.

9 May Thursday

Pat flew to Paris on a mission. She went to Paris to buy herself a Hermès scarf. She spent nearly three hours in the store deciding which scarf to buy. She said that the staff were wonderful. She said they had nothing but patience. A friend went with her to help but he was not involved in the final choosing. That was her job alone. The friend stepped outside to have a cigarette break now and then. While smoking, he was able to keep track of the limousines and other fancy cars arriving at the shop. Most of the other customers were wealthy Asians and none of them were traveling alone. Maybe they were with family or perhaps they were with friends. The shop was spacious and well organised. The staff could manage all of the buyers and the entourages who came along with them. The scarf was Pat’s gift to herself for her 60th birthday. It was not a casual decision. It was a special, long-dreamed of and costly purchase. She wanted to get it right. It has been several weeks now but she has not worn the scarf yet. She opens the box on her kitchen table to admire it and to show it to friends. She unfolds the scarf and look at it spread out large. Then she folds it up again and puts it carefully back into the box. She is simply overjoyed to have it here in her house in Tipperary. She has invited me over for a viewing.

10 May Friday

There is a small piece of printed linoleum outside my work room.  It is old. It might have come from Johnnie Mackin’s house.  It might have come from Tommie Halley’s house. It might have come from some other old house where people had lived but where no one is living any longer. Maybe it was stuck onto the bottom of something and it fell off once it arrived here.  I have had it for a long time already. I keep it on the step. It is not useful for wiping feet. It is not useful for anything. I like the pattern. I think of it as a little welcome mat.

Your Own Name

11 May Saturday

Ned painted his van. He painted it red. It already was red but he repainted it, just to brighten it up. He painted it with some red gloss paint from his shed and he used a paint brush. It is not well done. There are saggy bits where the paint was too heavy and it drooped in kind of sideways puddle. He did not do the small area around the letters on the back of the van because his brush was too big to get in between the letters. Around the chrome letters it is possible to see the old, not glossy red that was the previous colour. The van sat behind him at the Farmers Market as it always does. There was a lot of discussion of his van and his painting skills and not much of any attention paid to wooden bowls for sale on his tables. He got a lot of teasing but he did not seem to mind. I think he enjoyed it.

12 May Sunday

There have been thundering and thumping noises throughout the afternoon. All week there has been silage cutting. After it was cut the grass has been left to dry in piled up lengths through the fields. The fields looked like corduroy. Now machines are racing through the fields and picking up the piles and spitting them into huge trailers. The trailers are huge and blue and they are pulled by blue tractors that rush along beside the grass collecting machines. It is a dangerous time to be on the road or driving through the farmyard as the speed of the activity keeps everything moving at top speed. From here in our valley it sounds like planes on a runway. Sometimes it sounds like thunder. Sometimes it sounds like rumbling traffic from afar. The noises are a shocking change from the usual deep silence.

13 May Monday

I was paying for my milk and newspaper when I felt eyes upon me. I looked to my left and there was Peggy, right beside me, and staring intently at me. The minute I turned towards her, she averted her head sharpish and marched across the shop to the magazines. She picked up a magazine and began flipping through pages rapidly. It was a teen magazine. Peggy has no children and she has no grandchildren. I am certain she has no interest in a teen magazine. It was obvious that she just grabbed the first thing that her hands touched. Peggy has not spoken to me for four or five years. The last time was a phone conversation when she rang and said that she did not want to fall out with me. We spoke on the phone for 45 minutes that day. We parted on good terms. Or I thought we parted on good terms. Since that day she refuses to salute if we pass one another in the car. She does not just fail to salute, she turns her head abruptly and looks away even if she is driving in a forward direction. It is a dangerous kind of head turning while operating a motor car, but she is making a point. In the last two years she has extended the snubbing to Simon. Her problem is with me and not with him, but he is now tainted by association. I wave and I greet her with a smile wherever and whenever we meet. This friendliness on my part has no effect. I have been told by another neighbour that Peggy fell out with the neighbour’s cousin over a jar of jam. That snubbing and feud lasted for twenty years. It only ended when the cousin died.

14 May Tuesday

The woman at the desk asked me: “What is your own name, so?” Anywhere else a person asking for my name would be enough. Your Own Name is a kind of double possession. A double descriptor which never fails to surprise me. It should not surprise me any longer but it does.

Wet Rain.

31 May Friday

I could not sleep last night. It was the jet lag. Coming from west to east is often a problem. Reading had not worked and listening to the radio had not worked. I finally got out of bed. I played solitaire for a while. This usually tires me. I get bored and sort of hypnotised by the cards and then I get sleepy. I did not become sleepy. I just kept playing. I worked on a crossword puzzle from yesterday’s newspaper. I read yesterday’s newspaper. After three hours I finally went back to bed. I did not sleep. The room was getting lighter and lighter. The birds were making an enormous noise outside. I should call it the dawn chorus but it sounded too noisy for a chorus. It was cacophony. I got up again. It was about four o’clock. I made a cup of tea and I went outside. It was too chilly to sit down so I walked around and looked at things. There was plenty of light to see everything that had been growing in my absence. The ox-eye daisies were rampant. They are the wild flowers that just take over everything at this time of year. It was really getting light but it was not bright. It was only a little after four in the morning. I could see the white blossom of the daisies and the pink roses against the grey stone of the book barn. There was plenty of light to see colours and to see details. It was subdued light but it was light. Joe’s cows were not in the near field but they were just a little further along in the second field across. They were all standing around along the rounding of the hill pulling grass and eating. I wondered why they were not sleeping. I wondered if cows sleep. My thoughts kept returning to sleep. There were more cows down in Donal’s field. That is the field I call the Low Meadow but Jim Trehy told me that a field like that is known as the Bottoms. I try to think of it as the Bottoms but as often as I remind myself of it, this name does not come naturally to me. It is still the low meadow and this morning it was full of Donal’s cows. I could see them clearly. Their black and white hides showed bright against the green. I walked down the orchard meadow and through the apple trees and I considered getting out a rake to gather up some of the long grass which had been cut down around the trees. I was wearing my dressing gown over my pajamas and a shawl around my shoulders. I was wearing low rubber boots. It did not seem the best outfit for raking and anyway I was too tired to DO anything. The only thing I wanted to do was to sleep and since I could not do that I was happy to look at all of the variations of white blossoms against all of the green and to watch a rabbit hopping and to listen to the birds singing and screaming. I finished one cup of tea as I walked so I went  inside to make another. It was 5.15 and there was no chance that I was going to get any sleep.

2 June Sunday

There is a big black bull in Joe’s front field. I call it the front field. Probably Joe does not call this field the front field. It is the first field as I enter the boreen from the road. It is the field on my right. When there is a bull in residence, the bull is always in this field. I do not think that Joe owns a bull. I think that he rents or leases a bull for a month or for a few weeks for breeding. The bull arrives from another farm in order to inseminate cows. I do not think they say inseminate. I hear it said that the bull is here to Cover the Cows. This is not the same bull as in recent years. The previous bull was brown and white. This bull is black. He is so black that he looks like a silhouette against the green pasture. He is so black and so big that it is almost hard to see him. He is like an absence cut out of the field.

4 June Tuesday

Today has been all day Wet Rain. People might think that all rain is wet.  There are different kinds of rain. There is Soft Rain. Rain can be Desperate. It can be Lashing. I do not think there are as many words for rain here as some northern places have for snow but there are a lot of ways to explain and describe rain. I doubt I have heard all of them yet. Wet Rain is a particular sort of soaking rain. It is the kind of rain which means you will get wet no matter how you dress or how you move.  A Wet Rain will drench any person out in it. This is a certainty. The daisies are drooping down with this all day rain. They are drooping and dripping. They are lying down flat with the excessive water so they are tangling into each other and sometimes tripping us when we try to move through them. We get wet simply by walking out to check to see if the post has arrived or going down to the the book barn to do a job. It is much too wet to go out to trim these flopping daisies out of the way.  We have the choice of changing our trousers with abnormal frequency, or else we just stay in the house.

5 June Wednesday

A motorcar had turned in at the end of the lane. There was a tractor and another big machine cutting and collecting silage in the adjoining field. Jobs like cutting silage get contracted out. I recognized neither the machinery nor the men. They machines both rushed over to the corner of the field when the car arrived. A woman and a small boy got out of the car. The woman stretched up on tip-toes to pass a couple of plastic containers over the stone wall to the young man. He climbed down from his tractor to meet her. Then she handed a flask and two big plastic bottles of some fizzy drink over to him. He put one container and one bottle up and into his tractor. He walked over and handed one of each of the things up to the man in the other machine. Then the woman lifted the little boy over the wall. The man reached and lifted the boy the rest of the way over and into the field. The boy was about 6. I am guessing his age from his size. Maybe he was younger. Maybe he was older. I did not know the woman, nor the man, nor the other man who never left his machine.  I had never seen the little boy. I was only out for a walk by myself. The man, who might have been a brother or the father or an uncle swung the boy up into the tractor and then he climbed up himself. The little boy stood high on the seat beside the man and he waved wildly with both hands at the woman and at me.  He was delighted to be in the tractor in the midst of the important work of bringing in the silage. He wanted to be seen to be high up in the tractor. The woman and I stood and waved at the boy as the machines turned away from us and started back into the work of cutting grass and circling round and round the field. We waved until the boy stopped waving and directed his attention to the job being done.

6 June Thursday

All week, every single time I look out the window or walk out the door I see a rabbit. There is never not a rabbit in my line of vision. Simon has been adamant when he assures me that there is only one rabbit and that I am always seeing the same rabbit. Tonight I walked across from the barn and I saw three rabbits in a little group quietly eating grass together. Another one was hopping over near the white lilac.  I should know better than to believe Simon.  Rabbits often look alike. And rabbits are known to multiply. Pretending that there is only one is silly.

It is Nice to be Nice.

7 June Friday

The bee hives from the bee man in Burncourt are back on the tops of Mike’s wrecked cars in his work yard. These hives are different from the ones that the same man brought last year. One is covered with tar paper. Another looks like a picnic cooler painted yellow. The third one is just a wooden box with a red top. The bee man is looking to attract a new swarm. None of the boxes have attracted any bees yet. I think this weather is too cold for bees.

8 June Saturday
I went to the vet’s office to collect some bubble wrap. They are happy to save the bubble for me as it is a kind of recycling. It is a slow job for me to go through it all and remove the tape from the bunched up bits, but it is free. I try to remind myself that the time I spend untangling and folding up the bubble wrap is cheaper than the money we would spend to buy brand new rolls of it. They seem to have less bubble these days. Maybe the vaccines and the liquids for the cows and horses are being shipped in plastic instead of glass containers. Or maybe there is another reason. Anyway I need to stop in more frequently than I used to and I get less per trip than I used to.

As I waited for the young girl on duty to stuff my bubble into a bin liner, I met a 3 1/2 year old mixed breed Whippet. I fell in love immediately. I have been vaguely looking for a new dog. I have mentioned here and there that I am ready for a new dog. I have mentioned here and there that I am no longer happy to live without a dog. I have mentioned that when I see the dog that is to be my dog, I will know immediately. Seeing this dog gave me that feeling. Unfortunately, this dog was happily owned and loved by the two people with her. But now I have a whole new breed of dog to be looking at and for. I did not know I wanted a Whippet, but now I do.

9 June Sunday

Elderflowers are everywhere. Except when they are not. They look like they are everywhere. The cream colored blossoms are polka-dotted all over the landscape. Everywhere in every direction, there are elderflowers. Their omnipresence is deceptive. The big floppy flowers are all high up on the trees. Today we had a few hours of bright sun in the midst of all the rain and the grey darkness and cold days. When we do get some sun, it is watery sunlight. It is not strong hot sun. I decided I must gather the flowers and make at least one batch of elderflower cordial. The weather forecast is promising ten straight days of rain and no sun. And this on top of all of the cold and sunless days we have already had. I decided I had to use today’s sunlight to get the blossoms while I could. Popular wisdom says that blossoms picked in overcast light will make a cordial that smells like cat pee. I did not want to risk that. I went out with clippers and a basket to collect 20 or 25 blossoms, which is not very many. It was really hard to even get that small amount. Everything was high up and way out of my reach. I eventually got my flowers and made my single batch. It was far too difficult. I can only hope the rains move off and I will have a second chance to make more.

10 June Monday

The tiny calves are together in one field, without their mothers. They have two little white plastic houses to go into to get out of the rain. Or to get their food which might be in there to keep it dry, or to keep it from being blown around. These are the reasons that I thought they have the little houses. Today under a steady soft, but persistent, drizzle, I saw all of the calves huddled in a tight group in a far corner of their field. They were moaning and bellowing together in voices louder than their small bodies seem able for. And they were all wet. So much for my theories about shelter.

11 June Tuesday

A starling is caught in the blind of an old empty house in Irishtown. It must have gone down the chimney and got itself caught in the blind trying to escape out the window and now it is dead. There is not a thing to be done. It is too late for anything to be done. I look at it every time I pass. I try not to look but then I do. It has been hanging there for a long while now. It does not seem to get any more decomposed. It just hangs there. Dead.

12 June Wednesday

I went into town to get a new tax disc for the car. The old one expired at the end of May. We have until the end of June to get a new one. A one month grace period. I was feeling a little bit confused. Maybe this is the old way and things have changed while I failed to notice that they had changed. I felt certain that the one month grace period somehow does not apply any longer and that instead of me being a few weeks early to get my new disc, I am actually a few weeks late. I asked the woman at the counter if this was still the system. She said Yes, of course. I asked her why we are allowed an entire month after the date of expiration. Shouldn’t the tax expiring mean that the tax has expired? Why do we get a whole month extra to sort ourselves out? She explained that everyone is always so very busy with things to do and deadlines and life in general, so why should the motor tax office put more pressure on people? Then she added, “And, anyway, it is nice to be nice.”

Going to Bed in the Bright

20 June Thursday

A young man boarded the bus with us at the airport. He was carrying a large bouquet of flowers. It was a showy and extravagant bouquet in a white cellophane paper. The paper was like an enormous upside-down white skirt. I do not know where he bought such a bouquet. I do not think there are flowers on sale anywhere at the airport. I think this man must have bought the bouquet somewhere else. He must have arrived at the airport with the flowers but it was apparently not to give the flowers to someone just off a plane from somewhere because he had no one with him. He just had the flowers. Now he was boarding the bus and taking the flowers somewhere else. The entire bus smelled of his bouquet. It was a bit much. There were enormous lilies and something else with a strong smell. The man wedged his bouquet high up into a crack between the two seats in front of him so that he could enjoy the journey and have his hands free while the flowers were safe from any crushing and damage.

Before leaving Dublin we made a stop at the bus station. Two people heavily laden with plastic carrier bags stuffed full of things got on the bus. A terrible smell arrived with them. Suddenly the flower fumes that had seemed overwhelming during the journey from the airport to the station seemed not so bad. There would be at least two hours between leaving the Bus Aras and the first stop. No one would be able to get off the bus. This was a daunting prospect. I wondered if I would be able to stand it. A older woman leaned across the aisle towards me and she sort of cooed: “Oh the Poor Poor Misfortunates.” Then she sighed heavily and went back to her book.

Traffic was bad and the bus was slow. The two hour journey took three hours. I was sitting near the front of the bus. The bouquet was propped up in its position of safety in the center of the bus. The Poor Misfortunates sat all the way in the back of the bus. I suppose I was lucky in a way. From where I sat, the smells cancelled each other out and I was far enough away to able to forget about them, at least for some of the time.

21 June Friday. Solstice. The Longest Day

At this time of year there is not much night. Today is the longest day. The sun rose at 4.56. It will set at 21.56. The elderly woman in the shop complained that these long hours of daylight depress her. She feels that seven hours of darkness is not enough. She finds it a sad and difficult time because she fears Going To Bed in the Bright. She knows that she is not the only one.

22 June Saturday

The talk at the Farmers Market this morning was all about the dead goose. By current count, 41 geese live in the river with their nests up on the banking of the castle. They are fed a lot of snacks by tourists and given a more healthy regular diet by locals. They have no reason to leave the area. Last week one of the geese was walking across the car park when he was hit by a car and killed. The car drove away without stopping. The murdered goose was named Bruce. I did not know any of the geese had names. This makes me wonder if perhaps they all have names? Apparently a young girl gave Bruce his name but how did she recognise him in the crowd? They all look very similar to me.

23 June Sunday

The cows in the lower meadow began bellowing sometime after midnight. They woke me up. I lay in the dark and listened. I wondered what had set them off. There was moaning and mooing. Screeching. Lowing. Roaring. I do not know what got them going. Hunger? Separation? Distress? Maybe a fox startled one of them.  After about twenty minutes they were quiet again. I went back to sleep.

24 June Monday

To me, it is a pie. Here it is called a tart: top crust, bottom crust and a layer of fruit in between. I find there is always too much pastry for the skimpy amount of fruit inside. The fresh tart in the shop had a large circle cut out of the top crust. The piece of crust which had been cut out was laid onto the top of the tart, just beside the hole, so that the hole was both absent and present. It was still attached to the tart and had been baked right along with the rest.

25 June Tuesday

A man in a tractor dumped a big pile of stuff to the side of the storage shed on Mason’s land. It was grey and looked like cement which meant it was probably lime. When his trailer was empty, he climbed down from the cab and put a delivery note bill under a stone. I was walking up the track towards him. He waved and shouted across the field, “If you see your man tell him the bill is right there. But no worry. He’ll find it or he won’t!”

Any Stick You Could Buy In A Store

26 June Wednesday

It was raining hard. Just as I turned to drive into the boreen I saw a young boy pressed against the stone wall. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was not waterproof. He was dripping wet and his hood was plastered tight to his head with the rain. I recognized him as the son of a neighbour a kilometer or so down the road. I think he is 12, or maybe 13. I stopped to ask if he wanted a lift home. He said no. I saw that he had a hatchet held in his hand. Maybe it was a hatchet or maybe it was an ax. It  was pressed close down along his leg. It might have been that he was trying to hide it from me. Or it might have been that he was trying to keep it from getting wetter. After I got home I mentioned him to Simon. He said the boy had been up and down past the house several times in the rain. Always carrying his hatchet. I have spent the rest of the day wondering if we should be worrying about this lad marching around with a hatchet.

27 June Thursday

The fire station in Lismore is not large. I am not even sure that it is even wide enough to have a fire truck inside. There are two yellow firemen’s helmets hanging outside the station. The original plan must have been for them to be used as hanging baskets.  No one planted any flowers in the helmets this year, so there are just a few dead stalks.

28 June Friday

Sharon moved away at least six months ago because the house she had been renting was being put up for sale. It was Mary Corbett’s cottage. Then it was The Murder Cottage. Dessie lived there next and it was still spoken of as The Murder Cottage. When Sharon moved in, she wanted to change the way people referred to her home. Living in a place where someone was savagely killed carries a tough legacy. She searched out a large flat stone and put some sticky vinyl letters on it. She renamed the place The White Cottage. The letters were quite small. The heavily varnished stone was leaned up against a tree so that it could be seen from the road.  We all tried hard to use the new name but The Murder Cottage remains the shorthand way to identify the place. The house has not sold yet. A man comes along and does some small jobs every few weeks to keep it looking tidy. When Sharon left, I thought maybe she had taken her naming stone with her but today I walked past the house and there it was lying flat on the top of the wall with most of its letters missing.

29 June Saturday

We had just finished lunch when there was a tiny tap on the door. It was Tommie. He was returning the plate I had taken to him last week. The plate had been full of lemon cake and strawberries. Now it was empty and washed.  I was preparing strawberries to eat with cream just as he knocked so I offered him some. Tommie loves fruit. He loves all fruit but he especially loves summer berries. He refused a cup of tea but said yes to the fruit.  He sat down and we all three ate big bowls of fresh berries. Then we talked. Or Tommie talked. He told us stories of Real Life People. He told about a woman who could tell a lie and he said that whatever she said and whatever way she said it, it looked better than the truth. As he talked he swung his walking stick up above him and around in the air. He was pleased when we complimented him on the stick. It was a length of ash with the bark stripped off. It was not straight but it was strong. He said he preferred this stick to any stick you could buy in a store.

After an hour and a half, Tommie said he should be going. I walked him out to his motorcar. I was surprised to see that the passenger door was open and I was shocked to see Margaret sitting there. I asked him why he had not brought her into the house. He said it was because he had not meant to stay so long. I spoke to Margaret and said that she should have come inside. She said she was fine where she was, just sitting out and listening to the weather. I guess by weather she meant the little breeze. She is mostly blind and she cannot hear a lot, but she perhaps she was able to hear and see enough to enjoy the light wind and the birdsong. Her face looked terrible. It was black and blue and she had a big bandage on her forehead and another one around her forearm. Her fingers and her hand were all black and blue and swollen. She said she had had another fall. She said “This is just the way things are going, Girl. I recover from hitting the ground just in time to fall again.”

30 June Sunday

I was walking up near Middlequarter and thought to take the path that drops down to the Holy Well. It was a bad idea as everything was heavily overgrown and I was wearing shorts. There were too many nettles to make such a walk pleasant or even possible, so I gave up. I was sorry as I have not been down there for a long time. There is not much to see. I am never certain how and why one little spring gets called a Holy Well and another does not. There are hundreds of Holy Wells around the country. Not all of them are signposted. Some are just known to be where they are by the people who know. Usually the water is believed to have curative powers. Sometimes a particular saint used a well and that made it holy. I must ask around for the story of this well, which does not look like a well at all. It is just a slab of stone with a trickle of water coming out beneath it. And at this time of year it is probably completely choked out with weeds and nettles.

1 July Monday

Anthony has a bucket near the doorway of his premises. There is a thick piece of timber on the bucket to make it more comfortable. Anyone waiting to have a tyre repaired is welcome to take a sit-down on the bucket. Or someone who is walking by can take a seat and chat even if they are not having a tyre repaired or replaced. Today, I see that Anthony has added a red cushion.

Will I See You Out?

2 July Tuesday

The woman stood in the middle of the road. It is not a busy road. It is a single track road with three houses on it. One of the  houses has been empty for four years. It is an extremely quiet road. The woman stood in the middle of the road watching as two painters were finishing up a bit of detail around her windows. She was admiring her freshly painted house from as far away as she could be which was not really very far at all. I was out for a walk. I do not know this woman except to say hello to. We exchange pleasantries like “It’s a desperate day altogether!” and “A Fine Evening, isn’t it!” But that is as far as we go. That is as far as we have ever gone. She used to have an elderly dog. I spoke to the dog every time I passed the house. He was deaf and blind and did not pay any attention to me.  Today the woman turned to me as if we were in the habit of discussing a great many things. She said, “It is looking well, isn’t it?” It was both a statement and a question. I replied, “Yes, indeed it does look well.” She nodded and said “Yes. I think it is looking well. I am happy how well it is looking.” If I had not seen the painters there I would not have known that the house had been painted because it was exactly the same colour as it was before it was painted.

3 July Wednesday

The barley looks fine in the fields on both sides of the track. It moves constantly and gently with the smallest breeze.

4 July Thursday

There are a lot of bees around the edge of the roof of the barn. They are just over the door. They have been there for several weeks now. We now try to enter and leave the barn from the opposite direction, but it does not really make much difference because the swarm is still just above and to the left of the door. We cannot ignore them but we can move quickly and quietly past them. It is a pity they did not choose to make a hive on the back side of the barn. They would have had more privacy and we would not be so aware of them. Their noise is loud. It is a little bit scary to go into the barn and a little bit scary to come out, but really I do not think it matters much. They are busy and they seem to pay us no attention at all. Anyone who sees or hears the bees advises us to get a beekeeper to come and take them away. The hive is well tucked up and into the eaves. I do not think anyone could get up and get them out without killing the lot. Since the bee population is in short supply all over the world, we feel it is best if we leave this community to just keep doing exactly what they are doing.

5 July Friday

I see Marie at least once a week. I do not know her well. I do not know her family or where she lives or anything like that. She used to work in the shop and then she trained to work at the Day Care Center. The pay is much better there and she loves working with the children. She is a cheerful person. We always greet one another and she always calls me Sally. I used to correct her and tell her my proper name, but I no longer bother. I just return her greeting and chat about whatever there is to be chatted about.

6 July Saturday

Maureen got out of the car. She has been instructed to stand still for a moment so that she does not get dizzy by moving too quickly. Her friend stood close by. She was there to give Maureen an arm if needed, just until she got her balance.  Her friend squealed, “OhMyGod! Your glasses are filthy! It looks like you cleaned them with Mashed Potatoes!”

7 July Sunday

I have been picking gooseberries. It feels like I have been picking gooseberries forever. The bushes just keep on producing. Every afternoon I sit on my box and I pick and pick and I pick and then I toss bags full of berries into the freezer. I am in competition with the birds. Often I am picking from one side of a bush while a bird is eating away on the other side of the bush. This is a battle and I am determined to win. I do not mind the birds having a good feed of fruit. I just want to be certain that I get more than they do. The thorns are sharp and painful. It feels like they are ripping me to shreds but at the same time, they never seem to pierce my skin. There is no blood but there is a bit of shouting and cursing as I get stabbed again and again. I think there are some kinds of gooseberries that have no thorns. Maybe these are new breeds. Even if thorn-less gooseberries exist, I am not going to plant any of them.  I already have too many gooseberry bushes. Today I have decided that I am finished with the picking. Whatever remains on the bushes is all for the birds.

8 July Monday

Cars drive too quickly through the village. Tractors and farm machinery always go too fast, especially when they are getting in the silage which is what they are doing now. The days are not long enough for the work that must be done and there is always the possible threat of rain which will ruin the Getting In. The narrow roads are treacherous with speeding equipment. If there are several other vehicles pulled in or a delivery truck parked when one is ready to leave the shop in a car, it is not easy to see around them. This is a problem at any time of the year. It is worse with speeding tractors on the move.  It is nearly impossible to see if something is coming from either direction. A person walking out of the shop or arriving and getting out of their own car will offer to check the road for the person attempting to depart. He or she will say “Will I see you out?” Or “I’ll see you out then.” That means they will stand in the road and look both ways and signal or shout when it is safe to back out. It is the polite thing to do and it is much appreciated. We all do it for one another.

9 July Tuesday

Another batch of elderflower cordial has been bottled. This is the first time I have made several small batches over a few weeks. Ordinarily, I make one big batch. This year it was about gathering the blooms at the right moment and in bright sunshine. The weather was against me and then blossoms were often too high for me to reach. I hope I do not do it this way again. It is just as much work to make a small batch twice as it is to make a big batch once.

Sheep Racing at 7 o’clock.

30 July Tuesday

We took the ferry from Liverpool. It was a new way for us to return from England. The boat was mostly freight. There were only a few cars on boat. We were the very last car to board because we drove round and round the area looking for the dock which was not signposted in any way. Everyone had begun to eat when we got upstairs from the vehicle deck. It was 8 o’clock. Our food was included as part of the fare price. We all ate our hearty suppers as the boat prepared to leave and within half an hour of announcing that food was being served, the Phillipino kitchen staff started clearing it all away. Everything was completely gone before we even left the enormous harbour of Liverpool. Most of the truck drivers knew this so they took two helpings of the steamed pudding with loads of custard in case they missed their chance. There were no more than fifteen tables spread between two rooms. Since everyone was eating at the same time it was easy to see that there were not many people on board. In the room where we ate there was a large round table with a few smaller tables close by around the edges. Everyone who sat at the round table was a lorry driver from Northern Ireland. Maybe they all knew each other from earlier crossings. Maybe they did not know each other from earlier crossings. I think the brotherhood of truck drivers means that they did know each other simply by their job. They were all in the same club. They discussed the tiny utilitarian cabins which we had all been assigned. They commented on the narrow little bunks. Several of the men remembered ferries where they had been required to bring their own sheets and pillows along with them. There was a nostalgia about this, either for the time or for where those those journeys had taken them. This ferry did not seem to be of this time, but the drivers were remembering even less modern journeys. We listened to the men discuss their travels. They had all been away to different places and now they were all going home. Being at the center of the room placed both them and their exchanges on stage. The lights started dimming. By 9 o’clock we were all encouraged to head down to our teeny cabins to sleep.

At 5 am, there was a loudspeaker announcement regarding the serving of breakfast. Then a person walked down the corridor tapping twice on each door with a key or some metallic object to make sure we were awake. We heard our own two taps and we heard the tapping continuing down the hallway. We climbed back up the steep ladder-like staircase, where everyone ate porridge and tea and toast. The Northern Irish drivers sat at their round table. No one had had much sleep so it was quieter than it had been the night before. Each of the truckers sat with two or three extra cups of tea at their place. The extras were to carry down to their lorries. We were all down on the vehicle deck by 5.30. The freight drivers lined up their cups on their dashboards. The boat decanted us into Dublin Harbour at 6 o’clock on Sunday morning. Driving through the city has never been so easy.

And we were back at home in Ballybeg before 9, even after a stop in Cahir to buy milk and a few staples.

31 July Wednesday

Picking black currants and picking more black currants. The picking does not end. The currants are fat and delicious but I am beginning to wish there were not so many of them.

1 August Thursday

I miss walking up the mass path. It is thick with all of the growth of summer. It is not possible to walk with shorts and short sleeves without being attacked by the nettles and the brambles. Even with long trousers and long sleeves the tangle is winning. I am missing out on a lot of installments of growth and animal movement and bird activity. I do not even know all that I am missing. It will not be long before I am able to move through it all again without too much of a struggle. It will be like no time has passed.

2 August Friday

The room where the wake was being held was not large. There were family members in chairs along two of the walls. The deceased was laid out in a coffin against the wall at the far end of the room. We filed in behind others in the single line and we shook hands with each member of the family. We repeated our condolences and we said “I am sorry for your loss” over and over again. When a person reached the coffin, he or she stopped and crossed themselves. I did not cross myself. I just continued to the next group of family members.  As always, the room was hushed and the lighting was subdued. When we first arrived and before we had been able to enter the room with the family and the dead man we had to wait in a small line. It was not a long line, but first we were out on the pavement in the sunshine and then we stood in a little entry hall. As we were waiting to take our turn an elderly man came out and he shook the hands of each one of us who were waiting to go in. He said, and then repeated again and again, “I will have to die myself to ever be this popular.”

3 August Saturday

Maurice told me that the word Áras means large building. It suggests a residential building. An abode. A dwelling. Maybe a castle. He said that the central Bus Station in Dublin which is called Bus Áras is not literally translated as Bus Station but should instead  be The Bus Castle.

4 August Sunday

I knew there would be rain. I  believed the forecast. The forecast was for The Odd Passing Shower. The forecast promised that the showers would hold off until the afternoon. I walked up and around Knockperry. As usual, I wondered about the carved head installed in someones wall. I always intend to ask someone somewhere about its history. I always forget.  I got two thirds of the way around before the skies opened. I had no rain jacket and there was no shelter up there so I just kept walking. I got soaked through. Not one part of me was dry. There is a small encampment of travellers just before the road drops down. Actually it is just one caravan and one horse trailer and a bunch of stuff scattered around. Two dogs huddled underneath the caravan and watched me walking by in the pouring rain.  I had been told that there was Sheep Racing scheduled for 7 o’clock in Clogheen. I was eager to see how anyone could convince sheep to race against one another, much less run in the same direction, but the rain was so heavy that I never got to Clogheen to find out.

5 August Bank Holiday Monday

People often substitute the word Ye in place of the word You. They use it in conversation and they use it in text messages.  To my ear it sounds almost biblical. (Are ye back yet?) I love hearing it and I love reading it but I cannot use it myself   I cannot incorporate it into my speech.  It would sound false in my mouth.

Endless Rain

7 August Wednesday

Marian bemoaned that the summer is Flying By. She said, “That’s what happens when June doesn’t fall good.” She said, “Summer never works if you don’t have a June.”

8 August Thursday

There is always another dead bird. This is the first time that I have picked up a bird with a plate. This bird smashed into a window. When I found it, it was still warm but it was dead. The plate has been useful as I moved it around to keep it out of the sun. It is time to toss it over the hedge but I keep looking at it. I wish I knew what it was.

10 August Saturday

It was disappointing not to see The Crosswords from Clogheen this morning. I wanted to ask them if the Sheep Racing had taken place as scheduled last week in spite the heavy rain. I was ready with a lot of questions about how they get the sheep to line up and how they get them to go in the same direction and how they get them to keep going in the same direction. I wondered if perhaps there was a sheepdog in the back urging them forward or at least not allowing them to change direction. I wondered what sort of marking or numbering they used to keep track of each sheep contestant. I have spent a lot of time thinking about it all. I am sorry that I did not drive over in the lashing rain just on the off chance that the race took place. It might not have happened but it might have. Either way, I am sorry to have missed it.

11 August Sunday

When I first discovered the Distemper Brush, I loved it. I wanted to buy it but I did not need it. I just wanted it. I took a photograph of it on the painted cement floor of the hardware shop. I kept thinking about it. Eventually I just had to buy the brush, so I bought it and brought it home. I hung it on the wall where I admire it daily. I sent photographs to Laurie and she made a beautiful drawing of the brush for my book Too Raucous for a Chorus. I have kept an eye on the section of the hardware shop where the brush was hung. It was the only one in stock when I bought it and to this day it has not been replaced. Maybe there is not much demand for painting with distemper these days. Now I have made a postcard of the brush so I can share it more widely. I am loving the postcard nearly as much as the brush itself.

12 August Monday

The rain is sort of endless. It is endless but erratic. There are moments of blazing sunshine and blue skies but every day there is rain. It is not cold rain. But it is rain. The days are warm and often muggy and the rain is a constant. Sometimes it falls straight out of the sky in an enormous heavy downpour and then it stops abruptly. The sky clears and it is bright and then it buckets down again. Sometimes it is an off and on again drizzle that never ceases but it never really stops anything from happening. A man walked out of the shop this morning and he pointed up at the sky. He announced, “He is very cross That Man Up There. The only way to please Him is to go to Mass five times a day but I’ll not be doing that! I carry an umbrella wherever I go.” I was the only person around. Even so, I am not certain that he was talking to me.

14 August Wednesday

I have filled another huge bowl with more black currants. They just keep coming. And now the raspberries are ripening. That means more picking in an everyday kind of way. Apples and plums are barely visible. After the heavily laden branches of last year, it is a shock to see how few apples there are on any of the trees. There is one tree that is having normal growth and production but most of the trees are leafy and lush with no apples at all. As always, I have been keeping a careful eye on the figs. It has been disappointing to see how few there are. This morning I walked up the stone steps to go into the small mezzanine room and I could barely get in the door. The fig branches and leaves had taken over the top of the steps and all of the branches up there were full of fruit. Once inside the room the thick foliage took over the entrance. It was a battle to get in and a battle to get out. One side of the tree is devoid of figs and the other side is full of figs. Now I must pay regular attention so that the birds do not get more than me.

15 August Thursday

Acting the Maggot is a way of saying that someone is messing. A person who is a messer would Act the Maggot without a second thought. Most farmers are happy for us to walk through their land but they would not be happy if we were to be Acting the Maggot. Acting the Maggot might just be some rowdy and foolish behaviour or it might be reckless and destructive. There is a certain amount of disrespect involved with such bad behaviour. It might be a lot of disrespect or it might be a little.

16 August Friday

There was a bright dry spell after lunch. I spent two hours scraping moss and some horrible slimy stuff off the concrete area outside my workroom. There were brown globs of the stuff all over the place. At first I thought they were excrement, maybe from the fox. On closer examination, I saw that they were kind of translucent and more sepia than brown in colour. If I saw these globs on a beach I would assume they were some kind of seaweed. Stepping on them was dangerous. Moss is slippery enough but these globs were extremely slippery. These globs were deadly. I do not know what to call them. Globs is as good a word as any. I filled an entire wheelbarrow with moss and globs and a few opportunistic weeds that were growing out of the cement and between the stones. By the time I finished, it began to rain. Again.

18 August Sunday

Before the sun sets today, there will be a new owner of the Liam MacCarthy Cup. It is the big day for the All-Ireland hurling final. The counties of Tipperary and Kilkenny are in a frenzy. Many thousands of fans will be traveling to Dublin for the match at Croke Park. Everyone else will be watching the game in bars or at home. The build-up and excitement has been immense. People are all sporting the Tipp colours of gold and royal blue. The colours are more and more wide-spread every day. Shirts and flags and pennants and caps and dangling car fresheners in the shape of shirts and the funny little lengths of braided wool that appear before every big match. I am fascinated by these braids. I imagine the lengths of yarn being carefully braided by grandmothers and mothers to be hung on car mirrors, antennas and handbags. Any bit of decoration is good as long as it shows the Tipp colours. The Kilkenny colours are yellow and black. These are neighbouring counties with a long and fierce rivalry. A small stone bridge on the border has been painted so that one side is blue and gold and other side is black and yellow.  Every interaction has people discussing whether or not they will be attending the match in person. Nobody has asked me where, or even if, I will be watching the match. Once the match is won, The Liam MacCarthy becomes the important and cherished thing. The word Cup is dropped. And it is never called a trophy.  The Liam MacCarthy will be held high on the top of the bus in the parade for the team when they come home from Dublin. The Liam MacCarthy will travel up and down the county for a year and it will appear in hundreds of photographs. It will be taken to schools and sports centers and old peoples homes and any number of places where groups are gathered. It seems that every single person wants to be photographed with The Liam MacCarthy.

Patients Walking

19 August Monday

The town did not really get going until 10. I had been dropped off at 8.45. It was hard to find anything open. It was difficult to find even a cup of coffee. The few people around looked happy, but dazed. There was a lot of broken glass on the pavements. The shopkeepers sweeping up the glass were all in buoyant moods. The smell of beer and urine was everywhere. The door of a phone booth was held open with an entire case of empty Bulmer’s cider bottles. As the town woke up and more people appeared on the streets, everyone was discussing where they had been for yesterday’s match. Tipperary won. Many people watched from here and many went up to Dublin. It is important to mark where one was on such a momentous occasion. The overpricing of tickets is still being commented upon.

Now the primary topic of conversation is no longer rain. It is The Win. Now the question is:

“Will ye go to Thurles tonight?”

“Will ye be driving up for the welcoming parade?”

“It will be mobbed of course it will” is what everyone says, but each person declares that of course they cannot miss it.

There is so much ritual. Today I learned about the hospital visits with the Liam MacCarthy Cup. The winning team made visits to the two childrens’ hospitals in Dublin. This is apparently a yearly ritual for every winning team of the All-Ireland. It happens like clockwork the day after the match. The entire team goes in and shows the Liam McCarthy to the ailing children. There is a lot of posing of team members with children in their pyjamas and with the Liam MacCarthy. It does not matter if the children are from Tipperary nor if the children even like the game of hurling. This is the first time I have heard of this visit.

The radio is full of cancellations. Bingo and many other things all over will be cancelled as the whole county will be rushing to Thurles for the big victory parade and party at the stadium. I will be glad when I do not need to pay any more attention to all of this. There will always be more detail. I will never know enough to know all of it.

21 August Wednesday

The black and white farm cat spends a lot of time looking at the wall. It is waiting for shrews or rats or mice or whatever rodent is living in the spaces between the stones. The cat can wait for hours without moving. The grass in the center of the boreen is high. Sometimes this same cat sits in the tall grass exactly in the middle and it refuses to move even when confronted with a car. It snarls and hisses at the motorcar as if there is a chance it can win. Today it tucked itself down flat as if that might make itself invisible. It almost worked. I think I could have driven over the cat without doing damage to it when it was tucked down low and tight to the ground like that but I am a bit nervous to try it. This is not a likeable cat but still, I do not want to kill it.

22 August Thursday

Derek the Post said he had seen John at a funeral. John was our former postman. He is now retired. He has been ill for a long time but he was fit enough to attend a co-workers funeral. Derek said John was not looking good but at least he was there. Derek said it was a great funeral. He said they gave their fellow postman a grand send-off.  He said, “Give me a funeral over a wedding any day. At least you can have fun at a funeral.”

24 August Saturday

Kathleen gave me news of her grandsons. One of them is 16 and he has a summer job. He has been up every morning at 6 am to milk 250 cows.  She says that he is loving every day of it.

25 August Sunday

Tommie was away in hospital for three weeks but now he is home again. He is glad to be back at home. He says that he is still weak. He is happiest when he is sitting down or lying down. He says that he is not feeling Too Mighty. Margaret went to stay with her sister while he was in hospital. She is not able to stay alone. Usually she does not go much of anywhere at all, so being at her sister’s was a holiday for her. In a normal week she goes to Mass and she goes to have her hair done. These are her two trips out. Sometimes she goes out driving in the car with Tommie but that is not going anywhere. It is just going. The hairdresser has now retired but she continues to do Margaret and three other women who have been her customers for a long time. These women are now invited to go directly to the hairdresser’s house. Tommie is proud that Margaret is one of these chosen few.

26 August Monday

Wild damsons are ripening in the boreen but they are too high to reach.  I do not think even a ladder can get me up high enough to pick them.  Wild honeysuckle and blackberries are everywhere in the ditches. My raspberries are ripening by the minute.  I am already picking them twice a day just to keep up with the quantity. Today was the first day that a morning mist was down over everything. I could not see over the fields. I got wet from the dew while picking our breakfast berries. It felt autumnal and it is not even the end of August. I need to go and check up on the apples in Johnnie Mackin’s orchard as we have no apples on our own trees. The good news is that the mass path is passable again. It is not clear but it is no longer a tangle and a struggle.

27 August Tuesday

The clock in the room of the dental hygienist remains crammed behind the radiator. It has been in this position for twelve years. A few years ago the room was painted. At some time after the paint was dry, the clock was replaced in the same position behind the radiator. Each time I arrive for a cleaning, I feel I should have brought a nail and a hammer.  I could hang the clock on the wall.  I only remember this plan when I am already reclining on the chair. The door into the room has a rectangle cut into it. Or out of it. This hole has also been there for a long time. The hygienist herself wishes that a window would be installed in the cut-out hole. She wishes the hole would be finished off in a tidy fashion.  My theory is that the hole remains a hole because it allows some air into an otherwise airless room.

Destroyer Foam

1 September Sunday

The Lumpy Fields are special. The land is fertile land but it is rough. Disheveled is the way to describe it. It has been a while since I have walked there because the cows use the fields a lot in the summer months. Now I have Jessie and Molly to walk every day and that is where we go. There are many rabbits. Every field is bordered by hundreds of holes. The dogs go mad and run fast to smell everything and to investigate. They are finding their news in the fields.

2 September Monday

Paddy is a farmer. He has been farming all his life. He is 80. He is a big advocate for taking exercise. Two years ago he could not bend down to tie his shoes because he was so stiff. His daughter signed him up for a class in water aerobics. He likes the class and has been attending weekly ever since. He is proud that he is now both fit and flexible. He is proud of his body. Thursday last he was trapped in his tractor. He could not open either door to get out. He was trapped and locked in. He had no reception on his phone. He swung the back window open and crawled up and out over the seat. He is quick to tell everyone he meets that he could not have done that two years ago. Back then he would have had to wait the day out until someone came to find him and rescue him and that would have been if he was lucky. He might have had to wait two days for anyone to notice that he was missing.

3 September Tuesday

I am sitting up in my room. The stench of slurry spread across Joe’s fields is making my eyes water. I hate to close the door on a sunny day but this morning I have no choice.

4 September Wednesday

The raspberries continue to ripen rapidly. I pick them twice a day. I am happy to share them. I am frequently told that I should be making jam. I do not want to make jam. I do not want to do anything with the raspberries. I just want to eat them. I freeze some to eat later. I usually keep one bowlful for us and take another bowlful to someone else. Each time I give the raspberries to anyone they comment that it is late in the year for raspberries. I explain that it is my Autumn Bliss breed but still they behave as though it is not right to be having raspberries at this time of the year. I offered some to Shirley when she was here re-painting a text on the gable end for Simon. She was thrilled. She said she loves raspberries. She announced, “Call me a pleb if you like but I just hate strawberries. I cannot be bothered with them. Of course I eat them out of a tin like everyone else but I would never touch a fresh one.”

5 September Thursday

Gavin is back after three months in Boston. Many Irish college students do this. It is a part of a system called a J2 Visa. The students have permission to work for three months in the USA. They need to get the job beforehand, from a list which the J2 organization has ready. They live crammed into apartments that are too small for the many occupants. They have a wonderful time. Some of the students come home with the money they have earned. Some of them spend everything they earn and return for their last year of university completely broke. Gavin worked for a moving company all summer and he traveled all around both with the job and with his friends. He went out of the city into Massachusetts and to New Hampshire, Cape Cod, Maine and all the way to Washington DC. When I asked how he liked it, he was full of the excitement and the heat and the many differences. He commented that he was surprised that he never saw a single cow for the entire time he was in America. I was surprised that he found this notable enough to mention.

6 September Friday

The big black bull has returned.  He is back in Joe’s front field. He was here for a few weeks and then he was gone and now he is back again. He is curious about me whenever I walk by.  He comes over the the fence and watches as I pass. I like to think that he recognizes me, but I think he is not really interested in me.  He is just bored being in that big field all alone all day long.

7 September Saturday

It was not a good way to wake up. We thought that there were wasps on the outside of the window. Then we realized that they were on the inside of the glass. And we realized that there were a lot of them. We quickly closed the window to stop more from flying into the bedroom. That was a mistake. The wasps were not coming in from outside, they were dropping down one at a time from a tiny hole up in the ceiling light fixture. At short intervals, each wasp squeezed itself out and then hesitated before flying toward the window and the light. The room was full of confused wasps trying to get from where they had been to somewhere else. The noise was loud. Simon began by gently pushing them out the window with a section of newspaper. Then we began to swat at them. Then we got a fly swatter and started to kill aggressively. The vacuum cleaner was next. Alive or dead they got sucked in. We could not keep up with the number dropping down from the ceiling.

The morning was spent getting advice. Everyone has a wasp story. Apparently this year has been a terrible year for wasps. We have had one nest in the roof of the book barn but we have just learned to live with that crowd. We learned that the wasps are all hungry and they are angry and this is the end of their season so they have an air of desperation. I am not sure exactly why they are angry. Kieren told me about a destroyer foam which he says works the best of anything he has ever known and anything he has ever had to sell but he cannot keep it in stock. He sells out of it as soon as he gets it. It is not just the wasps who are desperate. People are desperate too. Wasps are making life hell for everyone. Jim at the market told us that Pat came to his house and rid him of the wasp nest that was in his shed. He did it with a tin of petrol placed in with the nest. We went over to discuss this method with Pat at his vegetable stand. He said he used a long pole to put an open tin into position and by the time the petrol had evaporated the wasps were dead from the fumes. The Co-op had a stock of Destroyer Foam and the woman there was eager to tell us how well it worked.

Back at home we had plenty of wasps still alive inside the vacuum cleaner. We also had them all over the duvet and in drawers and on pieces of clothing and in shoes. Some were dead and some were alive. We also had a few more stragglers coming down through the ceiling light. Simon filled the little holes and then he glued the light onto the ceiling with a long length of timber pressing it up and tight for a few hours so that no more wasps would be able to squeeze through. It took us a while to locate the place outside between the slates where the wasps were going in and out. It was on the opposite side of the house.

We had been instructed to use the destroying foam just before darkness or at dawn, while the wasps were inside and sleeping. There was a sudden moment when the night went from dusk to very dark. We were not paying attention so we kind of missed our slot. We decided that it was too dark to go up a ladder especially not knowing if a swarm of wasps might come rushing out at the person with the can of spray. The first raid was planned for early morning.

8 September Sunday

The guitar group from the Men’s Shed was playing at the market yesterday. 6 or 8 older men with guitars, and one man in a chair with a tambourine and a saxophone which he did not attempt to play at the same time. The men at the Men’s Shed were given guitar lessons a few years ago. Since then they have formed a band. They arrive and perform at the Saturday market a few times a year. Mostly they all sing together as they strum but at one moment a man named Bobby was introduced and he stood his guitar on its stand and sang out: Have you ever been lonely? Have you ever been blue? The whole band crooned along as background.  Within minutes everyone in the market was singing along as they did their shopping. The stallholders and the customers were all singing with Bobby. He had that kind of voice.  It was difficult to keep our attention on the problem of solving our wasp problem because the singing was louder than any advice we were being given.

10 September Tuesday

We are winning the Wasp Wars. There seem to be fewer insects going in and out of the slate opening in the roof. We will continue  the attack until they are gone.

Hard to Put Down The Time

12 September Thursday

Sharon’s dog was run over and killed. She used to have four dogs and this was the last of the family group. She is heartbroken. She explained her sense of loss by saying, “I am finding it very hard to put down the time.” I was not sure what she meant by that but now I know that she simply does not know what to do with herself.

13 September Friday

There are long tendrils with thorns dangling down from branches in the path. They grab at clothing and hair and skin. Walking up there is a bit tricky especially when I reach the place where the crab apples are all over the path. They make the walking deadly. It is like walking uphill over ball-bearings, but if I try to duck out of the way of the clingy tendrils I am certain to spin out of control on the apples. All it takes is a branch to fall and the entire architecture of the path is changed again.

14 September Saturday

We produced a shopping bag to commemorate our dear friend Joan who died this summer. She loved the Farmer’s Market and she loved this poem by William Carlos Williams, so we thought this a fine way to remember her.

15 September Sunday

A dog appeared in the yard. It was old and yellow. I think it was some kind of a Lab but I did not recognize it. It is always a surprise when I do not recognize a dog. I walked outside to greet it and then I heard voices over in Joe’s field. A young man popped his head around and asked if he could cross over the land as he could not easily get through the top gate due to the brambles and thorns. I said yes but told him to be careful of the fence as it is about to fall down and the stile looks sturdy but it is not. He hopped over the fence and four more dogs came rushing through as did a young blonde girl. Maybe she was his sister. None of the dogs were hunting dogs. They were just mixed breeds out for a chaotic walk. I commented on the number of dogs and he said he usually has more with him than the five but today he was traveling light just out on the hunt for some deer. He had a shot gun which startled me. I forgot that it was the beginning of the hunting season. For the next few hours I heard him up on Keating’s hill with a loud horn. It was the kind of horn they use for fox-hunting. He and his dogs and his sister, if it was his sister, criss-crossed back and forth through the woods and the bushes for a long time. I never heard a gun shot but he blew the hunting horn again and again.

16 September Monday

An Post has new vans. A few years ago they changed all the delivery vans from green to white with a flying postman stretched diagonally across the side of each van. No one liked the white vans.  We all liked the green vans. Now they have changed them again – this time to a terrible plasticky kind of green. They are ugly.  The new vans are a bit longer and they are a hybrid vehicle which is a good thing.  Derek told us that there is a new man in charge at An Post. He said that the man used to work in television so he knows a lot about telling people what they should like. None of the postmen are happy with the new vans. The new boss is phasing out all deliveries by bicycle too. This is causing a quiet uproar.

17 September Tuesday

The man was waiting his turn. When he got to the desk he told the librarian he wanted to get a library card. She asked if he had ever had one in this library before. He said No. She asked if he had ever held a library card at another library anywhere in the country and he said No. She raised her voice and demanded, “Well, and why not?”

18 September Wednesday

The National Ploughing Championships are being held up in County Carlow. The yearly three day event moves around the country. It is always held in a location where there is plenty of land for the various ploughing competitions and farm equipment demonstrations plus all of the other activities around the business of farming. It is unusually good weather for it this year. No rain and no cold, just day after day of glorious sunshine. People are flocking to attend. I know a lot about The Ploughing without ever attending. In that way, it is much like the All-Ireland Match. I find out more than I ever want to know without trying. It does not matter if I am interested because it is part of the background. Everyone discusses who is going to The Ploughing and who has gone to The Ploughing. The radio is full of interviews and songs and various special interest items all being broadcast Direct from the Ploughing. This morning I heard about two brothers just back from Minnesota where they won silver medals for some particular form of ploughing. They were looking forward to competing back here at home. It is important for politicians to attend The Ploughing and to be seen among their constituents. The build-up in the weeks before The Ploughing are always full of radio excitement and there was much advice about preparation. I heard a lot about Hoof Polishing. I am not sure why the hooves of a cow need to be polished, but it is subject about which there are strong opinions.

19 September Thursday

Willie has an answer for everything. Today he said, “Sure, why say it is Bad when you can say it is Not Good.”

20 September Friday

I sat on a cement wall in the hot sun at the petrol station while a young boy power-sprayed manure and mud from the tyre wells and the bottom of the car. The car is scheduled for the NCT vehicle inspection test on Saturday. If manure falls on the heads of the inspection men they will not be happy. They might well fail the car for that. We are living below the farm line. We cannot drive in or out the boreen without going through the yard. The cows cross that way often so there is always a build-up of muck. It is much worse in wet weather than in dry weather. Lucky for me it has been a dry week. When the boy finished spraying there were huge clumps of mud and manure all over the ground underneath the car. He assumed I must be a farmer myself. He said, “With that much muck, I would have thought you would be off up The Ploughing with all the others.”

21 September Saturday

Everyone sits together in a very small waiting room as their cars are tested.  Everyone listens when one of the inspectors come out with the result of each car.  It is impossible not to listen, or at least to overhear.  An inspector calls out a name.  He shouts out the name of the car owner on the certificate even though that might not be the name of the person who has brought the car in for the test.  “Now—Kitty O’Gorman’s car!” I was already nervous because our car is 22 years old. When the inspector called for me, he jumped right in on the attack. The NCT are eager to get old cars off the road. This man was especially harsh about the small bit of paint that Mike sprayed up along a brake pipe to cover what he said was a tiny area of rust. The man pronounced, “You cannot just cover over something like that!” He said it three times. His voice got louder each time. He was angry to think I was trying to trick him. The car failed the test. Usually with A Fail, everyone in the room looks on with commiseration and a slight feeling of fear that the same thing might happen to them. In this case, since the inspector was shouting at me, everyone in the chairs in the small waiting room kept their heads down. No one looked at me as I left.

22 September Sunday

I walked into St. John’s, the Protestant Cathedral in Cashel, because the door was open. I had never been inside before. The door is usually locked when I am in the area. They were about to begin a special Harvest service. I did not stay for the service but I admired the apples and vegetables placed here and there as decoration.

Everything is Grand.

23 September Monday

The car situation is not as dire as feared. Mike says he can repair what is wrong next week and if we pass the re-test we can put off looking for a new car. Or else we can take our time looking for the right second-hand car. At least we need not leap into a decision.

24 September Tuesday

A sparrow hawk sits on a utility pole between here and Old Grange. He has been on the same pole every day for a week. He sits very very still and moves his head slowly from left to right, right to left and left to right again. The movement is so slight he could be almost asleep. When he sees the prey he wants he swoops off from his pole and he moves fast.  He is gone in a flash.

25 September Wednesday

What a week for weather. Rain. Sun. Rain. Sun. Rain. Rain. Rain. It is hard to do much out of doors. I am keeping a close eye on the cows in Joe’s field. They are not in the near field but they are in the field just beside the near field. They are very close. If they come back tonight after milking and move into the near field as is their normal way, they will barely be contained. The fence is rotten. The ground is wet and the wood is wet and the fence is old and now it is rotten. It is not rotting. It has rotted. In the last few months, we have propped up bits of the fence and nailed lengths of wood along the horizontal parts but now our temporary fixes are not enough. The posts are rotting from the ground up. We know that Joe is aware of the problem. He will get around to repairing the fence when he has a chance. I just hope he doesn’t forget and let the cows into the near field because if they are in that field they will be here in our yard in a matter of minutes. With everything so wet and so squishy their heavy feet will make a terrible mess.

26 September Thursday

I have received a Jury Summons. I really do not want to sit on a jury again. It was 2016 when I did so before. The older man who was on trail was defending himself although he knew little or nothing of the legal process. He attended proceedings wearing the jacket, waistcoat and trousers from three different tweed suits. He did not wear a tie but his white shirt was clean and buttoned right up to the top. The case was confusing as it involved the accusation of himself entering a solicitors office and throwing a large quantity of used motor oil along the receptionist’s counter and onto the carpet. He made a terrible mess and then he raced out of town on a red bicycle followed by a female Garda on her own bicycle who stood up in court as a witness. After a prolonged flapping of papers, the accused announced to the court that he had never owned a red bicycle. Things in the courtroom progressed very slowly. After several days of this kind of slow procedure, the man changed his plea to Guilty and we. the jury, were sent home. I never understood why he was angry at the solicitor nor why he chose to throw oil around as a way to vent his anger.

27 September Friday

So far the cows have not arrived in the yard. They now appear to be held at a close distance by a thin string. It is that kind of white string stretched taut between metal posts. The string has a little thin bit of wire with an electric charge in it and I think the cows have learned not to touch it. Sometimes I do not believe there really is a charge in the string. I think the cows just believe there is a charge when they recognize the white string so they stay well away from it.

28 September Saturday

I meet the Dulux Man every Saturday. Every Saturday he asks me if I have found a new dog yet. Every Saturday I tell him I have not found a new dog. I tell him that I am not really looking. Or I say that I am not actively looking to find a new dog but if the right dog happened along I would not be averse to the idea. His current dog is a spaniel and she is perpetually eager to go. She is always tugging at the leash which helps to keep conversations with the Dulux Man brief. He tells me that he takes the dog out four or five times a day so sometimes people say to him that they have not seen him out walking that day but he says that his walking times are always changing and the dog does not mind so neither does he. He never speaks of the dog by a name. The dog is just She. The Dulux Man spends a while at the market talking to the people who are there every week. He talks to those who are customers and those who are vendors. He does not buy anything himself. He just talks. He always wears one of those fishing vests with many pockets. In the summer, he wears a sleeveless T-shirt underneath the vest and when the temperature drops he puts on a long sleeved shirt. It is only September but he has already moved into his long-sleeved mode. I do not know his name so I still call him the Dulux Man in my head. He does not know my name but he does not care. He remembers my dog and dogs are what interest him. One Saturday he told me that his mother was originally from Cahir but she moved over to England when she was young and that is where she lived and that is where he lived too somewhere near Lancaster until he came over here and he has been here since. These are the things I know about him. It is rare that we speak of anything except dogs.

29 September Sunday

They call the mannequin Mandy. She is propped up near the potatoes when there are any potatoes growing. Otherwise she just stands or leans around somewhere outside. Robert had some duct tape wrapped around her private parts “Just for The Decency” he said, because her old clothes had worn out or blown to bits or somehow fell off when they moved to the new house. Brendan came up on his tractor to break up the soil with a rotavater. He was shocked by Mandy’s near nudity so he halted his work and drove all the way back to his own house and went upstairs and found some of the clothes left in the press by his mother. His mother has been dead now for at least ten years. He chose an outfit for Mandy and drove back up to Robert’s house on his tractor. Driving from Robert’s to Brendan’s house and back again is a slow enough journey on the tractor. It took Brendan most of the morning. He dressed the mannequin carefully and stood her up beside the ditch. He then finished the job he’d been hired for which was the tilling of the soil.

30 September Monday

Everything is Grand. An event is Grand. Dinner is Grand. The weather or a day can be Grand. Grand can be a refusal as well as a positive description. If someone is offered a cup of tea and they do not want a cup of tea they will say “No, you’re Grand.” Or “I’m Grand.” Getting the hay in before a rain is Grand. If something is suggested to do or to be done, the answer to imply agreement will be “Grand”. It is a multi-purpose word which gets used every day in a great number of ways. I doubt I will ever get all of the ways.

1 October Tuesday

It is a simple method for making a tall support. One barrel is placed on top of another barrel. Both ends are cut off the top barrel. The bottom barrel might have its bottom cut off or it might be left on to help to keep the shape. The two are held together somehow while they are filled with a cement mix. When the concrete is hard this makes for a tall strong column. The column can be used to hold up a fence or a gate. I am sure it can be used for others things but what it cannot do is to be moved.

Evening Is Gone Altogether.

2 October Wednesday

I am pleased to announce that Living Locally has been reprinted by Uniformbooks, with financial assistance from A Purse For Books. It presents a distilled selection of the years 2007-2012 from this blog, and is illustrated with my drawings of rusted metal objects. The new blue cover is even brighter and bluer than the original.  I could not be happier.

To order from Coracle:            coracle.ie/living-locally-2/

3 October Thursday

Three Garda had set up a little road block. Every vehicle had to stop. There was no way to continue without stopping. Maybe they were checking to see if people had paid their road tax and if they had up to date insurance. Or maybe it was going to be a breathalyzer test. The laws for Drink Driving have become very strict. The police are checking people at night and they are also checking people in the morning because the medical experts say that it takes 18 hours for alcohol to leave the blood system. People get stopped on their way to work and pulled in for Drink Driving which means it is hard to have a glass of wine with dinner if you know you are going out the next morning. I waited for the two cars in front of me. When I got up to the officer in charge, I said, “Good Morning, Sir. What are you looking for today?” The man leaned right over to my window and said in a hushed voice, “We are looking for Americans but it’s okay. Now we have found one.” He stood up straight and waved me along.

4 October Friday

We were all waiting with excitement and trepidation for the arrival of Storm Lorenzo. The radio was full of news and warnings and sandbags. We knew that Galway and the west would get a great whacking when the storm came in off the ocean. The coastal areas were mostly under threat. All day Thursday, every conversation turned to Lorenzo. Storm Lorenzo was quickly shortened to Lorenzo. He was a threat but we already knew him. We were on intimate first-name terms with him. Each time the radio was on there was more news about where Lorenzo was, and what route he was taking and whether the warnings were Yellow or Orange. There was preparation in cities, towns and in the countryside, and in the homeless shelters. Battered and Blown were oft-used words. Bingo and Line Dancing and Bridge Clubs were cancelled all over the county. We were told to keep our mobile phones charged up and we were instructed how to call emergency numbers even if the lines and phone towers go down. We were told to have a battery-fed radio with fresh batteries at the ready, as well as candles and torches. Everyone was told to stay home and off the roads and if we did need to be out for any reason at all, we needed to watch out for trees and branches falling or already fallen. We were told that the trees were more dangerous because they were still so heavy. Heavy with what? I asked. The answer was leaves. The trees have not yet lost their leaves so they are heavier with leaves than they will be later when their leaves have fallen. We went to bed with the sound of the gusting wind. We woke up to the sound of gusting wind.
Today we are hearing reports from all over the country. Lorenzo was not as devastating as predicted. There are lots of congratulations at how well prepared we were. The wind continues. The wind is blowing and thrashing and blowing and gusting. It has not stopped once all night and all day.

5 October Saturday

Michael has been pestering us for months. He has been inviting us to come and look at his Old Books. He has been promising us that his books are old and that they are valuable and that we will want to come and look at them. He was convinced that the books are valuable simply because they were old. Today was the day. We could no longer escape. He rushed out to his shed and pulled some books from a high shelf. Then he ran upstairs in the house and brought down several more books. A few of the books had covers but the covers were not the covers that had been on the books originally. At some point the books had been roughly torn out of their hard covers. Most of the books had been shoved back into a cover that was not the cover that belonged with the book block. Some of the pages had been used by children as paper for drawing. Some of the pages had been used for lists or for drawn diagrams. Many pages had been nibbled by mice and most were swollen with dampness. There was not one complete book among the 10 or 12 Valuable Volumes. We tried to explain that the books were indeed old but that old is not enough to make a book valuable. Michael became angry with us. The whole time he was talking his cigarette lighter was swinging back and forth. He had it attached to the lapel of his jacket with a safety pin. I could not take my eyes off it. He said that we were frauds and that we did not know anything about books. He said we were of No Use To Him At All.

6 October Sunday

It has been raining off and on for days. Today was sunny and almost warm. By late afternoon there was no excuse. The grass was dry. We needed to cut it. It was a rapid kind of mowing just so that everything that has grown long does not get out of control. The time available to cut grass gets smaller and smaller as the days get shorter. By the time the morning dew has dried off, it might nearly be dark. Mowing in the dark is a bad idea. Cutting the paths down through the long meadow grass makes everything look sharp and crisp. When the grassy middle of the boreen gets very long and starts to rub against the bottom of the car we know it is well past time to cut it. It does not get cut every time the rest of the grass gets cut. There is not much I like better than the look of the Freshly Mown Middle.

7 October Monday

The nights are drawing in. Each day feels shorter than the day before. Today it was not fully light until almost 8 o’clock. The sunset will be at 18.54. If a day is grey and rainy it feels much shorter than a bright day. Conversations are punctuated with a shake of the head and the words, “Ah, Now. The evenings are gone altogether.” Evening is the word for afternoon. Evening is followed by night. If evening is gone altogether then we proceed directly from morning to night. This is all a bit depressing.

8 October Tuesday

The raspberries continue to ripen so I continue to pick them. There are fewer berries each day so my gathering work is now once a day rather than twice a day. It is better if I pick at the end of the day because the mornings are so wet with dew.  The freezer is full of bagged berries. Raspberry vinegar is quietly fermenting. Instead of two large bowls every day, I bring in one not so large bowl a day.  Everyone we know has received bowls of berries. It has been easy to be generous with such bounty.

___________________

From Slow Boat Review by Nick Holton:

Robert Walser quoted in the opening pages of Living Locally:
“What I saw was as small and poor as it was large and significant, as modest as it was charming, as near as it was good, and as delightful as it was warm.”

When I established SlowBoat in it’s current iteration just over a year ago I would explicitly reference each post against one of the six themes that run beneath the surface of the content – boat / silence / seasonality / sense of place (navigating) / savouring / simplicity – however as the year has passed I’ve increasingly seen posts crossing my self-imposed thematic boundaries and touch on several, or all, themes in the one post.
This book review is a case in point. Artist, writer, printer, and bookmaker Erica Van Horn’s Living Locally is a celebration of simplicity, sense of place, savouring and seasonality.
A ‘chronicle of place’, direct, simple, ‘attention to the everyday’, essential, elemental, colloquial, ‘strangeness found in such a concentration of repetition and usage’. I could take a few lessons from Van Horn when writing blog posts! The fact is this selection from her journals of life in rural Ireland is pretty much perfect.The writing is crystalline in its eloquent simplicity. What she achieves with brevity and gentle repetition is a complete picture of a community, it’s roots, it’s people, the weather, the days chores. It’s a wonderful, admirable and quietly seductive piece of writing. And it gets under your skin, in a good way. It’s neither whimsical nor overtly nostalgic, the descriptive narratives are just that. Acutely observed, bittersweet, astute, comic, warm, Van Horn tells simple tales profoundly well.
I found the book as effective an antidote to our gloomy, strife-torn modern world as you’re likely to get.

Disembodied Hands

9 October Wednesday

Alistair visited from Orkney. We walked together up the mass path and stopped to collect horse chestnuts the top. I was filling my pockets with bright shiny conkers and he was collecting the ones barely visible and still in their prickly outer husks. He told me that there are no horse chestnut trees on Orkney. He was gathering a selection of the spiky leathery capsules to show to his grandson who has never seen horse chestnuts. Now I think of Alistair’s grandson every time I pass whatever bounty the tree has dropped since I last walked that way. I do not know the name of this little boy.  I think of him as Alistair’s grandson. Today I was bending down and collecting a few more chestnuts when I was thumped from behind and knocked to my knees. It was Jessie the new dog at the Shine’s house. Jessie is another one of those names that people give to dogs but rarely to people. There is always another female dog called Jessie. This Jessie is a St Bernard puppy. At five months old, she is already the size of a small pony and she loves to jump up on people. She has no idea how strong she is. I dread to think how big she will be when she is fully grown.

10 October Thursday

His appointment with the nurse was cancelled due to A Bereavement. He will have to wait God only knows how long for another appointment. Everything stops for A Bereavement and the How Long part is never clear. Grief is not a finite thing. There might be travel to be considered and there may be obligations. No employer can deny how much time can be taken off work for A Bereavement. I think two or three days are considered normal and after that things are up for negotiation.

11 October Friday

The days are getting cooler and Alma’s dog is getting older. The old dog spends most of her day sleeping in the Hot Press. Alma is getting older too so she understands this need for sleep. Alma’s biggest worry is that she will close the door to the Hot Press and forget that Susie is inside.

12 October Saturday

A lot of rain. A lot of wet. There is mud everywhere. I drove around the corner and slid from one side of the track to the other. I had no control of the vehicle. The mud was in charge. John watched me slide. When I got out of the car, he said, “You Got Taken.”

14 October Monday

The announcement is at the entrance to the little park at the Old Bridge. THE FAMILY THAT PRAY TOGETHER STAY TOGETHER is freshly re-painted every year. I love the disembodied hands. The fingers made of concrete get thicker and more stubby looking with each new coat of paint.

The Virgin and her surrounding structure, which is somewhere between a boat and a bathtub, are also repainted regularly. It is the same shade of blue that is used for any painting of grottoes and statues.  I think of it as Virgin Blue. The stones in the stone wall are painted white.  The halo which used to be a glowing blue neon is now just a wire structure. The glass has been broken and It has not been replaced. If I pass by at night the halo is no longer illuminated but since I remember that it used to be lit, my mind keeps the glow going. The wire looks more like a lampshade than it ever did when it was supporting the neon.

It’s a Tonic.

1 November Friday

Not every bus journey is a good journey. Every so often the bus we board is a terrible old broken-down vehicle and I wonder how and why they ever let that bus out of the depot. Today’s bus was a bad bus. Many of the seats were broken in one way or another. Some of them were leaning backwards nearly horizontal and several were leaning forward so far that no one could possibly sit on the seat. All of the seats were stained. It is difficult, at first glance, to tell if a stain is fresh and wet and sticky, or just a dry discoloring on the old and grubby upholstery. There were no outlets for plugging in and charging phones. All of the tray tables had been broken off. The only good thing was that it was one of the increasingly rare buses with the exuberant running Irish setter on the woven seat covering fabric.

An older man boarded. He shook hands with everyone in the seats all around him before he sat himself down. He pronounced to the bus at large: “It is a fine day. A fine day to travel by bus.”  He added, “It is good to get away for a day. It’s a tonic.” He did not appear to notice that he was reclining well below the level of the windows on his broken seat.

2 November Saturday

There is a lot of moss everywhere because there has been so much rain and everything is sodden. I am always pleased to see moss growing and glowing down the center of the tar road. It is not exactly growing. It is a smudge. It acts to remind us all that even though the road is supposed to be wide enough for two vehicles we all drive right down the middle as if it were made for just one. The moss is safe to continue growing down the middle. There is no chance that it will be run over and destroyed by tyres.

4 November Monday

I was sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. TippFm was playing quietly on the radio. A special announcement cut in and interrupted the programme to say that Gay Byrne had died. There was only one other person in the room. It was an elderly woman. Her left hand shot right into the the air with her finger pointing upward almost before the announcement was finished. It was the gesture of someone raising their hand to speak in a classroom. She called across to the receptionist in her cubicle and said, “Did you hear that? Gay Byrne is dead!” The receptionist had missed the announcement because she was busy. Together they discussed how very good he was for so many years. Was it 35 or was it 37 years? They agreed that he was brilliant, especially on The Controversial Ideas.
A man came out of the doctor’s rooms and the woman told him right away that Gay Byrne had died.
He looked sad, and a little confused and he asked, “Oooohhh. Ah. No. And how old was he now?”
“He was 85. Such a man. Such a man.”
After the man left, the woman still wanted to talk about Gay Byrne. As a broadcaster and announcer on radio and TV and because of the Late Late Show, everyone in the entire country feels that they know Gay Byrne personally. He was a regular part of life for a long time. Many speak of him fondly as Gaybo. A nickname like that makes him into family. The woman was determined to continue to be the bringer of this news but there was no one left to tell except for me. I was seated only two chairs away, but I was reading my book with my head down.  She turned to me and said, “Erica, did you hear that Gay Byrne died?” I was startled to be addressed by my name. But, of course, she already knew my name because when I first arrived into the waiting room, I had gone to the loo and when I came out of the loo, I told the receptionist that someone had peed all over the floor. I said this quietly, but the receptionist answered in a firm and loud voice. She said, “Thank you, Erica!” She said, “I do not want to know but of course I need to know, so thank you, Erica.” She went off to get a mop and I took a seat to await my turn. That is why the old woman knew my name and that is why I got dragged into the conversation about Gay Byrne being dead.

7 November Thursday

The winds have been fierce. Leaves are blowing down from any tree that still has leaves. They blow into the kitchen each time the door is opened. I swept them up and then I swept them up again and now I have ceased sweeping. There are leaves on the floor. Sometimes there are a lot and sometimes there are not so many because they get kicked and shuffled into the edges and corners of the room. As I make a cup of tea or do any other job, I am happy to crunch around on them. They make a good sound on the stone floor. The leaves outside are soggy and wet and they make no sound at all when I step on them.

You Can’t Go Near It For The Weather.

24 November Sunday

There was a terrible noise of yelping and baying and barking. The hunt was in the valley. I am not a fan of the hunt. I dislike the advantage of the dressed-up people on horseback. The one who has the horn is called The Master. He is constantly bellowing and blowing and shouting to the dogs and to the other riders across the fields. I hate the fox being hounded out of his world and running for his life. At one point the noise of the dogs down by the stream got louder and louder. I could not stand it for another minute. It sounded like they had cornered the fox. I rushed down the path to shout at the dogs and to confuse them with a different command from a different human. I was running downhill as fast as I could on the rough ground wearing rubber boots. The ground was slippery with wet leaves and muddy grass. I nearly collided with the fox who was rushing uphill to escape the dogs. I do not know which of us was more startled. He turned abruptly and rushed back towards the dogs who were baying. They obviously thought they already had him cornered in some place that he had already slipped away from. The fox did not know that I was there to help him. He could not know that I was not trying to hurt him. I felt terrible. I had foiled his escape route and scared him even more. I felt better when I could tell by the dog sounds that they knew the fox had eluded them. He must have veered left and up into Joe’s field. After that the dogs continued their chaotic running in all directions. I chased them out of the yard each time they arrived until they finally disappeared up and into Donal’s fields.

25 November Monday

Everything is wet. It feels like it has been raining forever. Everything that is not wet and underwater is covered with moss. There is a mossy covering all over everything. The moss grows on rocks and hard surfaces. It loves the damp. It is bright green and cheerful but it is wet. Fields are flooded and there are sandbags all over the place. Everything everywhere underfoot is squishy and slippery. I cannot drive through the farmyard without mud and muck splashing all over the car. And I can neither get in nor out of the car without a special kind of push and leap movement. If I forget to do my leap I end up with a thick line of mud across the back of the right leg of my trousers. Everyday someone tells me that I have mud on my trousers. It is always a woman who tells me. It is always someone telling me nicely and quietly because they think that of course I will want to know. They are certain that I do not want to be out and about in town nor anywhere else with a big clump on mud on my trousers. I always say thank you and I act a little surprised to find that I have mud on my leg. I do not tell them that this is an every day event and that it is not just mud but it is mainly cow manure. It is a greenish brown kind of mud and manure mix because the cows are still eating grass and the color of the manure reflects that. The boreen goes right through the farmyard so I have no choice but to drive through the muck. And it does not matter how often I clean the side of the car the splash-up happens again the minute I drive through the yard. Soon the cows will be moved up onto their winter platform and they will not be crossing the road anymore. The ground will freeze so there will be less mud. I hardly dare to hope that this rain will stop.

26 November Tuesday

There is a dead mouse in my workroom. I cannot find it but I can smell it. The stench is bad. There are big fat flies looping about. These are the kind of flies that gather around death. It is probably best that I cannot find the corpse. It is too cold to leave the door open to get rid of the smell. I have been burning a scented candle that someone gave to me as a gift. It is the kind of gift that someone else gave to that someone. And that someone saved it until it was time to pass it on to someone else. No one wants this candle. It has a terrible smell all of its own. I liken it to a floral toilet cleaner. Who makes these candles? Who thinks they are a good idea? Who thinks they smell good? I lit the candle and headed out for a walk. Between the smell of the dead mouse and that of the stinky candle, it was impossible to stay in my room.

27 November Wednesday

Ned Shine arrived in the yard in his Hedge Cutter. The machine is always called the Hedge Cutter even though the hedges are always called ditches. Ned was cutting the ditches with his Hedge Cutter. He opened the door of the cab so that we could say hello to one another. His sheepdog was in the cab with him. I could not see the dog until the door was open because she was well below the level of the window. She was tucked in beside Ned’s feet. The dog’s face and my face were exactly across from one another.  I was standing on the ground and she was sitting in the cab. I have never seen this dog before.  I do not know her and she does not know me. That did not seem to matter. She began to lick my face as soon as the door opened. When she was finished licking me, I closed the door and Ned continued with his hedge cutting.

29 November Friday

The woman told the man in the shop to Leave It Into The Bag. Leave is frequently used in place of the word Put.

1 December Sunday

It was dry enough this morning to spend time plucking figs. It is one of those jobs I have been meaning to do for the whole month of November. It was one of many jobs that we could not do because of the rain.  The excuse everyone repeats is that You Can’t Go Near It For The Weather. The fig leaves had already died and dried and fallen so the fruits were easily visible. The rule is to pick all of the figs except the ones that are the size of the smallest fingernail. The tiny tiny remaining figs will be the first ones to begin their growth in the spring. Because the morning was sharp and cold, I found that I was snapping the figs off rather than plucking them off the branches.

2 December Monday

I got a text announcing that a short film had been made about Frank’s shop in Grange. The shop has been closed for several years now. Frank became ill, and his son Shay ran it for a while, but then the family decided to just stop completely.  We none of us knew if it might be re-opened at a later date.  We hoped that it would be re-opened. We all miss Frank’s shop. The film about the shop was made by a grandson named Michael. There was a showing of the film in the Village Hall in October.  Unfortunately, I missed the viewing. I heard later that the Hall was completely packed out with family and friends. It was standing room only.  It was perfect for Frank and his wife to walk the very few steps from their house to the Hall. They were the stars of the evening. Today PJ sent me this link for the film.  I have already watched it four times. I wish it went on for longer.

https://vimeo.com/372622526

3 December Tuesday

I found the dead mouse. Most of the stench had already evaporated. It was not the burning of the candle that eliminated the smell. It was the drying out of the corpse. I opened a box containing our small concertina After Brancusi. Dozens of enormous bluebottle flies came flying out smashing into my face and collecting all over my head. I rushed the box outside and the remaining flies flew away. The dead mouse was resting in a sorry clump on top of the little volumes. I could see that some of the contents would need to be thrown away. As would the box. Enough bodily fluids had escaped to render some things ruined. After the mouse was removed what could be rescued was rescued. And once free of the distraction of death, I enjoyed looking at my drawing of the bench which was my whole reason for opening the box in the first place.

Seven Thirty.

When the post man finds the gates across the road he uses it as an excuse to not drive down the boreen. He just marks on the letter Gates Locked and that gives him permission to leave our post in the van overnight or even for several nights.

12 December Thursday

We entered the airport through the arrival doors and we were hit with a blast of noise.  There was Irish music playing loudly on some kind of CD player or portable sound system and a row of five children in school uniforms dancing energetically. This was a welcome home performance for the many people arriving home from far away for the Christmas holidays. At a pause in the music, the five dancing children were shoved out of the way by another five children who took their places and danced and jigged like mad with their hands on their hips and big smiles on their faces. Another group pushed them roughly out of the way and they began to dance. This continued for as long as we watched. Then we were pushed out of the way by the next group of people off another flight coming through the arrivals door.

13 December Friday

A few years ago, Joe devised a new and sort of rigid system of keeping the gates drawn across so that the cows can move from the field to the yard or from the yard out into the fields. When the gates are pulled across and blocking the car passing, it is inevitably a wet day. It is always a muddy and mucky mess at the top by the farm and it is never the kind of day when I want to get out and go to find someone to open the gates. I could do it myself but that would assume that I am wearing boots and that I do not mind walking in the muck. I always have the wrong sort of shoes for that job and anyway I rarely want to fill the inside of the car with mud and manure. In recent weeks, there has been a new man working with Joe. I assume he is Polish. But he might be Latvian or Moldovian or even Lithuanian. He is definitely Eastern European. He was very cheerful when I needed the gate opened today and then when I came back a little later and the gates were still blocking me he was cheerful again. His English is poor but he told me to just lay on the horn and he would come to open up for me. “No problem.” He said and he repeated: “No problem.”

14 December Saturday

Jim found mouse droppings in his bag of oats. He likes to be the one to prepare the porridge every morning. He makes the porridge for himself and for Margo. Margo is the Polish woman who is living in the house as a carer for Jim. Her real name is not Margo but not one person could pronounce her Polish name so Jim called her Margo. Now everyone else calls her Margo too. Jim is 93 and he cannot be alone at night. Margo has her own rooms upstairs and she is there Just In Case there is a need for her. When Jim found the mouse droppings he said that it was a fiddly job to separate them from the oats. He said that he did not mind that a mouse had been in the oats but that he himself would not be the one to pick out the droppings. He told Margot that this would be a good job for her. He told her that she could separate all of the mouse droppings from the oats and he would stick to the more pressing job of preparing their porridge for breakfast.

15 December Sunday

Laurence has been in and out of hospital and now he is at home again. He looks frail but he seems happy to be back. I asked John how his father was doing and he answered that “He’d want to be as Good as he is.”

16 December Monday

Adrian was weighing some parcels for me in his post office cubicle. A man was behind me waiting for his turn at the counter. He was not directly behind me but he was over near the bird seed and the dog foods just looking at things in a relaxed manner. It was not like being in line but it was obvious to both him and to me that he was next and anyway we were the only people there. The radio in the shop was playing some Christmas music. The man was facing towards the bird nuts with his back to me when he started to sing along with the carols. As he got warmed up his voice got louder and he began to harmonize. He sang in a beautiful voice. When I was finished I nodded to him and said “Thank you for the singing.” He nodded back and continued to sing as he walked over to the counter. The song on the radio was not over yet so the man did not stop singing until the song came to an end.

17 December Tuesday

I asked for black ink cartridges. The woman in the small shop had blue ink cartridges. She had no black ink. She said, “Blue is the correct color for ink. There is no one alive who needs to write with black ink. No one in their right mind would use black ink. Blue is the color for ink.” She was so vehement that I bought the blue ink cartridges even though I did not want them. I wanted black ink. I still want black ink. Now I will have to wait until I use up the blue ink before I can move back to black ink. I am going to make myself use the blue ink. Just to think about it again and again. I shall write a lot and frequently with that pen until I use up the blue ink. Luckily I only bought the one packet. And I will have to find a different shop.

18 December Wednesday

After living here these many years, I still say Seven Thirty instead of Half Seven. And the day after Christmas is just the day after Christmas. But I cannot say that out loud. It is yet another example of how I get things wrong. The day after Christmas is Stephen’s Day or it is St. Stephen’s Day. If I were to say it is Boxing Day that would be incorrect because that is what the English call it. No one here says Boxing Day. And no one says Merry Christmas. It is Happy Christmas. Happy not Merry. Merry would mark me as from somewhere else, as if my accent does not already do that. Nor do I call the Nativity scene The Crib. If I speak of it at all, I would call it the Nativity or the Manger. No one says The Manger. It is always The Crib. The Baby Jesus is in The Crib. The whole scene with the shepherds and the kings and Mary and everyone else is called The Crib. And when people say that they will see me in the New Year they punctuate their good wishes by saying Please God or God Willing. These are two more expressions that are not in my vocabulary. I am consistently marked by the things I get wrong.

19 December Thursday

The fence has fallen down. It has been propped up many times, first from one side and then from the other side.  I think this is the end. The posts are rotten from the bottom up. The rain and the mud have won. The wild strong winds of last night were the final straw. The wind just blew the fence down. There is no way it will ever stand again. The west of the country was badly hit by these winds.  Losing our already wobbly fence is not much of a problem in comparison. Even the little stile step has given up.

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He Is Not Keen On Caps.

21 December Saturday

Our usual system has fallen asunder. Derek the postman was off work with a bad back so the post all got piled up inside the box instead of being put into the shed which is the norm when we are away. The substitute postman did not know the system, nor did he have the key to the shed since Derek still had that and he was in too much pain to be worrying about passing on our shed key to the man taking over his delivery route. The old tool box which we have been using as a post box let in the rain after too many days of heavy heavy downpour. Half of everything was sitting inside the box and under several inches of water when we found it. It was not a real problem. Most ink is waterproof these days. It was just a matter of drying letters out on the radiator before opening them. An attempt to remedy the problem in anticipation of future torrential rain was to buy a new plastic box which looked good in the Co-op, but it is really a bit light for the job. We have several weights in the bottom so that the wind cannot move it around and then another stone has been placed on top. There is also a piece of wood under the front edge just to tip the box a little to stop a huge and deep lake forming in the cover. There are clips to hold the lid on but if they are not clipped and the wind is ferocious the whole top blows away. Stone and all. This new box is not ideal. Now I am wondering if we should just return to the rusty tool box and hope that there will not be another prolonged period of heavy rain.

25 December Wednesday

There are two feeders full of peanuts hanging on a tree just outside the window. The birds all go for the feeder on the right. There are five or six different kinds of small birds eating at the feeders. Chaffinches. Bullfinches. Blue Tits. Robins. Gold Crests. House Sparrows. Wrens. Maybe there are others too. Every single one of them prefers to eat from the green feeder. The feeder on the right has a green plastic top and a fine metal mesh. The one on the left has a metal top and heavier metal mesh. The green cylinder is emptied hours before the metal one is even one third empty. We watch this happening day after day. I brought the metal feeder indoors and emptied it and scrubbed it with hot water. I thought maybe it had been contaminated in some way and since I rarely remember to wash the feeders, I thought this might be as good a time as any to do it. The cleaned metal feeder did not attract more birds. Next, I moved the feeders. I changed their locations on the tree. The green one was hung where the metal one had been and the metal one was hung where the green one had been. I thought I could trick the birds into going to the metal one which was placed where the green one had been. They have paid no attention to my attempt to confuse. They continue to empty the green feeder first. The birds are all choosing the green topped feeder over the metal topped feeder. I wonder if they can see colour and they prefer the faded green to the not very shiny metal. It does not matter. I wanted to feed the birds and the birds are eating. When the green one is empty they will go for the metal one. Or not.

27 December Friday

The morning was cold and grey. We walked up Middlequarter. Just before turning onto the rough track, we met a woman with two small dogs. The first dog stopped in front of Simon and he refused to move. He was not aggressive. He just stopped. The woman said “He is Not Keen on Cats.” We had no idea what she meant. There were no cats in sight. She nudged the dog forward and patted herself on the head. It was well after she and the dogs had gone that we realized she had said Caps. “He is Not Keen on Caps.” The dog had a problem with Simon’s tweed cap and he had to be jollied along to continue walking. I was surprised that a dog would have such an opinion about headgear.

29 December Sunday

Tommie is up and down to Waterford to visit Margaret in Ardkeen Hospital. She fell and broke her hip again. It might be the same hip that she broke a few years ago or it might be the other hip. He might have told me which hip it was, but I have forgotten.  She had to have two operations to get it right. He said that she is weak but cheerful. Different people take Tommie down to visit with her every other day. He finds the whole journey very tiring. It is almost an hour away and he can no longer drive that far himself. I have offered to drive him but he says he has a waiting list of offers so instead I check up on him on the days when he does not go down to Waterford. Billy Kennedy took him down on the 25th so that he could have his Christmas dinner together with Margaret. She cannot hear much and she cannot see much so all she can do is to worry. She worries about small things. She insisted that Tommie take her blue cardigan home and then she asked him to bring it back. She has been back and forth about her purse too. First she is afraid to have it with her in the hospital and then she is afraid to not have it with her. Tommie put his foot down about that.  He is refusing to take her purse back  to the hospital. Now she wants Tommie to bring her the vase that she made by sticking broken ceramics into plaster. She says it will brighten up her room to have the vase and the artificial flowers there. He says she won’t be able to see it anyway. I think it is important for him to discuss these demands that Margaret makes upon him because besides carrying things back and forth to Waterford, there is not one thing he can do to help her.

30 December Monday

We are seeing shoots of green as daffodils push up and out of the ground. We are not seeing snowdrops yet. The order of everything is wrong.

31 December Tuesday

Another unseasonably mild morning. Two women were standing outside the shop talking. One of them was saying that her tree has lasted well this year. She said it is the best Christmas tree she has ever had. She said it still has not dropped any needles. She has confidence that it will last well right up until Twelfth Night. Her companion said that must be because it was more freshly cut when she brought it into the house. “No,” said the woman, “It is because I have been putting Red Bull into the bucket instead of my usual sugar and water.”

1 January Wednesday

The boreen is full of trees that have fallen over in the winds and because of the rain. The earth is still so wet. Roots cannot hold. The earth has been wet for so long that even though the rains have stopped everything remains soggy. Branches heavily laden with ivy have snapped off. Once again I am crawling on my knees to go underneath trees and climbing over other trees and slipping in the mud just to take a walk. I am wondering why I do not simply go for a walk somewhere else.

2 January Thursday

The pencil selling dispenser is new and shaped like a short fat pencil. The top of the unit has a point like a sharpened pencil. It is made of clear plastic with small drawers to open once a pencil has been selected. The little drawers are labelled from 5B or 5H  right on down to plain H.  Every pencil in the display is a Faber Castell. I believe it is the only kind of everyday pencil sold in the entire country.

3 January Friday

I went into a shop in town to buy a few things. The shelves were nearly empty. They did not even have any milk. More places are opening up again after the holidays but the delivery of supplies has not fully kicked back into operation. I sort of wondered why this shop was open at all. When I went to the counter to pay, the woman at the till offered me a coupon for a discount off my few purchases. I said okay and waited but she did not give me a coupon. Her eyes were darting back and forth and back and forth and she moved her head as though she had a crick in the neck. She said “Look at me. Look at me. Look at my eyes. Look where I am looking. Down! Down! Down to the left!” It almost seemed like she was talking to someone else but I was the only person there. I looked down to the left and there was a piece of paper with four coupons on it. She spoke in a loud whisper. She said, “Pick it up. Pick it up. Rip one off and give it to me. I cannot be seen to be giving it to you, but it is there for the taking. There is a camera installed here now and if they see me giving you the coupons, it will mean my job, but there is no reason why you cannot find them for yourself!” I did as she instructed and when I handed her the coupon, she acted surprised and then she gave me 5 euro off my shopping.

4 January Saturday

Birds are crashing into the windows every day. I think they think it is spring because the days are so mild and things that should not be growing are growing. Most of them fly off but sometimes they knock themselves out when they hit the glass. This afternoon I heard a loud thump. When I went outside, I found a fat robin on the path. She was on her back breathing heavily. After about an hour, she was still there but her breathing was less labored. I picked her up and moved her to the table with a little bit of water and some mashed up nuts. She sat upright and very still for another hour and then a second robin came to collect her and they flew off together.

 

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Dirty Carrots + Small Potatoes

6 January Monday

Today is Women’s Christmas. Little Christmas. Nollaig na mBan. Twelfth Night. Epiphany. Today is the last day of Christmas. The tradition is that all the decorations and signs of the holiday must come down and be put away before the day is over. The tree. The wreath. The cards. The lights. Everything must be cleared away. The men are supposed to take over the duties of the house because the understanding is that the women have been doing all of the cooking and cleaning and everything over the twelve days of Christmas and now they need a break. Women gather together to go out for lunch or afternoon tea or dinner just to be together with other women and to have the chance to eat some different food. Women get together to be without children or responsibilities. I assume all of the holiday stuff has to be completed before the women go out but I am not sure exactly who does all the clearing. It is probably the women.  The new thing I learned is that the kitchen floor must be swept before going to bed on Twelfth Night. Again, I do not know who does the sweeping and is it the very very last thing done before going to bed?

7 January Tuesday

The ground underfoot continues to be muddy and slippery. I have been walking out with Breda’s dogs every day. My current preferred route is up Murphy’s lane and into the fields. The stubble in the field is crunchy even while it is soggy. It does not make sense. The stubble gives no resistance underfoot. When flattened it stops my feet from sinking in to the mud but it is soft and pliable and it still makes a crunching noise. I find the combination of crunchy and soggy at the same time confusing. The dogs don’t mind. They are running and running and running and trying to sniff down every single rabbit hole.

8 January Wednesday

It has been unseasonably mild. There are cows out in fields. Joe’s cows are in a field that has kale in it so this is a winter eating treat for them. It is not normal to see cows out in the fields at this time of year. Most herds are kept under cover in big sheds with open sides so there is air and light but no freedom to roam. They stand on slatted floors so their excrement falls through and they are not standing in their own mess. Standing outside in mud and muck, or inside in muck, causes hoof infections. Joe houses his cows up on a specially constructed platform. The platform is open so the animals are exposed to the elements all winter. I believe this is called an Out Wintering Pad. In the summer months, Joe gets delivery of enormous piles of wood shavings. The shavings get dumped in several piles and he uses the tractor to move them all into a storage place. While they are outside the smell is wonderful and woody. Throughout the winter, fresh shavings get spread down on the outdoor slats and replenished every so often. I find it worrying that the cows are outside in the rain and the cold and the winds all day and all night all winter. Joe has assured me that it is not a problem for the cows. I continue to worry.

9 January Thursday

There is a shed up beside the ruin of Murphy’s cottage. It is open to the elements but the roof is still good. There are three small triangular windows in one wall of the building. Someone laid a piece of sheet glass on the bottom edge of one of the triangles, like a window sill.

 

10 January Friday

The place where I enter the Lumpy Fields is two rusted gates joined together at a single point in the middle. A twisted piece of wire holds the gates together in a precarious kind of balance.  To make the opening big enough to pass through, I use both hands to lift and push the diagonal gate up into a horizontal position and then I slide it along to allow enough space for me to pass between the edge of the gate and the wire of the electric fence. For some reason the fencing wire is always on even though there are no cows in the vicinity. I do not need much space to squeeze through but I have been zapped enough times to want to avoid more shocks. To close the gate, I slide the one along again until there is more weight in the section of gate on the right and it drops back into its angled position. The two gates are old and not very sturdy but the system works.

11 January Saturday

When asked if a man would be running for a local political office again in the upcoming elections, the women seemed to be in agreement that He was very Shook Looking. This did not mean that he had been shaken up nor upset by something.  Mary explained that it meant that he was not looking healthy.

 

12 January Sunday

The farmers market was open at barely half capacity yesterday. There were not many stalls and there was very little to buy. It was windy and cold and drizzling with rain.  I am not sure why any of us were there.  I bought Dirty Carrots and a cauliflower from Pat.  I do not like Dirty Carrots. I have never understood the excitement with which they are greeted. People go looking for Dirty Carrots and they are excited when they find them.  I have no problem with a dirty carrot but I will never understand the lure of Dirty Carrots.  Dirty Carrots have clumps of soil on them. They take a lot of washing. The sink is full of sand and clay after they are washed. I do not think they taste any better than any other carrot. I have been marveling about the attraction of Dirty Carrots for years. I rarely buy them, but because there was so little to purchase yesterday I did buy some. While paying for the Dirty Carrots and the cauliflower, I looked at Pat’s money box. He was using small potatoes in the compartments where the bills were piled up in order to keep his paper money from blowing away.

 

 

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He Has Been Knitting His Own Cardigan.

15 January Wednesday

A courier rang and announced that he was up at the farm. He refused to drive down the boreen. He had a parcel to deliver and it needed a signature. He claimed that he could not and he would not leave it at the shop in the village. I explained that the people at the shop signed for our deliveries all the time. I said it was a system that worked and that it was normal for us. He was not going to do it. He said that if I did not arrive to sign for the parcel he would be obliged to return it to the warehouse. The rain was lashing down. I said he would have to wait a little while as I had no car today and I would have to walk up to meet him. He said he could wait but then he said he would not wait for long. He told me to hurry. I slogged up the track in my rain jacket and my welly boots carrying an umbrella. I carried the umbrella because I knew I would need to protect the parcel on the way back down.  I was hoping it would not be too heavy. He handed me the thing to sign out the window of his van. He had no intention of getting out and getting wet. I passed him the umbrella. He held it over my head while I signed and then he handed me the parcel and returned my umbrella all while sitting up high and dry in his van.

16 January Thursday

The judge in the court case was annoyed. The young man in question was not doing the things he was supposed to be doing. He was not doing the things that he had been ordered to do by the court and he was not doing things in the order that they had been assigned to him. He was not obeying the rules of his probation and the judge said that he was self-referring elsewhere. The young man was just doing things in whatever way he felt like doing them. He is knitting his own jumper. He has been allowed to knit his own cardigan. These are the expressions the judge used. I suppose the expressions might be positive in certain contexts but in this case they were not.

17 January Friday

A rabbit is a symbol of luck. John Mike casts rabbits in a jelly mold. I do not know if he casts rabbits because they are a symbol of luck or if he just he likes rabbits. He casts the rabbits in concrete, not in jelly. His garden is full of rabbits. Some are painted and some are left natural. The colour of concrete is the colour he calls natural. Rabbits are tucked under bushes and in little lines around the edges of the beds. There must be several hundred rabbits in the small area around his house. Maybe there are more. He will not listen when anyone curses real rabbits that are eating vegetables and young plants in their own garden. John Mike will not have a bad word said about rabbits. He holds up his hands and shouts STOP. STOP. STOP.

18 January Saturday

Free. I have learned a new nickname. Free is short for Geoffrey. Free Hackett. Free Costigan.

20 January Monday

There were only two of us sitting in the waiting area. A nurse came out and spoke to the other woman who was waiting and then she went away. Before she left she encouraged the woman to fill up her cup at the water cooler and to keep drinking. The woman had been sitting on the other side of the room but she moved to sit closer to me. She came and sat in a chair leaving only one empty seat between us. The woman and I were sitting in the Ultrasound Scan department. We were both waiting to be called. My instruction letter had said that I should drink one and a half liters of water one and a half hours before I arrived. After I drank all that water I was instructed to Hold It. The woman had obviously had the same letter. She told me that the first thing she did when she arrived in the scan waiting room was to go and pee. She said she could not wait one minute longer.  She said that she could not hold any water at all these days. She said she certainly could not hold a liter and a half and if she could she certainly could not hold it for that long. She sipped slowly from her plastic cup. She said, “It might be alright if I had a lift to get myself home but I have to go home on the bus. There is no way I am getting on the bus after wetting my pants.”

The nurse came back and introduced herself to me. She said her name was Rose. She checked my date of birth and she told me to keep drinking water. She refilled my cup and then she refilled the cup for the other woman. She told us both to keep drinking.

The woman looked over at the book I was reading and she squealed, “Oooh! I’d like to read that book.” I was startled by her enthusiasm. I asked her if she knew something about the book. She said No. I asked her if she was a fan of the writing of Natalia Ginzburg. She said No, but she said that she liked the title. The title was “Happiness, as Such”. She asked me if the book was good. She asked if it was new. I told her that it was not new. I explained that it had been published in 1973 in Italian. I told her that this translation had been done in 2019. So it was new in English. She snorted. “Why would you be wanting to read such an old book? I only like new books. I like happy books. I might like that book but probably I would not because it is too old.”

Rose came back and asked the woman to finish her still full cup of water. When the cup was drained, she led the woman away to the Ultrasound room.

 

21 January Tuesday

The mornings have been crunchy and white with frost. The frost does not last long but it is good to have this hard dry cold after all of the mud and damp. Everything looks different.

22 January Wednesday

I detour past the house as often as I can. I do not know who lives there. I know nothing at all about the house. I have been trying to understand what the gunny sacking is doing on the wall. Why is it draped in such a particular way and over such a small area of such an enormous wall? The fabric is well secured and it has been there for several months already. Is it hiding something or is it protecting something? It has not been left there by chance. Each time I approach, I think that this time will be the time when I pass the house and the fabric is gone.  If it is gone, I will not know anything more than I know now.

23 January Thursday

The birds continue to empty the green-topped feeder. The nuts in the other feeder do get eaten. Eventually. Slowly. Very very slowly. Every day I tell myself that I will not refill the green-topped feeder until they are both empty, but then I do it. I cannot bear to see the branches laden with birds all waiting for nuts. I just want to know why they do not like the metal-topped feeder.

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The Bee Hive

24 January Friday

There was a gate. Was there a gate? Now there is no gate. Maybe there never was a gate? I see a stone wall cleared of any growth. Has the wall been recently rebuilt to compensate for a place where a gate had been? Or was the hedge covering the wall simply cleared? Passing the same place every day, and sometimes several times a day, I feel I should know exactly how these things are. The fields, the openings, the gates, and the ditches are all so familiar that I am confused. Once bushes grow up and around this wall I will not remember where the wall was and I will not remember my question about the space or the gate that might have been there. Or might not have been there.  However it was will be lost within what it is.

25 January Saturday

Bright sun and deep mud.  Somehow it is easier to struggle and slog in the mud up the Mass Path when the sun is out. When I came out onto the road at the top, I met PJ and his two dogs. Jessie, the Saint Bernard puppy, is growing bigger by the day.  PJ nodded towards my muddy trousers and said, “You got taken”. I did not understand what he meant until he pointed out that by me falling into the mud, the mud had won. I got taken.

26 January Sunday

Margaret is still in the hospital. Tommie continues to be driven up and down to visit her in Waterford every other day. She had a kidney infection after the two hip operations so she was put into isolation. She went on hunger strike for a while. Well, it was not a hunger strike but she went off her food and she went off her food for long enough that it was a worry for Tommie and for the doctors and nurses. No one knew what to do to tempt her back into eating. Now she is eating again, but no one knows what made her change her mind and to begin eating again. Tommie figures she just got hungry. He worries each time that he goes to Waterford what he will find this time. He cannot do anything to help but he can worry. He put his foot down and refused to carry her decorated vase to the hospital. He is pleased that she seems to have forgotten about the vase.

He told me that he is very very weary. He said that weary is different than being tired. He is weary. He has decided to spend two or three days at home this week just to get himself rested up before the next journey to Waterford. When he is at home he gets many phone calls from people inquiring about Margaret. He gets worn out with having to explain everything. The telephone is near to the front door. There is a little seat beside the telephone table but it always has things piled up on it. Tommie has to stand up to speak on the phone so he never likes to talk for a long time. This is a telephone that is attached at its base with a twisted, tangled, and not very long cable. The hallway is a little bit draughty. This weekend he had a call from a former neighbour asking about Margaret. He was surprised that this woman was ringing as he did not know how she could even know that Margaret is in hospital nor did he think it was like her to be asking after Margaret. It was not a normal call. It was a call that puzzled him. He could not think how this woman knew that Margaret was unwell. He thought about it for a long while. He said he could not rest until he identified The Source of the information. Finally, he remembered that both woman went to the same hairdresser. He said he felt better knowing that he had located The Source.

27 January Monday

The battery died. It needed a neighbour and jump leads to get it going. The red cap covering one terminal of the battery was all chewed up. The black one was fine. That was not why the battery died but it was a messy surprise. As a result of the dead battery, I learned that rats are a big problem this winter. It is not just us. Noel O’Keeffe has had many cars coming into the garage with complaints of things not working. The  answer is always rats. Farms are active spots for rats and it seems every farmer has had his engine invaded by the rats. There are chewed brake cables and fuel lines and any number of rubbery plasticky things under the bonnet all gnawed until they do not function correctly any more. All car problems keep coming back to the hungry rats. The garage has developed a rodent strategy. Blocks of poison have a hole in the middle. Noel’s mechanics are attaching the blocks with a loop of wire. The loop is fastened to something inside the engine so that a rat can be attracted to the block and he or she can nibble away at it and then hopefully go away and die. It is a clever system, but it will not be so good if the rat dies in the engine.

 

29 January Wednesday

The Bee Hive is a bungalow on the Dungarvon Road. It has not been open for as long as I have been here.  The house is always referred to as the Bee Hive.  There is no sign and there has never seen a sign but everyone knows it as the Bee Hive. There are two old petrol pumps outside. They have not been serving petrol for as long as I have been here. The inside of the bungalow used to have a room that served as a bar. All of the drinks were served in bottles or cans. There were no barrels or kegs and there was no refrigeration.  I do not know if there was even an actual bar. There were drinks to be bought and chairs to sit in while drinking the drinks and petrol could be bought outside. The shade in the large window was up when the Bee Hive was open. If the bar and the petrol pumps were not open for business, the shade was pulled down.  I have never seen a person going in or coming out of the Bee Hive. The building is kept tidy outside. The Dungarvon Road is a busy road.  Few passing cars would even notice the pumps, much less stop expecting to buy fuel.

30 January Thursday

A lot of people are described as a A Good Few. Actually, a lot of anything can be A Good Few, not just people.

1 February Saturday

Today is the First Day of Spring. In Ireland. It is not the first day of spring anywhere else. Some people say it is The First Day of Spring because today is the halfway mark between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Others credit Saint Brigid. Brigid is the patron saint of a lot of things and today is her day. Her presence is good for crops and babies and farmers and printing presses and dairy cows and lots of other things. She is the patron saint of blacksmiths, boatmen, brewers, cattle, chicken farmers and children whose parents are not married. She is the patron saint for children with abusive fathers, children born into abusive unions, dairymaids, dairy workers, fugitives, mariners, midwives, milk maids, nuns, poets and the poor. Poultry farmers, sailors, scholars, travelers and water men all come under her protection too. She is sort of an all-round helpful and hopeful saint. She is a good one to have on your side. Most years I feel like it is crazy to be celebrating the first day of spring on 1 February, but today the air feels light and right. The snowdrops are up. There is even the first appearance of wild garlic showing itself.  We all comment on the noticeable stretch in the days. Everything feels positive so it might as well be the First Day of Spring. Another positive thing about the days being longer and lighter means that people are happy to say that 1 February is the first day in the year that You Can Eat Your Dinner By The Light of Day.

 

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Nest Building

6 March Friday

We organized the bags around our feet as the bus closed its doors and drove off. At that exact moment, a woman greeted us with a hearty roar.

She shouted, “You’re back, then? Have you been away to London again?”

I looked up in confusion. The woman was no one I knew. After a few minutes of her enthusiastic chatter, I realized that I did indeed recognize her as the woman who had sat beside us in the bus shelter last November. That day the X8 was well late. There had been heavy traffic when the bus left Dublin, so it was now behind schedule all the way along its route. We were on our way to Cork to catch a flight. We had plenty of time so we were not worried about the bus being late nor about getting to our plane. The woman was sitting in the bus shelter to be out of the rain. She was not going anywhere. She was just waiting for the rain to stop. She told us all about her brother in Manchester who was dying. She thought it was The Cancer but she said that no one was telling her straight. She had been to see him once and she thought she might need to go again before it was too late. She announced that it is no good going to see someone when the person is already dead. They won’t appreciate your visit nor your love if you just travel to see them dead and in the box. She said that is the easy way for people to look like they care. She said she understood it all as it is no fun visiting a dying person because there is not much to talk about. They have no future and you do, so every conversation is going to be a bit skew-whiff.

The woman talked and talked and rarely paused, and when she did pause, she asked a question. She might have been 28 or she might have been 45. It was hard to tell. She quickly found out that we were flying to London, but also that we lived here and that we were only going over there for a book fair and some visiting. She said she was happy about that. She was happy that we would be coming back. She felt it was important to have people from different places living in Tipperary because it made the area like the world and not like a village. She said too many people had already married their cousins and the whole county was in sore need of fresh blood just the same way as farm cats need to be refreshed before they all become inbred and end up getting stepped on by a cow because they are too stupid to move out of the way. She covered a lot of conversation in every gust of talking.

I had not seen the woman again since that day in November. Now it was March. I doubt I would have recognized her at all, but when she started talking I knew her voice. She recognized us and she started right in as though we had all been speaking together this day last week. She reported that she was just back from Manchester herself, but this time it had been for The Brother’s funeral. She said he lasted longer than anyone had expected or even hoped for. No one had expected him to make it to Christmas, but he did. She said he was little more than a shell when he died. She said that she had only been back a few days but when she arrived back from the funeral and the flight, she had gotten off the bus and walked right down to the Aldi and bought herself a Shepherd’s Pie for her tea and it was lovely and full of carrots and peas and just what she needed after the plane and the bus and arriving home into a cold house. She said her boyfriend was useless so she knew there would be nothing to eat and that he would not be at home to welcome her anyway. She recommended that we do the exact same thing. She said, “A Shepherd’s Pie is not something you will ever regret.”

8 March Sunday

Primroses are blooming in the boreen. The air is cold but the pale yellow blossom means that spring is here.

10 March Tuesday

The market square felt a bit empty when I stopped in Mitchelstown. Half the country has gone over to England for the races at Cheltenham. The other half of the country was placing their bets for the first race at 1.30. I parked in front of Paddy Powers. People were rushing in and out of the door. It was the busiest place on the square. The word on the pavement outside the shop was that you should bring your own pen when placing a bet. People were agreed that The Virus is sure to be clinging on to those little stubby pens that they always have for you to use in the bookies. I heard one man tell another it would be no good at all to have your horse come in with a big win, and then to die of The Virus right after.

I have been sewing up the sections of a book. I finished one section and I am halfway through the second section. Each time I build up a sizeable amount of cotton off-cuts, I take the threads outside and leave them on the table for the birds. Immediately, the birds leave off their eating of nuts in the feeders and they attack the pile. Within minutes, the threads are scooped up and off into various nest building projects. As often as I take them outside they disappear. I cannot sew any faster.

14 March Saturday

Popping in and out of several pharmacies, I had been asking for the hand sanitizing liquid that is being recommended. We are being told to use it all the time, after every single interaction out in the world. Everyone is looking for it but no one has any to sell. One pharmacist said that she had heard that the woman who ran O’Gormans Pharmacy in Clonmel had gotten 144 bottles of the sanitizer in yesterday, but she added that they were probably already gone. Every single person is trying to protect themselves. I saw people shopping in the supermarket with gloves on. Some of them were wearing the plastic disposable surgical gloves, and some people wore just any old winter gloves. One woman was wearing thick hand-knit mittens. In the second pharmacy I visited, the pharmacist came out from the back and suggested that I buy some cheap vodka. 40% should do it. That will work just as well as any hand sanitizer, she said. She turned to the other woman behind the counter and then back to me, and she said, “You did not hear me say this!!”

16 March Monday

I heard a car horn outside. Ned had arrived with the heating fuel in his mobile tank. He needed me to move my motor out of his way, and to fetch him a ladder and then he needed me to open the window so we could drag in the extension lead to plug in his generator. He said he knew we were all in lock-down so that is why he arrived without ringing first. He knew we would be at home because where else would we be? He said: “You are going nowhere‘” He did not like the idea of us running low on fuel. When he was finished filling the tank, I asked if he wanted to come in for tea. I was not sure if I should ask him to come into the house, but I did. In the end, he did not offer me much choice. He said, “Of course I will come in for tea. We always have a cup together, don’t we? We cannot let a small thing like a world-wide epidemic get in the way of our tea. Your table is a large table. I will sit at one far end and you two can sit at the opposite end. We will speak up good and loud-like and we’ll have no problem hearing one another.”

17 March Tuesday

Today is Patrick’s Day. There is no celebration anywhere. No celebrations, no church services and no parades anywhere. Everything is cancelled. It is quiet. It is very quiet. I walked up the Mass Path, slipping in the mud all the way up the hill. Once there, I was delighted to find the wild garlic in bloom. I had not noticed any growing in the lower meadow yet, but the path at the top is lined with the shiny leaves. I came home with huge handfuls of it ready to be eaten.

 

A Cow With Red Tape on Her Tail.

21 March Saturday

I love the gate closest to the end of the boreen. It was constructed to follow the uphill slope of the land.

22 March Sunday

I met Breda and Margo up at the Boulders at 11. We each traveled in our own cars and we did not venture near to one another. We walked for three hours following a particular overland route that Breda knew and that Margo wanted to learn. She was tracking us on a new app on her telephone. I was happy with the freedom to walk the mountains without a single thought about where I was going. There was no path. All I had to do was keep Margo in my sights. We saw one man and his dog in the far distance. We saw no one else. Breda kept repeating, “There is Not A Sinner in Sight!” I saw some furry caterpillars curled into circles and nesting in the dry grasses. We saw a lot of sheep, and ten or twelve Belted Galloways in a loose group. The gorse was in bloom everywhere.

23 March Monday

I found a new cattle ear-tag stuck in the peaty soil up the mountain yesterday. I did not show it to Breda nor to Margo. I knew they would not be interested. I knew Breda would tell me to drop it because it was covered in muck and dirt. I put it in my pocket and today I have washed it. I am delighted to add it to my collection of tags.

25 March Wednesday

There were cows being led up the road. Rather than wait, I turned up the Knocklofty road on my way home. Seeing a car stopped up ahead, I assumed it must be yet another farmer blocking the road while yet another herd was ready to cross. It was not a normal time of day for the movement of cows so it was odd to be stopped in two places for the same problem. As I neared, I saw that it was not cows. A woman was walking around the outside of her car which was stopped exactly in the middle of the road. She was looking down. I assumed she had a mechanical problem. I drove a bit closer and then I stopped and got out. There was a white-haired lady sitting in the back seat. An old and extremely dirty terrier was wedged under the car on the driver’s side. He was not trapped. He was just sitting there with only his head showing. His head was unusually large. The woman said she stopped because the dog was in the road and she did not want to hit him. As soon as she stopped, he dove under her car and now she could not get him out from underneath nor could she get back into the drivers side. He was barring her way. I approached the dog and he bared his teeth and snarled at me. He was ugly and he was vicious. I talked to him nicely and then I lowered my voice and attempted to sound stern. I told him to Go Home. Go Home. Go Home. He snarled and snapped each time I attempted to get closer. At one point, he rushed at me and then he ran around the car and wedged himself in under the other side. A small van pulled up behind my car. I went over and asked the driver if she had any kind of a stick. She got out with a walking stick and a small boy. By now the white haired lady had gotten out of the back seat of the first car. All five of us were keeping our distance from each other and we were all trying to keep an eye on the dog. The woman with the stick pushed at the dog and he scooted underneath the car so that he was completely out of sight. He came running out again and went from one side to the other side returning always to his position of head exposed and body tucked underneath. I ran up the road to the only house in sight to see if the people there knew who owned the dog or maybe if it was their own dog. Two big lazy friendly dogs greeted me in the yard and then they returned to lie down in the sun. They could not be bothered. No one answered the door, so I ran back down the road. Just as I got there the dog rushed out from under the car and into some tall grass. He bared his teeth and snarled at the woman with the stick who had nudged him away. Without a word, we all jumped in our cars and raced off before he could rush out and get underneath one of our vehicles. He was looking for shelter and protection. I have been worrying about this dog all day. I know that he was angry and probably he was scared and hungry and maybe hurt, but I also know that he was vicious and dangerous. I deserted an animal in need. I had no idea what else to do.

26 March Thursday

An Post has given us all postcards. We can post them for free anywhere within the country. It is their gentle idea of a way to keep us in touch with one another. It is a gift to make everyone feel better. Having the postman arrive down the track is like a visit. There are lots of balancing acts. Some of the postmen have to take turns taking care of their children while their wife works. Some of the postmen have fallen ill, or someone in their family has fallen ill. There is only one postman left who knows our rural route but he must also do his own regular route so he delivers to us every other day. Maybe he arrives three times a week or sometimes it is only twice a week. There are never any deliveries on a Saturday. Having things delivered by post is more thrilling than ever.

27 March Friday

This year Lent lasts from 26 February to 9 April. Every year I hear people describing or listing what they have given up for Lent. It is only valid if you give up something that you want and you love like butter or chocolate or wine or television. The idea of Lent seems to be to remind yourself that you cannot have everything all of the time. I am surprised that people are still bothering now with this particular denial when all of life has been turned upside down. I find it strange that people are still sticking to their self-imposed restrictions even while so much of life and normal activity have been curtailed from outside forces.

28 March Saturday

We are eating wild garlic at least twice a day. So far it has not been added to breakfast. I keep a jug of it on the counter. It is used as a garnish. It is made into a pesto. It is mixed in some way with just about everything we eat. When I go out to collect more, it is a form of shopping. I must decide where to get my leaves from today. Under an apple tree? Under which apple tree? Near the water butt? Down the edge of the path? These are the decisions that keep me busy.

29 March Sunday

We changed our clocks last night. This means that the sun is now setting at 8, but really it is not fully dark until 9.

30 March Monday

We have been walking through Joe’s fields but it is hard work. The last time the cows were in the field it must have been extremely wet and muddy. There are deep and varied hoof holes all through the grass. The soil is now dry. The holes are hard. Walking over the fields makes for a lot of lurching and staggering. Without strong boots and a sturdy stick, such a walk is potentially ankle-breaking stuff. It is a relief to get to the long rough track and out of the fields. Every day this week, we have lumbered all through the fields and around on the road and down the boreen to home. It is about a 4 1/2 kilometre walk. Today, we saw only one man on a bicycle and one man in a tractor. Most days we see no one.

31 March Tuesday

There is a cow in the field of the other Joe. She has red tape on her tail and red tape around each of her back legs. None of the other cows have any red tape. I would like to know what this means and what her problem is. The chances of me bumping into Joe to ask about the tape are slim. I wonder about the cow and her red tape each time I pass. I shall continue to have theories.

Essential Errands

3 April Friday

Birds are everywhere. In the cities people are remarking that this easy to hear birdsong in their lives is thrilling. Here it is the same as always. It is of course exciting, but it is the same as always. The bird activity sounds no different. It is spring and birds are building and discussing and rushing about. What is unusual is the racket inside the book barn. I knew the starlings were building their nests in the roof as they do every year, but now they are way past the building stage. There are already new chicks. There is a great noisy chirping altogether. Never ending chatter. Sometimes there are what sound like little screams. At moments it is impossible to be inside the barn and to get anything done. The noise is too loud.

4 April Saturday

I was glad that I remembered to ask Joe about the red tape when I saw him. He told me that the cow was probably on a course of antibiotics. The red tape on her tail and her legs was simply there as an alert to ensure that her milk could not be put in with the milk of other healthy cows. He said that this is what he does for his cows and he is just assuming this is the case because the cow in question belongs to the other Joe and she is not one of his own cows. He was only answering my query.

5 April Sunday

All day rain. Soaking rain. Heavy, lashing, pissing rain. Desperate rain. It is desperate rain with gusting winds that throw the downpour into different and often surprising directions. This is the kind of rain we have not had for many weeks. Many many weeks. The farmers will be pleased. It is good to have an excuse to stay in the house. It is good to have an excuse that has nothing to do with disease or contagion or death. It is a valid and completely ordinary reason to be struck indoors all day. It is pleasing to feel trapped and happy. I spoke to Tommie on the telephone before lunch.  I ring him often. He is not allowed to visit Margaret in the care home in Cappoquin. His dinners are delivered to his house. He was not bothered by the rain. He said “Sure, where would we be going anyway?” Several times, as the rain appeared to let up, I dressed for a walk but as soon as I was ready to step out, the rain came down hard again. If I had a dog I would be obliged to go for a walk, but since I no longer have a dog, I am not obliged. I made the short trip across to the tool shed to fetch something from the freezer. I decided that as a walk out, perhaps this was enough. Going to the freezer is a bit like going out to a shop. I always find something in there that I did not know I needed or wanted. Which is kind of what happens in a shop.

 

 

6 April Monday

I am trying to use things up. My plan is to not wear anything that has much life left in it. I only wear old clothes. I wear the sweaters that have unraveled at the sleeves and have been caught on barbed wire. I am letting holes and stains have their day. Socks that are almost worn out with holes in the toes or almost broken through at the heels are being worn and worn. When the heels finally break through, the socks will be thrown out. We are eating the things from the back of the cupboards. There is a high shelf in the pantry that I cannot reach. Since I cannot reach it and I cannot see up there, I pay little attention to what is there. The other day we soaked and cooked some ancient lentils. That was a mistake. Even after several days of soaking and cooking, they never softened. They remained hard and unrelenting but the sauce they were in was so good that we crunched our way through them anyway. Homemade chutneys and jams have appeared. These are the things that are always being Saved for Something Special. Now is the time. They are being dusted off and they are being eaten.

Yesterday I threw out six old telephone books from 2014, 2015 and 2016. Some were the residential directories and some were the Golden Pages. Of course, throwing out is a relative term. All I could do was to move them from the house into the lean-to. It is me who drives things to the Recycling Depot. This morning I decided it was time and I loaded up the stuff to go. It has been more than two months since my last trip. Maybe it is more than three months since I last went. I think it was January. The lean-to was full. Gathering all the stuff from the various buildings took me an hour. There was not one inch of spare space in the car when I finished loading up.

The instruction from the government is to go no further than two kilometres from home, except for Essential Errands. I drove to town with three Essential Errands to do. I have to break the two kilometre rule to go anywhere at all. As I drove up the Cashel Road, I was stopped at a Garda checkpoint. I had heard about these checkpoints but it was my first time to be stopped at one. The young Guard looked at my car and said, “Going to the Dump?” I said, “How did you know?” He claimed that he just has a sense for these things, and he waved me along.

7 April Tuesday

This morning, the doctor telephoned to check that Simon is okay. They had a long and cheerful chat about a variety of things. Dr. Maher said that he rings a few of his vulnerable patients every day just to make certain that they are keeping well and safe.

In the afternoon, a police van arrived. Mattie McGrath, our local TD, was the passenger and a young Garda was driving. They came to see that we are all right in the lockdown. This checking up on isolated homes and older people is another gesture by the authorities. It was also a way for the new Garda to learn where people are living. New police recruits are trained in Templemore at the Garda Training College, and then they are sent all over the country. They are never sent to the place where they are from, so each new posting is full of strangers, never friends and family. Ideally this means that there is less chance of them being compromised or corrupted but it also means they do not know the back roads, the boreens and the hidden away places. The word Garda means Guardian, which means they are the protectors of the people, so in order to be protectors they need to know where everyone is. Mattie, as a TD (Teachta Dála), is one of several elected Deputies for Tipperary. He sits in the Dáil in Dublin. He is the equivalent of a Member of Parliament or a Member of Congress. He is also a neighbor on the road into the village.

8 April Wednesday

Every day there are more and more plants and flowers to notice. I cannot keep track of what appears but it is fun to try. Nothing in nature is ever the same. The same plants appear every year but they are always a surprise. Today I saw the first bluebell. Dandelions. Celandine. Robin-Run-Up-The-Hedge. Forget-me-nots. Every tree has buds or blossoms. Gorse. Hawthorn. Spring is rampant.

9 April Thursday

In the midst of this time of isolation and hand-cleaning and worry, the Everyday Challenges remain the same. The enormous milk tankers which race along at speed remain a danger on the road for both pedestrians and drivers. Milk gets collected every other day from each farm, but both Glanbia and Dairygold collect in this area so there seems to be a long shiny milk truck on the road every single day. Today I pushed myself into a ditch as a tanker came barrelling around a corner. After it was gone, I spent ten minutes getting myself unhooked from the brambles that held me.

10 April Friday

Good Friday is always a quiet day. But this is the quietest Good Friday ever. Except for one tractor in the distance, there is not a single human sound. In previous years there was always the discussion in the build up before Good Friday about the pubs being closed in the whole country and all alcohol consumption forbidden. Increasingly these discussions have felt more and more at odds with contemporary life. The pubs have been closed for many weeks now. There has been no Good Friday discussion this year. The radio has been silent on the subject.

11 April Saturday

We walked down through the fields below Molough Abbey. On the right side the field is freshly plowed. Maybe it has been planted. If not, it is all ready and a crop will be planted any day now. On the left side of the track, the rapeseed has grown tall. It is as high as my head. It is so beautiful to see the glowing yellow of the blossom but the smell is terrible. It smells like fiberglass resin. As pretty as it looks, the stink of it nearly ruins a walk.

12 April Sunday

Another Sunday of all day rain. After a week of warm sunshine and eating our lunch outdoors in sheltered spots, today feels like winter. The rain has been hard and straight down and it has never ceased all day long. An Easter Sauna seemed a good idea. I enjoyed walking across the grass in my dressing gown and my rubber clogs while holding an umbrella. I liked stepping out of the sauna and standing naked in the rain, using the downpour as my shower. I liked walking back across the grass not even bothering with the umbrella.

Maisie’s Stile.

14 April Tuesday

There is still a lot of hay stacked in the three-sided sheds. It takes a farmer weeks and weeks of work to get a shed filled up with bales in preparation for winter. The removal of the hay then happens slowly over the winter months. Some years the farmers empty their sheds and run out of hay while the cows are still under cover. This year cows have been out in the fields and feasting on grass for several weeks now. The grass is not growing fast, but it is growing. The cows are eating in the fields and there is still hay to fall back on. I think this is a sign that all is well.

15 April Wednesday

I went to the supermarket in Clonmel. It was my first trip to a large store in 5 weeks. I felt nervous and I felt a little bit silly for feeling nervous. It was 8.30 in the morning. The shop was not open for everyone yet. There was a man outside making sure that people were over a certain age before he let them in. I fit his age bracket, so I was allowed to enter. Inside the store was gloomy. The lights had not been turned on yet. It wasn’t really dark, but it was odd to be in a supermarket and to be in such subdued lighting. There were very few people. There were so few people that it was almost like I was on my own. Whole long aisles were empty. I was surprised to turn a corner and to see another person. Everything was extremely quiet because of the lack of light. I went down an aisle to get some shampoo and I heard a peculiar moaning sound. There was one woman at the far end of the shelves. She was wearing a big woolly hat pulled down low. She was keening and moaning and banging her hands on her head. I wondered if she was alright. I listened and I was able to hear her muttering to herself. She said: I cannot do it. I cannot do it. I have to do it. I have to do it. I cannot do it. Then she moaned again. Walking past her, while keeping my distance, I saw that she was standing in front of the hair dye selection. Dying her own hair was obviously not something she was accustomed to doing and it was not something she wanted to do. I think what I was hearing was fear.

16 April Thursday

A cow was sheltering in the corner of the field nearest to Scully’s wood. As I grew near, I saw that she was giving birth. The calf was most of the way out. The mother bellowed at me. I assumed this was a Go Away kind of noise, so I moved along quickly to give her privacy. A little later I walked back up the boreen to see how mother and child were doing. The black calf was shiny and still very slimy with placenta and the residual birth stuff kind of hanging off in places. It was standing up and sucking on the mother’s teat. The mother turned her head and once again gave a huge bellow. I felt my presence was an intrusion so I left. I was pleased to see that they were both okay.

 

17 April Friday

I have been searching for Maisie’s stile for more than a year now. I have not been looking in any kind of focused way but each time I walk up by where her old house was, I try to locate where the stile was. Today I think I found it, but really, I cannot be certain.

While in her eighties, Maisie walked across the narrow road and went over the stile into the fields for a walk every day. Her two elderly dogs went with her. She was always wearing a cardigan and an apron over a striped dress. Her outfit was the same all year round. As she got older and more stiff, she just walked across the road and climbed up onto the steep stone stile and used the high vantage point to look around and over the fields. She did not climb doen the other side. Eventually all she did was cross the road and cross back home again. The stile remained a destination until even crossing the road became too far for her. After that, she would just stand at her gate and look out at anything that might move and at all of the things that did not move.

Maisie was not outdoors very much in the last few years of her life. She lived mostly in her kitchen with a lot of cats. The smell was terrible. I could not enter the room because I knew I would be sick on the floor, but I spoke with her regularly through the open door. She died at the age of 93. The house where she lived has been torn down now and a new house built in its place. The new gate is not where the old gate was and the new house is not on the same footprint as the old house. I hold her old gate both as a photograph and as a location in my mind. But the changes have made it difficult to locate where both the gate was and where the stile that Maisie walked straight across the road to climb over was. Brambles and bushes have grown up and over the stone wall. Once the foliage has taken over I will never be able to see the stones of the steps. One day I walked through a lower farm gate and back up into the field thinking that it might be easier to recognize the stile from the other side. But the other side is even more overgrown than the road side. I feel like today I have identified the spot. I might be wrong but I feel satisfied to have found what I have been looking for, so I hope I can now stop looking for it.

18 April Saturday

There is a new ritual for funerals in this time of isolation. It is not the same as an actual funeral but because people are not allowed to gather together for the traditional ceremonies in the family house, or the funeral home, or the church or the graveyard, an announcement is now made for mourners to pay their respects On The Road. The route the hearse is to take will be announced for a certain time of day. The departure time and approximate times of arrival through certain villages along the way will be listed. The journey will be along the lanes and roads that the deceased traveled regularly. The arrival time at the church or the graveyard will be announced too. People are not invited to attend the service which will be restricted to family only but they are invited to stand outside their houses or beside their fields at the given time. They are invited to stand inside their gate or outside their gate. To stand respectfully as the deceased passes and to pay their tribute in this quiet way.

19 April Sunday

I almost stepped on part of a dead bird  outside the kitchen door this morning. It was not a whole bird. It was one wing and a bit of connecting flesh from what had been a starling. An hour later, I was down near the book barn where I found another wing and more remnants. I wondered if the two wings were the wings of the same bird or if two different birds had been eaten. I decided not to think about.

20 April Monday

One building down in the village has been closed up for as long as I have been here. I always think I should ask someone about it but I never remember to do so. The windows and the doors are completely closed up with blocks. There is no visible way to enter the building, or at least not from the front. I do not know if it was a house or a shop. The closed up place no longer surprises me but what does surprise me is that every few years it gets a fresh coat of paint.

 

Interrupting the Silence

22 April Wednesday

We were heading out of the village for a walk. Since we were passing Tommie’s house we thought we should stop and say hello. We knocked and then we backed off as far as the stone wall. He came to the door and pulled out an aluminum cane with three feet. After greeting us, he explained that the cane belonged to Margaret. It was a special one for The Balance but since she is no longer at home to use it, he uses it himself when he comes to the door. He leaves it in place so that it is always ready. He leaned heavily on the cane while we talked together for a few minutes. He spoke calmly of the long lonely days and the need for us all to be trapped and to stay trapped. He understands that it is important that we do what we are told, but he is not enjoying being obedient. After a short time, he announced that he had to go back inside to sit down. He said his legs had held him upright for long enough. Before he closed the door he thanked us for Interrupting the Silence.

23 April Thursday

Stitchwort has taken over the hedgerows. Whenever I call a hedgerow a hedgerow, I am quickly corrected by anyone around here who hears me say the word. A hedgerow is not a hedgerow. A hedgerow is called a ditch. I should know better by now. I do know better, but I do forget. Stitchwort and vetch are the predominant blossoms of the moment and because the stitchwort flower is a bright white it makes the ditches look polka-dotted from a distance. I love stitchwort. Vetch demands closer examination. I am fond of its leaves with the grasping tendrils at the end, but for the moment stitchwort is my favorite flower.

 

24 April Friday

Joe’s cows were in the adjoining field last night. We could hear them tearing and pulling the grass as we lay in bed. We were nervous because at the moment there is no proper fence to keep them out. If they were to break into the yard, or if they were to break out of their field, they would of course make a mess trampling and eating plants and leaving enormous hoof holes in the grass. The fence needs to be replaced, but for now there is only a piece of white rope stretched across the missing pieces of fence. It would not keep a determined cow out. Then there is the fine string with the bit of blue in it. I believe the blue is a filament of wire that is hooked up to a battery to give a tiny electric shock. Much of the time these flimsy strings are not connected to a battery so there is no shock to be given. I know this because I step over them or under them regularly and I rarely get a jolt. The cows do not know whether a string is electrified or not. They just seem to learn that the blue and white string means that they have gone far enough. I do not like falling asleep with the niggling worry that I might be woken at any moment by a garden full of cows.  I slept well last night trusting that the very large field offered enough eating options and distractions for the herd not to take interest in the one section that offered an easy break out. Happily, this morning all of the cows are still on their side of the pieces of string.

 

25 April Saturday

John Scully was on the road outside one of his barns. The yard was full of drinks cans. Beer cans and cider cans and lager cans. Thousands of cans. Millions of cans in tumbling piles. There were also twenty or thirty of those huge bags that you need a tractor to lift and carry and place somewhere. The bags are usually used for sand or mulch or even firewood. The bags were all full of cans. There were lots more cans in various heaps up against the barn buildings. I asked him what he was doing with all the cans. It turned out that they were not his cans but they belonged to his friend Pa. Pa has been collecting them from pubs and from friends in order to crush them and then to sell the crushed cans as scrap metal. Pa has a special machine called a hopper that he uses to crush them all up at speed. I think there are a lot of already crushed cans in one barn all ready to go. I do not know how much money one can get for a ton of crushed drinks cans. Somehow I do not think it is much. Pa is not around these days and John has all the cans. Maybe he has the hopper too. He said he has other things to worry about. His tractor has broken down and he is trying to repair it. His lawnmower is broken too. The grass in front of the house is knee high. He himself is sporting a huge white beard. He says everything is growing and there is not enough time for all the jobs needing to be done. The cans can wait.

26 April Sunday

No one ever uses the bottle banks on a Sunday because the bottle banks are located in the car park beside the church. It is not a law nor is it even a rule, it is just something that everyone pays attention to because a Mass might be happening inside and it would be disrespectful to be smashing bottles outside the church while people are worshiping inside the church. In these days of quarantine, Mass is no longer held in the church on Sunday, but still, without it being discussed, no one uses the bottle banks on a Sunday. So now it is not because there is a Mass taking place but simply because it is Sunday that the bottle banks are not used on a Sunday. The fact of it being Sunday is enough to make us all hold onto our glass bottles and jars until Monday, or any other day, as long as it is not Sunday.

28 April Tuesday

When the daily total of deaths from the Corona Virus are being reported they are not identified by town, nor by county. The deaths are listed by the totals in the East, South and West of the country. The news reader might announce 22 deaths in the East, 2 in the South and 7 in the West. The Republic is a complete country but the North of the Republic is never spoken of as a part of the country. The North of the Republic is not a place. When The North is spoken of, it means Northern Ireland. This is the North of the island. This is the North of Ireland. So there cannot be another North other than The North. There is only one North.

29 April Wednesday

I took an unexpected tumble out the barn door. I do not know how it happened. One ankle twisted and then the rest of me went down and I ended up flat on my back with my knee twisted and my shoulder rammed and my back throbbing. I was so surprised by it all that I just lay on the hard cement weeping. I wept copiously. When I stopped crying I tried to notice how much the different parts of my body hurt and where they hurt and if anything was broken. I lay quietly on my back. Maybe I was in shock. The ground was wet but at least it was not raining. Very quickly, I became distracted by the starlings who are nesting in the eaves right above the doorway. They were taking the open door as an opportunity to swoop in and out of the workshop. When a large dollop of excrement landed on my leg I decided that it was time to get up off the ground and to hobble over to the house.

30 April Thursday

Recent weather has been predictable in its unpredictability. After days and days of warm dry temperatures, it has turned changeable and wild. Rushing fluffy clouds and rain and sun and then more rain and more sun and the greyest of skies and heavy hard downpours followed by the bluest of skies. Everything is fast and thrilling and then it is over and there is something else. It is this kind of constant change that does not let us forget we live on an island. We are landlocked here in our valley, and we are in also in full Corona lock down, but the sudden changes in weather remind us that we are never far from the sea.

1 May Friday

I am still feeling fragile from my fall. Nothing is broken but I am stiff and weak.  I am reading a lot. I am not walking or doing much of anything physical. I am thinking that perhaps I move too fast. Maybe I need to slow down instead of always being in a rush.

Welcome Home Dear Husband.

3 May Sunday

This morning, I cut Simon’s hair out in the garden. I gave him a haircut but I am not yet willing to let him give me a haircut. I placed his hair on the wall for the birds. No nest building material goes to waste in the spring. Everyone is getting haircuts at home. Marianne reported that she had just given Jim a haircut because she said he was looking like A Blown-Over Thistle.

4 May Monday

The weather is dry. It is too dry. The farmers need rain. The crops need some proper soaking rain. We all need more rain. I have a mossy ground cover that I love because it creeps and covers things throughout the garden. Some people hate this plant because they think it is invasive. I cannot think of it as invasive. It is easy to get rid of it. It is easy to tear off a bit if it arrives in an awkward place.  It provides a soft spongy cushion over rocks and hard surfaces. I was looking at a clump of it today and remembering that Tim and Máiréad Robinson gave me a bag full of this plant many years ago. It was rampant in their damp garden in Roundstone. The Connemara climate was perfect for keeping it moist and happy. I brought some home and I have had it growing here ever since. Máiréad told me that the local name for the plant was Welcome Home Dear Husband No Matter How Drunk You May Be. The idea being that if you fell onto the plant after having Taken The Drink, it would soften your landing. Now both Tim and Máiréad have died of the dreadful Covid Virus. I am glad that I have this small living thing to remind me of them. Most people will remember Tim for his wonderful writing. I will, of course, remember that, but I am most happy to have this tiny spreading plant from their garden.  This little plant is impossible to kill.

5 May Tuesday

Today our freedom of movement has been extended. We are now permitted to go as far as 5 kilometres from our home to take exercise. This is a big increase from the 2 kilometres we have been restricted to until now. It feels like the whole world has opened up. It feels like anything is possible and that things will get better. I drove up to take the Knockperry walk and to feel closer to the mountains.

6 May Wednesday

Rat Glass. Rat Rug. Rat Hole. The word Rat has been on my To-Do lists everyday. I know it is hard to live near a farm and not to have rats around. I know it is hard to live anywhere in the world without having rats nearby, visibly or not visibly. I prefer it when they are not visible. On Saturday, I saw a rat disappearing into a hole under the concrete outside the printing shed. Later I went into the print shed and I found that the back wall had completely rotted in one corner. The hole was a big hole. The hole was easily big enough for rat entry and departure, and the old rug on the floor was covered with hundreds of rat droppings. I closed the door to the shed. I have yet to deal with the problem. The next day, I found an enormous rat dead on the grass near the shed. I could not see any wound on him so I do not know how he died. He was much bigger than the first one I saw. I smashed a jar and poured the broken glass down the hole in the rocks. Now I will smash some more glass and place it outside the print shed beside the hole in the wall. Mick instructed me on the broken glass method years ago. It is an ugly solution but rats are an ugly problem. It is too hard to kill them with poison when they are living outdoors. If they can get to water, the poison may not kill them. With Mick’s method, when a rat cuts its feet on the broken glass and the other rats smell blood, they gang up and kill the bleeding rat. Very quickly all the rats will avoid the area where the broken glass is so that they do not become the next victims.

7 May Thursday

The postman was sorting letters up against the steering wheel. He had his head bent at an angle and a telephone clamped tight onto his shoulder. He was talking on the phone while sorting and tossing a few things onto the seat beside him. He looked busy and efficient. I was disturbed that he was doing all of this while driving his van down the middle of the road with me coming towards him in the opposite direction.

8 May Friday

I walked around the bend just as the fox jumped down off the banking. We were both startled. He saw me while he was in mid-air and he twisted his body so that as he landed he was already running away. It all happened fast. He was gone in a second. It was almost too quick to recognize what was happening. The fox was young with a shiny dark red-orange coat and a thick and bushy tail.

9 May Saturday

One part of the Saturday ritual that has been maintained in this time of lockdown is porridge for breakfast. It was our habit to order it at the café where it always tasted different from what we make at home. Of late, the At Home version is Pinhead Oatmeal which is far superior to regular oats. The café will never be serving Pinhead, but when we are allowed, we will once again enjoy eating our Saturday breakfast there. We like eating upstairs and looking out at the weir and the castle. It was the whole activity of driving to the village for the papers and then over the back road to Ardfinnan and on to Cahir for breakfast and then to the Farmers Market across the street from the café. We are missing the Farmer’s Market. We miss the fresh fish and the cheese and the vendors who have all become friends and the other shoppers too who are our once-a-week friends. Going to the village for the newspapers remains, like porridge, as a Saturday morning constant. Today we woke up to such a thick fog that it was impossible to see as far as the place where the fence would be if it had not fallen down. Everything was gone. It was impossible to see the fields. It was impossible to see across the fields. The hills had disappeared. Waterford did not exist. The Knockmealdowns did not exist. By the time I drove back from the village with the newspapers, I was in a little tunnel of light fog. It was already lifting a little then, but it was 11 o’clock before it burned off completely.

10 May Sunday

The boreen is becoming more narrow by the day. It is closing in. The stitchwort and vetch and bluebells, violets, primroses and ferns are all getting overwhelmed by cow parsley. The cow parsley is lining the boreen and taking over the ditches. It is frothy and soft and nothing else has a chance to be seen. Every year I delight in driving through it while it rubs both sides of the car. It is like going through a car wash without any water.

11 May Monday

I have been wearing a few garments again and again and again. A thin black cardigan is a favorite. It is full of moth holes. Some of the holes are large because I have washed it and worn it and washed it and worn it again. The holes get bigger and bigger. There are no longer moths nor eggs anywhere near it. They have done their damage and they are gone. I wear it every day and I layer more things on top of it if it is cold and if the day gets hotter I take it off. A few days ago I walked in the mountains wearing shorts and a tee-shirt. I did not need that sweater or any sweater at all. Today is not like that. Today is cold and there is a vicious wind. I went down to the shop to purchase a few things. As I left, a woman followed me from the hand-washing station outside the door to my car. I do not know this woman except to say hello to. Sometimes we comment on the weather to one another. That is as far as our relationship goes. I am not sure what her name is but I think I know where she lives. She is an older woman but I do not think she is as old as she looks.  If she is as old as she looks, she should not be out at the shop, but staying at home and cocooning. She spoke to me from the required distance. She said, “I do not want to interfere but I could not help but notice your moth holes.  I have a solution for that if you want to know it.” She did not wait for me to respond. She kept talking. She said, “Since your sweater is black you must only ever wear a black shirt underneath it. That is the trick. That way no one will notice the holes and you will get a few more years out of it.” I thanked her for the advice and she nodded quickly as she turned and walked away.

To Town on the Wood Road

13 May Wednesday

They are called Maize Strips. They appear each year in certain fields. They change the land. They define the curves of a field. They make everything look different. They make the fields beautiful. The Maize Strips are made of a thin white plastic material extruded over the soil from a machine. The soil in the in-between section of the strips weights the white strips down. Seeds are planted through slits in the plastic or underneath the plastic. I am not exactly sure how that works. The plastic works like a little green house holding in the heat and encouraging growth. The corn grows through the plastic while the weeds are kept down.  The white material breaks down all the time as the corn gains strength and height. By the time the corn is a foot high, none of the white is visible. I would like to believe that the Maize Strips are made of potato starch or some kind of material that breaks down and goes directly back in to nourish the soil. I wish it was not plastic, but I fear it is.

14 May Thursday

I met Siobhan in Ardfinnan this afternoon. A visiting carer was at the house to shampoo her mother’s hair and to make her a cup of tea. Siobhan’s mother is 102 and it is not wise to leave her alone. Siobhan had a slot of about an hour before she needed to be back at home. We walked through some fields on the far side of the river and she was able to point out the back of her own house across the fields. She used to walk back there with her father and if he caught some fish he would hold them up and her mother could see with the binoculars if they were having fish for supper. We counted 39 swans in the river. It was not easy to count them because they kept moving. There is big discussion as to whether the swans belong in Newcastle or Ardfinnan. Both villages want to claim them. The swans go where they want to go. There are six geese on the green and in the river. The number is down from 12. No one knows if the geese are being stolen by a fox or by a man. There is now a new small hut for the geese to be locked into at night. Tommie Myles, the butcher, and a woman named Norah, who normally runs the pub but of course the pub is closed for the lockdown so now she has lots of extra time, have joined forces.  Together they make sure that the geese are safely shut in before dark and that they are let out again in the morning.

15 May Friday

John the Post used to complain about the cow parsley in the boreen. Every year he would be angry about the sudden growth. Every year he acted like it was a new and unexpected thing just put out in his way to annoy him. As he drove up and down the boreen four or five times a week, the cow parsley would get thicker and denser and then it would start to droop with its own weight or with the weight of the rain if it was a rainy season and John could never laugh and think of the copious cow parsley as a crazy little fluffy car wash. The cow parsley made him furious. He was irate all the way down the track and he was irate all the way back up, every single day, until the season moved on and the cow parsley had fallen flat to the ground or it had been cut down. Derek is the post man now. He does not let things bother him. He commented on the cow parsley today but he told me it was much worse over Ballindoney way where the road is a proper tar road that is made to have space for cars in two directions. He said there is no use to worry about it. He said, “We could have much worse things coming down on us.”

16 May Saturday

The sun does not set until about 9.40 at night.  Dusk is still falling at 10.30. It takes a longer and longer for the night to get fully dark. Most nights I am asleep before the dusk has dropped.

18 May Monday

I took Tommie into town this morning. I offered to drive him as I did not think he was able for driving himself. He did not think so either. He needed to go to the dentist because his dentures are crumbling. One front tooth has completely broken off. Others have been breaking off in pieces. Sometimes he swallows the pieces and sometimes he spits them out. The dentist is open two mornings a week for emergency visits. This is an emergency.

I made Tommie sit in the backseat in order to maintain the sense of social distancing and I made him wear his seat belt. We had a little struggle finding the ends and getting him hooked in. He said he was too old for seat belts. He said he felt like he was the Queen of England or someone like that but he said if he was the Queen he would have to wave to everyone and he would not enjoy that.

He reported as much as he could about his time inside at the dentist. He said that every single person wore masks and face shields but then he admitted that he only saw the dentist himself and three other people and one was the woman at the desk. He said he was the only person who was not wearing a mask. He said, “I do not even own one.” He said, “I see them on the television and everyone has one but I do not have one.” He sounded a little bit plaintive. The dentist asked if he had driven himself in to town and he said, “No my friend drove me. Her name is Erica but just now today sitting in this chair I do not recall her second name.”  The dentist whose name is Daniel said, “Oh, do you mean Erica and Simon, that Erica?” Tommie was pleased that the dentist knew who I was and that he knew that it was me who had given him a lift. It made him more certain than ever that the dentist is a fine and clever man because he knows everyone there is to know.

On the return trip I asked Tommie if he would like to drive home a different way just to see how things are out in the world. I drove in to town on the Wood Road and I drove back by way of Marlfield. I thought he would be curious about who was planting in the fields closest to home and who had cut their silage and where cows were grazing, but he said, “No, it does not matter how we go because I have never been much of a man for sightseeing.”  He said, “I feel strange being out of my house at all after eleven weeks at home. I do not feel very confident.  I will be glad to get myself back indoors.”

20 May Wednesday

We received a special six page pamphlet today in the post. It is full of information about the Covid Virus. It is all written in Irish. Usually these government announcements are in both English and Irish. I will give it back to Derek in the morning and ask if an English language version is available.

21 May Thursday

Over the recent weeks, elderly people have been disappearing from our view. Everyone over 70 has been asked to stay at home in quarantine. 70 is not so old but that is the number and they are being cocooned. The outside world is full of younger people and the less we see of the older people the more it is possible to think that they do not exist. We see grey hair but we do not see people with white hair. We never see a very old person out walking with a stick. Johnny told me today that they are starting to come out. He said they are sick to the teeth with being cooped up so they are coming out. Today there were two white haired men in front of the church. They were keeping the width of a car between them as a form of distancing and they were roaring back and forth having a lively and much needed conversation. The shouting might have been because of the distance or it might be that their hearing was bad and they would have been shouting no matter where they stood.

22 May Friday

The young dog down at McGrath’s farm has moved himself out onto the road. He looks at each car carefully. He is not chasing the cars. He is just staring at each approaching vehicle and making us drive around him. The old dog is out on the road some days but she stays well back. Her head goes back and forth as she watches a car approach and pass by. Her head is busy but the rest of her body has no more energy for chasing. She had been training up this young dog to be the chaser she can no longer be, but this one does not have the same urge.

23 May Saturday

A second day of wild thrashing winds.  The Amber warnings are still out for much of the country. In between the noise of the winds and the worry about falling trees, branches and wires, there are moments of scary silence over the land. It is nice to have something to talk about that is not the virus. “Fierce Windy Today!”

24 May Sunday

There are big fat bumblebees in my work room. I do not know how they get in but they do not seem to be able to leave the same way that they arrive. They fly slowly and heavily with a loud droning noise. They have thick black legs. They do not fly so much as hover. They bump into the glass on the window and the door. Every day I find at least one dead bee on the floor. If a bee is still alive, I take it outside or I leave the door open so that it can depart. I had a piece of cardboard outside the door where I placed each corpse. I collected about 25 dead bees but the huge wild winds in the last few days blew the cardboard and all of the bodies away. I have started a new Bee Board today and there are already seven dead bees on it.

 

25 May Monday

I took Tommie back to town today. He sat in the back seat again. I left him in the waiting room where there were three big high backed arm chairs with floral upholstery. There used to be eight chairs and a table full of magazines. Now there are only the three chairs with large pieces of clear acrylic hanging down between the chairs doing the job of separating each chair from the next one. There is not a magazine in sight. Tommie was the only person there. He sat himself in a chair. He looked like he was in a booth. He did not have to wait long. When he came outside to meet me, I could see that he was disappointed. He looked like he was about to cry. He had come into town to get his new teeth but instead he had his mouth measured.  Now he has to wait two more weeks to get his new teeth.

Home-made Seating.

27 May Wednesday

I went to the doctor’s surgery. There were many notes taped onto the door and the windows. All of the notes instructed me not to enter the building, but to telephone the front desk to announce my presence. I rang the desk and was told to wait outside the door but not to stand too near the door. I was to wait for the nurse to come and collect me. The nurse’s name is Alice. Every person is always on a first name basis. I stood and waited for Alice at a good distance from the door. I was glad that it was not raining.

28 May Thursday

It has become a thing with us women. When we meet, we look at one another’s hair. When someone looks freshly shorn there is a little bit of envy and an immediate need on behalf of the viewer to comment. One woman who was looking particularly well-coiffed told me that her 15 year old son had cut her hair. He did a good job. Some people trim their own hair and some wear it pulled up in a pony tail or a top knot. There are a lot of hair clips and head bands. Some women are doing home dye jobs just to keep their roots from showing. There is a lot of panic about roots. There are many blondes who are determined to make us believe that they really are blondes. And a lot of women who should be grey but who refuse to be seen with grey hair. It is a very telling time. On the 8th of June, we will enter the second phase of the 5 Phases that the government has decreed for us to come out of lockdown slowly and carefully. There are three weeks between each phase. On the 8th, among other things, our freedom to travel will be extended from 5 kilometres to 20 kilometres. Hairdressers and barbers are not allowed to open until Phase 4. Phase 4 is not until the 20th of July.  The issue of hair will be even more desperate by then.

29 May Friday

We can look out the kitchen door and see anyone arriving down the boreen. We can see whoever appears from behind the grass roofed book barn. Usually it is one of the three cats from the farm, a grey squirrel, a rabbit or a high stepping pheasant, a magpie or a pigeon on foot, or the fox. In the last weeks there have been more people walking this route than we have ever seen in all of our years here. Because of the small distance still allowed for us to be away from our homes, people have been discovering walks closer to home. They have been discovering this boreen and the mass path. It is still a wild and unkempt route, and for those who wear white sneakers and do not like mud it is not an advisable walk. We have met people who live nearby but who we had never spoken to. We have seen other people we have not seen for ages. On a fine day it is good to stand outside and talk. It has made the Lockdown into a strangely social time. There are two small girls, now walking this route regularly with their parents, who equip themselves with little backpacks and rough walking sticks as though they are on a real trek into an overgrown unknown.

30 May Saturday

Today was the second Saturday back at the Farmer’s Market. Last week was too windy and cold to linger, so today was like the first day back after two months. The sun was out. Not all of the vendors have returned. There were only 7 stalls and elaborate marks sprayed onto the tar to tell us in which direction to move and where to queue. We all kept crossing each other in the wrong ways but it is a big space and there are never more than a small number of people so social distancing was maintained and a good time was had by all.

31 May Sunday

Ardfinnan is a village full of home-made seating in public places.

1 June Monday

Small rectangular bales of hay leaning up against one another are called a Stook. It sounds like Stewk. The word Stook is both a noun and verb. The bales get Stooked by hand, and they are arranged in Stooks. Leaned together, the air moves around them and allows the smallest area of each bale to be touching the ground while they dry out a bit, waiting to be collected and taken into a shed and under cover. When the bales are leaned up together it is important that the knot of the twine which holds each bale together is facing outwards. That way the rain, if it comes before the bales are collected, will drain off the bale with the least amount of water going in and soaking the hay.  These bales are only made in small fields of hay. Big fields need huge machines and produce round bales. Richie and Greg explained all of this to me while they were collecting bales one Stook at a time. They only had a tiny trailer and four bales were all they could transport at a go. Richie explained that a Stook is also a term for someone being in a bad humour. Now that I know the word Stook I am looking forward to listening out to hear someone described with it: “That man is in a Stook” or “She has got herself into a Stook.”

2 June Tuesday

Every day from 12-1, RTE1 plays musical requests for people who want to send birthday or anniversary greetings to a person somewhere in the country. Since the Lockdown this shouting out has been more popular than ever. Everyone is at home and they cannot go to visit the person who is celebrating so they send elaborate messages by radio and  whoever is being sent the message will receive it because it is almost lunchtime so they will be in the kitchen with the radio on in anticipation of the one o’clock news. If a person is quite elderly it can take a long time for the announcer to list the children and grandchildren and the great-grandchildren. If there are family members living in Germany and New Zealand and Boston as well as Limerick and Inchicore and Ballycotton, the locations have to be mentioned too. The announcer has taken to bunching up a few greetings for several people who have a birthday on the same day and one song will be played rather than a separate request for each person. As always, Roundy Birthdays get special attention. I never tire of this expression for a birthday that ends in a zero. Today a man was mentioned who was celebrating the 50th anniversary of his 21st birthday.

3 June Wednesday

I am still wearing my oldest clothes. I am still trying to wear things right out and into the rag bag or the bin in the course of this quarantine.  Sibby announced that she has taken to wearing her best clothes even if there is no one at all to see what she is wearing. She announced that if she does not wear them now then when will she wear them. She said she is too old to be saving things for later. She said, “I am happy to be wearing my Sunday clothes on a Tuesday.”

4 June Thursday

Haying and the bringing in of silage have made the roads deadly.  Agricultural contractors are racing around at speed rushing from one job on one farm to the next job on the next farm. Their machines are enormous. They take up the entire road.  The tractor drivers start at 7 in the morning and work till 10 at night.  There is a roar of machinery in the distance all day long. There is the tradition at dinner time that the drivers are fed by whichever farm they are on at the time. The hearty meals around the kitchen table are now taking place on patios or under trees or even at big table set up in the cow sheds.  Everyone is social distancing at the lunch table.  The wives of the drivers are always known as Silage Widows.  They do not see their husbands or partners for days on end. This haying season seems to be coming to an end but in 6 weeks it will start up again for the second cuts.  Weather permitting.

5 June Friday

After four or five days of hot dry weather, the temperatures have dropped, and each day is cool and brisk. Today the wind is sharp and every few hours there is a burst of heavy rain. The rain lasts for fifteen minutes and then in an hour there is another burst. The cow parsley has gone all skeletal and vetch has become the predominant flower in the ditches. Its purple flowers and tangly leaves are rampant. Honeysuckle, buttercups, clover, the dreadful hog weed, speedwell, foxglove, red campion, silverweed, dog roses and loads of ferns. Everything is in bloom and maybe it had been blooming earlier but we could not see it because up until now the cow parsley hid everything from sight.There is so much to look at.

Swinging the Beans

9 June Tuesday

Yesterday Tommie and I went to the dentist again. He was in high spirits. He was looking forward to his new dentures. He was looking forward to eating toast without first dunking it into his tea. He was not in Daniel’s office for long. All that happened was that he had more measurements taken and he had his mouth yanked about a bit. He was disappointed to be leaving yet again without his new dentures. We walked down the ramp slowly. He was not tearful. He was cross. I drove him home on a different road. I slowed the car to look at a field where small bales were strewn all over the place. They had not been properly stooked. They were a mess. It was obvious that the bales had been in this disarray for a week or more. I could see the error in this because of my recent education about stooks and stooking. These bales were exactly as they were not supposed to be. Tommie was outraged. He has spent his whole life knowing the correct way to care for hay. He could not believe how wrong this was. He told me that I should go right in and inform those people of the Error in Their Hay. He said he would wait in the car for me. I said it was way too late to save that hay. Tommie was invigorated by his anger. It was the best thing that happened on the whole trip.

10 June Wednesday

She was unhappy to learn that she was listed in his mobile phone under W for Wife. He wanted her to list himself in her telephone under H for Husband. She had him listed under his own name and she felt like that was where she wanted to look for him and that was where she wanted to find him. He had a perfectly good name. He explained that this was not about his name. His name would, of course, stay the same. This was a practical detail. This was about A Possible Future Emergency. She understood what he meant but she said that she did not like being reduced to being Noun. He pleaded. He said, “Sometimes it is important to be a Noun.”

11 June Thursday

We set off early for a walk over Joe’s fields. The cows had been gone from the near field for long enough. We knew that they were already up in the milking shed by the time we set out. We would not be in their way and they would not be in our way. We passed a group of calves with ear tags as big as their ears. They were no longer babies. They were off the formula and now eating grass and hay. These were adolescents, or maybe teenagers. They ran to the gate to look at us.

12 June Friday

The expression everyone is using is Letting Out. We are still only in Phase Two of the opening up of services and shops and movement in the whole country.  Already the language has changed to accommodate our new freedoms. Letting Out is what happens for the cows in the spring.  They have been cooped up in open sided sheds and when spring is finally arrives they are let out and they go a bit crazy frolicking and jumping and racing around the meadows.  We are not Coming Out of Lockdown. We are being Let Out.

13 June Saturday

The fox moved through the long grass. His head and body and tail moved as one long curving line. His legs were not visible. The grass was too long for that. He was just a slither of colour. The cows were in the same field. They did not pay any attention to the fox weaving in and out very near to them in the grass. The cows paid no attention to the fox and the fox paid no attention to the cows. They were all in the same field but they were doing different things.

14 June Sunday

The sign was very small. It was tiny. The road is not a busy road. The arrow pointed down a side road which is even less used. The smaller road is a narrow dead end with only four houses the whole length of it. One belonged to Pa and Peggy but they have both died and their cottage is empty.  I walked down to the Bake Sale because I thought it would need some customers.  The little girls doing the baking would be disappointed if no one came to buy their cookies and cupcakes. I could not have been more wrong about the lack of passing trade. Everyone from their primary school was there, plus the parents and a few grandparents and it was a lovely afternoon so people were lingering in the sun and drinking tea and staying two meters apart from each other in all of the official ways, but happy to be together and happy mostly to be anywhere at all.

15 June Monday

I love these days with the doors and windows open and the bird activity and noises of tractors in the far distance.  I stepped outside to drink my coffee on the bench beside the kitchen door. As soon as I sat down I had to jump up and move to another part of the garden. Something has died in the honeysuckle. The smell is terrible. There is a rotting corpse in there getting heated up by the late morning sun. No doubt I could dig around in the foliage and find whatever it is and remove it, but I am not going to do that. I shall just wait for the smell to go away.

 

16 June Tuesday

Twice a week we do a Zoom exercise class. There are about 30 people participating in the class. At the beginning of each class we greet the people we know and the people we don’t know but who we now recognize as other regulars and when it is over we all wave good bye to one another. We have named this class Swinging The Beans because some of the exercises require us to use tins of beans as hand-weights. Simon started out using chickpeas but now he claims to prefer cannellini.

 

Staying Home

18 June Thursday

I stepped out of the book barn and found myself up to my knees in wasps. They were swarming in a deep dark mass from my knees right down to the ground. Some of them were not even flying. They were just walking around. They did not seem to be going anywhere except for a few who walked right up and onto my sandals. I panicked and stepped back into the barn and I shut the door. I stood there for a few minutes but since I did not want to be in the barn anymore, I had no choice but to step out again. The wasps ignored me and they kept swarming. I waded slowly through them. When I cleared the barn and the wasps, I looked back and I could see that there was the usual crowd up under the eaves going in and out in a busy manner. There did not appear to be any up and down activity between the two groups. Still, the low-to-the-ground swarming felt dangerous.

We phoned a man who does Pest Control. His name was Pat. He works with his daughter, and their firm is called Arrest-A-Pest.   He said he would stop by this evening. We were pleased that he would be coming so soon but we had the usual heart-sinking feeling about the word Evening. Evening is a complicated word. Evening here is not like Evening elsewhere. Evening is any time after lunch and it stretches as far as night. The way I understand it is that Evening is both afternoon and evening combined in one word. These days the sun is not going down until 10 pm and it is not full dark till much later. We had no idea when Pat would arrive but we knew it would not do us any good to think nor to worry about it.

Pat said on the telephone that he knew where we lived and he did. He arrived at around 8 pm. He had known Willie English and his three siblings who had lived in this house for years. He knew Johnny Mackin from the ruined house above. He said he had Come Up in the area. He was born just over in Roxbrough and he knew everyone around here. He knew the people who were still alive and he knew those who were dead. He was pleased to tell us as much as he knew. We showed him the wasps. They were busy up around the roof but there was no longer a single wasp down low to show to him. He said that they are not wasps but honeybees and that it is illegal for him to do anything against them. He said we would have to live together in friendship. He said the honeybees are not aggressive and that they will not attack nor sting us. Sadly the honey they are producing is all up in the roof with the queen and there is no chance that anyone can get to it. He explained that the swarm down low to the ground that scared me this morning was a group consolidating to move out. There was a ready queen and the crowd was heading off with her to make a new home somewhere else. It was just a fluke that I walked into the middle of them while they were preparing to depart. Pat said they were not interested in me and probably thought no more of me than they would any tree that was in their path.

19 June Friday

There are certain seasonal things that I never remember. There are months when it is okay for the farmers to spread slurry on the fields and there are months when it is not allowed. There are certain months when it is not permitted to cut the ditches. The months when birds are nesting and laying their eggs in the bushy growth are the times when the cutting is not okay. I should know the months both for spreading and for hedge cutting by now. They should be in the calendar of my head, but somehow these familiar activities take me by surprise every year. Early this morning I walked along a stretch of road and I felt dizzy with the heavy scent of the wild honeysuckle. It was sweet and thick. I slowed down so that I could enjoy it. It was almost overpowering. I wished that I was not alone. I wished that I had someone walking with me today to share the fragrance.  In the afternoon, I walked along the exact same stretch of road and the honeysuckle was completely gone. The big machine driven by Ned Shine or someone working for Ned had come along. The hedges had been cut. It looks like a massacre and there is not even one tiny blossom of honeysuckle left to see nor to smell.

20 June Saturday

At the age of 66, the government gives everyone in the country a card which allows them the freedom to travel anywhere in the country on a bus or a train for free. The card includes travel to and travel within Northern Ireland. It works for public transport within a city like Dublin or Cork. I had my birthday a few months ago and my card arrived right on schedule but I have never used it. This spring has not been the time when anyone wants to be traveling on a bus or on any other form of public transport, even if it is free. Traveling on a bus is not what anyone wants to be doing, at least not if they can avoid it, so the gift of this card is sort of like being given nothing.

21 June Sunday

Elderflower blossom is everywhere. Loose and loopy branches bounce up and down in the breeze. The creamy white blossoms look enormous and blousey. Foxglove is rampant too.  I think I have never seen so much of it in so many places. And as always the wild daisies have taken over the garden.

22 June Monday

Today I received a check in the post from the insurance company. It was for 30 euro. They sent checks out to everyone because they know we have not been driving our cars during the lockdown. They felt we should be rewarded and reimbursed for not using our motorcars. There is a new sort of boasting that people are doing about how little petrol they have used in the last three months. Two men were discussing this outside a shop. They were shouting to one another across the back of a blue car and banging their fists on the boot of the car for emphasis. The first fellow said he had filled his tank in the middle of March and he still had 3/4 of a tank left. The other man said he had only put 27 miles on the clock since the lockdown began. It was a kind of oneupmanship to announce how far each man did not go.  There is newfound pride in the act of Going Nowhere.

23 June Tuesday

I walked out this morning and I found a puffball beside the path. We ate it for lunch.

24 June Wednesday

I saw Anthony’s Christmas tree.  It is the one made of tyres that he brings out every year. It is sitting on a pallet out the back with assorted machines and stacks of old tyres and stacks of new tyres.  It is waiting until it is needed again. It looks a little forlorn with last December’s greenery still there but gone dead and the baubles hanging just as they were when it was Christmas.

25 June Thursday

The government is encouraging people to stay at home this summer. They want people to stay in the country and not to fly off to Europe nor to travel by ferry to the continent. The Kerry County Council has sent a check for 100 euro to every household to encourage residents to stay in Kerry and to spend this windfall locally.

26 June Friday

Tommie was rushed to hospital and after a week there, he was sent to Saint Teresa’s Care Home in Clogheen to recuperate and to regain his strength. Once he was over feeling ill, he had a lovely time. He enjoyed being fed three meals a day and he enjoyed the tea and biscuits before bedtime which was at 9 pm. He said if he had stayed any longer he would have gotten fat. He loved the women who worked there and he loved not being alone all day every day. He said that before he went into hospital The Spring Had Gone Out Of His Step. Now he feels that he has it back. I took him to town and this time his new dentures were ready. He came home a happy man.

27 June Saturday

Another sign of the year moving along is Joe’s delivery of wood shavings for his cows. They stand outside all winter on a specially built platform with no roof over their heads and these wood shavings underfoot. As the shavings fall through the cracks of their platform, new shavings get put down. Every year I worry about the cows exposed to the weather and every year Joe tells me that they do not mind being out. All day today I have heard the noise of the tractor scooping up the shavings and taking them off to be stored until they are needed in the winter. The smell as I pass through the farmyard is lovely. I know there will be a second delivery in the next week or so.

 

The Odd Passing Shower

30 June Tuesday

The Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tony Holohan is begging people not to go Abroad. At the same time, the radio is full of non-stop advertising from airlines offering low fares to escape to everywhere and anywhere. Travel agencies have asked the government to put a halt to all travel outside of the country. They want everyone who has booked a holiday overseas to get their money back with a payment from the government. They want everyone to Holiday At Home. In daily life, there is a constant question and answer discussion about where one is going for a holiday. The question is asked even when just buying milk. It is imperative for everyone to be going somewhere simply because we are out of lockdown and allowed to go somewhere more distant than 20 kilometres from our homes. Some people are going to Donegal or to Tramore but a lot of people believe it is their right to go to Spain or to a place further afield. The country is divided between those who fear people bringing The Covid back with them and those who just want to Go. There is a lot of hand-wringing and worry about people Going Foreign.

1 July Wednesday

A rabbit flew off the banking at a great speed. She thumped into my chest before pushing off with her feet, dropping to the ground and disappearing. I guess she was being chased. She came out of the opening in the bushes that the fox usually comes through so I assume she was being chased. My presence interrupted the whole activity. This is the first time I have ever collided with a running rabbit.

2 July Thursday

We walked out of Ardfinnan on a narrow tar road in the direction of Lady’s Abbey. There was grass down the middle of the road. On the right we passed a small two-story building. It was small but we knew it was too big to have ever been a house. It was built of stone. All four walls were standing but the roof and the windows were long gone. It was built as a Fever Hospital. Lady’s Abbey was also without roof and without windows. It has been through various states and re-buildings over the centuries. There are a few graves outside and a few crumbling interiors intact. In one small room there is a wooden chair. It is not an old chair. The chair is in fine condition. It has a red velvety seat which has not been damaged by the weather, so it cannot have been in the room for long. Someone carried the chair in there for a reason. There is nothing inside the room to suggest an altar or a place of prayer or any reason at all to be there for a long enough time that anyone might need a chair. The ground beneath the chair is not even flat enough to allow for sitting without teetering or tipping over. I have been thinking about this chair all day. I will go back soon to see if it is still there.

3 July Friday

Slurry has been spread on the fields. The entire out-of-doors stinks. A terrible stench hangs over everything. It causes a burning in the back of the throat. The washing can stay on the clothesline. It is too late. Who wants to sleep in sheets that smell like slurry? They can be left outside for a few more days. The rain and the wind will refresh them and blow all of the odor out.

4 July Saturday

A man leaned into his car boot and lifted out a Madonna. I do not know if she was made of plaster or wood, but she was carefully painted. I could see no chips, cracks or missing bits. She was large. She was at least half the size of the man himself. He cradled her in his arms as he walked across the road with slow deliberate steps to where another man was waiting with the boot of his own car open. The second man had blankets ready. Together they wrapped the Madonna carefully and they laid her down in the boot. They were gentle in all of their movements. They crossed themselves before they closed her in.

5 July Sunday

Birds are eating my gooseberries. It has never been such a big problem as it is this year. I do not mind sharing with the birds but this has been a battle. They have had more than half the crop off my four bushes. This morning I sat outside on a box in a soft drizzle of rain. I have to pick in the rain because I want to collect the gooseberries before they disappear.  I picked as many as I could but even while I was picking a thrush was on a near branch plucking and carrying a berry away. And it was not just one thrush. As soon as I turn my back, a whole flock descends and strips the branches bare.

6 July Monday

Murt stood outside his gate. Sometimes he stands inside his gate and sometimes he stands outside his gate. He cannot walk far these days but he likes to have a look at things. It is important to have something to report to the next person he sees. He told me that he saw two girls out walking. They were going fast. He was impressed with their speed. He said, “Those girls are Good To Walk. They went past me like I was Tied to the Ditch!”

7 July Tuesday

The woman was discussing the definition of her crease. She was thinking of maybe even changing her crease once she had her hair color sorted out. She has had a lot of time to think about it because until now it has not been possible to talk with her hairdresser. I had no idea what she was talking about. I had to ask. A crease is the parting in the hair. A crease defines the point on the scalp from which the hair goes left or right. I did not have to learn a new language when I came to live here but I am always learning a new language.

9 July Thursday

On and off rain everyday. It is grey and gloomy and it does not feel like July. Some days are cool and some days are humid and close like a tropical jungle, but the days are rarely bright. Lady’s Mantle always looks good with raindrops in its leaves. That is one small good thing about the rain and drizzle. We all feel a bit discouraged. The weather people on the radio are running out of ways to forecast the rain. Today we are promised Just The Odd Passing Shower.

 

——————————————

The Beinecke Library at Yale invited me to contribute something to their project Creativity in Isolation.  I thought I had nothing to offer but then I realized that of course, this journal is what I have been doing throughout the lockdown. It was not a special something extra for the lockdown nor something that I did because of the lockdown. It is just a continuation of what I have been doing anyway. With many thanks to Tubyez Cropper, for doing the tricky stuff, and to Nancy Kuhl for pushing me.

https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/article/creativity-2020-erica-van-horn-journal

 

 

A Two Bird Morning

12 July Sunday

I was in a hurry. I ran out of the shop, opened the car door and threw my newspapers onto the back seat. As I slammed the door I wondered whose sun hat was on the seat. That was the exact moment when I realised that this was not my car. I re-opened the door, grabbed my papers and apologized to the man sitting in the front seat as I did so. He did not turn around. He mumbled with his mouth full: “You caught me eating The Chocolate. I have been told not to eat The Chocolate.” He did not seem at all bothered that I had put my things into his car and that I then took them out again. He was only worried about being caught eating The Chocolate. I never saw his face so he need not worry that I will identify him.

13 July Monday

A Two Bird Morning. The first was a tiny wren who came into the big room and flew into a window and knocked herself out. I took her outside and placed her under a table. She was still there an hour later. I worried that she might be injured, so I placed a jar lid full of water and some crumbs nearby in case she needed sustenance to get herself flying again. Perhaps it was just the shock that kept her there. An hour later I looked to see if she was still there. I moved the water a little closer to where she was sitting and my movements startled her. She made an awkward little stumble and a wobbly flight and disappeared into the rosemary bush. About an hour later, a starling came sweeping into the kitchen, did a quick circuit and rushed out again.

15 July Wednesday

Tommie is back at home. Again. He was rushed into hospital for a second time. He spent another seven days inside. While there he was given a second test for The Covid which he assured me is a most unpleasant thing. He felt that having the test once was painful but twice was unfair. He said it is the fault of his lungs and his breathing but the antibiotics did their job and now he is pleased to be at home again. He claims to have No Big Energy but for the moment he is committed to the idea that his lack of energy is the fault of the heavy grey and humid weather, and not his health. He reported that his new teeth give him a lot of pleasure every single day. He can eat anything at all without fear that he might be swallowing another tooth. He declares that it was money well spent and that these new teeth that Daniel made him are even better than the previous set.

17 July Friday

I had seen a little envelope like this once before. I found it on the ground out in the middle of nowhere. It was from Fourmilewater and it was yellow and white.  I did not know what it was for. Today a neighbour offered me some Dear Little Envelopes from her church. The envelopes are dated and because the dates have expired, she would just be throwing them into the recycling. Because no one has been attending church during the days of the Lockdown, she has a backlog of unused envelopes. She knew I would like them. She knew that they would be a novelty to me. The plain green ones are for the weekly offering. She has loads of those. The ones for special collections have different colours on the top. The three I have been given are for St. Patrick’s Day, a Projects and Development Fund and the Diocesan Priests Easter Collection. People attending the church can decide which causes they want to contribute to. There is no obligation to put money into every envelope. There is no obligation, but there is a list. And every envelope has a number. My neighbour’s envelopes all have the same number printed onto them. This number is her number. The person who gathers the envelopes together in the Parish office can tell exactly who gave what. They can match the number to a name and keep track of the generosity, or the miserliness, of each Mass-goer. Throwing random coins into a collection basket is an anonymous way to contribute to a church. There is nothing anonymous about the envelope system.

18 July Saturday

There are three different windows in the end of the building. The stone shed was part of the farmyard when Maisie lived there. Her house was torn down and a new one built in its place. The shed with the three unmatched windows remains exactly where it was, even though it is hard to remember it’s exact location now without the house to define its spot. It is strong and well-built and the roof is good. These windows were the windows that were available at the time the shed was being built. They were not a decision. They were just there and they did the job.

20 July Monday

Tommie was interested to hear of the visit from Pat, the man who came to investigate our wasps. The wasps that were not wasps but honey bees. I said we had been surprised that Pat knew so much about our house and Willie English and his siblings and Johnnie Mackin and everyone else in the vicinity. He snorted and said, “Of course he knows everyone! He Came Up here.” Pat had told us that himself, but he did not tell us that he was Aidan’s brother. I asked Tommie how I could ever have known that Aidan and Pat were brothers. He said that everyone knows that. I reminded him that of course I did not grow up here myself. I did not Come Up Here. I do not know all of the extended families of every single person whose home place is here. He remained scornful. He told me that I have been here long enough to know these things for myself.

21 July Tuesday

I am picking blackcurrants every other day. The bushes keep producing. The figs are ripening. Both the birds and I are keeping careful track of them. Raspberries promise to be abundant, but the apple trees are not doing very well. Nor the wild plums. Meadowsweet, Brambles, Herb Robert, Dog Roses and Cranesbill appear everywhere. After the seasonal massacre with the hedge-cutting machine, the honeysuckle is again crawling over the ditches and smelling sweet. Ferns. Ferns. Ferns. Everything is growing. Everything is fine.

23 July Thursday

We walked out to Lady’s Abbey to check on the chair with the red velvet seat. I was delighted to see that it was still in its place and still looking well. There was a man we recognized who was mowing and trimming around the graveyard and the Abbey. He used to work for the council but we could not remember his name. He did not remember our names either, but we all knew that we were known to one another. He clears the grass at the Abbey once or twice a year even though he is not paid to do it. He also does the grounds down at the old Ballybacon church. He was wearing a floor length leather apron totally covered with bits of grass. He said he had wondered about the chair himself. His theory was that probably someone left the chair in the small room so that they could bring it out and sit beside a grave. They then put it away so that it would not be wet the next time they came to sit upon it.

 

25 July Saturday

Tomorrow is Reek Sunday. This is the traditional day for devout Catholics to climb Croagh Patrick. Every year up to 25,000 pilgrims arrive from all over the country. Local farmers open their fields for parking and there are stands for refreshments and volunteers and ambulances at the ready. Mountain Rescue teams are on hand, as are multiple priests at the top of the mountain saying endless Masses. Some of the pilgrims walk in bare feet and others climb in their Sunday best which is not really appropriate clothing for walking up or down a steep and rocky mountain. Croagh Patrick is exactly the kind of pointed mountain that a child might draw. This year the priests and everyone else in County Mayo are asking people not to come and walk the mountain on Sunday as a crowd because of the Covid but instead to spread their visits out over the summer. Tomorrow there will  be no parking and no priests and no one to rescue anyone if there is an accident. There will be chaos if the pilgrims ignore the advice and arrive anyway.

Biddable

27 July Monday

I was thinking that the haying was not quite as frantic as the silage but I was wrong. Few farmers own the enormous machinery needed to cut, turn and bale the hay. Contractors have the machinery and they send out teams to race and rush around the fields in order to do the job for everyone in the area. When they finish one set of fields they are immediately on the road to another set of fields. The big machines are always in motion. They often move in convoys. The machines get bigger every year. Most of them take up the entire road. And the roads are deadly. This afternoon, I was driving up from the village and I met a tractor racing towards me. Then I saw that it was not a single tractor but one tractor followed by two huge machines. There was no way we could pass one another on the narrow road. These were the machines that were as wide as the road. I began to reverse but I was on the narrowest bit of the road just past O’Dwyer’s farm. The corner there is a blind spot and it is a bit scary even without tractors racing around. I was backing slowly. I am not the best backer-upper. Another tractor appeared behind me. This one was pulling a trailer full of hay bales. The trailer made his backing up more difficult. We both went slowly in reverse, as did the second tractor that had come up behind him. I found a field with an open gate and I backed myself in there. I waited in my field while the two tractors and the loaded trailer maneuvered themselves into the O’Dwyers farmyard. The first three were able to drive along on their way and once the second two had come out of the yard and passed up, I drove out of the field and headed home. It was not the longest wait but it was long enough. An idea might be to stay at home until the haying is over.

 

29 July Wednesday

Since Monday the 20th, we have been required to wear masks inside all shops. There was a pair of short muddy boots in front of the shop. A man came out of the shop. He said quietly to himself, “On with the mask. Off with the boots. Off with the mask. On with the boots.” He climbed up into his tractor and drove away.

30 July Thursday

So far we have had one perfect fig from the tree. It was delicious. We could have believed ourselves in Italy while eating it. It was that good.   I am keeping an eye on the rest but the birds are also keeping an eye on them. Sometimes they peck into a fig that is still too hard to be tasty for them.  I do not know why they are in such a hurry.  The pecked fig is ruined for both them and for us. The only thing that we have had copious quantities of this year are the black currants. Everything else has been a victim of the weather. I have a lot of hope pinned on the raspberries and blackberries.

1 August Saturday

I prefer a circular walk but sometimes I am forced by conditions or locations to turn around and go back the same way that I came. This is not a terrible thing. The view is different when the direction changes. But it is less satisfying than a walk which starts in one place and arrives back in the same place without repeating itself. When I am forced to turn around and go back the way I came, I touch the gate or a post or a tree before I turn around. Since the onset of Covid 19 and the threat  of germs I got into the habit of tapping the gate or the pole with my foot instead of my hand.

3 August Monday

We met Thomas while out for a walk somewhere between Goatenbridge and Clogheen. Siobhan knew him. He was happy to chat with us while sitting on his bench near the house. He asked if there was Anything Strange which is just a way of asking if we had any news. He owns 14 old tractors but most of them do not go out anywhere on the road because of the insurance. He just crosses with them into his fields. Or his son does the driving. Or his grandson. Mostly the tractors get worked on and painted and fixed up. One tractor was hooked up to a table saw. It was being used as the power source to run the saw. Thomas had cut some chairs out of trees and made a little sitting place by the road. It might have been for people to stop and sit and rest while they were walking by, or it might have just been just to look at. He included a small table also cut from a tree and on it he placed a teapot.

 

5 August Wednesday

The door was open. The radio was blaring. The keys were in the ignition. The motor was running. The man who owned the car was inside the shop. He wore a mask with his mouth covered but with his nose exposed. He talked to this one and to that one. There were only two or three people inside the shop when he arrived but then someone came in and someone left. It went on like that. He spoke in a loud voice. Maybe he thought nobody could hear him because he was wearing a mask. Maybe his voice sounded muffled to himself. He was in no hurry to leave. Someone suggested that he might run out of petrol keeping the engine running but he said there was no worry about that as he had just filled up over at Joanie’s.

7 August Friday

Biddable. It is not a word I was accustomed to hearing but now I hear it often and I enjoy it. I think it is my new favorite word. When someone is agreeable and not difficult, he or she might be called Biddable. A Biddable person will be someone open to options.  Dogs too are spoken about as being Biddable, but that is about obedience.

 

8 August Saturday

I am trapped by bales.  I cannot drive out through the farmyard. I cannot do anything but wait.

10 August Monday

We had two days of hot sunny summer weather. The mornings began cool with dew on the grass and then the sun warmed everything. After weeks of grey heavy skies and thick humid weather, the change was wonderful. I have been depressed by the lack of summer. Today we woke up to white mist over everything. There was no horizon. It is still warm but the blue sky is gone. We are still waiting to see where the weather will go today.

Bockety

13 August Thursday

The new stove arrives today. It is not a stove. It is a Cooker. After all these years I still forget that a stove for cooking food is called a Cooker, not a stove. The name comes directly from the action that the thing does. A Cooker cooks. The word stove is reserved for a wood stove or for something like an Aga that provides heat.  Replacing the old Cooker has been an idea on the horizon for months. Back in April, I thought there was a dead rodent in the honeysuckle. The smell near the kitchen bench was terrible. The smell went on and on. I could not believe one small body could take so long to decompose. Then I thought it was second dead rodent. I avoided the bench and I sat elsewhere. There are lots of places to be outside. It was not a bother.

When the gas bottle that provides the fuel for the cooker ran out, we replaced it. It reminded us that we meant to buy a new Cooker last summer and then again in the autumn, but we just never got around to it. Replacing the bottled gas involves unhooking it from the rubber tube and carrying the yellow cylinder to the car and wadding stuff around it so it does not thrash around in the boot while driving to the shop and then having Kieran unload the empty and putting a full bottle into the back of the car. And again, wadding a blanket or cramming a box or something around or against it so that it does not crash heavily around in the back when the car turns a corner. I cannot lift the full bottle out of the car. Simon does that. He hooks it up and then we have gas, but it is not great this butane gas. It is wet. The heat has never been high heat. We decided last year to buy an Electric Cooker even though we both dislike Electric Cookers. What we dislike even more at this point is the constant transporting of gas bottles up and down from the village. Empty gas bottles and full gas bottles. Back and forth and up and down.

After the latest bottle was replaced, it did not last long. It only lasted two weeks which is far too soon to be running out of fuel. A bottle should provide at least 100 hours of cooking. The timing was terrible. It ran out while we were preparing supper. The smell was back again too. I could not believe that there was Yet Another Dead Rodent in the same location in the honeysuckle. We decided that maybe there was a leak in the gas line that takes the gas into the kitchen through a small hole in the wall. We thought maybe a rat had chewed the rubber, or maybe the rubber was just old and perished. We began to turn the gas on at the top of the bottle where it stood inside the honeysuckle bush each time we chose to prepare food. Then we had to remind ourselves to turn it back off again when the cooking was done. That was all right on a fine day but when it was raining it was annoying to go outside each time the Cooker was needed. And then again when it was no longer needed.

Sean Hackett sent out an electrician named Tommy Lonergan. He installed an outlet and switch to adapt the electricity to allow the Cooker to work. Now that Tommy has done his part, the new Cooker can be delivered and installed. I will take the last gas bottle back to the shop and get our deposit back. I will return the old empty one as well as the new one we had on hand in anticipation of yet another one running out. We need never buy another. And as for the honeysuckle, this seems like a very long-winded way to announce that since it has gone scraggy and horrible, and since it’s major function was only ever to hide the gas bottle, perhaps this is the time to cut it down.

14 August Friday

I bumped into Michael Keating this morning. He only just found out that Jim Costigan died. Pat at The Cross told him and he said he had been meaning to tell Michael and Joe for weeks and weeks now, but then he forgot and with no one seeing much of anyone these days the news got lost.
Michael told me how fond his father and Biddy had been of Jim and how much they enjoyed his yearly visits to service their Stanley. Michael said if the times had been different and if he had known, he would surely have driven his mother over to Moyglass for the funeral, but of course he did not know at the time and anyway we were all in lockdown and not able to travel that far from home. We spoke of the many ceremonies and rituals going on without any possibility of being shared in this strange time. We spoke for as long as we could talk with Michael up in the tractor and me standing down on the ground. We talked until a car came along and then we had to move along because we were blocking the road.

 

16 August Sunday

Cows walk from all corners when they are ready to leave a field. Walking around all day while eating grass and changing places does not make much wear on a field.  By the time the walking cows get to the track or the gate that they need to file through they have formed a single line. There is always one cow who is the leader. Their single line nearing the gate quickly wears a path through the grass.

17 August Monday

Julie used the word Bockety to describe the house. It suggested that the house is ramshackle. Bockety is a lovely word. I am not certain if it is a word in common use or if it is her own word. She was quick to tell me that Bockety is used to describe things, not people.

18 August Tuesday

The washing was hanging on the clothes line when the rain began. We had 24 hours of hard steady straight down rain. This morning the clothes line is drooping dangerously low. The clothing is heavy with water. Everything is too wet to bring indoors. I am waiting to see which happens first: Will the clothesline break with the weight of wet fabric or will the clothes dry in the breeze before that happens?

21 August Friday

The early evening silence is enormous. It takes a while to register that the deep quiet is because the wind has stopped. There is no wind. After two days of howling and thrashing and buffeting, the world is silent. We have been beaten and buffeted by gusts of noisy wind since Wednesday night when Storm Ellen hit. Branches and entire trees have fallen down, roofs have blown off, fences have been blown down and electricity has been lost all over the country. This area has been hit harder than usual. The storms off the Atlantic usually hit the west of the country first and they are weak by the time they reach Tipperary.  We got off lightly. We did not lose electricity but lots of homes nearby did.  Along with the winds we had thunder and lightening and rain off and on throughout the days and nights. Here we have had many branches to pick up. Things blew all over the place. There were small animals and birds dead everywhere. They had been tossed into walls and trees. Part of the roof in the entryway to the sauna blew off. The roads are lined with trees being cut up into manageable pieces. I rang Tommie to see how he was after the storm. He said he did not hear a thing. He slept like a baby all though the worst of the winds.  He said “Giving these storms a name like Ellen is a trick to make us less frightened. Sure, we all know an Ellen, don’t we?”

Easy Enough to Forget

25 August Tuesday

Tommie was finally allowed to have a visit with Margaret in the care home in Cappoquin. He found it awkward.  He and Margaret sat on opposite sides of a big sheet of glass and they both wore masks. He said she did not know who he was with his mask on, so he took it off. She still did not know who he was.  He felt that after more than 60 years of marriage she should recognize him, but 5 months of no contact had made him easy enough to forget. He was told that he could schedule a half hour visit every two weeks but before he had the chance to make a second visit, they placed the care home back into lockdown.

26 August Wednesday

The ditches are full of honeysuckle and purple loosestrife and creamy clumps of meadowsweet. I am still waiting for the ripening of the blackberries. There are loads of little hard berries but there has not been enough sun to ripen them. The teasels took a beating with all of the storms and winds. They are tumbling everywhere. Very few remain standing fully upright.

27 August Thursday

The roads remain dangerous. Farm vehicles command priority.

28 August Friday

I recognized the woman at the dump. She was the one who had quizzed me about how to dress when dropping off the rubbish and recycling. She said it was a terrible dilemma because if she came all the way into town she wanted to do some other errands and she liked to look nice when she went into a shop. She did not want to wear her good clothes because going to the dump could easily become a messy job if your Black Bag full of the horrible non-recycling stuff broke or if something leaked in the car or spilled when one lifted it up. This woman was always in two minds about whether to dress for the dump or to dress for the town. She lived too far out to make two separate trips. It was last year when she quizzed me about how I managed this issue for myself. When I saw her today, she looked just the same to me as she did then. She certainly did not recognize me from our previous conversation. Either she has resolved the question in her own mind or she is still worrying the problem.

29 August Saturday

As always, the cows ate their way right around one field leaving it tidy and short with straight edges exactly where the fence stopped them eating. Today, after milking, they walked right through that field to the next one where the grass was fresh and long and ready for the eating.

31 August Monday

I saw a yellow plastic ear tag under the gate. It was stuck in the dried mud. I briefly debated whether to crawl over the gate or to squeeze under the gate. I had to get the tag. I looked around until I found a stick. It was a short stick but it worked alright as an extension of my arm. I stretched through the gate and scratched away at the mud until I dislodged the plastic. Then I scrabbled and raked it over towards me. As always, I am delighted to have a new tag.

2 September Wednesday

We often hear reports on the radio lamenting the fact that the country is no longer practicing religion as it once did. Actually it is not so much a lament but more of an observation about the change in attitudes and behaviour. Few people attend mass regularly and that is not just because of The Covid. The numbers attending church have been falling for many years. There are not so many people subscribing to the practices of the church. When it comes to a funeral or a wedding or the confirmation rituals for children, it appears that everyone is still a Catholic. There are maybe not so many people practicing the official religion in official ways but it remains common to see a car slow down when it passes a church while the driver crosses himself or herself. Increasingly the crossing is often done while the driver is also on the mobile phone.

Many sentences end with the expression God Willing or Please God, especially when anticipating the future. Today my doctor told me on the telephone, “I will see you on Thursday at 10.30, God Willing.”

In written form I do not usually see God Willing abbreviated (G.W.), but P.G. (Please God) and T.G. (Thank God) are common on paper. I am not even certain that people realize that they are saying it. They just say it.

4 September Friday

Raspberries are ripening fast now. I am picking a bowlful every day. Sometimes it is just a normal kind of cereal bowlful and sometimes it is a very large bowlful. We are eating copious quantities of raspberries, giving some to neighbours and freezing some. The freezer is now full of all sorts of frozen fruit. I spilled an enormous bag packed full of blackcurrants inside the freezer today. The hard little berries all tumbled to the bottom. Of course. It is a pity it was such a large bag. I have yet to go out to the shed to empty the freezer of its contents and shovel up all the escaped frozen blackcurrants. Blackberry picking has not started. They seem to be slow to ripen, although I hear from other people that they have huge quantities growing near them. I am busy enough with my raspberries so I am glad the blackberries are not ready.

5 September Saturday

Breda and I walked up the old path along the stream to the waterfalls. It was clear for most of the way. We remarked on what easy going it was and we remarked that we had not expected it to be so clear, but as soon as we said that we walked into a mass of fallen down trees and branches. Either Storm Ellen or Storm Frances had done the damage. It was a mess. It was a scrabble to get through but with a lot of crawling and snagging and scratching, we managed to get in and then we had to keep going because backing up was not possible.  Halfway though our struggle we heard a man shouting. It was another walker who was crashing through from the other direction. He said he had walked down from Bay Lough which is several hours walk from where we were then. He was a huge fat man and he was pouring out sweat. By the time we met, he was out of the branches and done with the thrashing and he had blood pouring down his face. When we pointed to the blood on his face, he waved both of his hands in the air and said “No Bother. No Bother. You know yourself. It will be after clotting itself any minute now.” And then he marched off down the path.

6 September Sunday

The cows get a bit of fresh grass thrown down to munch on while they are waiting for the rest of the herd to finish up the milking. Some days they wander off down the fields whenever they are ready, but if they are being taken to a new field across the road they have to wait till everyone has been milked. They do not leave the farmyard until they are all ready to go together in a group. I like seeing them snacking in a long line.

7 September Monday

While walking up through Joe’s fields today I found another ear tag mashed into the manure on the track. This one had been snapped off so no doubt the last bit is still in the ear of the cow. A few days ago Breda pointed me towards a tag in the bog when we were up the mountain. She did not want to pick it up but she knew I would want it.  It was a small one, made for a sheep.  Finding three new tags in one week is a thrilling bounty. Sometimes I go for months without finding a single new one.

A Bull In The Back

10 September Thursday

Thursday is a big day for shopping. It has to do with it being the day when people get paid. I always forget about Thursday. Normally I try not to go to a supermarket on a Thursday but sometimes I forget. I went to the Supervalu in Cahir and it was full of the workers from the meat processing plant. The workers are mostly from Brazil and Roumania. Meat plants have been a big problem in recent months with sizeable outbreaks of Covid in the factories because of sloppy testing practices. Or no testing. The government is now putting pressure on the meat processing plants and forcing extra testing and vigilance. It is a difficult situation. The workers are treated badly and they are poorly paid. Many of them do not speak enough English to really understand the rules of the current pandemic situation. Their employers exploit that fact. They know that the workers cannot afford to miss a day of work so if they feel unwell they will come in to work anyway. They will bring their symptoms with them. On top of that they have to share their protective equipment. Even their masks get shared. As do their beds because the meat plants tend to be working 24 hours a day. The workers are living with other men who work in the plants and they share the beds. When one man is out working, another man is sleeping in his bed. They are living in close proximity and sharing every single thing in wretched circumstances. Their lives are dreadful. This morning in the SuperValu there were ten or twelve of these men running around the store calling out to one another. They were happy and excited, like children on an outing. These men all wore terrible cheap clothes made of flapping synthetic fabric.  Many garments had been torn and then repaired with heavy black tape. The black tape itself was heavier than the fabric of the garments so there was a lot of drooping. Several of the men had huge scars and rough stitches on their shaved heads. Several had oozing sores on an arm or a hand. At least two were missing fingers. I felt like weeping as I watched them gleefully rushing up and down the narrow aisles. At the same time, I wanted to get as far away from them as I could.

12 September Saturday

Blackberries are now rampant. They are ripening in every direction. The ditches are heavy with berries. I call all of them blackberries. Other people call them brambles. There are many different kinds and they are all in varying degrees of ready for the picking. Some are sour and some are tart and some are juicy and sweet. Once they are all together in a bowl they are lovely. Bird droppings full of blackberry excrement are everywhere. There are purple and blue smudges on the clothes that hang on the washing line, on the outdoor tables and chairs, on the car, on the road.

13 September Sunday

Michael stopped. His truck was pulling a trailer with a bull in it. He was taking the bull to another farm to be put into a field with females. He turned off his engine. He was in no hurry. As we spoke, with me on foot and him sitting inside in his truck, the bull began to throw himself around. The trailer rocked from side to side. The force of the bull’s weight thrashing around inside the trailer made the whole truck move. Even with the emergency brake on, Michael’s pick up truck was getting pushed and jolted along. I could not believe that the truck could be rammed forward by the sheer force of a bull in the back. Michael was neither surprised nor worried about the energetic antics of the bull. We continued with our conversation until another vehicle came along and we had to stop blocking the road with our words.

14 September Monday

Wet Pubs are scheduled to open on the 21st of September. Wet Pubs are those pubs that do not serve food. I had never heard this expression but I knew exactly what it meant as soon as I heard it. In recent weeks, bars and restaurants that serve both alcohol and food have been allowed to open with strict rules. The time a customer is allowed to stay in the establishment is restricted to 90 minutes. Public houses that only serve alcohol have been kept closed. This means most rural pubs, the wet ones, have not been allowed to open. Eating a bag of potato crisps is not considered food. Now there is a date for the reopening but there will still be strict rules and that means no one can stand at the bar while they order or while they drink. Drinks must be served to a person sitting down and staying seated at a table that is a distance from any other table. Rose is not planning to open the pub in the village. It is a very small place. She is thinking that she will give it a few weeks and see how things develop elsewhere goes before she gives it a go.

15 September Tuesday

I saw six greyhounds running along on the side of the road. Several of them had thick blue ropes dangling from their necks. They had escaped from somewhere. They were not running fast but they were not loitering and sniffing at things. They were on the move. The one in the lead was young and light on her feet. She sort of danced along almost on tiptoes. She kept turning her head to check if the other five were still with her. It had all the look of a great day out.

16 September Wednesday

Telling someone to Keep It Between The Ditches is as close as you get to hearing someone telling another person to drive carefully.

18 September Friday

I long for a dog. For the moment I have a windowsill full of animals. It is not enough. It is not the same as a real hungry happy dog but it is something.

20 September Sunday

The freshly mown middle.

Peppermint Oil

23 September Wednesday

The week after the Third Thursday in September is traditionally the week when the National Ploughing Championships are held. Of course the championships are cancelled this year. There is as much discussion on the radio about the cancellation as there would be if the Ploughing was really happening.

25 September Friday

There are spiders everywhere. It is a good year for spiders. It is a great year for spiders. We all comment on it. We are all  living with them. They are inside the house in corners and on the ceilings and around the windows and slipping around in the bathtub and in coffee cups and everywhere. It is not just one kind of spider. There is a lot of variety. There are big spiders and small ones. There are the huge wood spiders.  No one seems to know why they are all visible and active all at once nor why they are all visible and active at this particular time of the year. Ned told me that peppermint oil is the answer.  He repeated peppermint oil a few times but he never told me exactly what I should do with the peppermint oil. He assured me that peppermint oil will send them packing.

26 September Saturday

The car park beside Cahir Castle was full of big trucks and machinery. Fifteen porta-loos had been dropped into place. They blocked access to the bottle banks. The entrance to the car park was closed with metal gates that could be shoved aside. Security men were allowing those people who wanted to attend the Farmers Market into the car park on foot. They would not let any cars drive in. Already more than half of the car park was roped off. They were just waiting for the market to be finished at one o’clock so that they could take over the rest of the place. No one seemed completely sure what the film was but the name I kept hearing repeated was Matt Damon. Matt Damon. Matt Damon. Whatever the film was, he was going to be in it. His name was heard like a little rumble coming out from under all the masks. There were men walking around with clipboards and dozens of men in reflective security vests. Big lights were in place behind the fish stall.They were taking over the entire place while we were trying to shop for our fish and vegetables. The late strawberries are finished, but I was delighted to see that Tipperary Pippins are in season and being sold on the Apple Farm’s stand.

28 September Monday

A tiny wren was flying around the room. Wrens are always small but this one looked extra tiny. It was young and it was crashing into the windows trying to escape and to get itself back out doors. It finally smashed into a window with such force that it knocked itself out. I picked up the little body and placed it under the rosemary bush with a jar lid full of water nearby for when it woke up. The wren did not wake up, so I buried it under Kattie English’s rose bush.

29 September Tuesday

I took the car in to Mike to get something fixed. I had an hour to wait around. I had forgotten about the filming in Cahir. Since Saturday we have had all the news: The film is called The Last Duel, and it is set in Medieval France. The car park is completely closed off now and there are temporary walls in place so no one can see what is going on down there. Some of the walls are made of stretched plastic sheeting and some are woven willow. Flags are waving on standards and large red banners are hanging down off the sides of the castle. It all looks festive in the sunshine. There are one or two dozen people leaning over the side of the bridge looking downriver and hoping for a glimpse of the actors: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jodie Comer, Adam Driver. They are all there somewhere.  Ridley Scott is directing the film. No one is so interested to see him. The radio station Tipp FM has a car from which they are broadcasting reports of the activity even though there is not much to be seen so I think there is not much to report. People talk among themselves about what they are not seeing. There are several small rough carts made of dark planks standing around in front of the castle. Another carriage rambles around town pulled by horses that need some exercise. The Limerick bus had to wait to unload its passengers because a carriage was in the way. There is an open courtyard inside the old mill where all of the horses are being stabled. The town seems full of this movie but at the same time everything is proceeding as normal. A elderly man standing on the pavement remarked, “Isn’t it just a fine thing to have something to talk about that is neither The Covid nor the weather!”

1 October Thursday

I had not seen the woman for months and months. She started right in talking as if we had only met yesterday. She started right in talking as if no time had passed.

“I would not marry. I have no time for marriage. It is not for me. I will not even live with The Boyfriend. I need my evenings for the crocheting and the knitting. He can fool around on top of me down in the shed at the bottom of the yard. My mother knows what we are doing down there but I am a grown woman. She would never come down while he and I are down there. Not like the bathroom though. She walks right in when I am taking a shower or having a wee. She thinks it is no problem. She did that to my father for years. She took the locks off the doors because she was afraid of him falling, or that is what she said anyways. I only moved back in after he died so that she would not be alone but now I am never alone. I live in one room, in my own room, but really I never know when the door might open and she will be there. I am never alone except when I am down in the shed but that is when The Boyfriend is with me, so really I am never alone.”

I said, “Well, it is good to see you after all this time. You are looking well after the quiet of Lock Down Life.”

She said, “I’d look better if I had my teeth in.”

2 October Friday

I took an early walk through Joe’s fields. I timed it for when I thought  the cows would be up in the milking shed. I do not always get the timing right. Neither Joe nor the cows work to an exact schedule. I have been spoiled by the long stretch of dry weather and the ease of walking up the track and through the fields on a hard firm surface. Now the weather has changed. There has been rain. We are promised a lot more rain. Today the sun was watery but there was sun. The track was slippery with mud and manure. It was difficult work walking uphill.

4 October Sunday

When a mass is being held in the church, a small group of men stand outside the church. They are not always the same men but their behavior is always the same. They stand close to the front door. The men are dressed for the occasion. They wear their good pull-over sweaters with clean ironed shirt collars showing at the neck. Usually there are four or six men standing and smoking cigarettes and talking quietly among themselves. When everyone else comes out of the church the men are right there by the door. They will be noticed. They will be seen to be In Attendance. Some people might realize that these men have never gone into the church but most people will believe that they were standing or sitting at the back of the church for the whole time and that they were the first to leave the building. Today I stopped at the shop and I looked across at the church. I saw five men standing and leaning outside while a Mass was being said inside. They were lolling against the wall of the church in the watery sunshine. Instead of the usual cigarettes being smoked, the five men were all wearing masks. Not one of them was smoking.

A Drive-By

9 October Friday

I looked down and saw a brown wallet at my feet. It was fat and well-worn. I picked it up and looked around. There was not a person in sight. I started back into the shop to leave it at the counter in the hope that the owner would return to claim it. Before I reached the door, someone shouted my name. I turned and saw Dilly running toward me. She was wearing her mask. I could not see her mouth but her eyes were full of panic. She called out, “It’s mine! Erica, it’s mine!”  She was still breathless as she told me that she had been parked right there, right there with her car just beside my car and she had noticed that it was my car when she got into her car and she drove the kilometre all the way up the road to her house and she got out of the car before she realized that she must have dropped the wallet as she sat into her own car. She noticed and registered the presence of my car but she did not notice the dropping of her wallet. She turned around and came rushing back. I was happy that the lost wallet found its owner so quickly. She whispered through her mask that she was just after drawing down some money out of the Post Office account so the wallet was Fat Full of Cash. It took a little while but I was glad to see the panic leaving her eyes. She removed her mask and I removed my mask and we stood and talked in the watery sunlight. We kept the distance of the car bonnet between us. I watched her face return to normal as we spoke of this and that and about how much she missed seeing her grandchildren. The whole time she was talking Dilly never stopped clutching her wallet with both hands.

10 October Saturday

New bramble growth is rampant. The young ones are hanging down as tendrils. They grab at my hair and my face and they catch on clothing. I have had two falls in the last week. Both happened while I was walking up the mass path. Both times the reason for the fall was the thicker brambles that are growing or creeping sideways across the path. They hooked my ankle and down I went. I am good at falling. I fall often. I have learned to sort of roll into a tumble and unless there are a lot of rocks, I am mostly unhurt. The first fall was into mud and leaves. The second fall was caused by creeping brambles too but I fell into a scattering of apples both rotten and not yet rotten and some freshly fallen from the trees up at Johnnie’s orchard. The apples that are still hard are like ball bearings. Once the brambles tripped me it was difficult to get myself up and out of the rolling mess without slipping on another apple. The best part about the fall was the lovely smell of rotten apples on my trousers and my hands. The smell followed me around for the rest of my walk.

11 October Sunday

Shebeens are getting busted all over the country. Hundreds of these illegal Wet Bars have opened in sheds and garages and in custom-made structures built of scrap wood and old pallets. Some are elaborate with beer on draft and electricity and portable toilets installed outside. Others just offer a few cans and bottles to drink by lantern or candlelight. Most have a wood stove for heat. Depending where they are located, those partaking can arrive by foot or bicycle or on a tractor but it is best if very few vehicles are visible. These private bars have always been around in rural places but apparently they are now opening in the suburbs and in the towns. The Gardaí are finding them and busting them but they know that for every three they find, there are another one hundred shebeens out there.

12 October Monday

No Bodge! No Bodge has evolved from No Bother. I do not know if people have always been saying this, or if it is a new development of slang. Now I hear it all the time. When I say thank you, the person I am thanking used to say No Bother which I did not really like but that was what was said. Now when I say Thank You what I hear in return is No Bodge. Maybe this is a distinctly local expression or maybe it is more widespread. Since we are in constant but varying degrees of lockdown we do not venture far. Perhaps everyone in the entire country now says No Bodge. Or maybe it is only within our very near world.

13 October Tuesday

Moll Collins of Moneygall turned 100 years old this week. A colour photograph of her was printed in the Irish Times. In lieu of a party, a Drive-By was organized and assisted by the the Gardaí from Roscrea and Nenagh stations. Moll sat in a chair at the end of her path just outside her gate while people drove or walked by at a safe distance. They tooted their car horns and they called out Many Happy Returns. It looked like the best celebration ever.

15 October Thursday

There are announcements on the radio telling British people resident in the country to hurry up and exchange their driving license for an Irish one. They must do this before the end of the year or else they will no longer be legal to drive here. Their insurance company will not cover them. They will be illegal driving on their British licenses. This is all part of the reality of Brexit arriving on 1 January. The British will no longer have the rights of other Europeans. Most of them feel outraged by this change. They think things should continue as they are even when that is not possible. Everything will be different.

16 October Friday

I finished stacking firewood into the lean-to and under the long bench. Billy the Timber has retired and his son no longer cares to cut and sell firewood. Johnnie O’Brien delivered this wood but we were asked to pay for it by writing a check to Father Sheehy’s GAA Club. The load was a mixture of Lime wood and Palm wood. Together the load smells like old geraniums. I had never heard of using palm as firewood and when I looked it up I read that burning palm in your wood stove is tantamount to burning straw. Then I learned that the palm trees that grow all over the Irish coasts are not real palm trees but they are some kind of import from New Zealand called a Cabbage Palm (Cordyline australis).  They look like palm trees and they grow well in this temperate climate and in windy locations, but they are not even remotely related to Palm trees.

 

17 October Saturday

Tommie told me that he is 88. He implied that he will not be 88 for much longer but he would not tell me his birthday. He does not want me to know the date. He does not want me to give his birthday the smallest amount of attention. He said he has never had a card nor a cake and never a party to celebrate his birthday.  No one has taken notice of the day even once in his life and he says there is no reason to start now.

18 October Sunday

The honeybees are still in and out of the barn roof. They are busy all day every day. They are in and out and swarming around the entrance. There must be a massive supply of honey up there and there is no way anyone except the bees can get it.

20 October Tuesday

The early blackberries growing in the ditches suggested such bounty. We thought this year might be the best year ever for blackberries. Since that moment of initial promise, actual plump edible berries have been few and far between. I have not gathered large bowls full of blackberries. I have had a few cupfuls here and there. Most of my blackberry eating has taken place while coming upon a laden bush when out walking. The bushes are still full of hard berries that I am beginning to accept are berries that will never ripen. My raspberry canes keep producing but they are slower than they were. They take longer to ripen and the berries are smaller and less sweet. Every three or four days I can fill a bowl. It is worth keeping an eye on the bushes. It has been raining now for 24 hours. Maybe more. The wind does not stop. The rain blows hard in different directions. There is flooding all over County Cork. We do not have any flooding but we have a lot of water everywhere. The raspberries were looking ready to pick so I went out and picked some in what I thought was a lull between downpours. It had not stopped raining.  It continued as a drizzle but no longer a lashing. I did manage to gather half a bowl of raspberries and I got completely soaked doing so.

22 October Thursday

As of midnight last night we are in full Level Five Lock Down. Again. We are allowed to go no further than 5 kilometres from home for exercise. Schools and crèches remain open. I am wondering if The Boulders fall within the 5 km restriction. The Boulders are a group of about seven large stones maybe pushed into place so that no one drives off that bit of the road.  There used to be some blue paint on one or two of them. It was the same blue used to mark sheep. Most of the blue has worn off. The Boulders is nothing more than a slim spot to pull off the narrow road and park before heading out to walk on Barranacullia and beyond into the Knockmealdowns. The Boulders is a place to meet in these times when we all have to travel in separate cars. If it is more than 5 kms from here, it is not much more.

23 October Friday

We love the postman. The days when letters or packages arrive from afar are the best. Derek also brings news gathered from along his route. Even if nothing comes and Derek does not appear down the boreen, we savor the anticipation. He is not an early postman so his arrival time is always a surprise. He might arrive anytime from 9.00 to 11.30. These days he only comes three times a week. Last week we learned that one of the postmen went off to Greece on a holiday all by himself. Everything there was closed. He had to spend most of his time locked up in his hotel room and then he came home and had to self-isolate for two more weeks. All the other postmen had to take turns working extra hours to cover his route. Derek said, “I have no news today. I am keeping Myself To Myself as I have been told, so I have no news.”

 

 

 

An Added Apostrophe

26 October Monday

Today is a Bank Holiday. In the current climate, it is difficult to know what this means. It is difficult to know if the words Bank Holiday mean anything at all. We remain in Level Five Lockdown. Everything everywhere is closed and everyone is staying at home. The word Holiday feels misplaced.

31 October Saturday

Wild winds gusted and bashed the country all night. All leaves have been blown off all trees. Branches are naked. Views are opened up. We can see things in the far distance. We can view vistas that have not been visible since last year. This is all the work of Storm Adrian. Or it might be the other storm that was coming right behind him. It is not easy to keep track of the names of these relentless winds off the Atlantic.

Most of the vendors at the Farmers Market did not even try to put up their little tents this morning. James, the vegetable man, attached his tent to his car in the hope that the car would keep it from blowing away. Lorraine opened the boot of her car and used the interior space to display her baked goods in tiered rows. We could not get very close to anything she had on offer but we could point to what we wanted. No one lingered at the market. We purchased our food and we rushed away. The noise of the wind made conversation impossible.

1 November Sunday

Today is the first day of the shooting season. I have already seen three cars with men inside and tiny covered trailers being pulled behind. The trailers carry the gun dogs, usually three or four of them squished into the small space. The men will be out hoping to shoot birds and the dogs will be hoping to retrieve the downed birds. It is the time of year for me to sing loudly and to recite poetry when I walk through wooded areas. I need to alert the men with guns that I am not something to be shot. More importantly, I hope to alert the birds of possible danger.

2 November Monday

Joe has had a new man working with him up at the farm for a few weeks now. Today I was chatting to the new man while waiting for the cows to cross the track, so I asked his name. He said his name is Joe. Joe is working for Joe. And then there is the other Joe in the adjoining fields. Joe and Joe and Joe. We are surrounded by Joes.

9 November Monday

It has been an exhausting week. Watching and listening to the election and the results and the endless discussions and laborious counting has been all-consuming. On top of my own concern, I have had to take on the role of The American. I have received many phone calls and messages of congratulations and of shared joy and relief. These messages have arrived from England and from just down the road. I have been stopped by neighbors out walking. Without seeking the job, I seem to have been representing the entire nation. I am the American Friend. One man who knew who I was although I did not know he was, stopped his car when I was walking on the road. He rolled down his window and he asked me if I had voted in the US election. He said, “Of course it only matters to me if you voted the right way.” We quickly established that he and I shared the same idea about who the right choice was. One man, who is a Rabid Republican, avoids me if we happen to be in the village at the same time. Many years ago he lived in the United States and he retains his vote there. He takes his responsibility as a voter seriously. He takes his role as an American even more seriously. I do not know why he lives here and not there. I do not think that he likes having another American in the vicinity. Without me around, he could be the authority on all things American. I do not want the job but I know that he does want it. Actually, he stopped acknowledging me years ago, so this election makes no difference to anything at all.

10 November Tuesday

The newest Gift from the Government is the offer of Free Postage to anyone sending anything to a residential Care Home. A letter or a parcel to a friend or an elderly relative or anyone at all is now carried by An Post for free. The government is trying to make up for the fact that because of The Covid, no one can visit their loved ones in a home. They think everyone will feel better if things can be sent without cost as often as one wants. And they are certain that the people inside the homes will feel better too.

11 November Wednesday

The bales of silage wrapped in pink plastic are cheerful against the grey skies.  Not all farmers use the pink plastic but many do. The pink silage wrap appears every year. It starts out bright pink and it fades in the light.  It’s purchase price goes toward helping support Breast Cancer charities. The idea is that the surprise of pink bales in the landscape will remind everyone that this is an problem that is not going away and that it is one that needs attention and vigilance. The pink is always a surprise. No matter how often I see the bales close up or in the distance they refuse to be ignored.

12 November Thursday

The child had thrown himself onto the ground. He was weeping with ferocious energy. His crying left him gasping and gulping and making a lot of noise. It looked to me like he could not get any air. I watched him with concern. His mother saw my face. She said “Don’t worry yourself, he knows that kind of Hegging will get him plenty of attention.” Hegging is the word for this particular form of desperate sobbing. Just when I think I know all the words that might be new to me, along comes another one.

13 November Friday

Helen McGrath keeps bees up in the Knockmealdowns. Her bees feed on mountain heather. The honey is delicious. The printed labels for the jars were missing an apostrophe. I have enjoyed adding an apostrophe each time we purchased a jar of Helen’s Honey. A new label has now been designed. This one has an apostrophe where it should be, so the jar we are now eating will be the last one with An Added Apostophe.

14 November Saturday

The man selling organic chickens and sausages, bacon, and rashers off his tiny table at the market pronounced loudly to another man. His voice was scornful and dismissive. He said “Vegetarians are No Good to me!”

16 November Monday

The winds have been relentless for weeks now. I go to sleep with the sound of the wind and I wake up to the sound of wind. We have also had a lot of rain. The fields around the village disappeared as they turned into one enormous lake. The river left its banks and became part of the lake. There were no longer any edges to anything, no recognizable boundaries. We lost all sense of location in the landscape. Trees without leaves popped up as if growing out of water. It was hard to know if they were dead or alive. The hump-backed bridge was the only familiar thing. It was shocking to drive down to the shop and to see all of the water. Now the waters have mostly receded. Fields are back and the grass is bright green. It is not easy to believe that all of that water has been so quickly absorbed by the land. Of course, not all of the water is gone anyway. Most of the fields have select lakes and ponds still visible in their low places.

17 November Tuesday

Our internet has been down more often than it has been up and running. It is all weather dependent. It comes and goes in gusts, like the wind. It has not been possible to ring a neighbor and to ask to go to their house and use their internet because we are not supposed to go inside anyone else’s house. Everyone is trying hard to obey the rules and not to allow anyone into their homes. I went down to the shop and I was given permission to sit alone in the badly lit storeroom surrounded by boxes of pasta and porridge and biscuits. The cold came up through my feet and numbed my legs but the wi-fi was strong and good. I have been trying all day to post this blog. I may need to drive back to the village and head back into storeroom to get it done.

Don’t Act the Maggot

23 November Monday

The good news is that I now have a robin friend who hops along close to me as I perform small outdoor jobs. Wherever I go out of doors she appears and follows me. The days are bitter and frosty and short so most jobs get done in small spurts. I am stacking another load of firewood, and plucking off the big figs left on the bush while leaving only the tiny fingernail-sized ones. Moving the clay pots into the shed to avoid them cracking with frost and moving plants into the house or the book barn to help them to survive the winter. This new robin has no name yet but if she sticks around and becomes the robin who recognizes me and who I expect to see every day, I will of course name her. It is companionable to have a small presence to chat to in the cold. She tips her head to the left each time I speak.

24 November Tuesday

Tommie has lost track of how long it has been since he last visited Margaret in the care home in Cappoquin. He thinks he was forbidden to visit even before we went into this lockdown but he claims he is mixed up with the time. He knows that there is no chance that Margaret will remember when they last met so if he cannot remember then it probably does not matter anyway. He told me that when he last saw her she was in good form and that she was Thumping Away on Her Crate. He said he could not hear the racket through the glass dividing wall. Her Crate is what he calls her walking frame.

25 November Wednesday

The day was sunny and frosty. There was only one car parked in front of the shop. An elderly woman sat in the passenger seat. She waved to me with enthusiasm and mouthed greetings through the tightly closed window. I went into the shop and when I came out again the car was still there but the woman was gone. I looked up just in time to see her scurrying out from the churchyard leaning heavily on her stick and coming across the road as fast as she could move which was not very fast. She was out of breath when she reached the car and she asked me not to tell a soul that I had seen her. Her husband was still inside in the shop. She said there would be a massacre if he learned that she had stepped out of the car, especially as she was wearing neither a hat nor a mask. She had just popped into the churchyard to say hello to her parents in their grave. She felt certain that they would be feeling the cold.

26 November Thursday

The Community Alert text message warned that a white Nissan van was ‘calling to farmers’ yards looking for hay.’ The identifying number of the van was given and any sightings were to be reported to the Cahir Garda Station. The problem was not that someone was needing hay for their animals. The implication was that Looking for Hay was a pretext for people looking for things to steal.

27 November Friday

Not many cows are still grazing in the fields. Some herds are already under cover for the winter. Whenever I see any cows out in the grass, I call out “Hello Cows! It’s me!”

29 November Sunday

The morning is white. There is nothing to see beyond the book barn. The fields are gone. Joe’s cows are gone. The hills beyond are gone. There are no hills. Thick fog makes everything into an absence.

1 December Tuesday

Today is the first day that things are open again. We have completed our Six Week National Level 5 Lockdown. Almost everything is re-opening today: shops selling non-essential goods, libraries, churches, hairdressers and barbers are all open. Restaurants and cafés will be allowed to open in a few more days. Wet Bars will not be allowed to open. Everything is being staggered to try and keep group movement under control. We are still required to stay within our own county. Announcers on the radio are warning people not to be careless and not to congregate in groups indoors. I heard several voices instructing people: Don’t Act The Maggot. To Act The Maggot is to behave in a foolish way. It is to play at being dumb, usually to garner attention. I have never heard this slang expression used in official terms but today I have heard it again and again. Because everyone knows the expression, we know that we are being told to behave.

2 December Wednesday

I was nearing the top bit of the mass path where it is almost a road or it would be a road if anyone could drive on it. It is wide enough for a single vehicle but it is overgrown with grass and weeds and bushes on both sides are impinging. I saw Buddy up ahead. He was squatting and relieving his bowels. He looked at me with surprise but he did not bark. He finished what he was doing and then he jumped up and over the wall into his yard. Once there he began to bark furiously. His barking made Jessie come running and she ran ahead of him to bark louder and to jump up on me when I reached the tar road.  Buddy stayed in the background and let her do the job of protecting the property.

4 December Friday

There was a bloody bird carcass on a mossy rock. The bones of the body were still attached to the wing. I must have interrupted the fox because when I walked back that way an hour later, all evidence of the bird was gone. There was nothing left except the mossy rock.

7 December Monday

The fog was bad. Again. Thick and white and impenetrable. Driving to Waterford was terrifying but I needed to go to the hospital for a test.  I had no choice. I had a valid medical reason to cross the county line and I was driving in dense fog. It was a big day for me. I was halted by a Garda. I thought I was being stopped to justify my destination, but instead it was because there had been a collision. It looked bad. I had to wait a little while for the emergency services to arrive. I was the only car waiting so I was asked to put on my flashers to warn anyone who might drive up behind me. As I sat waiting for permission to drive onward, I watched two Garda unfolding a newspaper and attempting to cover the license plate of the mangled car. They had some tape but it was not the right kind of tape for the wet and cold weather. The newspaper kept falling off. They tried tucking it in around and behind the number plate, but nothing was working very well. The paper got wet and fell off. The Garda who had stopped me told me that they were trying to cover the plate so that if someone saw the car and perhaps knew the people who had been in it, they would not recognise the vehicle and be upset.

Pineapples and Pine Cones

12 December Saturday

I found shredded paper and mouse droppings in a deep corner of the long cupboard. There was no food in the vicinity.  The mice were happy enough to chew on other things. I was cleaning up the mess and moving things around as I searched for more of the same. All the time that I was looking and clearing, I was wondering where the mice had entered, and when. I do not know if this is fresh activity or old activity.  I wondered if this nibbling was done yesterday, or was it long ago?  Maybe it was September?

14 December Monday

He is a tall man. He wears a waistcoat with many pockets over a heavy sweater, but he does not wear a hat. There is no logic about when he arrives. It might be early on a Sunday morning or he might appear on a weekday afternoon. There are twelve or fifteen small dogs with the man. They run in ever lengthening loops all around him but they never go too far from him. None of the dogs have collars and none of them are large. They are not hunting dogs. Some of them look like long-haired dachshunds but I do not think that is what they are. That is the nearest way for me to describe them. All of the dogs are mixed-up breeds and all of the dogs are short-legged and all of the dogs are fast and quiet. They are not a barking and baying pack. The man is formal in his address. He has dark curly hair and looks like a person from a medieval painting. He is not a modern man. He might be in his late thirties or he might be older. When the man and his dogs appear down the track he always asks politely if I have seen The Fox. I always say no. I never help anyone in their pursuit of a fox. Sometimes he asks if it is okay for him to cut across our land and to cross up into Joe’s fields. Sometimes he turns and goes back the way he came. Other times he continues up the Mass Path towards Johnnie Mackin’s. The dogs are everywhere. They are like a liquid mass moving all through the yard and off into the fields. They rush to drink out of the low water butt. I see the dogs before I see the man. He carries a curved horn over his shoulder with a strap. It gives off the loud rallying TallyHo call associated with The Hunt. This man has no horse, no weapon and no crowd of people and baying dogs with him. He is always alone with his many small dogs. When he blows the horn the dogs all come running from wherever they are. He also carries a huge whip, which is hooked onto his belt. When he cracks the whip in the air the dogs hear the loud snap and they come running to join him. Each time he comes the man tells me that he is looking for The Fox because it is stealing chickens. I do not believe him. Today the dogs appeared and shortly after they arrived, he himself arrived, walking down from Scully’s wood and asking if I had seen The Fox. I did not say a word. I bent my head at the neck and gave him a little grimace to say that we have had this conversation three or four times already and to say that you know that I will not tell you even if I have seen The Fox. He nodded, said Thank You, and then he bowed low from the waist. He turned and strode back up the track. A few minutes later I heard the horn. Any of the dogs remaining in the yard rushed away to join him.

15 December Tuesday

The morning was bitter and sharp. The cold was harsh. Derek was late delivering the post. He was so late that I had assumed that there would be no post delivered at all. I asked him why he was not wearing his cap. He acknowledged my concern and agreed that yes, it was way too cold to be out without a cap. He told me that he had had a puncture. I wondered what a punctured tyre had to do with him not wearing a hat. He explained that he had to change the tyre on the van early this morning in the dark and when he was finished, he used his cap to clean and dry his wet hands. It was the only thing he could find. He said it was better to wear no cap at all than to pull a wet and muddy one down over his ears.

18 December Friday

As of today, we are released from our six week lockdown. We are now allowed to cross county borders. The trouble is that everyone else is allowed to cross the county borders too, so there is a mad rush in all directions. It is pre-Christmas panic. It seems to be a very good time to not cross any borders and not to go near the town and to just pretend that we are still not allowed to go anywhere. We shall continue to stay at home.

19 December Saturday

It was a rare treat to find razor clams at the market.  We ate them for lunch.

20 December Sunday

I am always happy to see Anthony’s tyre tree out on display again. He keeps it out back on its pallet all year and brings it around to the front at this time of year after festooning it with fresh ivy vines and little lights.

21 December Monday

The shop in the village is extra busy right before lunch time. There are workmen and delivery men picking up sandwiches to eat in their vans and there are the wives of farmers all in a rush collecting a bit of something towards the dinner. There is always one women who roars, “I cannot stop to talk. I left The Spuds On The Boil!”

22 December Tuesday

When something is broken beyond repair, it is Banjaxed. Banjaxed means that an object or a machine is broken, or ruined. A person can be Banjaxed too—ruined or shattered or deeply deeply tired. A person who is Banjaxed might just be exhausted.

24 December Thursday

I have lined the windowsill with pineapples and pine cones. The pineapples were on special offer at the supermarket for 47 cents each. I bought a couple and then I bought a couple more. They look very festive. The windowsill looked best when there were six pineapples in a row, but we keep eating them so now there are only three.

25 December Friday

Someone spread slurry on the fields. It was either Joe or Joe. The smell is noxious and it burns the back of the throat even when I am outside for only a few minutes. That is the bad news. The good news is that the first snowdrop has come up. It is early but it is a welcome sign of spring. A sign of hope.

27 December Sunday

We have been beaten and thrashed by Storm Bella. We had yellow warnings and we had amber warnings. Winds and rain and the noise of it all. It went on and on and on. I think it is now over. I hope it is over. There is deep water everywhere but we have not suffered downed trees. We have not lost our electricity. The west of the country has had it worse with snow and severely blocked roads. We are just mired in even more mud than we already had. Walking out in any direction is hard slogging work.

29 December Tuesday

My pursuit of mice continues. The long cupboard has been cleared. Traps are set but the mice ignore the traps. They are eating poison every day but it is not killing them. They take some of the poison and move along the length of a shelf and eat it there. They come back for more and more pellets and they continue to evade my traps. Apparently there is an explosion of mice all over the country this winter. Everyone has mice and everyone is fighting the same battle but most people do not talk about it for fear of the rodents reflecting badly on them. My mice keep chewing and nibbling paper and cardboard. Any and all food items have been removed and stored in a big plastic box. Everything else taken out of the cupboard is in little piles along the wall. I am looking forward to being able to put things back but I am mostly looking forward to the end of the mice.

30 December Wednesday

Today is Simon’s birthday. I bought him a calendar down at the shop. It was a fund-raising project for the FAS scheme. It has a few tractors on it. It also has one page with some cleaned-up farm equipment repainted with bright colours. I do not think he will like this calendar much, but I will. He is not interested to view farm machinery and tractors in the everyday world around him so he will not be interested in photographs of them. I will wrap the calendar up and give it to him with the card I have not yet made. He went up and down to the book barn a few times this morning.  It is too cold to stay working down there for long. On one of the trips back and forth, a bird shat on his head.  It was obviously a big bird because it was an enormous messy dropping. He had to wash his hair thoroughly to get rid of it. If it had been a seagull, it would be considered Good Luck. But we think it was a magpie or a crow.  Their droppings are big but they do not arrive with any promise of luck.

31 December Thursday New Year’s Eve.

Last night the sky was beautifully clear. We were able to see the Full Moon. The out of doors was so bright that there was no need for a torch. We have missed the last two full moons due to thick cloud cover and rain. We missed the alignment of Jupiter and Saturn too. Maybe this sighting of the full moon is a positive sign for the year to come. Last night at midnight the entire country went back into Level Five Lockdown.  It is only 13 days since we were released from the last lockdown. Everything except essential retail shops such as food and pharmacies is closed and will remain closed. We can only go five kilometres from home for the purpose of exercise. These restrictions will remain in place until the end of January. It is more cheering to think about the bright full moon and the extension everyday of our hours of daylight.

Do You Read Books?

3 January 2021 Sunday

The Leopardstown Races are a big part of the holiday season. Traditionally they take place 26-29 December. This year they happened as usual but without the big crowds in attendance. Of course. Everyone who follows the racing watched it on the television. Siobhan’s mother was busy at Leopardstown from her armchair every day, as always. She sat with her pen and the newspaper and made notes about each race. She knows the background of each horse. All year she keeps track of all the race meetings and of the horses, trainers, jockeys and owners. There is not much about the horses that she does not know. Mrs. Hally is 102.  Siobhan tapes the program because her mother falls asleep frequently. Each race gets replayed and replayed until Mrs. Hally feels certain that she has seen everything.

6 January Wednesday

We took a walk out to Lady’s Abbey. It was cold. I wanted to check on the red chair that had been stored in one of the small rooms at the ruined Abbey.  We were shocked to find the chair laying on the ground outside. Someone, probably kids, had used it to start a fire, or else they had started a small fire with the idea to burn the chair once the fire got going. It was a bad idea. The red seat of the chair did not burn well and they never got enough heat going to burn the back and the legs. All they did was ruin the chair.  Someone had left that chair safely sheltered so that it would be available to sit upon each time they visited the Abbey. A man walking with a crutch appeared as we were leaving. He used his crutch to point to the chair and the failed fire and he said, “Kids! They are trying to have fun but they don’t know how.”

8 January Friday

We walked up behind the house that used to belong to Francie Cooney.  It has just been sold.  The sign is still up. It says SALE AGREED. I had never been up onto the land so we wandered in to take a look. Once there are new people in possession we would not think to go in and look around. That would be intruding.  The land goes back in three sections. I have been passing the house for years. I had no idea there was so much land stretching back from the road. The small house is in the first part and then there is a big open-sided shed with a rounded galvanized roof full of tools and broken machinery and some more land and then there is a third section with two stone buildings and a high wall. The stone wall on the left side of the entire piece of land is about two and a half meters high. Just by being back there and talking quietly we disturbed a fox who was sleeping up in a secret place on the wall. He ran along the length of it and disappeared.

9 January Saturday

Tommie loves fruit. He claims to love all fruit. He is also partial to sweet things: cakes and biscuits and puddings and pies.  But his preferred favorite thing is fresh fruit. I knocked on his door today, took a few steps back and asked him if he likes pineapple. He looked dubious and then we talked a little and I gave him the box with a piece of pineapple cake in it. The box was made of cardboard so Tommie could not see the cake that was inside the box. Looking at the box gave him no clues to its contents. Simon had made the cake from one of the pineapples that has been lined up on the windowsill with pine cones. It was the last of the pineapples that we called our Christmas decoration. The cake was made following a recipe from Mauritius but I did not tell Tommie that. He was a little disturbed about the fact that he did not know if he had ever had a pineapple or if he had ever seen a pineapple. He would have been further disturbed by the word Mauritius. I gave him the box along with a carton of Bird’s Custard.  I told him that the pineapple and the custard go well together. He asked if this thing in the box was a sweet thing or was it something else. He did not say the word pineapple. The word seemed to disturb him.  I explained that it was a cake made with the fruit of the pineapple. Once he knew that it was a sweet, his face relaxed and he looked happy and he said that he looked forward to the eating of it.

11 January Monday

Robins are everywhere. There are many birds of all kinds on the feeders and on the bushes but mostly there are dozens and dozens of robins. For a while I thought I was getting to know one and that she was getting to know me. Now I know that there are too many robins to really focus upon. I cannot recognize one from another. They are all fat and they are all everywhere. I cannot keep the feeders full enough.

12 January Tuesday

There is not a lot of variety in the things to see when I go out to walk. At this time of year there is not much animal activity. Most days things are much the way they were the day before.  Most days I never meet another person. I have to take different routes to provide myself with variety especially now that we can only go five kilometers from home for exercise.  Today I got excited when I saw something in the road up ahead of me.  I was looking at it for a long time as I approached. I could not decide what it was.  Finally I got close enough to identify it.  It was a sugar beet. What did I expect it to be? It was not even a whole sugar beet, but only half a sugar beet. The other half must have gone off in the machine that gathered them up in the field. This half might have fallen off a trailer. It gave me something to look at and something to think about. I am still excited about it.

15 January Friday

Tommie did not enjoy the pineapple cake. He was polite about it. He said that since he has never before eaten nor seen a pineapple probably it is too late for him to start. He did not like the pineapple cake but he was very happy to have eaten the entire carton of Bird’s Custard.

16 January Saturday

I went to the Farmer’s Market but it was not fully up and running after the  Christmas break. I was a week early.  Pat was not there, so there was no fish. James was not there so there were no organic vegetables.  Maria was not there so there was no cheese. Those were the things I had come to buy. There were a few other stalls open so I did purchase a few items. I decided I would need to go over to the supermarket to buy more food.

A man in the SuperValu car park shouted to me: DO YOU READ BOOKS? I looked up as he ran over to me, wearing his mask and lugging an enormous shopping bag full of books.  I looked at the books and they were a terrible mess or at least the ones showing at the top of the bag were in a dreadful state.  The covers were bent and curled and stained and torn. I told the man that I had so many of my own books at home that I simply did not have space for anymore.  I directed him to the wire bin just inside the door of the supermarket. The bin is full of books that people leave there and other people scrabble through them and help themselves to whatever they want. The man said he was headed for that bin but he saw me first and he said he thought I might be the kind of person who might want an entire bag of books.

17 January Sunday

Sometimes Saturday night or maybe Sunday night. Going to the sauna once a week is the closest thing to Going Out Somewhere that we have had throughout the last ten months. It is an occasion to look forward to and an occasion to savor. Walking the 80 meters across the yard in the darkness in my dressing gown offers a new challenge. I can no longer just wander along looking up at the stars as I usually do. There are snowdrops coming up everywhere in the grass.  They are not easily visible by the light of the lantern because most are not yet in blossom. There is not very much white to catch the light. Walking in the dark demands careful attention. I do not want to step on them.

18 January Monday

I telephone Tommie once a week and when I do I try to have some news for him. Sometimes there is little to tell. We none of us have much news in these endless lockdowns. He told me that he considers himself a hermit these days. A hermit who has his dinner delivered each day by Eileen Condon. He told me that her portions are mighty.  The dinner is usually too much food so he has enough left over for his tea too. He finds these days of quarantine long and lonely. Today I had some news for him. He was pleased to hear that a man from the council had been down for a look and now some work is promised on our boreen.  I told him that the potholes are worse than they have ever been. Even the postman is shocked by the state of things. It is easy for the council to forget about this road because there is only our one house on it. They forget that they are responsible for it.

19 January Tuesday

I had received the order from Dublin. My habit is to send payment by return post with a check. The last time I made this same order, Esther included an envelope addressed to herself in my handwriting and with an uncancelled stamp on the upper right hand corner. This was the envelope I had used for the time before. Esther did not say anything in her note about the envelope but I accepted it for the small kindness that it was. I put my check into the envelope and I felt smug for getting the chance to use the same stamp twice.  This time an envelope arrived with my order again.  It was completely wrinkled and a little torn and it was addressed to Esther herself again, but not in my handwriting.  It was someone else’s handwriting and someone else’s envelope. Their stamp had not been cancelled either. So I used this envelope already posted by someone else to send my payment to Esther, again for free.

20 January Wednesday

Some undergrowth has been cleared up at Middlequarter. A post with signs for walkers is suddenly visible. It is not a new post nor are the signs new. They were there but they were hidden. I am intrigued with the one pointing to the village announcing: Refreshments Available.

21 January Thursday

While out walking I had seen the car driving around slowly. It is always a big thing to note the first new car of the year. Well, it is not a big thing, but it is anyway a thing to be on the look out for the first brand new car with the number of the new year on the license plate.  I saw a red car with the number 21 and then I saw it again about 30 minutes later. It was driving slowly around the area.  No one is allowed to go more than 5 kilometres from home so this car was circling and driving the same roads.  Because of the new and very infectious variant of the virus, the Guards are out in surprising places stopping people on bicycles and in cars and telling them to go home and to stay at home. They are giving people warnings. This morning I saw the red car again down at the shop. There were no other cars parked out front. There was no one around at all, except me, and this car with the 21 plates backed in so that the front of the car was facing outwards. The driver was sitting in his seat waiting to catch the eye of anyone who arrived. As I left I recognized that it was Larry Doocey sitting in the car. He was waiting for people to notice his new motorcar.  I spoke to Tommie in the afternoon and I mentioned Larry and the new automobile. He was not surprised, but he appreciated getting the news. He said. “Ah yes. It is exactly the time for Larry to buy a new car. He has always been A Man for The Changing Up.”

22 January Friday

We were told to expect the road crew from the council today. The plan was that they would bring the digger and scrape out the grass down the middle of the boreen. Then they would return on Monday to fill and fix as much of the road as they could fix.  That was the plan but this morning the digger was not available so now we are promised the same activity for Monday. The idea was that we would be trapped down here all day unable to drive out.  It is nothing new to stay home all day but it is not normal to be warned of the entrapment ahead of time. .

The Hedge School

25 January Monday

No one wants to go to the dentist. This new variant of the virus from England is rampant. Everyone is nervous. I had an appointment with the dental hygienist. I rang up to cancel. The receptionist did not seem surprised. She sounded as though she was waiting for my call. She told me that everyone is cancelling. If a procedure is essential or if it is an emergency, people are willing to go to the dentist. If not, no one wants to go. I heard on the radio that the government is considering employing dentists to take on the job of vaccinating people. At least then they will have something to do.

 

26 January Tuesday

Derek delivered new postcards. They are a gift from An Post. The ones sent out to us during the first lockdown were big and glossy and the pictures on them were not good. This new offering is smaller. Each one is the size of a normal post card and it is on better card stock. It is not glossy. The best thing is that the front side of these new cards has no image on it. It is just white with a green edge. The blank card gives us a chance to write or draw or glue something onto it as we wish. We can post our cards to anyone on the island of Ireland, North or South, for FREE.

27 January Wednesday

The digger arrived at 8.30 on Monday morning. The grass was scraped and removed from the middle of the boreen. There were two men on the job: one with the small digger and the other with a larger machine. He collected the grass and soil and stones and took it all away. We were trapped for the day, as anticipated. In the morning they cleared as far as the gate into Scully’s wood and after returning from their dinner, they did about half way in from the tar road. I think that their plan was to meet in the middle. The men did not come back on Tuesday but they left the digger and three kinds of shovels and scrapers up at the farm, so we knew they would be back.

Today they reappeared and finished the entire road. On both Monday and Wednesday Derek handed our post to the man in the small digger. The digger is small but it is still as wide as the boreen. There was no way for Derek to get by. The man delivered the letters and packets to us himself rather than backing up to allow the post van to drive down and then to drive back up again. I am sad to see the grass gone. The primroses will not be blooming down the middle this spring, but I feel certain that they will return next year. Or the year after that.

28 January Thursday

The butcher was a thin nervous man. I asked for a shoulder of lamb. He quickly directed my attention to a silver tray with three lamb kidneys in one end. The rest of the tray was heaped with tiny tiny pieces of diced lamb shoulder. The pieces were so small I did not know what they might be useful for. The tiny cubes of lamb were too small for stew. They were too small for anything. They looked like pink peppercorns. I wondered if they were a mistake. He suggested that I might prefer the diced lamb shoulder rather than the entire shoulder I had requested. He was disappointed when I thanked him but said no.

 

29 January Friday

Walking up Bahernaugh in bitterly cold sunshine, I decided to continue as far as the old hedge school. The road is now impassable by car, and it was rough uphill walking. The old man who used to live up there died last year. He was in a care home for a year before that. There are plenty of sheep in his fields. I think they belong to his cousin Michael.  The house and the sheds are closed up and looking sad, but the little sign is still on the blocked up window identifying the one building as a school.

30 January Saturday

The Garda are everywhere. They continue to surprise. They are fining people for going too far from where they live. We are still in lockdown. The end date of this lockdown was scheduled for today but that date has changed. It is now tentatively planned for 5 March.  That may or may not be the date when we are allowed more freedom. We can only go 5 kilometers from home for exercise. If we go any further than that we must have an essential reason:  food or medicine or a medical appointment. There is nothing open so there is nowhere else to go anyway. People no longer get warnings. We are now being fined for going too far from home.  Five cyclists in fancy lycra gear were given fines. Five men. Five fines. It was obvious they were on a long cycle ride as a group. No one dresses up like that to go only five kilometers.  One man was fined for having a passenger in his car who was not someone he lived with and who had no reason to be in the car with him. The radio is full of news of these fines. It is making us all stay closer to home, which is of course the whole point.

 

31 January Sunday

We think about being somewhere else, but of course we cannot go anywhere. This is a recurring theme.  We prepare food from different cultures and we listen to music from far away. We watch films and we read books in order to transport ourselves.  We want to travel, but we recoil at the idea of boarding a crowded plane, train or bus to go anywhere at all. A seat on a bus is not a place where anyone wants to be these days, even if the bus seat is one of the newly upholstered ones on BusEireann.  The running red setters are so cheerful. They suggest great speed and momentum and joy.

No.  A seat on the bus is not a place where anyone wants to be these days. As an healthy option, my book BY BUS, written pre-pandemic, when we were able to roam freely on buses, is now published by UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE in Brooklyn, NY. This book offers the reader multiple journeys by bus, without the need to wear a mask.  It is now available to order with a pre-publication discount:

By Bus

The Third Floor

1 February Monday

The Irish calendar decrees that today is first day of spring. It does not feel like the first day of spring. It feels like February. Every year I feel certain that the first of February is not remotely the first day of spring. Breda and I walked in the mountains and we sat down to eat our sandwiches in the cold and wind. We did not linger. She pointed out the kind of reeds used for the making of the St. Brigid’s crosses. It is a tradition to gather the reeds and make the crosses today, but we did not collect reeds as we had no intention of making the crosses.  It was too cold to do anything but to keep walking. Back down here, at home, we have masses of snowdrops and crocuses and even some daffodils are starting to show. Perhaps spring is closer than I think.

2 February Tuesday

When I listen to the radio or while I am waiting in the shop, I hear people moaning and despairing about how greatly they are suffering because they cannot go to visit their mother who lives in Wexford or Fethard or Waterford. There is a lots of weeping and wailing because people have not seen their mother in three weeks or two months. Anyone whose mother is more than five kilometers away feels hard done by. A lot of families got together in the summer in one of the few parts of last year when we were not in lockdown and many more people got together over Christmas. Too many people got together at Christmas. That is why the virus took off and that is why we are in Level Five lock-down now.

Today is my mothers birthday. She is 95 and there is a big blizzard kicking off in New Hampshire, so she is trapped at home alone. She tells me that she has heat and food and plenty to read, so she is not unhappy. And she has the telephone. I have not seen my mother since October 2019. I try not to mention this when people are moaning. All distances are too far right now.

5 February Friday

I was pulled over at a Garda checkpoint in Poulacapple on the way to Kilkenny. I reached over to the passenger seat to get my letter from the doctor’s office validating my journey as Essential Inter-County Travel. The Garda did not look close enough to read the letter, he simply nodded to acknowledge the piece of paper. He said that to his own eyes I had the appearance of an honest woman, so he waved me along.

Before the doctor could get down to any other business he wanted to put a pin in his map. The pin was the important thing. An enormous map was pasted on the wall over his desk. It was a world map. He wanted to know where I was from originally. With my guidance he stuck a little round blue pin into the map as close to what we could consider New Hampshire as was possible. A tiny bit north of Boston was the best we could do. He did not have a national map for his Irish patients. This mapping activity was only for those of us from far-flung locations. Most of the pins were white and some were blue but I do not know if they marked any difference or if he just ran out of white ones and so he moved on to a box of blue.

8 February Monday

The Third Floor is spoken of with all seriousness. The Third Floor is where Covid-19 patients are taken at the hospital. The entire floor has been given over to the care of people who are ill with the virus. If someone tells you that a person is On The Third Floor you do not need to ask what the problem is. You do not even need to use the word hospital. The Third Floor says it all.

9 February Tuesday

The good thing about growing bamboo is that I have a regular source of strong and flexible sticks. I made a flag for Mrs. Hally’s 103rd birthday. The flag was on a piece of card and it stood tall on its bamboo pole. I thought it could be stuck into a plant pot on the porch outside so that it could be seen from where Mrs. Hally sits in her chair looking out over the marsh. I knocked several times before Siobhan came to the door. She said in a whisper that the priest was there in the house and that he was just now saying a Birthday Blessing for her mother. I was interrupting the Blessing. The Bishop has instructed priests not to go into peoples houses during the Covid lock-down but this priest is a good friend of Mrs Hally and the family. He knew how very much a Birthday Blessing would mean to her. He was willing to defy orders from the Bishop. Apparently most people in the village would not have knocked at the door. They would have known that the priest was there when they saw his car outside, but because he had just bought a new car, he was maybe not quite as visible as he would usually be. New or old, I would never recognize the priest’s motorcar from any other motorcar.

10 February Wednesday

We walked up on one of the steep forestry roads above Goatenbridge. There was water streaming down the side of the track and the running water was full of frog spawn. Another sign of spring.

12 February Friday

There is always another word or expression to note. I think I have been hearing this one for a long time but I just did not fully register it. To Make a Hames of something is to screw it up due to clumsiness or ineptitude or simply by being less careful than you should be. I made a Hames of it or She’s after making a Hames of it. Like an athlete dropping the ball: He made a Hames of that pass.

15 February Monday

I drove to the village and found it full of cars. Cars were parking everywhere. People were hopping out and putting on their masks and walking rapidly toward the church but they were not going too near to the church. Nor were they going inside. There was a funeral about to begin. Funerals always take place at eleven o’clock in the morning. Only ten people can attend a funeral mass inside the church in this Level Five Lock-down. The ten person limit was not enough to allow all of the dead man’s family to attend the service. The people outside the church were family and friends and neighbours. They were lining up along the road before the hearse arrived in order to pay their respects. I think they were also there because it was somewhere to go. There was a good amount of waving and calling out to each other across the way. The sun was out and the wind was sharp. People were zipped into their jackets and masked up and hatted but they were happy to be out of their houses and most of all they were happy to see other people because even a sad event provides a chance to be less alone.

16 February Tuesday

The day was grey and wickedly cold. I dropped my little box of blueberries on the floor of the shop. They went everywhere. They rolled under shelves and off in every direction. I laughed as I crawled around on my knees to collect the berries. The girl who worked in the shop laughed. There were two other two customers in the shop. They laughed. There was a lot of laughter. We needed the laughter.

17 February Wednesday

The first leaves of wild garlic are pushing up. They are too small to eat yet, but it won’t be long.

18 February Thursday

There is plenty of rain and plenty of mud. The road crew has not returned to do any more work of the boreen. They were so quick and eager to start at 8.30 on a Monday morning. That was nearly four weeks ago. The track is now one long running mess of mud. Derek tells me that they will be filling the potholes one shovel full at a time.

21 February Sunday

After days and days of torrential rain and flooding and more torrential rain and more flooding, the sun has come out today. The roads are once again passable. We are no longer trapped by water.  Fields are appearing in places that looked like lakes. We have had no internet for most of the last few weeks. We get a small signal for two or three hours each day. This problem might be weather related, but it might not. What it is is annoying.

 

Relief Milker

24 February Wednesday

The internet man visited and he told us that another man would be coming to check out our location for reception and to install the service. We expected the man on a Saturday but he arrived today because the weather was good. He told us that he is a farmer in Cork. Before becoming a farmer, he had been in the army. That was where he trained in orienteering. He claimed that he is a Good Man To Read The Land. He used powerful binoculars to locate and determine that our house is not in a direct line with the nearest mast. He said that was not a problem and that he would be able to bounce a signal off the house of a man named P.J.O’Neill across the valley. He got things set up quickly with a small dish. With his knowledge of land, he does this installation of Line of Sight broadband for the internet company as a second job. Right now is his busy time on the farm because all of his cows are calving. We were lucky to get him between the calves and between the downpours. He left his wife in charge of the birthing today. He said she is well able for it, but the rain and wind are a different and less predictable thing altogether. Suddenly we have really fast broadband. We have a three week trial period, but already, after a few hours, this is faster than anything we have ever experienced here. We knew our internet was bad but we did not realize how truly dreadful it was until now, when it has come good.

26 February Friday

We walked up past Lady’s Abbey. I detoured in to look into the roofless area of the old Abbey and to check for the red chair. Someone had tried to set it on fire a few months ago and I wondered if since then the whole chair had been removed or if it had been completely burned. I was surprised to find neither thing had occurred. The chair was back in the small room exactly where it had been before someone tried to burn it.

 

28 February Sunday

There are loads of daffodils everywhere. And crocuses. And wild garlic. I saw the first primrose today.

1 March Monday

We woke to a thick white cold fog over our world. I went down to the book barn to look for something and found there was no electricity in one end of the barn. We thought a fuse had tripped but finally we decided it was probably mice who had chewed up some wires under the floorboards. We tried different experiments and we went up and down with extension leads and then I had to fix a cardboard box that collapsed when I leaned too heavily on it and I was sweeping up mouse poison that was scattered all around but had not been eaten. I was rushing because it was cold and because suddenly there were so many things to take care of. I went back and forth between the two barns and the house.  Simon was making multiple trips too. The postman arrived at about 10 or maybe it was 10.30. I had been so busy that it was not until I was standing and talking to him outside that I realized that I was still wearing my pyjamas and my dressing gown with rubber boots, a big scarf and a wool hat. He did not seem to notice.

2 March Tuesday

The mornings remain icy. The grass was white with frost, as was the roof of the barn. The field was white. I looked out the window as I waited for the kettle to boil. The fox was moving slowly uphill. He turned and looked in my direction. It would be nice to think that he saw me at the same time that I saw him but really he was just looking around.

3 March Wednesday

The Donegal Postman is the man who most reliably predicts the weather. Word is already out that he is promising that April and May will be fine.

4 March Thursday

On the good days there are already cows out in fields. It is lovely to see them again. I did not realize how much I missed seeing cows on the land. As always, they have been under cover all winter long. Today I had to pull over in the car to wait while the McGrath’s cows walked up the road from a far field to their milking barn. I was happy to wait.

5 March Friday

Throughout this pandemic we have read about people ordering Take Away food. We have heard reports of people living on nothing but Take Away food. Food delivered to the door has not been an option for us. There are few restaurants and they are all closed anyway. And no one wants to deliver anything down our dirt track. We read about a restaurant in Tramore that has been delivering fine food all over the country. We decided to see if there was any chance we might receive their offerings. A restaurant in Dublin or Cork would not consider delivering to these parts, but we hoped that Tramore, which is only 43 kilometres away, might do so. It has been a year since we ate any food besides that which we have prepared for ourselves. The Beach House said delivery was no problem so, as directed, we ordered on Thursday the 25th for delivery on the following Friday. Today.

After lunch this afternoon we received notification that our package had been damaged and that the recipients had refused delivery. We knew we had never been called nor had anyone arrived here, so there was no way we could have refused delivery. After various phone calls and emails with the owner of the restaurant we all recognized that the problem was with the courier service. All deliveries are in chaos over the entire country. Mike told me he waited three weeks for an automobile part to arrive from Ringaskiddy. We were refunded and we are now promised delivery of a free meal on the 19th of March. We will be invited to choose from the menu next Thursday. Peter the owner was very upset that our food had not been arrived. He said they have delivered things as far away as Donegal and Galway with no problems so Tipperary should offer no difficulty. It takes less than a hour drive to Tramore but since we are still unable to travel more than five kilometres from home, it might as well be the moon. It is hard to imagine people living in a city waiting nearly four weeks for a takeaway supper. We are not unhappy to wait. We hear nothing but good things about this splendid food.

6 March Saturday

The birds cannot get enough to eat. I am constantly filling the feeders. There is never enough for them to eat. Some days I chop up an apple and leave it on their table. Other days I leave crumbs or some oat flakes. Whatever I put out disappears immediately.  Whatever I put out is never enough.

7 March Sunday

A Relief Milker is a someone who goes and helps out on a farm on either an occasional basis or on a regular day or for part of a week. He does the milking and whatever other jobs need doing. A lot of young men move around the country side helping out on farms. Sometimes it is older men but mostly it is the younger ones. Today I saw a fellow getting into his car down in the village. His services were advertised in the dried mud on his door:

G.BYRNE

RELIEF MILKER

AND ALL ROUNDER

 

8 March Monday

Rain. Sun. Rain. Sun. Rain. Rain. Rain. Sun. Wind. Rain. Every day is a wild thrashing of in and out weather. We live within the weather. The sunny moments can be hot but the rain can quickly turn to sleet. The wind has been so loud it is difficult to keep the sound of its roaring out of our ears even from inside the house.

9 March Tuesday

The little notification from the national network is always visible on the upper right hand corner of the television screen. It reads STAY AT HOME. We will know that things are normal again when this message is no longer visible.

 

10 March Wednesday

The jewellery shop in Cahir is not open. By law, the shop is not allowed to open. It is not an essential business. I needed a battery for my watch and the jeweller told me to ring him when I was in front of the shop and he would step outside and give me the correct battery. His shop was not open but it was open.

11 March Thursday

Breda and Siobhan and I walked down the field track at Molough. We knew we were taking a chance. Rain and gusty winds arrive without notice and every downpour is a heavy downpour. We wore full waterproofs and we took our chances. Torrential rains came down twice. And each time there was a one of the two big sheds available to step into. One was echoing and nearly empty as most of the winter hay has been removed. The other shed at the bottom of the track had large pieces of machinery, none of which we were certain about the function of, but it was pleasant  to look at them and to discuss their possible functions while we waited for the rain to clear again.

12 March Friday

We have had 10 weeks of lockdown since Christmas. The new possible deadline is early April but no one believes that we will actually be released then. The vaccine is rolling out slowly because the supplies are not arriving into the country. Everyone is weary of all of this.

I heard two men talking with the distance of a pick-up truck between them. They were wearing masks and they each had a big woolly hat pulled down low. Their conversation was loud. They were both shouting to compensate for the muffling by their face masks. It was a continuation of the on-going discussion between people of who lets their wife or their husband or their partner cut their hair. One of the men said that he had finally agreed to let his wife cut his hair but he would not be letting her loose to cut the grass.

13 March Saturday

I return home from my walks with my pockets full of lichen. I might fill one pocket or I might fill two pockets. I do not need this lichen but I love the silvery look of it on the ground. I am obsessed with lichen. I love spying it among the other vegetation and I love collecting it. When I arrive home with two pockets full I feel wealthy. I fill bowls with the lichen and I leave it on a windowsill to dry out. When that bowlful gets dusty, I throw it out as there is always more to collect. Now I am coming home with my pockets full of wild garlic. There is so much of it popping up every day. It is more useful and of course more delicious than the lichen and it is beautiful, but maybe not as quite as beautiful.

The Mend

For any readers of this blog who received notification last week entitled RAINFALL RADAR, you have probably realized by now that this is a pre-Covid posting and it is a mistake. 

Apologies to all. It is human error mixed up with technology error. 

A small moment of Time Travel….

—

I was the first patient scheduled for surgery on a Monday morning. The surgeon visited me in my room before the operation. We both signed a paper document. He told me that he had seen a red squirrel on the weekend. He said it was the first one he had seen in the seven years since he has been back in Ireland. We both felt that this sighting of a red squirrel was an auspicious start for the week.
I have lived here for several decades, but I have never seen a red squirrel. I only see the pesky grey ones that were mistakenly imported as a wedding gift for someone many many years ago.

—

My wrists are thin and my hands are bony. Veins stand proud on the back of my hand. Rings, bracelets and nail varnish have always seemed to me to be a bad idea. I try not to call attention to my hands. I was lying flat on my bed in the hallway outside the operating theatre when the anaesthetist arrived. He was from somewhere on the Indian sub-continent. He introduced himself to me before he lifted my hands gently, first one and then the other. He said he had never seen such wonderfully large and visible veins. I said Yes. My hands are not beautiful. He held my two hands in his two hands and he replied, Ah no. They are beautiful to me!!

—-

My first food was toast. First I was served one half a slice of white toast. The next day, I was given two half slices of toast. Underneath the toast rack lay a single slice of soda bread. Not toasted.

I set off to take a small walk down the corridor. I held onto the white rail against the wall. At the first door there was a woman standing a few feet inside.

She asked: How do I look?

It was 8.30 in the morning. The woman was all dressed in pink. Her nightdress showed pink underneath her dressing gown. The dressing gown was white and fleecy with pink swirls all over it. With her bright white over the knee anti-blood clot socks and fluffy pink slippers her outfit was completely coordinated. Her wispy white/blond hair was cut about shoulder length with a flyaway fringe. Her eyebrows were drawn on or maybe they were painted on with some dark brown product. The ends of these wide eyebrows were squared off with sharp corners. They were about the width of a magic marker. The rest of her face was heavily made up. The painted face and the fluffy pinkness failed to make her look youthful. The woman looked like a cupcake but not a fresh cupcake. Everything about her was a little mashed. She looked like she was missing some air.
She announced to me that she had had a hysterectomy. Her surgeon was doing his morning rounds now. She was waiting for him. Her surgeon was not the same man as my surgeon. Hers was a different surgeon than my surgeon. We had had the same operation but she informed me that her man was The Best. She inferred that my doctor and my entire procedure was no doubt sub-standard.
She asked again if she looked alright. I could not tell her that she looked okay for a mushy cupcake. She wanted to look nice for her surgeon. She wanted to please him.
I turned and I crept slowly back into my room.

————

The glass in my three windows is covered with some kind of a film. None of the other rooms have this coating on the glass. The film is translucent so it allows in a white light but it cannot be seen through. The film stuck onto the windows is cracked and distressed. The light is diffused. Soft and sort of feathered. The outside looks sharp and colorful through the narrow slots that are open.

When asked about it, one nurse suggested that the coating might be there to stop the intensity of the sun. Another suggested that perhaps the covered glass made the room appropriate for the respectful privacy due a nun or a priest.

 

It is quiet inside and it is quiet outside.  Except for the birds.

I hear birdsong through the open side windows.

—————

First names are an important part of life in this country. Everyone is on first name basis immediately and it important that a name, once known, is used frequently in the course of a conversation. Many people manage to use the name of the person they are talking to in every single sentence. The regular use of Christian names combined with the fact that there are a few names that are used again and again and again means that there are a lot of women named Mary. Mary is a popular name here among the nurses. I can hear them at all hours calling to one another up and down the corridor. Mary shouts up to Mary and Mary shouts back to Mary. One Mary says Are you there, Mary?  Shall I wait for you, Mary? and Mary calls back in a cheerful voice I am coming Mary. I will be with you shortly, Mary. The patients are Mary and the nurses are Mary.

A woman comes around sometime during mid-morning and mid-afternoon and again before bedtime. She is offering coffee, tea or a glass of milk. I made the mistake of ordering coffee.  It is best to stick with tea.

————
I take small slow walks out of doors. I look at everything coming up. Slowly. Slowly. The walks are slow. The coming into flower is slow. The grape hyacinth. Flowering red currant. I do not really like the flowering currant but for a few weeks every spring it is a pleasure to see it.

——-

Looking across to Anthony’s  field. It is steep.  The cows are there and they look like they might fall off the side of the hill and tumble down.

——

The hospital bed was delivered by a young man about to become a father for the first time.  He delivered the bed to us earlier than we had requested because he did not want to travel too far from home. He did not want to miss the baby’s arrival.  He was excited, so we felt excited for him.  We had ordered the hospital bed because our own beds are built so high off the floor.  The top surface of each platform is 36 inches off the floor. The mattress on top makes it higher.  It is normal for me to climb up and down with the help of a stool but after surgery I feared the climb might be difficult.  The hospital bed is now in the big room. I spend the day and the night seeing this room in a new way. The things on the wall opposite look like completely new things.  I lay here in a lazy daze of staring without seeing but seeing it all.

—–

I can see the glass door of the cupboard. Reflected in the glass, I watch the cows walking by up in Joe’s field. That field is about three meters above the ground level outside the house.

—–

Three pheasants under the birch trees at the bottom of the meadow.

—–

I take nuts out to the birds. Slowly. I decant a small amount from the big bucket and I carry them out in a bowl. I thought I would walk around for the recommended 10 minutes but after feeding the birds I came back into the house and fell into the bed.

—–

Derek the Postman told me Napping is the important bit.

—–

There is a teasel bent on its stem down near to the ground.  It catches on my dressing gown each time I walk to the bird table.  Each time it happens I think that I will return with the secauters and I will cut it down but of course I never remember and leaning down to cut the thick stem is probably not a good idea anyway.

 

I rang Tommie from my bed.  It had been a while since we have spoken.  He told me that he has had his second jab,  and that he felt ill for three days after it. He said he slept a lot and that he was off his grub.  We agreed that this is not like him.  He interrupted the call and told me that someone was at the door.  He told me to wait.  He went away and I waited but he never came back to the telephone.  I had no chance to tell him I had been in hospital.

The last time I saw him, before my hospital stay, I took him some apple cake on a plate.  John Mangan arrived at the same time.  John was carrying his bag of messages from the shop.  We three talked at a distance from one another  with Tommie standing in the doorway holding his plate of cake.  He said he would just go and put the cake into the kitchen.  He went inside and he never came back.  John and I talked for a while.  We wondered if maybe Tommie had sat down to eat the cake.  It was cold so I decided to leave.  John said that he would wait a little longer and if Tommie did not return soon he would shout out. He promised that he would not leave until Tommie’s front door was firmly closed.

—–

The sun pouring in through the skylight is knocking me out, but since I am already lying down it is fine to just go back to sleep.

—–

We live in a valley. Everything in every direction is up or it is down. I started by making Figure Eights around the yard.  Now I have progressed to following the perimeters around buildings and bushes. I attempt to find all of the edges I can walk without any climbing. I like coming up behind the sauna in a way that I usually would not view it.

 

The daffodils that have been folded down lie with their faces in the grass. They might have been bent by a passing fox or a badger or a cat.  It might just be the weight of the blossom itself that topples the flowers. I pluck the bent ones and bring them indoors.

—-

Pat assures me that I am Heading for The Mend.

—-

I have lost track of days and I have lost track of weeks.  On the 12th of April we had a national opening, of sorts. The schools are all open again. And we are now allowed to go 20 kilometers from home for exercise– an extension of the 5 kilometers sanctioned up until now. Nothing more is open. All shops remain closed.  Life remains on hold. It is more than 100 days since this version of lockdown began just after after Christmas.  I continue to live in my own little lockdown within the lockdown.

—–

I am learning the lines of my perimeter walks. There is a great deal to pay attention to and to notice every time I go around. I pride myself on observing all of the small signs of spring.  Everyday there are new poops from the fox. Why does she choose to relieve herself here in our yard when she has all of the surrounding fields to choose from? It must be some kind of territorial marking.  I see which branches have buds. I see forgetmenots and dandelions and whitethorn added to the visible blooms. Blue bells. A few apple blossoms. The promise of wild garlic flowers bursting out in another few days.  But I completely missed the completely flat tyre on the car even though I walked past it at least eight times.

—-

This walking by foot feels like one long journey not a lot of small walks for the purpose of building up my strength.  I walk around and around following my own trail through the grass. It feels like one long walk.

As I stroll around at slow speed I remember the frequently quoted Antonio Machado line: Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking. I walk and walk and walk. The grass records my path.

My Own Name

23 April Sunday

I lost track of when the first swallow arrived this year. I have lost track of a lot of things. Breda knows exactly because she always keeps a record. She writes the date on her calendar and every year it seems to me that she sees the first swallow a few days earlier than she saw it the year before.  She is delighted with the first sighting and she tells everyone she meets that she has seen it, so in a way her sighting has become a signal for me to start looking for my first swallow.  Breda now tells me that she has heard her first cuckoo.  I will need to get up and into the mountains before I have a chance to hear one and since I am not yet able for the mountains, my first cuckoo will be heard much later than Breda’s first cuckoo.

26 April Monday

As of today, I have permission to stop wearing my blood clot socks.  I am sick to death of them.  They are difficult to put on and they are difficult to take off. This does not mean that I have reached a full recovery, but giving up wearing these socks every day up feels like a momentous thing.

28 April Wednesday

I remembered that putting out cooked eggshells for the birds is a good thing to do in the spring when they are laying their eggs. Since the birds need extra calcium, they take the shells and that provides the chicks with more of what they need to get strong.  The blue jays in New Hampshire used to eat paint off the sides of the house in order to get a calcium boost. I do not think we have blue jays here.  There are jays but I do not see the big blue jays I that recognize from home. I cooked up some empty eggshells and crumbled them, and I took them out to the bird’s dining area. After two days I could see that not one bird had been interested in the eggshells. They were all on the table and on the ground exactly where I had scattered them. There had not even been any wind to blow them away. Blue jays are native to New Hampshire. They are not native here.  I thought the local birds might be tempted by the cooked and crunchy shells but they have no interest. They do not even want to try them. It is better for me to continue with apple scraps.

2 May Sunday

Florrie told me that her husband took to baking bread during the lock-down. It has been a fashion of the Covid months and everyone was making bread but she was completely surprised when her husband decided to start baking. First he made soda bread and then he progressed to sourdough. He is currently on a new phase of making pizza bases. He was happy to make bread and she loved that he made bread, but she said he would not cook the dinner. Florrie’s husband had no interest in any other kind of food preparation. Baking was a form of entertainment for him. He felt that cooking was her job and he was glad to leave it to her.

4 May Tuesday

The magpies are going crazy on the nut feeders.  They jump up from the ground and attack the feeder.  Sometimes there are two magpies beating and thrashing at the same time while the feeder swings wildly on its branch.  I do not think it is easy for them to get their big beaks into the little mesh openings but they continue to try.

5 May Wednesday

I had my first vaccination today. The scheduled time was very specific. I was advised to arrive no earlier than five minutes before my assigned time, which is what I did.  The whole thing was well organized.  There was no wait at all, just a steady movement toward the vaccination booths. There was a quiver in the air. Everyone was eager to get their vaccination and we had all been warned by friends and family and neighbors to drink lots and lots of water before we arrived. People checked with one another in the queue to make sure that everyone else had drunk enough water. Some people carried bottles of water with them as if to illustrate that they were the most hydrated.  As I moved along the route, I was asked repeatedly to state Your Own Name. No one just asked my name.  It was always Your Own Name, as if I might be giving someone else’s name and always with the double form of possession.

When I reached the vaccinating booth, I was once again asked for Your Own Name, and the two women there squealed with delight at hearing My Own Name.  They wanted to know all about it and where it came from.  They knew right away that it was not local. When the woman at the desk noticed that I was born on Valentine’s Day, she announced that my mother had missed a great opportunity as she could have named me Valentine. She said my mother Should have named me Valentine as there was nothing finer than to be named after a saint.  I did not explain to her that my mother would never in one million years have considered naming me after a saint.  I could not explain that that was not how my mother chose our names. When I left the booth after my jab the two women sang out “Good Bye! Good Bye! Dear Valentine!” as though My Own Name really is Valentine.

6 May Thursday

John the electrician returned early this morning.  He finished the job of re-wiring the book barn that he had started yesterday. He finished the job that Peter Ryan began when he drove down on a digger and dug out a trench to lay a cable from the tool barn to the book barn. He finished the job that needed to be done after the mice chewed some wires and the book barn caught on fire. We were lucky to catch the fire in its early smoke-filled stages and we were lucky that the fire did not start in the middle of the night.  It was mostly the paper shelves that suffered damage. We were fortunate that no books were destroyed.  The fire forced us to do a major clear-out of paper and samples and all kinds of collected stuff.  The fire made us do a lot of work that we would not have done if we had had the choice.  I am still not fully strong so my level of participation in the work has been slow and small. Every day the doors were thrown open to air out the place but we had to establish elaborate methods to let the air in to circulate but not to let the swooping and diving birds come in. Plenty of birds did get in but most of them flew out again. Now the smell of burnt plastic fittings and smoke are gone and the new wiring is complete. We trust the rodents have been defeated.

8 May Saturday

I returned to the Farmers Market today for the first time since mid-March.  It was nice to be welcomed back.  It was lovely to have been missed.  Pat O’ Brien had his final day selling vegetables last week. Three weeks ago he announced that he thought he had just enough potatoes to last him three weeks and when the big sacks of potatoes were gone that would be the last day for him. And so he is gone. He was the one who organized the market and got it all started eighteen years ago. It is a shock to note his absence.  The remaining stalls have all been moved around to accommodate the gap. I neither have nor need a photograph of Pat, but I have an old picture of his money box with small potatoes placed in position to hold down the paper euros on a windy day.

10 May Monday

Some things are opening up today. We can now go anywhere in the entire country. We are no longer confined to a twenty kilometer radius within our county. Hairdressers and barbers are open, but most non-essential shops are not.

11 May Tuesday

The baker told me it is called Gur although some people call it Gudge.  In Cork, it is known as Donkey’s Gudge. What it is is a cake made of all the leftover cakes and biscuits that did not get sold or eaten. It is never the same twice because the leftovers are never exactly the same.  The baker in Grangemockler told me that he adds jam and raisins to his Gur and it has a thin top and bottom made of pastry. Those are the his only constants. He swears that leftover Christmas cake makes the finest Gur. I bought a piece of the Gur he had on offer today and I brought it home. It was not delicious, but it was filling.

13 May Thursday

Two sparrow hawks hover on the side of the book barn.  They sit on the roof or cling vertically on some stones. They spend many hours waiting and watching. They are watching for the starlings who are nesting in under the roof.  The starlings are careful when they go in and out.  It is a dangerous situation.

14 May Friday

No bag is ever used only once.  I comment on this frequently.  It is not so much about recycling as it is just something that is always done, and has always been done. Sugar bags are re-used to carry jars of homemade jam.  Sugar was poured out of the bag to make the jam and later the same bag is used to transport the jam in case the sides of the jar are a little bit sticky. The bag for Flahavan’s oats appears regularly, often, and in many guises.  The bags are too sturdy and well made to use only once. People carry their sandwiches to school or to work in these strong paper bags.  Today I loaded one up with empty glass jars to give to Anne for her marmalade making. I know that she will re-use both the jars and the bag.

15 May Saturday

There are flowers in the edges of the track and along every road and every path.  Buttercups, and Tufted Vetch, and Stitchwort and Speedwell, and more Vetch. Primroses. Wild garlic. Loads and loads of Vetch, and Lady’s Smock, and Herb Robert. I love the names and I love that that Cow Parsley is now blooming and sheltering all of the small blossoms. They are not hidden but they are a little harder to see.

17 May Monday

More of the country has opened up but there are many warnings along with the openings. Shops and museums and libraries are now open. We can go places but at the same time, we are sort of being told not to go anywhere. Or not to go to many places and not to go anywhere with many other people.  Restaurants and bars remain closed. The weather is so changeable that it kind of goes with the mixed messages we are receiving. The weather is not very encouraging for going out to all of the places where we now have permission to go. We have driving lashing rain followed by sun and blue sky and then there is rain again. It is not easy to be outside for more than a few minutes without a big sweeping gusting change. Even though we are landlocked, it is obvious that we are living on an island.

19 May Wednesday

I met Mickey the Boxer getting down off his tractor.  He had loaded up a single bale to take down the road for his cows. He used his cane to get himself down out of the small tractor and and he used it to push himself back up into the driver’s seat.  Collecting one bale from Tom Cooney’s shed and taking it home again was a job that had taken him the entire morning.  When I met him, we talked together for a few minutes about the weather and the hay and the unseasonably cold nights and the frosty mornings and then he was ready to head home for his dinner.

The Egg Man Wears a Fedora.

 

 

29 May Saturday

There have been no coach loads of tourists for months and months and months. There has not been one tour bus in the car park below Cahir Castle since the pandemic began. The five or six extra long places reserved for parking buses have not been used. Slowly, we have all begun to park in those places when we arrive on a Saturday for the Farmers Market. It is not a big thing. It just means the cars can spread out a little more than they already do. Today it seemed a very good thing to have the use of the bus area because there was not much room to park in the regular car spaces.  A few dozen geese had come up from the river and they were all sitting around on the asphalt. There was little room for cars to park nor even much space to drive around the geese.

1 June Tuesday

Everything has been wet. It has been wet and it has been cold. The weather predictions of the Donegal Postman promised us that April and May would be warm and dry. Instead they were wet and cold. Everyone has been disgusted and disappointed. I have only been able to walk up the Mass Path because I am still wearing long trousers and sturdy long sleeved shirts. The vegetation has grown tall and thick. It is way over my head. The nettles are monstrous. I pretend that I am pleased that it is not too hot to walk up there, even while I am being slapped with wet leaves and branches.

2 June Wednesday

Breda and I met up at The Boulders and we walked for about an hour around and over Barranacullia. One hour was enough for me. It was my first time walking up in the mountains. We did not go high enough to see across and down to the sea on the south coast, but we heard the cuckoo.

3 June Thursday

Going to the hairdresser is usually great fun. Ollie always makes me laugh. He is a man with a giggle resting close under the skin. Today I went to have my hair cut. I had missed the brief slot when the hairdressers and barbers were open before Christmas. They were open and then abruptly more Covid restrictions were imposed and they were shut down again. I missed my chance. This was my first appointment since last September. Ollie was shocked to see how long my hair had grown. I was shocked to see him. He was behind a plexiglass screen when I arrived so there was no mask covering his face. I stared at him and I asked, “What has happened to you, Ollie? You look completely different!”  He said, “Yes–I RAN! I rushed out of the country when there was a gap in the travel restrictions!” He said that he knew the flights to everywhere and anywhere were going to be halted any minute so he flew to Turkey on 5 January and he had his teeth crowned and Done and he had his nose broken and then Done, and he had his forehead botoxed. Done. All in five days. He flew back to Dublin looking as if he had been severely beaten. He said his face was bruised and horrible but he had to go into quarantine at home anyway so it did not matter how gruesome he looked. Now he has his new look and gleaming teeth that I thought for sure were false teeth. He looks like a completely different person. His long hair has been cut very short. Even with his face mask in position over his nose and mouth when I could only see half of his face, he looked like someone else. There was no laughter. I remained in shock for the entire time of my haircut. Ollie informed me that the dental work alone had been worth the flight out. Flying to Turkey to have work on one’s teeth has been going on for ten years or more. It is called Dental Tourism.  He said it would have cost him 33,000 euro in Ireland but it was only 5000 euro in Turkey and he assured me that the quality of the work was better. I really did not care how much it cost, but it seemed essential to him to report these prices to me. There was no talk of new recipes nor of sewing up waterproof capes for his ducks nor of what was growing in his garden. There Was No Laughter. Ollie now has a plan to return to Turkey to have his eye lids pulled up tight. He might have his neck done too.  He will wait for a while to earn the money for all that, and anyway with the current restrictions, it is not possible to fly to Turkey nor to anywhere else right now.

4 June Friday

I walked down through the fields at Molough. I did not recognize the crop but it was growing tall. It was nearly at my waist. There was a lot of rustling and crackling as the wind blew though the plants. It was noisy in a quiet way. Suddenly a young deer leapt across the track from one field right into the next. At the point of crossing she was only a few feet in front of me. I do not know if she knew I was near. Before I could register surprise, three more fawns came rushing out of the tall growth and all four disappeared across the field with high bounding and bouncing movements. Within seconds I could see nothing except an occasional head bobbing up out of the far high growth. It was a Four Fawn Morning but it was over almost before it started.

7 June Monday

We were sitting outside and keeping our distance from one another. It was not warm but it was not raining so we were happy to be out of doors and sharing a cup of tea. I held the jug of milk over his cup. Without words, I was offering to pour milk into his tea for him. I did not want to interrupt what he was saying. Francie interrupted his own stream of conversation and he said, “Yes, but don’t lean on it.” I guessed that this meant that he did not want too much milk. Just a little.

8 June Tuesday

The same man has been delivering eggs to the shop for years. He always wears a knee-length white laboratory coat unbuttoned and flapping open over his trousers and his sweater. He wears this official looking white garment all year round, and on his head he wears a black fedora. He is not a young man. This is not a trendy fedora. It is an all weather hat that might look a bit smart on someone else but the egg man wears it pulled down low.  I have never seen the man without the coat nor without the fedora. In these times of continuing infection, he now wears the coat and the fedora and a face mask. He leans forward and down as he carries his big tray loaded with eggs. His eyes have never been visible.

9 June Wednesday

I walked the track through the fields at Molough again this morning. The crop has grown taller since last week. I was confused to see that some plants had been pulled out and thrown down on the ground in the middle of the track. When I reached the top, I saw the farmer and an elderly man and a young boy and a dog at one of the gates. The old man held onto the gate with one hand and he leaned on a walking stick with the other. The boy sat on the top bar of the gate. The farmer and his dog were inside the gate at the edge of the planted field. I stopped and asked what the crop was and I was told that it was gluten-free oats. I asked why some plants had been pulled up and tossed down on the track. The farmer said that those were the weeds and that they had to come out as they would contaminate the crop. They needed to be pulled out. He pulled up one of each plant and showed me the difference between the two. Once he pointed out the difference, it was easy to see that the plants were not the same. He had already been around the perimeter of one field pulling by hand. He said there were not many of the bad plants so it was not as big a job as it sounded. He had some men coming to help him tomorrow. Together they would comb the fields and it would take them only a day to clear the 100 acres of these occasional intruders. But for today he was on his own. The elderly man was too old to be any help and the boy was too young. The dog was there because the farmer hoped the deer would take his scent and maybe stop trampling this crop of oats.

10 June Thursday

Derek told me that one of the postmen has been seriously unwell and that he had to go into the hospital. No one wants to go into the hospital unless there is absolutely no choice. Everyone is afraid of what they might catch while inside. They might get the Covid or they might get the MRSA. There is no one who wants to take a chance if they have any choice at all. If they are too ill to have a choice, everyone else worries for them. Derek said that this man is an extremely thin fellow. He held his index finger straight up in the air to demonstrate. He said the man was Just Like This. He said he was not a man who could lose any more weight. Everyone at the sorting office in town is concerned.

 

11 June Friday

The weather has finally warmed up. There are flies everywhere.  They are big, slow and annoying flies.  Doors and windows are open so the flies come inside and they are a nuisance. Women are complaining about the flies invading their kitchens. It is a new topic of conversation. Every counter in every shop has displays of what I call Fly Paper and what everyone else calls Fly Catchers.  It is that horrible sticky twist of paper that if it works will end up with multiple dead insects stuck all over it. Fly Catchers and Fly Swatters. It is the season.

12 June Saturday

The man who sells organic chickens and organic sausages and bacon at the market now has an extra table beside the one that holds his little refrigerator. He uses the second table to sell the big sacks of potatoes and carrots and cabbages that Pat O’Brien used to sell every week. The things on the extra table are not organic. I am not sure if perhaps Pat O’Brien is providing him with these vegetables even though he is no longer at the market himself. I have never known the chicken man’s first name. His chickens are labelled as Butler’s Organic Chickens so if I think of him at all I think of him as Mr. Butler. The woman in front of me pointed to the enormous sacks of spuds and asked him to carry one to her car for her. She said, “So — you are the new Pat!”   Mr. Butler is a quiet soft-spoken man. He responded to the woman’s statement by saying, “I’ve always been a Pat.” So now I know the name of the chicken man.

13 June Sunday

It was at exactly the same spot in the boreen. I turned the corner and there was the fox. It was not the bright red fox that I see out in the field every day. This one was brown. He was bigger and he had a dark almost black tip on his tail. He saw me at the exact moment that I saw him. I was only a few steps away so he sprang up with all four feet off the ground and over the ditch. He was gone in a flash.

14 June Monday

We went down to the village for Margaret Hally’s funeral this morning. She had been living at the residential home in Cappoquin for a few years. The last time I spoke to Tommie he told me that since the care home restrictions had lifted, he was now driving up the mountain to see her once a week. I commented on the Cappoquin road. I remarked that it was bendy and steep and dangerous. I offered that maybe I could drive him up for his next visit to Margaret. He was annoyed that I would suggest such a thing. He said he has known that road all his life. He said he knows every corner and every bump in it. I said that for a change it might be pleasant to look out the window instead of having to pay attention to wandering sheep tumbling down onto the road in front of oncoming motor cars or in front of his own car. He agreed that it would be a treat to look carefully out at things as a passenger. He acknowledged that the wandering sheep are a challenge. Right after we spoke, Tommie was rushed into hospital. He has been there for several weeks. Today they brought him out from town in a special ambulance and in a wheelchair so that he could say his farewells to Margaret. He was hooked up to a small oxygen tank and he had a nurse at his side. We all stood in the bright sunshine on the street outside the church and then in the graveyard feeling sad for Tommie having to say goodbye to his wife of so many years in this diminished state.

The New Stanley

16 June Wednesday

An Post has printed special stamps to celebrate Ireland’s Pride Month. Booklets containing both national and international stamps are available for purchase. Some of the rainbow colored stamps are printed with the word PRIDE and some are printed with the Irish word BRÓD. An Post sent everyone a card with the information about this support for the LGBT community and suggested that we all display the card in our window as a show of solidarity.

23 June Wednesday

We have had a good spell of dry and warm weather. Now rain is promised. We know that all the fields and the gardens need a soaking. Jacinta was in a rush because she and her husband wanted to bring their turf in before the rain come. Every year they purchase turf from a man who owns a bog up on the mountain. They buy the turf by the line. The man has a machine and he cuts the lines and Jacinta and her husband and the other people who are buying the turf from him go up to the location regularly to make little stacks of the turf. This is called footing. They move the brick-like pieces of cut turf so that each side gets exposed to air, and over weeks, they slowly add more pieces to each stack as the drying process continues. When the turf is brown and kind of hairy it will let in the wet and hold the moisture. It will not dry out evenly. It will not be much good for burning. When it is black and crusty, it is more water-resistant and then it gives off great heat. With several days of hard rain forecast, Jacinta and her husband are eager to load up their six air-dried lines of turf and to get it all home and stacked in the shed. This will provide them with good fires in their wood stove all winter long.

28 June

I woke up depressed to see yet another morning of heavy grey cloud cover hanging over everything. Later I overheard two women standing outside the shop discussing and taking great delight that this day is drizzly and grey and damp. They repeated again and again that they love this weather, over and over and to whoever would listen. They agreed that neither of them enjoy a day when it gets too warm. They prefer a day that is cool and fresh. They did not enjoy the recent stretch of almost hot days. One of the women was complaining about how hard it is to get even the smallest of jobs done when it Goes Hot. She listed all the problems that she could think of about hot days. Then she stopped herself mid-complaining and she laughed and said, “I’ll Have the Ears Burnt Off You with My Giving Out!”

30 June Wednesday

The new graveyard is called the new graveyard even though it has already been there for nineteen years.  It is no longer new but it is newer than anywhere else for burying people.  There are now thirty-five people buried in the new graveyard.  It is filling up but the filling up is not fast. This morning, I met Olive at the gate to the graveyard. She had a scouring sponge and a spray bottle of cleanser with her. She had arrived to clean the stone on her husband’s grave. Murty has been dead for six years now. Six, or maybe seven, years. She told me that she misses him every day. She misses him dreadfully. She goes to clean his stone frequently just to give herself something to do.  She says that without Himself to cook for three times a day, her life has no order. Her days are empty. She was quick to tell me that three men died recently and that all three had been buried in the graveyard in as many weeks. She spoke of each man by his first name.  She said she was of course sorry and deeply sad for their families, but she added cheerfully that “Now we will have Some New Company.”  After a few minutes more, I said good-bye and I left her there with her cleaning equipment. All day I have been wondering what she meant by Some New Company.  Was she suggesting that the visits of other mourners might provide companionship for herself when she goes to visit her husband, or was she implying that the newly deceased would provide some company for Murty and the others who are buried in the graveyard?

3 July Saturday

I picked up three small courgettes. The man at the market stall offered me more but the rest of them were all big ones. I told him that I preferred the very small courgettes for their tenderness and sweetness. I said I was happy to take just the three. He directed my attention back to the larger ones again and he said, “But these were small last week.”

4 July Sunday

We drove up the mountain to meet friends in Lismore. Heavy rain was promised so we planned to eat in the outdoor area of a restaurant. This was to be our first time eating in a restaurant for more than eighteen months, since the pandemic began.  We were led through the still non-functioning and not yet legal indoor part of the restaurant to an area out back that had been built out of corrugated metal. There were gaping openings in the homemade construction to allow the air in, and to keep the rain out. The wind was blowing hard through the room and I was glad to have dressed in several layers of warm and waterproof clothing. The tables were much too close together and the floor was made of cast concrete. The noise inside the indoor/outdoor room was deafening. There was nothing to absorb the sound and nowhere for the noise to go. A table of six women were dressed in summery sleeveless party garments. They were all heavily made up. They were necking colorful cocktails and laughing and talking and shrieking and roaring. Every aspect of this lunch time OUT was thrilling and wonderful to them. They were celebrating. They were raucous. Along with the diners at the other four tables in the little indoor/outdoor room, we had to shout to make ourselves heard over the noise of the happy women and the crashing sound of the rain beating down on the tin roof.

5 July

She was disturbed that the day was rainy. It was not because the rain was interrupting the warmth of summer, instead she explained “I do not like to see the roads wet.”

7 July

The new cooker has been installed. The old cooker has been removed and the new one has been moved in, positioned and wired up. The new cooker is not beautiful, but it will provide us with reliable heat and hot water in the winter months. It is not beautiful nor is it new, but it is a fine second-hand Stanley.  It had only one owner and the only reason it had to be removed from the house it was in was because the woman of the house is now in a wheelchair and she could no longer work with it. It was too tall and the lids on top were much too heavy for her to lift. It took three men to take out the old Rayburn and to get the Stanley off the truck and to bring it in on rollers and to lower a new liner down the chimney. Ned and Eddie returned today to finish the bricking up of the chimney hole and the wiring and all of the smaller but important details. When Eddie finished the drilling and wiring, he turned on the cooker to test that everything was working correctly. We were all impressed with the immediate strong heat that came off it. The radiators heated up quickly as did the hot water in its tank. The day was warm and the doors and windows were all wide open. We did not need any heat at all but we needed to test the machine. Simon was excited by the large size of the hot plate on top and at how quickly it heated up. He sliced some bread and began to make toast. I made a pot of tea and we sat down with Ned and Eddie at the big table with our chairs all facing the new cooker while we discussed its merits and the job that had just been accomplished. We ate toast with butter and marmalade. We toasted the new Stanley with toast.

9 July Friday

The morning was cool and overcast. I was wearing long trousers and long sleeves. I thought I would attempt to walk the overgrown Mass Path. This was a terrible mistake. The nettles and brambles and hogwart made the track into a tangled mess. I knew right away that I had made a bad decision but I kept believing that since I had already been through the worst of it, I might as well continue. I was wrong. Over and over again I was wrong. Every time I reached a short distance where the undergrowth was kept at bay because of the tree shelter, the tangle took over again with a vengeance. I could not go back so I kept going forward. By the time I reached the road at the top my face and my neck and my hands had all been scratched and torn by the brambles. I had nettle stings on every bit of exposed skin.

11 July Sunday

It has been raining off and on all afternoon. A heron stood on the roof of the book barn for a long time. I wanted to go outdoors and get closer but I knew it would fly away if I approached. I went back and forth to the window to check on it for an hour. The last time I looked the heron relieved herself while I watched. There was a long white stripe of excrement in a perfectly straight line from the top ridge of the roof to the bottom edge. It was wide enough and white enough to be easily visible from the house. Then the heron flew away and within the hour the white stripe was washed away by the rain.

12 July Monday

I have been competing with the birds for the gooseberries. I think I am winning.

14 July Wednesday

When she commented about the man by saying: He Has a Turn in Him, I had to ask what she meant.  She explained that it means that he is able to do something good for others, but more than that it means that he is not all bad.

Tarmac Cactus

14 September Tuesday

There is a single lilac blossom blooming. This is not right. It is September. It is the wrong time of year for lilac to be in bloom. The blossom is scrawny. It looks indecisive about its very presence, but it is there.

15 September Wednesday

Alice brought me a large and long bright yellow squash.  She asked me if I liked aubergine. She offered it to me as an aubergine. She said she did not eat aubergines and she never had eaten aubergine and neither did her husband nor her sons. She told me several times that they had never eaten an aubergine and nor had she and she swore that she would never try one and anyway she said that she had enough different things to eat. I told her that it was not an aubergine but a big yellow squash but she was not bothered with the correction of the word. Whatever it was, she did not want it. It had been given to her and she was eager to give it away to someone else. She had accepted it because it was offered and because of course she wanted to be polite but she did not want an aubergine in her life. Alice brought it to me because she knew that we had a great many spices on our shelves, which was strange enough and odd in itself, and because of that, she thought we might enjoy something different to eat.

16 September Thursday

The side of the building is painted to announce the sale and servicing of LAWNMOWERS, CHAINSAWS, HEDGE TRIMMERS, and BRUSH CUTTERS. The front of the building has no sign and it offers no clue as to what takes place inside.

17 September Friday

The small fuzzy caterpillars arrive every year at  this time. They move quickly. Wherever I walk on a stretch of road they are rushing to cross. These speedy caterpillars are everywhere. When I see one I call it a Tarmac Cactus, but now I am told that it’s local name is a Hairy Molly.

18 September Saturday

Each week, Ned Lonergan brings his carefully hand turned bowls and boards and platters to sell at the farmer’s market in Cahir. Every bowl is engraved on the bottom with a wood burning tool. He writes his name and the date and the type of wood he has used to make the bowl. Each item is carefully oiled. The chair he brings for himself to sit in is a completely different kind of home-made.

19 September Sunday

I am picking raspberries twice a day. They are plentiful. In the morning I go out to gather a small bowl full quickly, just enough to add to our two portions of cereal. In the morning the leaves are wet. The mornings already feel like autumn and they are heavy with dew.   The leaves are wet so my sleeves get wet.  My sleeves are always soaked after the picking, so every morning I have to make a decision whether to eat my breakfast in my dressing gown with the sopping sleeves, or to go and get dressed for the day before tucking in to my cereal. In late afternoon, I go out again and gather a larger amount of the berries. These I freeze or take to friends, or I set them aside for us to eat in one form or another after supper.  Many people have received a gift of raspberries already. I love to give the gift of raspberries. Now I am beginning to give people a second offering. What I do not like is to make jam. I am happy to eat raspberry jam if someone else makes it. At this time of year, my preferred method is to eat my raspberries freshly mashed onto a piece of toast.    As I am picking, I often wonder about the berries that the birds have pecked at and maybe even eaten half. I never know if it matters and if the there is any problem with sharing bird saliva. I am not sure if birds have saliva. Anyway, there are plenty of raspberries both for me and for the birds and already the hedgerows are full of blackberries ripe for the picking. And the figs. The figs are fine this year. We had one perfect fig. One fig that tasted like we were in a warm and southern country, but there has not been enough heat for most of them to be be fully ripe and sweet like that. I bring them into the house at a certain point to finish ripening over a few days. If I leave them on the bush the birds will attack them and hollow out the fruit from the skin.  Once indoors, they are safe to ripen slowly and then they are delicious cooked into small tarts.

20 September Monday

There are dozens and dozens of little tiny wrens flying around. They come in the house and they get confused and they get stuck in impossible places.

 

21 September Tuesday

The house has appeared uninhabited for years. The paintwork around the windows is chipped and the curtains inside are droopy and dirty. There is never any activity to be seen in or around the house, or none that can be seen from the pavement. There is no space between the street level window and the door, just the narrowest piece of wood. Today I noticed that a clean and ironed white embroidered cloth has been laid along the inside of the window sill. A framed photograph of a man is on view. It is a photograph of a young man with a black and white cat. Beside the framed photograph there is a stack of five books. There is no name anywhere. There is nothing to say whether the man in the photograph is dead or alive. There is nothing to tell me if that same man is now old or if perhaps he is still as young as he was in the photograph.

I wish I had taken note of the titles of the five books.

Hatchet Boy.

8 October Friday

It was 5.45 in the morning. I was just off a flight from Boston. I walked and walked and walked through the darkness to find Zone 16. The Clonmel bus used to leave from a place closer to the terminal and that place was together with all of the other buses, but my transport is now at Zone 16 and anyway I was looking for a different bus than the one I used to catch. Now I was looking for the JJ Kavanagh bus. The old X8 BusEireann Express has not reappeared since the lock down. It was a long walk in the dark and the cold. It was at least a half a kilometre.  Maybe more.  I was weary. Zone 16 was a long distance from where the other buses stopped. The only thing Zone 16 was near was the small airport church that is called Our Lady Of Heaven. My bus was scheduled to depart at 6.15 but there was no sign announcing it, nor was there a schedule listed in among the other pinned up schedules. There was no reference at all to the bus I was hoping to board.  I was glad to see it pull in at 6, because that gave me time to talk to the driver and to make sure I was in the right place for the right bus. The driver told me that she was indeed going to Clonmel and asked me if I was here on holiday. When I told her that I was not on holiday but that I lived near Clonmel, she wanted to know where I lived and then she told me that she lived just down the road in the village. She told me that she was originally from Ardfinnan and that later she ran the shop in Goatenbridge, but she said it was finally too expensive to keep the shop going. She said she could buy her own groceries in town at the Tesco for cheaper than she could sell them in Goatenbridge. The shop went out of business and she later bought the house in Newcastle when Dessie and Noel were selling up their family land by the river. I knew exactly where she lived. Now she drives the bus first up and then down from Dublin Airport starting at midnight with a lot of stops along the way. I was not even at home yet but already I was being collected and delivered by a neighbour. I wondered why I had never even seen this woman before but she said her hours are erratic and sleep is the single thing she does most of when she is not driving her bus.

10 October Sunday

All week, the afternoons have been warm and bright. The honeybees in the roof of the barn are busy around their entrance. They are out and about in the garden on every bit of blossom available. The door and the windows of the house are all wide open. Some of the bees come into the house and they buzz around the skylight and the windows in the big room. I catch them in a cup when I can reach them and I take them back outdoors, but I cannot catch them all and some get stuck in the house overnight. Mid-morning, as the sun warms the room, the bees wake up and start their buzzing again. I like the sound of their work outside, but day after day, the buzzing is becoming annoying inside.

11 October Monday

It is not the first time. I heard a thump followed by a long whoosh noise as I drove up the boreen. I assumed I had hit a stone because I was going too fast and I thought nothing more of it. By the time I reached the village, my front left tyre was completely flat. I was driving on the wheel rim. I was lucky that Anthony was open and that he was able to replace the tyre for me. 85 euro. He could not be certain what had caused the puncture. We noticed two cuts in the side of the tyre but they seemed too high on the wall to be made by stones and they were definitely not thorns. That was about six weeks ago. Last week Simon was driving out and he felt a bump that he thought was a stone. When he reached the point where the dirt road meets the tar road, his front left tyre was flat. Another cut mark. Another 85 euro. This morning I went out to drive to the village to fetch the newspapers. A completely flat tyre. Another cut mark. Another 85 euro for another new tyre. These are not regular tyres for town vehicles. These are heavy duty tyres produced to accommodate rough terrain like this uneven road.

I have walked up and down the boreen examining both sides carefully. There is nothing sticking out from the rocks and the growth that could be responsible for this kind of cut in the sidewall. I keep making the same walk and I keep trying to figure out what is cutting the tyre, always the same tyre. I do not like to point a finger but I have begun to think about Hatchet Boy. It was about three years ago when I used to see him walking down the track holding a hatchet closely pressed against his leg. He was trying to walk carefully in order to hide the hatchet. He never said hello nor made any gesture of friendliness. He just waited until I had passed with the hatchet held tight to his leg. He was about eleven at the time. Or maybe he was nine. I knew that he walked down the track here and then turned off into the expanse of Cooney’s wood. I assumed he was doing some cutting of trees or branches down there for some project of his own. Maybe he was making a hide-out. I never saw him returning because he could use the route through the woods to get back to his own house. Now I am wondering if perhaps Hatchet Boy has graduated from his small axe to a knife. Perhaps Hatchet Boy is annoyed that our parked vehicle partly blocks the route down the track. Maybe Hatchet Boy is stabbing the tyre to punish us for blocking his way. There is plenty of room to walk even with the motorcar parked off to the left but maybe Hatchet Boy has taken offence. Maybe Hatchet Boy has evolved into a bit of a vigilante. Or maybe he just enjoys using his knife.

Since the most recent cut tyre, I am parking in a different location. I am keeping an eye on the vehicle in the hours after school, especially the hours just before dark. I cannot go to the home of Hatchet Boy and ask his mother is he is now carrying a knife, but I am not sure what to do next.

13 October Wednesday

Last night I found a slug draped over the bristles of my toothbrush.  I threw the slug out the window and washed my toothbrush multiple times in very hot water. Then I brushed my teeth. It is the problem of this time of year. Windows are open and things come in. This morning, I saw a slug stretched out long and thin on a window. I was interested to watch the body so elongated. I wondered how much time it would take for him to move across the expanse of the glass. I was interested but mostly I was glad that this slug was outside and not inside.

14 October Thursday

I had not seen her for many days. Paulina has been studying for exams and she has spending hours and hours every day and every night at her computer. When I greeted her and I inquired as to how she was, she threw up her hands and said, “Don’t ask! Don’t even ask!! My Eyes Are Cut Out of My Head and My Brain is Scorched!”

15 October Friday

Today is grey and wet. The soft drizzle is soaking. Not a bee is buzzing, neither indoors nor out.

 

The bees walk.

27 October Wednesday

Bees are still coming into the house on sunny afternoons. They come in and they often spend the night, but they are no longer buzzing around noisily in the afternoons. They walk. The bees walk or else they stand around in one place for a long time. They can stand in one spot for more than an hour.  Then they walk to another place. There is not much flying. I think they are preparing for winter sleep. They are a lot easier to catch.

12 November Friday

Our compost heap is always evolving. It was once a disheveled pile of vegetables scraps and leaves. Now the heap is less of a heap. It is inside a wooden box with a lid on hinges. This is the latest manifestation. At some point, this will rot and the pieces of old pallet wood will fall apart and then the compost heap will be slightly different or a lot different. Again.

I have never found a rat in the compost. I have never even seen a rat in the compost, but I am always aware that there might be a rat in the compost, so I am always on guard. I used to talk to myself out loud whenever I went near to the compost heap with the idea that just hearing my voice would make a rat take cover. Rats are bold and brave. I doubt that my voice would frighten or disturb them. For nearly three years we have had the compost contained in this wooden box. Before I open the lid of the box, I knock on the top. I also keep a heavy stick nearby. The stick is not a weapon. I use the stick to make a few loud thumps on the wood. The stick makes a louder noise than my knuckles can make. I do not want to open the box and to have a rat jump out at me. Nor do I want to find a rat just looking at me without bothering to move. If a rodent is present and active inside I want it to run away so that I do not have to.

14 November Sunday

It is a very small shop. The sign requests that only two people be inside at the same time. I could see one masked man talking to Seamus at the counter. I was ready to pay for my petrol. After waiting outside a few moments, I decided that there was no one else in there so I walked in the open door. The two men turned to me immediately. Seamus asked if I knew about Flax. I said that I did know about Flax and that I ate milled flax most mornings. Then he said: Walnuts. Do you eat Walnuts? I said Yes, I eat Walnuts. I love Walnuts. They are delicious and good for me too. He asked if I ate porridge. When I answered yes to that too, he turned to the masked man and said, “She is way ahead of us. She is doing everything right. We need to up our game.”

15 November Monday

Our well has been fixed and disinfected with an elaborate system that takes the water through a filter and then through an ultraviolet light and then through a salt water tank that also functions as a water softener.  The complete apparatus is installed on the back wall of the shed, near to the pump, with a small tube emptying some of the salty water outside. It all looks very scientific. I go out to look at it several times every day. We should have done this years ago. The man who did the installation was named Gearoid. For me, Irish names are difficult to say and even more difficult to spell. His son, Aaron worked with him. Aaron made dozens of trips to and from the van to bring in the tools and to carry things away again. Each time Gearoid asked for something he used Aaron’s name in the request and each time Aaron did the job his father thanked him and used his name again. He used long involved sentences. Gearoid would say, “Now Aaron I would be hoping you could go out and into the van and find the drill with the long extension that we will be needing to make a hole through this stone wall. When you find the drill, Aaron, I would be hoping that you could bring it to me here now, Aaron. I hope you could do that for me please Aaron.” It was a very formal and quiet working relationship. On completion, Gearoid promised us that our water would be very different from now on. He was right. We use less soap while bathing or doing laundry or washing dishes. The water tastes different. The tea tastes different and we use fewer tea leaves to make a good strong cup.  We marvel and discuss the taste of the water endlessly. We have been buying bottled water to drink for years and have used the Brita filter for tea and coffee water. Now the water from the tap is delicious and it is no longer full of lime or bacteria. No more endless huge jugs of water to buy and lug in from the supermarket and no more plastic bottles to recycle. We should have done this years ago.

17 November Wednesday

Our friend Jim is in the hospital. First he was in Waterford, then he was moved to Clonmel and then he was returned to Waterford and now he is back in Clonmel again. It has been about eight weeks that he has been bouncing back and forth. Sometimes he has been in isolation due to hospital infections. He is old and in a fragile state. When I spoke to him on the telephone his voice was weak. He told me that the physical therapists are now building the strength in his legs so that he can walk again. He is not able to walk by himself yet but he is optimistic that he will improve. The hospital wants him to be able to walk with a frame before they will allow him to leave. Jim tells me that he may get some of the use back in his legs but he fears that he will never go home. One daughter has been named as the single visitor to go into the hospital. Because of Covid, other family and friends are not allowed to visit and because they never know exactly where Jim is, they send get-well cards and messages to his home address, with the understanding that Jim’s daughter will deliver the cards to him in whichever hospital he is in. Today we learned that the daughter has not delivered any of the cards to him. Not one. He has not received a single card nor note wishing him well. The daughter is saving all the cards in large box so that Jim can look at them when he comes home.

18 November Thursday

Jacinta asked me if I thought the new cleanser made the house smell pendy. I asked her what she meant by pendy. She said pendy was the smell of things being a bit musty or a bit damp and old smelling. I said that I did not much like the smell of her cleanser, but I would not call it’s odour pendy.

21 November Sunday
It has been an unseasonably mild autumn. The nights are cold but most days have been bright and sunny. 0n the 26th of October, Joe told me that his cows only had another six days to be eating grass out in the fields. He said the grass was not growing so it was time to bring them inside and under cover for the winter. Today is the 21st of November and the cows have been outdoors every day since that conversation. They did not know they only had six remaining days of freedom so they do not know how lucky they are.

Yesterday Fortnight

24 November Wednesday

Tommie is extremely clear about when he does not want to be disturbed. Sunday morning is an important time to him. He does not want to have to answer the door nor the telephone when the television priest is performing Mass. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, there are always matches being played on the television. These matches are as important as the Sunday Mass is to him. They are so important to him that he feels that everyone he knows should know this and they should neither stop in for a visit nor ring him on the telephone. He feels that anyone who knows him should know about these times and that they should know better than to interrupt him. He told me that last week a woman called to visit and she came right in and sat in the old chair that used to be Margaret’s chair and this woman talked to him in a great big long gust for half an hour while the match was playing on the television. He did not listen to what she was saying and he did not turn down the volume but he swears that the woman did not take one single breath for the whole time that she was talking. He says that he has no idea who she was but she seemed to know him so he let her talk and then when she was done talking she said good-bye and she left. He was still annoyed about it when he told me and at that time this interruption was already five or six days ago.

25 November Thursday

The house is on a corner. The upstairs windows are undamaged. None of the panes are broken although the house looks like it has been empty for a long time. The single downstairs window has been covered with plywood and painted to look like the other windows. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make sure that the panes were delineated as six over six, just like the windows upstairs. I think the painter used masking tape to mark out the dividers between the glass.

27 November Saturday

I had a little cold and I was at the doctors surgery. I was not there because of the cold, but when I sneezed a tiny little sneeze the receptionist rushed out from her cubicle and shooed me outside. I was the only person in the waiting room and I was wearing a mask but she shooed me out the door anyway and she told me to go home. She said I could not come in and she promised that the doctor would phone me later. He did telephone me and he told me that I must have a Covid test. He said that things have gone so rampant and contagious in the area that they can take no chances. I was certain that I did not have Covid but I had to drive to a shed on the Fethard road at seven the next evening and I was given a PCR test while I sat in the car. I was also given a box of fifty masks and told that I would receive my test results within 48 hours. When I got the text telling me that my test was negative, I was completely relieved even though I had been sure that all I had was a very mild cold. I still have the little cold, but it is getting better.

2 December Thursday

Yesterday Fortnight means two weeks from yesterday. It is a common expression used to project a time two weeks in the future but not from today. It is always marked from yesterday.

Monday Week means a week ago Monday.

Half Two. No one says Half Past Two, nor do they say Two Thirty. It is always Half Two.

3 December Friday

Michael O’Sullivan the musician and composer was born in Clonmel. The house he lived in, or the house he was born in, now houses an insurance company called O’Sullivan Insurances. The building and the business might belong to his brother or his cousin or another of his relations, or it might not. Opinions and theories seem to vary greatly. I have not been able to ascertain if any of it is fact. When ringing the insurance company office it is not unusual to be placed on hold. The music played while waiting for a human to answer is one of Michael O’Sullivan’s compositions, performed by himself. Which might mean something, or it might not.

4 December Saturday

A Cattle Crush is an alley that a farmer builds to encourage cows to keep moving but to move in a single line. Mostly it is to get a cow into a safe position to be taken care of individually. It is used when the cows need injections or new ear tags or any old thing where the farmer needs to address an animal’s issues one at a time. Sometimes a Cattle Crush is made of fencing and sometimes it is made of cast concrete. Sometimes the side of a barn is used for one wall and fencing is used for the other side. The Cattle Crush beyond the Abbey has not been used for animals for as long as I have been using it. We open the little gate and walk through it on our way to the river.

7 December Tuesday

For two days the radio was been full of the approach of Storm Barra. Now it has arrived. Coastal areas are all under Red Alert. We only have an Amber alert. We have been sitting inside with rain and wind beating on the house from every direction. It feels like the roof might blow off. The bamboo is blowing itself horizontal. I went down to the barn for a bit of book-packing but it was too cold to stay down there for long. Branches kept flying and smashing against the windows. When I gave up my work to return to the house I could barely open and close the barn door. The wind was stronger than me. We heard on the radio that there are gusts of up to 132 km an hour in County Clare. The birds are going mad for the nuts. They are swarming all over the feeders while the feeders themselves are rocking and flapping in the wind. They need refilling but I cannot see the point of going out as the nuts would just fly away with any attempt to scoop them out of the bucket and into the small openings of the feeders. It is not only slates and chimneys and branches crashing around. The radio tells us that trampolines and lawn furniture are blowing and flying all over the roads and across fields. This is not a day to go out and empty the compost.

8 December Wednesday

Last night I filled buckets and bottles and pitchers with water. I knew that if our power failed we would have no water because the generator that pumps the water from our well is powered by electricity. Without electricity we would not be able to flush the toilet nor brush our teeth nor do any of the dozens of things that we expect to do with running water. There were multiple texts back and forth between neighbors as we checked in with one another. I laid out candles and made sure that the torches were fully charged. By bedtime, we had still not lost power. The wild blustery wind had not stopped once, not even for a minute. The noise of the wind filled the air and it filled our ears. I was so prepared for disaster that I think I was a little disappointed that my preparations were not needed. We have lost the internet, but we did not lose our electricity.  All day today we have continued to be buffeted and beaten but the sun is shining and the rain has stopped. We now know that the end is in sight. The radio assures us that this storm is moving eastwards.

This Day Twelve Months

17 December Friday

The woman in front of me at the post office counter announced in a loud voice: “I have not bought a stamp since This Day Twelve Months, and today I bought three!”

18 December

It was not a cold day but yesterday had been bitter. The older lady at the farmer’s market was half-way apologizing for appearing in her long fur coat. She explained out loud to no one in particular that she thought the day would be as cold as the one before had been. She was obviously happy to be out wearing her glamorous coat. She had taken a lot of trouble. Her long suede gloves were immaculate and her wig was perfect. The coat had a high fluffy collar and similar fluffy cuffs. It might have been mink or it might have been fox. I do not know much about fur. I felt I had to comment on her appearance and she was happy that I had. It gave her a chance to discuss the coat. It had been left to her by her friend who died earlier in the year. The friend had lived in the United States for many years and she owned three fur coats. She brought them back to Ireland with her, but the weather was rarely cold enough to have a need for even one of them. They were city coats designed for attending the opera or a concert. This coat she was wearing was not meant for an hour at the farmers market on a Saturday morning in December but she confessed that she had no where else to go and it seemed a pity not to wear the coat. Wearing the coat was a way to honor her friend. She told me that her friend’s initials were sewn into the lining at the hem and she thought of her each time she looked at the carefully embroidered letters.

19 December

Every year Anthony brings out his tyre tree and he decorates it with fresh greenery. Every year I am happy to see it again. After twelfth night, he will return it to the back of the yard where the greenery will die as it sits on its pallet until next year.

20 December Monday

I cannot see for the fog. It is heavy and thick and white. It has settled all the way down to the ground. My walking takes me from one tree to the next tree. I lose each tree as I pass it. I lose each gate as I pass it. I lose the stone walls. I am deprived of everything. Everything disappears as I move. Each thing looms and then it evaporates. Where I am going is familiar because I have gone this way before but inside the dense fog every single thing is new. I can only see the most immediate next thing and then my eyes are searching through the whiteness for the next thing.

21 December Tuesday

The local holiday clean-up seems to be proceeding as normal even though government warnings tell everyone to reduce their contacts and not to gather in groups.  I overhear the yearly conversations repeated about what has been done and about what has yet to be done. The flurry of activity is manic. The Omicron variant cannot stop all of these rituals. Getting the tree and its decorations up is just one thing. Festive evergreen wreaths must be taken to the graves of the family dead and the gravestones must be scrubbed clean. The car must be washed both inside and out, and the house must be cleaned and the windows washed even though most people will not allow anyone into their homes. There will be no one to see all the hard work. A trip to the hygienist for a cleaning of the teeth and a fresh haircut are essential to guarantee that everyone looks good in their photographs.

24 December Friday

Every year I get out my mother’s red tablecloth on Christmas Eve and every year I swear that this is its final year and I promise myself that this will be the year that I throw it away at the end of the holiday.  Every year we remark on the small red rounded iron-on patches and my father’s cigarette burns and the stains and the holes and melted candle fat. This table cloth is a mess. Every Christmas we say that this table cloth has had a long life but Enough is Enough. In the last few years I have laid a red and white checkered picnic cloth across the middle of the table so that the old red cloth only pokes out from around the edges. It is more difficult to see the wear and tear. The red checks look like summer. The checkered tablecloth does not look even vaguely Christmas-y but it covers a multitude of damage and of history.

27 December Monday

We walked out the road to Lady’s Abbey and as always, I stopped to look for the chair with the red velvet seat. It was no longer in the little room where it sat for so long before someone tried to set it on fire. I thought the area must have been cleaned up and the chair removed along with the rest of the burnt mess, but the chair had only tossed into an alcove on the side of the Abbey along with a lot of branches.

 

28 December Tuesday

Someone sent a card using last year’s postage stamps which marked The Christmas Day Swim. The swim is a big part of the celebration for anyone who lives near to the sea and since this country is an island there are a lot of group swims in the morning. The Christmas Swim is as much a part of the holiday as anything else.

1 January 2022

During Storm Barra, plastic feed bags blew down the boreen. One bag was stuck up a tree. I tried to reach it, first with a heavy stick and then with a rake. I could not get anywhere near as there were so many brambles and also because the tree was up on a precarious banking. I decided that I might have to wait for another kind of wind to catch it. It annoyed me every time I saw the white bag stuck high up in the branches. Last night we had more wild winds. The final winds of the year. Noisy smashing gusts woke us over and over all night long. This morning I found that the plastic bag had been blown out of its tree and that two others just like it were scattered down the length of the boreen. I walked along and collected all three and put them in the lean-to for eventual removal to the recycling depot. MAZZOLENI printed on the bags offered me the idea of a little bit of travel in these restrictive times. I like the idea of the Dry Cow Special coming all the way from Italy to feed Joe’s wintering Irish cows.

 

3 January 2022 Monday

Double barrel, solid with concrete.

This Day Week

6 January Thursday

Today is Nollaig na mBan: Women’s Christmas. Little Christmas. Twelfth Night. Epiphany. Today is all of these things. It is the official last day of Christmas and it is the day when all of the decorations and the tree should be taken down and everything except the holly should be removed from the house. Nollaig na mBan is supposed to be a day of rest and pleasure for the women who have done most of the work throughout the holiday season. The men of the house take over on this day and do any and all domestic jobs that need doing. The women are traditionally out visiting one another, sharing tea or dinner with female friends and family, but of course another year with Covid restrictions has put a halt to this ritual. Sharing a flask of coffee sitting on some stones after a winter walk in the mountains, or a shared park bench in the city, is more the order of the day.

8 January Saturday

I am walking across the yard in the dark and the rain. I am on my way to the sauna, wearing nothing but my dressing gown and carrying a little lantern. I am wishing that I was also carrying an umbrella. The ground squishes underneath my rubber clogs. There has been so much rain. There is so much mud. On the return trip, I am less bothered by the rain. My body is radiating heat. I feel impervious to the rain. I have to tread carefully because there are daffodils pushing up all over the place. They are already two inches out of the ground but there is not a snowdrop in sight. This is not the correct order of things. This is all wrong.

9 January Sunday

When a person says This Day Twelve Months, they mean a year ago today.  But if that same person speaks of This Day Week, they mean one week from today. I cannot figure out how these two expressions can be so similar but one implies going back in time while the other suggests the future.

12 January Wednesday

A farmer in Ardfinnan has two llamas in the field with his flock of sheep.  When he moves the sheep to another field for grazing, the llamas move with them.  The discussion locally is that the llamas function as protection.  A fox will not attack a sheep that has been separated from the flock if there is a llama nearby. I am not sure how much truth there is in this theory because llamas are not natural residents of Tipperary. Not one person can claim to be experienced much less an expert in the matter.

13 January Thursday

There are two kinds of names.  There are the names used as identifiers and the names used for address.  The identifier tells the listener about the person who is being discussed: Johnnie the Timber. Mickey the Boxer.  Pat Flan. Billy the Wood. Auntie She-She. I would never call Sheila Auntie She-She to her face. I would address her as Sheila, but if someone else speaks about her they call her Auntie She-She, so that we will know exactly which Sheila is being discussed. As for Mickey the Boxer, I do not know why Boxer is attached to his name, but it always is.  When I meet him on the road, I call him Michael. For years I thought one man was called Frankie the Wire, but eventually I learned that his name was Dwyer. It was  just a confusion because the whole name was said with a thick Tipp accent.

15 January Saturday

Breda and I walked up on Barranacullia. We walked around the mountain and down to the river and then up to the cairn on top. Wherever we walked the sheep ran along in front of us. Big lines of crushed up swedes had been poured out on the hill for them. They were interested to eat the vegetable matter but they were more interested to run away from us.

16 January Sunday

Simon boned out a chicken. He stuffed it with black pudding and rosemary and sausage meat and I do not know what else. When he was finished with the stuffing, he sewed it back up with book-binding thread.

17 January Monday

The light is lasting longer and later every single day. I enjoy taking a walk at the very end of the afternoon as the sky is going all pink and just as the sun drops. It is still light at five o’clock. Only a few weeks ago it was completely dark at five. A few times I have been caught out on a road when the light dropped faster than I expected. I should remember to wear a high-visibility vest.

18 January Tuesday

There is a low table in the waiting area of the doctor’s surgery. It used to be in the middle of the room covered with magazines and looking like an ordinary coffee table. There are no longer magazines available for anyone to touch or look at and there are only four chairs in the whole room. The low table is now pushed into place in front of the counter where the receptionist sits. The table is made of heavy wood. It is about 22 inches by 36 inches. It is not something that is easily moved. My impression is that it was placed there to stop people getting too close to the receptionist. There is a sheet of glass in front of the desk to protect the receptionist. The glass is 4 feet long and there is a shelf with bottles of hand sanitizer along the length of it. The only part of the long area not protected by glass is one end, about 6 inches wide, on the far left. This is where the receptionist hands out receipts and where the bank card machine is placed for payments. As a result of the low table blocking the way and the narrow point of access in the glass protecting the receptionist, every person who comes out of the doctors’ offices immediately squeezes themselves into the the slot between the heavy low table and the radiator that is attached to the wall. There is only about 10 inches available to stand in, so most people do so with one leg in front of the other. We each stand kind of sideways while trying to maintain a normal transaction. Every single person moves into this awkward space in order to settle whatever business needs to be settled. The table is another annoyance in our current life and we all accept it without question.

20 January Thursday

 

21 January Friday

Another late afternoon walk, up the road in search of a short mud-free stroll. There was indeed no mud, but the further I went, the stronger the smell. Slurry was being spread in the fields I was walking past. The stench was terrible and the after-effect of the smell was a horrible burning at the back of my throat. The interesting thing was a bright yellow and black sign announcing: CAUTION/SLURRY SPREADING IN PROCESS. It was both a redundant and an unusual sign. It is not normal to find something to read when I am out for a walk, but the smell of the slurry and the noise of the tractor is ordinarily enough to alert anyone to the activity of spreading. We do not need to read about it. Along with the sign were a pair of metal ramps so that any vehicles were able to drive over the thick hose that is transporting the pumped slurry from a tank to the tractor moving around out in the field.

22 January Saturday

Walking to and from from the sauna tonight my torch lit up dozens of snowdrops in the grass. They are just coming into blossom. This is a cheerful sign. Nature seems to be back on schedule.

Dressing the Bed

24 January Monday

The first time I saw the fox, it had been freshly killed by a car. It was splayed across the road close to the grassy verge. Every day since then, the fox has been pushed more and more off the road and into the rough grass. Day by day the body is more damaged. I think birds have been pecking at it. I do not want to look at the fox but it is on my regular route and I cannot stop myself from turning my head to see where it lies. It has gone from being a fox to being a corpse and now it is simply remains, lying stretched out in a bedraggled fox shape in bright green grass.

25 January Tuesday

Seeing the Galtees covered with fresh snow this morning made me feel like I have woken up in Switzerland.

26 January Wednesday

The eye surgery is located in a bungalow. For years, there were two doors for entering the building. The right-hand door was for the eye specialist and the left-hand door was for her husband’s practice. He was a General Practitioner. There was one desk in the middle of the first room entered. The woman who sat at the desk had two big black books open in front of  her. If you entered by the left hand door, you were there to see the doctor and the receptionist noted your appointment in one book. If you entered by the right hand door you had an appointment with the eye specialist. Her appointments were listed in the other book. The system worked fine. The system worked perfectly until one day the receptionist was out walking and she was hit by a car and killed. The replacement receptionist never juggled the two books with the same ease.

I had not been for an eye check-up for three years. I was surprised to see only one entrance. The front of the building had been re-done, as had the interior. The GP died and his wife, the eye specialist, retired. There was no longer a GP sharing the bungalow and except for all of the small rooms and funny turns, the inside looked like a different place. Everything was painted white and new lights had made the whole place bright but evenly dull. There were no rows of old dining room chairs in the waiting area. It is now more of a regular optometrist’s office with an eye specialist as an extra part of the operation.

When I went to pick out some frames for my new driving glasses, I was not allowed to touch the frames randomly. Everything had to be overseen. Any pair I touched had to be set aside for Covid disinfecting. The optician assisting me pointed to things but she did not touch anything herself.  I mentioned to the woman how Dr. Bernie, the previous occupant of the practice, always told me to bring in any old pair of spectacles I had lying around and they could put new lenses into them. She felt that there was no reason to buy new frames, especially for reading or for driving, if you had perfectly serviceable ones laying around in a drawer. The optician said nothing but looked horrified by this idea.

27 January Thursday

Margaret took her aunt out for a drive. It was a way to get the ninety year old Lillian out of the house and into the fresh air, and of course, it was a chance to see what was happening in the world. The primary purpose of the drive was a hunt for Whooper Swans. This year the Whooper Swans have not been as visible as they usually are. Often we see 40 or 50 of them gathering in the middle of a field looking from a distance like white plastic carrier bags tied at the top, full and heavy and  slumped on the grass. Then  a few days later the whole flock will have moved to another field.  I have only seen two of the migrating swans this year and that is not normal. Lillian has always harbored a great love for Whooper Swans. She loves the way they cheer up the winter. She knows all of the places where they stop to rest. Margaret drove in and out of small quiet roads for an hour before they found a sizeable flock. Then they went home, drank a cup of tea and discussed their find.

28 January Friday

The radio up-dates throughout the week gave us more and more details of the young man in Carlow who went to the post office to collect the pension of an elderly neighbor. He was told that the man himself had to come in to collect his own pension. The post-mistress said that the young man could not collect unless he was officially registered to do so. He went away and came back later with another man. They walked into the post office holding both arms of the pensioner. When the pensioner did not respond to questions from the post-mistress, the two men propped him up against the counter and they ran out of the post office. An ambulance was called but the man was already dead. He had been dead for several hours. He was not elderly. He was only 66. He had had a heart attack and died. The man who tried to get his pension is in jail. Had he succeeded in his fraud he would have received only 240 euro for all of his trouble. Adrian is threatening to put up a sign at his own post office counter announcing: No Pulse. No Pension.

29 January Saturday

The act of making a bed look fresh and tidy, with clean sheets, or simply with some pulling and tucking and smoothing, is To Dress The Bed. When someone has been sleeping in a bed and it has not yet been dressed, the expression to describe the disheveled bed is that It Has Been Tossed

30 January Sunday

Around mid-day I went to meet Breda, Fiona and Siobhan at the boulders for a walk on Barranacullia. There was a lot of mud underfoot and a steady  drizzle. It was not enough to call real rain but it was soaking and it was miserable. it was miserable but we had met up to walk so we walked.  It looked like there were even more sheep up on the top than the last time I was up there and the farmer had once again spilled out a long path of smashed root vegetables for the sheep to eat.  Once again I wondered what it was. Mangel is what it is called. Mangel beet is a kind of beet grown for wintering animals so calling it mangel might mean that is exactly what it is, or it might be a generic term for whatever kind of root vegetable is being used today.  The sheep were enjoying it.

31 January Monday

The birds cannot get enough nuts.  I fill the feeders and they empty them.  I fill them again and they are emptied immediately.  I mentioned this to Tommie when we spoke this morning. He is scornful about feeding birds. He says you should never feed a bird unless you are planning to eat it. In his opinion anything else is a waste of food and time.

The Cows Are in The Fields.

25 February Friday

I was on the bus traveling up from Cork. The man in the seat behind me talked eagerly to the young lad beside him. The boy was excited. He had just passed his driver’s test and he had a car at home that he had been fixing up. It was almost ready for the road. The man seemed to feel it was his job to give the boy some encouragement. Once he started talking I never heard another word from the boy.

“You’ll be off the buses for good when you’ve got your own motor car, lad.”

“Just go carefully. Take it sweet and easy. Whatever you do, you must never draw attention to yourself. That is the best advice I can give you.”

“Are you very good at the parking so?”

“I’ll take a spin in it with you if you like and I’ll tell you what kind of a driver you are.”

“I’ve never had a ticket for speeding or bad tires or anything at all. I’ve never had a single ticket. I’ve always been a driver Under The Radar me. That is the kind of driver you want to be.”

26 February Saturday

The weather has been wild. It changes every few minutes. I look out a window and see one thing coming down and by the time I turn to another window there is something else happening: RAIN. SUN. SLEET. RAIN. SUN. RAIN. SNOW. SUN. SLEET. SUN. HAIL. RAIN. SLEET. RAIN. SUN. HAIL. SUN. WIND WIND WIND WIND. RAINBOW. WIND. SNOW. SLEET. RAIN. SUN. WIND. WIND. Always the wind. Never stopping. WIND.

27 February Sunday

People were gathered around and talking in the space between the church and the shop. Mass had just ended.  I usually try to avoid this time. I try to be either earlier or later going to the village on a Sunday. I prefer to miss the muddle of people congregating and conversing while they leave the church. As I came out of the shop, I heard one man ask another: “Well, Johnny, How are ye? I heard you had lost your mind. Tell me now, is there any truth in it?”

28 February Monday

Andrzej has cleared the sides of the path and moved the fallen branches. Wind toppled trees have been sawn up and stacked in the lean-to for firewood. There is a lot of deep mud to struggle through but the walk up past Johnnie Mackin’s is more clear than it has been for over a year. It feels like a walk to a whole new place.

I March Tuesday

Ardfinnan is a village chock full of homemade seats in public places. Wherever one walks there is a bench or chair or something rigged up so that a brief rest is possible. Some of the seats offer a view but many are just dropped down in a random location. Views do not seem especially important. There are tables too. There are not as many tables as there are chairs and benches but there are several tables if a person is looking to sit down, eat a sandwich and listen to the birds. One table surprises me each time I see it. It has four legs encased in blocks of concrete. The concrete on the base of the legs is to ensure that the table cannot tip over, nor can it be stolen or pushed into the stream by hooligans. But there are no seats anywhere near to the table so it is not there for the eating of a sandwich or chatting with a friend over coffee. I am not sure what it is for.

2 March Wednesday

I saw Lena in the shop. She called out, “Hello Sally!” I answered, “I am not Sally.” She was wearing her mask but even so I could still see that her face registered shock. “Of course you are Sally. You have always been Sally.” I told her that I have never been Sally even though she has been calling me Sally for years. I told her that I never felt like correcting her but today I decided to just tell her that my name is not Sally. She screwed up her face and looked at me carefully, before she asked, “Why today?”

4 March Friday

Weather is the main topic of discussion. Weather rules our lives. This week has been cold. Very cold. Temperatures drop very low at night and every morning is frosty. The daffodils begin the day lying down flat on white crunchy grass. When the sun finally breaks through, the rest of the daylight hours are bright and cold and green. The daffodils stand up. The cows are in the fields. They are out from under cover during the afternoons. The winds are bitter and unrelenting but the blue sky makes everyone feel better. They say: “Well, at least it is dry.” Any day that is not wet is considered A Good Day.

5 March Saturday

Council workers with shovels and diggers have moved through the area. They made gashes in the grass and lumpy earth beside the roads to allow for the run-off of excess rainwater. The hopeful idea is to prevent flooding on the roads. There is no rain now and there has been no rain for a week or more, but they know it will come so it is important to be ready. It is an annual precaution and it always looks ugly.

9 March Wednesday

It is snowing. All night and all morning, and all day yesterday, it has been raining. Water has been gushing down the boreen and down the path, only taking a sharp right turn just before it reaches the kitchen door. Torrents of water have fallen. The noise from the beating rain was so loud that it was not possible for us to talk to each other over breakfast.  The noise of the rain hitting the roof was too loud. Now it is noon and the rain has turned to snow. I know it is too wet for snow to accumulate but even so the big fat wet flakes are beginning to pile up on surfaces. It is the ninth of March. Local opinion is that we have had our spring before our winter.

All to one side like the town of Fermoy

17 March Patrick’s Day

I just watched the 6 o’clock news. This is my favorite television programme of the year. They show clips from the big and small Patrick’s Day parades taking place all over the country: farm machinery, little girls doing gymnastics, and every Ukrainian refugee who has arrived here was in a parade. The Ukrainians were put in front position in a great many of the parades. They led their parades with tears pouring down their faces. Blue and yellow pennants and flags and banners were everywhere. Green was not the predominant color. There were doctors and nurses from the Indian subcontinent, Jamaican musicians and a gay tractor convoy — the whole diversity of the country out in force. Tae kwon do and karate clubs in disheveled groups tried to keep moving down the street at the same time as they showed off their skills. One parade was led by the oldest woman in the country to survive Covid, at the age of 102. She waved cheerfully from an open topped red car. There were groups of children dribbling basketballs, and line dancers with cowboy hats. Troupes of Brazilian singers and dancers. A dozen eleven-year-old boy swimmers flapped along wearing flippers and masks and taking huge gasps of rhythmic breathing. Their feet flapped and slapped while their arms practiced the crawl. Each boy wore his swimming togs but most had long underwear underneath. It is still March after all.

20 March Sunday

It has been a wild morning. The winds are gusting and thrashing. Birds are flying into windows from all directions. Three have already knocked themselves out and one is dead.

21 March Monday

We were both waiting in the plastic chairs at the clinic. There were several empty places between us. I had never seen the woman before. She started talking and she just kept talking. She told me that she was a painter. She explained that her family had owned a fruit and vegetable shop when she was a child and she said the whole family lived upstairs. She began by painting pictures of fruit. People praised her. Everyone said that her fruit was so real that they could reach right into the paintings and take it out and eat it. She trained to be a primary school teacher. All the time that she was teaching, she never stopped painting. Each time she enrolled in an art class she was told to go away and paint. Each teacher told her that they could not tell her how to do what she was already doing so well. She thought to go to art college but was told that if she did get a place in art college, she would have to Go Abstract because her kind of painting was old fashioned and nobody would teach it and anyway no one wanted it. She did not want to Go Abstract so she continued painting fruit and vegetables, and sometimes landscapes. She was happy now that she was retired because she could paint all day. She had just begun to paint birds but she found them difficult because they always moved. Sadly, she now has a dislocated shoulder, or maybe it was a frozen shoulder, and that was making painting difficult for her. She was hoping that physiotherapy would solve the problem soon.

24 March Thursday

This time of year is full of firsts. Today the first sorrel arrived on our plates. We ate the young leaves in a delicate paste tasting like citrus and making a perfect omelet. The wild garlic is pushing its shiny leaves up all along the path and it is blanketing the orchard. Small flowers are in bloom everywhere: Primroses. Stitchwort. Dandelions. Forget-me-nots. Celandine. Robin Run The Hedge. And the blossom on the fruit trees….

28 March

We received the notice from the ESB promising that our electricity would be cut off for at least a few hours or maybe all day. We received the same notice three times in the post, although every time the address printed on the card was wrong. Usually when we are informed of this kind of power interruption it turns out that it is only for a few hours.  This time it was all day.  It is amazing how many things stop working when here is no electricity.  The water is always a surprise as the generator bringing our water from the well is an electric pump. No electricity means no water, except for whatever we have put aside in jugs and buckets.

30 March

There is a bee flying around up high. He bashes himself up against the skylight and buzzes loudly. He must have ridden in with the firewood. There are some bees, or maybe they are wasps, who sleep tucked into the crevices of the wood over the winter.  If I see a sleeping bee when I am loading up the wheelbarrow, I put that piece of wood aside and leave him or her to continue with their winter sleep. Sometimes I miss seeing one and I bring it in with the firewood by mistake. The warmth of the house wakes the bee up and soon there is a groggy banging on the window. If I catch the bee and take it outside it might be killed by the cold, but I do not want it in so it must go out. Today I found an earthworm, long and stretched out on the floor. I thought it was a piece of twine. I can only think that it came in with the firewood too.

2 April Saturday

The first asparagus of the year. Or what I thought was the first asparagus of the year. Pat told me that he had a few bundles of it last week but it had disappeared before I got to his fish stall. He buys it from some people in Wexford. If they have any left at the end of the market day in Kilkenny, they sell it to him and he brings 12 or 18 small bundles to the Farmer’s Market in Cahir. It was tender and delicious. I cannot wait to get more next week, but I will have to get to the market early because I am not the only one who wants it.

6 April Wednesday

There are two bulls in Joe’s field. They have been there for a month or more. The was one bull all alone for a few months. These two seem to be both companionable and quiet.

10 April Sunday

We have changed our clocks. The stretch in the spring days has already been enormous but now it is still not dark at 9 in the evening. Dusk goes on for another forty minutes. Bird song goes on until nearly ten o’clock. Birdsong seems to never stop. Soon people will begin to use the expression Going To Bed in the Bright. No one likes to go to bed when it is still light outside but as the days stretch out lighter and brighter each week, very soon there will be no choice in the matter.

12 April Tuesday

It was cold and wet and the winds were the kind that cut right though you no matter what you are wearing. The waitress brought us a big pot of tea and as she put it onto the table she said: There is nothing like a pot of tea to Put the Heat Back Into You!

15 April Friday

The cable must have been tight up against the tree when the tree was small.  The tree kept growing and the cable was eventually embedded into the growth.  Now the tree has been cut down and the part of the tree that the cable is trapped in has been left to hang off the cable.  It is a curious thing. I enjoy seeing it each time I drive to the village.

 

20 April Wednesday

I jumped up on a chair to get something out of the bookshelf and then I jumped down again and I hit the floor at a bad angle and I fell and I rolled to a stop but I was not fast enough with my roll over the stone floor to avoid having hurt my foot.  I think it is a sprain. It is definitely not broken, but I cannot bend it. I can barely walk without a stick.  I am hobbling with the stick and when I am without the stick, I lurch. I cannot wear a shoe so if I go outside my heavy green wool sock gets wet in the grass. It has been three days now.  I have read three books while I rest the foot which is black and blue and swollen.  When I look up from whichever book I am reading, I see a cow looking down on me from Joe’s high field. I like to think it is the same cow keeping an eye on me but it is probably different ones who wander by. And I would like to think I have more sense. I am not 16.  As a short person, I have spent my entire life jumping up on things to reach high things. Jumping. Hopping. Climbing. Stretching on tiptoes. It is not easy to change the habits of a lifetime. I cannot go anywhere because I can barely walk and I can certainly not drive, so Derek the Post is the only person to have seen me lurching about.  He laughed with me at my predicament and declared that I am All to One Side Like The Town of Fermoy.

She’d put Hair on an Egg

24 April Sunday

It was a Friday at the end of March when Charles and Camilla made a royal visit. This was yet another event to remind the world that the Queen of England has been on the throne for many decades. A Farmer’s Market was planned for the royals on Friday pretending to be our usual Farmers Market which meant that on the Saturday half of our regular stalls were absent. They had come on the Friday for the Pretend Cahir Farmer’s Market and could not be bothered to come again the next day for the Regular Cahir Farmer’s Market. The majority of the people selling wares on the Friday are not people who ever normally do the market. They were invited for the photo opportunity.  The Pretend Market was twice the size of our Regular Market. The car park below Cahir Castle was closed off for two days ahead of the royal visit. Local people could not use the car park because of security for the visiting royalty.

Opinion was mixed about the entire visit. Some people were aggrieved, pointing out that this royal family is nothing to do with the Republic of Ireland. Others pointed out diplomatically that it was good for the area. Good for Tourism. Sure it would bring some money into the area. There was a photograph in the newspaper of Charles buying a loaf of bread. C + C also visited the Rock of Cashel and had coffee at the newly re-furbished Cashel Palace Hotel. They went to Waterford and met a bunch of Ukrainians who have been temporarily re-settled there.

The two or three days when the royals were in the area were cold and dry and still. There were no winds. It was perfect weather for spreading slurry. I just learned that thirty farmers in the area surrounding Cashel spread slurry on their fields for the occasion. The stench was ghastly and burnt the back of throats and the entire nasal passages of anyone who stepped out in the town Cashel including, of course, those in the royal entourage.

25 April Monday

I spoke to Tommie this morning. He is hoping that I will be able to drive him into town one day soon. He has a few things he wants to buy at Dunne’s stores. They are things he cannot buy in the village. He could ask the husband of his niece but he said he would rather go with me. I told him that my foot is still not fully healed and that if he is willing to wait I will be happy to take him to town when my foot is up to the job. He said he has no problem with the wait. He said he would rather go with me because he feels that we Travel Well Together.

26 April Tuesday

The black cat from the farm comes down the track most days. He spends a lot of time underneath the bird feeders. I thought that perhaps he was waiting to catch a bird, but today I saw him eating the peanuts that had spilled out from the feeders.

27 April Wednesday

You can usually recognize a Pioneer because they wear a small pin on their lapel. That is, you can recognize a Pioneer if he is a man who is wearing a suit jacket. It is not quite as easy as it used to be to see who is and who is not a Pioneer. I rarely see a woman with a pin although I know there are plenty of female Pioneers. The lapel badge signifies that the person is a Teetotaller not an Explorer.

28 April Thursday

The sky stays bright well after 9 pm. It is still blue but a darker blue at 9.30.

29 April Friday

She is the lady who volunteers herself for every committee. If someone asks her to do something or to help out in any way, she always said yes. Her week is packed full of meetings and responsibilities. Once she is on a committee, she is not so agreeable. She has never been an easy woman to work with. Jim is not the first person to tell me that this woman is a Hard Woman to Control in a Committee. Today he came right out and said that this woman is impossible. He said that she is the kind of a person who would Put Hair on An Egg.

30 April Saturday

I am trying to stay home and to stay still. The foot is still not healing as fast as I would like it to. I think I was foolish not to go for x-rays and now I feel it is too late. I had begun to drive again but only while wearing my wooden clogs. The clog on the bad foot worked like splint.  It kept me from bending the foot, but now I think that even that was too much. I should not have been driving at all. I am now trying to stay at home and to rest my foot as much as possible. This is what I should have been doing all along. The out of door ground is rough and uncomfortable to walk upon so I am spending a lot of time in the house while the birds are singing and the world outside is getting itself going with spring activity. All I can do is to keep the windows open and to go out to sit on the bench beside the kitchen door as a way to enjoy the spring weather.

2 May Bank Holiday Monday

The door to the Book Barn was wide open this morning. It must have been left open all night long. Three swifts were swooping and diving around inside. They were bumping and crashing into the windows and skylights in their attempts to leave the barn. We spent about forty minutes with a broom and with a colander. Eventually Simon captured two of them in the colander and he released them outside. We drove the third one out the open door.

4 May Wednesday

I miss going for walks. My world has become very small. It would be easier if it was wintery and cold and maybe rainy outside. Then I would not feel like everything is happening out there without me. It would be better if my foot would hurry up and heal.

Turn Left at The Master McGrath

6 May Friday

It has been raining, sometimes hard and sometimes gently, all day long. The rain has been washing the wall. Yesterday we asked our neighbors if their walls and windows looked like ours. We were standing in front of the east wall of the house, just outside the kitchen door, when we asked the question. The wall was splattered with bird droppings. The excrement was white and splashed as though from a great height or at great speed. Or both. There were lashings of it all over the windows and all over the walls. It was not a few instances of excrement. It was a massive amount. The whole wall suggested an explosion. The neighbors looked at our wall in disbelief. There is no such explosion happening at their house. Not on any walls.

7 May Saturday

I sat in the car waiting for someone to arrive on the bus from Cork. I was early and the bus was late, so my wait was longer than normal. A man came and sat himself on the wall in the sun. As soon as he sat down he took off his right boot. He waved his leg around a bit and then he just rested his stocking foot on top of his other foot. He talked to himself the whole time. I was too far away to hear what he said but some of it was funny, because he laughed often.

8 May Sunday

The rain did not really do much towards cleaning off the white splashes of bird droppings. It wet some of the guano and diluted it a little so that the whole mess dripped and dribbled down the wall and across the windows. There were seventy or eighty splashes of excrement on a wall that is only nine metres long. Maybe there were one hundred splashes. This afternoon Simon got out a mop and scrubbed the wall. His theory is that if he cleans the wall at the peak of these seasonal droppings, he will not need to do it again. I am not certain that we have reached the peak yet, but for the moment things look less like a disaster area.

9 May Monday

I heard John telling the woman to Turn Left at The Master McGrath.  McGrath, as always, was pronounced McGraw, as if there were a W at the end of the word and not a TH. This is how the name is always pronounced. The woman was confused. She knew she needed to drive on the Clonmel road all the way to the junction with the Cappoquin road just outside Dungarvan but she had no idea who Master McGrath was nor how she would recognize him. The Master McGrath Monument is easy to miss. It is a relief carving of the most famous greyhound in the country. The relief is centered on a stone obelisk. The monument is not huge and it is set back from the road but it is completely visible if you are looking for it. This dog won many races. He won the Waterloo Cup three times. When he died in 1871, the monument was erected to honor him, first at his birthplace and later it was moved to its present location so that more people could see it. There are many people who do not know anything about his celebrated history but they know exactly what to do if they are told to take a left at The Master McGrath.

10 May Tuesday

My right foot is still a problem, but now I know why. It is fractured. The X-rays do not lie. I am required to wear a big Velcro boot. And I need crutches, or at least one crutch to go anywhere at all. The cumbersome nature of the boot knocks me off balance. I bump into things a lot because I am not used to my foot being so large.

11 May Wednesday

The wild garlic is in bloom. The white blossoms look like little star explosions. The blossoms taste just as good as the leaves but they are more exciting to look at. When the flowers have finished blooming, the leaves will start to die back and that will be the end of wild garlic for another year. It is already getting harder to find it because it is disappearing underneath the cow parsley.  By the time the cow parsley dies back the wild garlic will be gone.

12 May Thursday

The whole country has gone mad. It is the time of First Holy Communions. As I am not a Catholic, this frenzy take me by surprise every year. I forget that it is an enormous part of local life. None of this activity took place during the lock-down years. Everything was cancelled which caused many people to bemoan the absence of the ritual. The radio was full of the crisis. There were endless discussions about the unfairness and the hardship of it all on the talk shows. Now it is all happening again. As a result, it is impossible to get an appointment for a haircut. The hairdresser said she is flat-out and she is working several evenings to try and keep up with the demand. People are cleaning their houses, mowing their lawns and all of their windows must be washed, inside and out. Visits are scheduled with the Dental Hygienist. New clothes are purchased for the participating children as well as for their parents.  It is difficult not to overhear conversations about the application of fake tans. It is imperative to look good in all of the photographs. Cars must be washed. Parties are organized and Bouncy Castles are a must-have for these parties. Gifts must be bought or envelopes full of money must be given. I hear people announcing with great excitement that they have to go to several of these parties in one weekend. The pressure is enormous, not just for the children but for the entire community.

14 May Saturday

I do not really know this woman. I do not know her name. I meet her at the market most Saturdays and we chat about small things like the weather and about how busy the market is or is not. Sometimes we comment about a fine looking cake or the new cheese stall. Today she started to talk and it was like a faucet had been turned on. I was not moving fast because of my crutches. I was unable to move away with ease or speed. She told me about her hysterectomy many years ago and how it had left her damaged for life. She declared that a woman’s life is too hard from beginning to end. It was a completely depressing conversation. She said that she now has nothing in her life except family and her ailments and her grief—(Dead husband. Dead son. Dead siblings. Dead grand-daughter) and now, I learn she has this seething anger about being a woman. She was happy to see me and to stand and talk in the cold sunshine. She said she finds the Saturday market a high point of her week. I found it grueling but I tried hard to be cheerful inside the conversation for her sake.

15 May Sunday

Silage cutting is in full flow. The sound of tractors and other machinery in the distance and in every direction is constant. The sound of the repetitive work continues late into the night. The farmers are all taking advantage of the good weather to get their first cut in.

 

I’ll be needing some light

8 June Wednesday

The woman went into the toilet that was just across the narrow corridor from where we were sitting. There were three other people besides myself. We were on chairs waiting to be called for an X-ray. The woman closed the door and then she opened the door. She closed the door again and then she opened it again. She closed it for longer and then for a shorter time. We all watched. She was hoping and expecting a light to go on inside. She stuck her head out the door and announced to us all: “I’ll be needing some light in here to be doing what I need to be doing.”

9 June Thursday

There is a dead rodent underneath the bird feeders. It is too small to be a rat. It might be a mouse. It is probably a shrew. The head is missing. The black cat from the farm is sitting on the wall nearby. He may have been the killer but he does not seem interested to eat whatever it is. It makes me question his hunger. He is scrawny. His neck is extremely thin. He looks desperate and starving even on a good day. If he is as hungry as he looks, he would eat that rodent.

21 June Tuesday

When Frankie answers the telephone he does not say hello. Nor does he say his name. He says “Well.” It is not a question. It is just the word, followed by the wait for whatever comes next. He also says this as a greeting when he meets someone. He snaps his head in a sharp little nod and he says, “Well.” He is not the only person who says hello like this.

23 June Thursday

Ferns are falling. They are weighed down by themselves. They are making the boreen more narrow by the day. Maybe it is the rain that is making them drop.

24 June Friday

The black cat comes down from the farm at regular intervals throughout the day. If I look out the door, he crouches on the path and catches my eye. I know he is hungry and he knows that I know he is hungry. Sometimes I put a few scraps out on a dish. He runs away when I step outside but as soon as the door is closed he returns and gobbles whatever is on offer.

25 June Saturday

Creena was driving past the church. She crossed herself when her car was directly in front of the church. She always crosses herself when passing any church. This morning she was driving and crossing herself and taking a left turn for the shop all at the same time. Then she saw another car coming towards her and she waved to the person in the car. She was not certain who it was in the other car, but she knew that not waving would reflect badly on her if it was someone she knew and someone she failed to acknowledge. She always salutes everyone just as she always crosses herself on passing a church. She was waving and driving and crossing herself and turning all with the same two hands. I watched from my parked position. Everything happening at the exact same time. I marveled that there was no collision.

26 June Sunday

Mickey responds with hearty agreement when someone says something that meets with his approval. He declares : “NOW you have it!” with the emphasis on the word NOW. He slaps his leg whenever he says it.

27 June Monday

People are dressing for summer because it is summer. There are people walking around in sleeveless dresses and shorts and T-shirts. Bare legs and sandals. We are wearing sweaters most of the time. Sometimes the sweaters are cotton but often they are heavy woolen sweaters. Every evening we consider lighting a fire in the wood stove.  It is not warm and it is not sunny and it does not feel like summer. There has been a lot of rain. Every conversation includes rain. Before the rain. After the rain. During the rain. The sound of rain. The threat of rain. The promise of rain. The clearing of the rain. Heavy rain. Light rain. Drizzles and downpours and desperate lashing. It is cold and it is wet. It does not feel like summer. It is disheartening and bleak. We might have a few hours of bright sky and sun but then it rains again. 6 or 7 or 10 times a day. It is impossible to do much outside because it has always rained recently so everything is wet. The garden is bright and green with weeds and growth.

28 June Tuesday

I am keeping an eye on my gooseberries. The branches are heavy with fruit. It is a yearly contest. I need to be ready for the moment when the berries are ripe and hope that I notice their readiness before the birds find out.

29 June Wednesday

I visited Tommy yesterday. His knee is painful and he can only walk with a stick. Sometimes he uses two sticks. He wants to go to town to do some errands. He and I have been discussing this trip to town since before Christmas. I do not think that he can manage walking around in Dunnes’ Store but he is determined to go there. He also wants to visit the men’s clothing store. He wants to buy himself a pair of new trousers and two new sweaters. We have made a date for next Tuesday. I am to check in with him on Monday to see if he feels Able For The Outing. Already I am worried about dropping him at the door of a shop while I go to park the car and then rush back to locate and assist him. He told me that his electric kettle is broken and that he is using an old and dangerous one that he found in a cupboard. The substitute kettle does not turn itself off when the water has boiled. It just keeps boiling and boiling until the plug is pulled out of the wall socket. He has already dropped it once because the handle got too hot to hold. He wondered if Dunnes’ Stores would take it back and replace it even though he has no receipt and the kettle is at least twelve years old. This morning I took him an spare kettle that we had here. I had tested it to make certain that it was safe. This made him happy. I too was happy knowing that he will not be dropping boiling water down his legs when what he needs and wants is a cup of tea.

30 June Thursday

Farms keep cats around to keep the rodent population down. These cats are not pets. They are usually inbred so they not the smartest cats. The idea is to keep the cats hungry so that they will be eager and efficient hunters. I should not feed the black cat when he comes roaming but I cannot help myself. He is so thin. He will eat anything I put in the dish. He eats pasta and vegetables and cheese. He eats things that I do not expect a cat to eat. He sits for hours under the bird feeders waiting for the possibility that a bird might drop to the ground. He stretches out on the table where I keep the water dish for the birds. I doubt that he believes he will catch a bird but when I put out bread crumbs for the birds he is the first one there to eat them. I know that if I give him a name I will be committed to this animal.  For now, he is just The Black Cat.

CANTEEN No.2

3 July Sunday

I stopped to admire the new underpass for the cows. It took many weeks and many many hours of several huge diggers removing rocks and soil and finding new places to put the enormous piles of stuff once it was dug up. The noise was mighty. It seemed like the work would go on forever. Now it is done. The cows can walk from the milking shed over the fields and under the road to wherever they are directed by string fences to their place of grazing for the day. There is a kind of slip road on each side of the underpass so the system feels like a wide motorway. The cows walk long distances to get to the far fields. I watched them moving slowly but steadily down the new track from the farm and disappearing underneath the road and then I crossed to watch them coming out the other side and ambling away to the grass. I wonder if they feel happy with the new underpass or if it is nothing more than another days walking.

4 July Monday

The Black Cat has learned to tell time. He skulks around the bird feeders in the early morning and then he disappears. He returns after supper to see if there are any scraps for him to eat. He is increasingly comfortable in my presence. He sits close to the kitchen door. He used to run far across the garden when I appeared or when I even looked out the door, but now he just moves a cautious but short distance away from me.

5 July Tuesday

This morning I collected Tommie at his house and drove him into town. He had decided that we should just go to Dunnes’ Stores and not go to the men’s clothing shop today. We agreed that one destination was plenty for the day. I dropped him at the door of the supermarket and went to park the car. By the time I got over to where I had left him he was talking to a man he knew from Goatenbridge. He was pleased to be recognized. He introduced me to the man. The trip was starting well. I gave him a trolley and a mask. He had refused to wear a mask in the car but agreed to wear one in the shop. I set him off to do his shopping and I went to do my own. I caught sight of him now and again and each time he was wearing his mask hooked onto his ears, not over his mouth nor his nose, but wedged underneath his chin. I drove him home and carried his bags into the kitchen. He plopped down into his old chair immediately. He was exhausted by the expedition but he said he was glad to have made the trip. As he thanked me, he commented that, as always, We Travel Well Together.

6 July Wednesday

This morning I found a pin on the passenger seat. I recognized it as the one Tommie had been wearing on his lapel yesterday. I rang him to tell him that I had found it and that I would return it to him soon. We agreed that the pin must have come off when I put his seat belt on or off. He dislikes the seat belt and he dislikes the face mask. He said that the pin was his Pioneer pin and that he would not like to lose it. He explained that when a Catholic child takes his First Holy Communion, he is given a pin. After the age of 18, each person has to make a personal decision whether or not to carry on as a non-drinker. After 25 years of abstinence, a Pioneer is given a silver pin. After 50 years, one is presented with a gold pin. Tommie explained that he had lost his gold pin some years ago and he had had to pay 50 euros to replace it. He was glad that I had found this one. He told me again that he would not like to lose it.

7 July Thursday

I am still picking huge quantities of gooseberries. They show no sign of ending. I have given away 19 pounds of them to several people who want to make jam. I have frozen more than 10 pounds. We are now on our third gooseberry tart. And still they ripen.

9 July Saturday

It was ten o’clock last night when the cows broke in. Or the cows broke out. A few of them escaped from their field and wandered into our yard. The majority of the cows remained on their side of the fence where they all started mooing and moaning and bellowing. The noise is what alerted us to the invasion. No doubt more of the cows would have followed the first ones but we shooed them out and back over the broken down fence. We telephoned Joe and then we worked at tying up the boards of the fence with some thick blue rope. We stretched more rope along the rest of the opening and waited until Joe arrived over the hill in his tractor.  We had a chat about the cows and the destroyed fence and the man who is supposed to come to replace the fence but who never arrives and about the dry weather and then we all said good night and he directed his cows along to a different field.

11 July Monday

There are blue and yellow flowers in bloom on top of the shed with the grass roof. There are more flowers than grass.

13 July Wednesday

I took some gooseberries and custard down to Tommie.  He was nervous about the gooseberries but happy to have the custard. He showed me his new chair.  A man had come and measured him for it five months ago. The man who measured him was named Sam.  The chair was free.  It was provided by the health authority. He was offered a choice of colours: black or dark red. He chose the red and felt certain that he had made a good decision. The chair is upright and extremely narrow. When Tommie sits in it, there is no room for him to gain a single pound.  The chair is designed to be plugged in. Once plugged in, it will function as a recliner. There is a device he can hold in his hand to make the back of the chair recline while the lower part will lift his legs up off the floor.  Tommie has not plugged the chair in yet.  He says he has no intention of ever plugging it in. He says he has no need for an electric chair and that he is happy enough with it the way it is.

14 July Thursday

The men working on the roads for the council have parked the small yellow trailer just off the road in a spot looking across fields to the Knockmealdowns. This little van appears here and there at intervals throughout the year. I am always impressed with how many functions the very small unit appears to cater for: a toilet, a drying room for wet garments and boots, and a canteen. There is no sign of any work being done in the vicinity but the men are guaranteed a lovely view at lunchtime.

No Road Markings

6 August Saturday

There were only four cars, but we waited a long time to board the ferry.  The docks were in Bootle, north of Liverpool. Passenger cars were the least important part of the crossing. The ship was designed for freight and for trucks. Increasingly, trucks leave their loads at the dock and drive away with a different load. Perhaps this is a way to economize on fuel.  Innumerable long trailers were manoeuvred onto the ship by small vehicles in which the driver could swivel his seat changing direction to either push or pull the load. With no cabs to take up space, a lot more lorry loads fit onto the ship. We watched all of the loading and the skilled movements. Once we were on board, we went to a small window where we were given a cabin key. The small window was also the location for the duty free shop which consisted of a single shelf of quietly rattling bottles.

It was already 8.15 by the time we got to our tiny cabin. A loud-speaker announcement told us that supper would be served from 8-9 pm. Our food and our cabins were included in the price of the crossing. Everyone who was on the boat went to the small cafeteria line where we had a choice of four different main courses and one pudding. There were not many lorry drivers on the boat. Each of the few who were there sat alone at a table. The small dining room was quiet as each man fiddled with his phone or watched something while he ate. One man finished his food and telephoned his wife. I assume it was his wife. He told her that he had eaten chicken curry and rice for his tea. He told her this three times. He said that the company was paying and that No, he did not have any salad but he had custard and an apple tart. He then explained how far he needed to drive in the morning to make his delivery and how far he needed to drive to pick up his next load and he said he would be back on the boat the next night and he did not know what he would have for his tea tomorrow, but he said he would be home after the new load had been delivered. His name was Taggy. It was embroidered in white capital letters on his company shirt. A few men got drinks from the bar. One German driver drank three pint glasses full of tomato juice. At 9 o’clock the food was cleared away and the overhead lights flashed. Another announcement came over the loudspeaker saying that the bar would close in ten minutes. We were told that breakfast would be served at 04.15 and that unloading in Dublin would commence at 05.30. We were instructed to go to bed.  As we walked through the little lounge area, we saw the elderly man and woman and their middle aged son who was their driver. They had been in the car in front of us as we waited to load. The three of them sat in a tight little semicircle right in front of a small television watching the Commonwealth Games being broadcast from Birmingham. They waved to us and said they could not go to sleep until they had finished their final cup of tea.

We all ate breakfast quietly in the early morning.   We waited for a long time while the lorry loads were taken off the boat in the dawn. It was not fully light when we rolled off the ferry and drove through the empty streets of Dublin on our way home to Tipperary.

7 August Sunday

A message from Fiona alerted me to a huge rainbow. I ran outside to see it and I tried to take a photograph but it was too big. I could not see either end.

8 August Monday

I went into the shop looking for potatoes. I saw Roosters, Wexford Queens, and McGrath’s New Potatoes available for sale. I could not remember what Wexford Queens are like and I did not know what breed the New ones were, so I asked Laurence which potatoes were the least floury. He told me that the Queens were lovely and floury as were the New ones from his relations up the road. He promised me that the Roosters were the least floury and that they were maybe even a bit Soapy. He told me that his mother had always been scornful of any potato that was in the least bit soapy. He said that soapy was not a positive attribute. I told him that I called such potatoes waxy, and that for me waxy was good. I told him that I am always on the hunt for a potato that is not floury. He assured me that this was firm evidence that I have not a drop of Irish blood.

11 August Thursday

Several signs have appeared on the road where there has been some resurfacing. The signs tell us to be careful because there are no road markings. There have never been road markings on this road. This is not News. There have been no lines nor any kind of markings for decades, but now we have signs to announce this.

12 August Friday

The Black Cat continues to appear every day at 5 o’clock.  She waits close to the kitchen door and catches my eye.  She is bolder and bolder with each arrival and she will eat whatever she is given. I have not yet found one thing that the starving cat will not eat. She even ate some old hummus. She came into the house and walked around last night.  She did not stay long but she showed no fear inside the house and seemed interested to look carefully at everything before she left. I think of the cat as she, but I do not know for certain what sex it is.

13 August Saturday

The latch for the shed door has been adapted to fit the droop.  The hole for the latch remains where it was but the angle of the whole thing has changed to accommodate age.

16 August Tuesday

The figs are not ready to pick but the raspberries are. I have finished picking buckets full of black currants. The apples and plums are now demanding attention. I cannot keep up with the fruit harvesting. Already the freezer is full.

20 August Saturday

There is jumble of books for the taking in two wire baskets on the way into SuperValu. Sometimes the bins are full to overflowing. Sometimes they are kind of empty. A strangely worded sign invites us to help ourselves:

PLEASE FEEL

FREE TO TAKE

HOME A BOOK

FOR YOU TO

READ

 

The Woman from Wexford

24 August Wednesday

Today a new runway opened at Dublin Airport. The work was completed both on budget and on time—which no one expected —so they had only one flight scheduled for the whole day: the 12 noon RyanAir flight from Dublin to Eindhoven. There was nothing prepared to celebrate the new runway. The last time the airport attempted to give an event some special attention, they did so by accompanying an incoming flight from Manchester with fire engines racing alongside the plane, sirens and lights flashing. The passengers on the flight had no warning. They were terrified. They assumed that their plane was on fire. Since today’s first flight was outgoing there was not much for the radio to report. They could not interview the first passengers to arrive on the runway. Instead an announcer talked to some of the Plane Spotters who were gathered near the perimeter fence. There were at least 100 people filming, recording and documenting the inaugural flight. The interviewer gave the Plane Spotters a good long stretch of comments and reactions because there was nothing else to report. They had quite a few complaints about the new viewing area, because there was too much traffic on the road. They felt they would have been better accommodated on the other side of the runway.

25 August

Everyone planted sunflower seeds this year. The seeds were sold by the Irish Red Cross as a way to raise funds and to demonstrate solidarity with Ukraine. I was late getting my seeds started.  I planted them in three different locations, some in pots and in two different places directly into beds. Those in the pots are way ahead of those in the ground.

 

 

26 August Friday

I received an appointment for a mammogram. Today was the day. The Breast Check Unit moves around the country. It is a mobile department. Usually it is parked on the grounds of the hospital in Clonmel. This year it was in Cahir. Everything inside is built-in so that nothing will move when the unit is attached to a lorry and driven to a new location. Everything is basic and efficient. A desk and a narrow bench are directly inside the door. When a person enters, she gives her name to the woman at the desk. When a woman leaves the unit the next person is called to go from the waiting bench into one of two small cubicles with a curtain and a moulded plastic seat attached to the wall. We are told to remove our tops and our bras and to sit wearing our jacket or a loose top while waiting in the booth. There is very little room in the booth. My knees were right up against the wall and my face was nestled into my own shirt hanging on the single hook. I had my book to read but even so, I could not help overhearing the names of the other women as they were called, or greeted when they entered or exited the unit. In the short time I was there, three women named Geraldine were called, one woman named Mary and me. I thought this extraordinary. I mentioned this plethora of Geraldines to the woman on the X-ray machine. She made no comment.

28 August Sunday

The blade snapped off the Opinel this morning. It has been a favorite knife in our kitchen for years. It has never lost its sharpness. The wood inside the handle simply rotted away.

30 August Tuesday

Tommie was sitting in his narrow red chair. He told me that he had bad news. He had gone to his doctor for the required eye test to renew his driving license. The doctor said that she did not feel she could give him permission to continue driving a motor car. She suggested that if he wanted to challenge her decision he was welcome to pay for an inspector to come and give him a driving test. Tommie is of the generation who have never taken a driving test. He began by driving tractors as a young boy and then he moved on to cars. When the State decreed that a driving test and a driving license become a legal requirement, he and most of his generation were just given licenses. It was an amnesty of sorts. It was also a way to save on a huge backlog. There were hundreds of people who had always been driving and it seemed unfair to make them all take tests especially as so many of them would fail and then they would be stranded. So at the age of 88 or 91 or whatever age he now is, Tommie was given his first ever driving test. A woman came up from County Wexford. He had to pay her 300 euro for her time before they even got into the car. It was a lot of money but he felt that having the freedom to drive out in his own car was important. He said she was a big lady and she filled up the whole front of his car partly with her body and partly with her air of authority. He explained to her that he no longer drives into town nor on any busy roads. He also told her that he had a new clutch in his car. She instructed him to drive her out on those roads that were familiar to him. He drove her up the narrow mountain road as far as the Waterford border and then she asked him to turn around when there was a chance. He did just that. He did not notice the huge white truck bearing down on him. He told me that it was very unlucky to see any thing at all on that road. He told me that and he said he told that to the woman from Wexford. 1 time out of 100 he reckoned. It was a very unlucky event. The truck did not hit him and he drove back down the winding mountain road. He then drove out on the Goatenbridge road and stopped when some silage machinery was coming out of a side road. The woman from Wexford told him that he had the right of way and that he should not have stopped. He told her that he was trying to be nice. When they got back to Tommie’s, the woman walked into the house with him. She sat in the big chair and he sat in the narrow red chair and she spelled out his errors to him again. She told him that he had failed to use his mirrors even once. She stood up and said, “You are Off the Road. Forever. As. Of. Now.” And she walked out. She did not say goodbye. He is crestfallen. He says that he feels Marooned.

31 August Wednesday

As I walk out there is always a lot to look at: clouds, trees, fields, cows, moss, lichen, berries, blossoms, birds.  But when I come across something to read I perk up, even if it is just a few letters and no complete words. I like finding language in the landscape.

1 September Thursday

The gate at the farm was closed.  My passage was blocked. Cows were crossing slowly, one every few minutes. I had to get out of the car to shout and ask Joe to open the gates to let me through. He explained that he was scanning the cows individually to see if they were pregnant. He said most of them are pregnant and a few of them are not. He told me that the heat and the lack of grass make things more difficult for the embryo. It is not just the silage, and the haying and the grazing that are affected by these many weeks of hot rain-less weather. Fertility is a problem too. He explained that even if a few of his two hundred and fifty cows do not give birth there will be a few who will produce two calves. He feels both hopeful and certain that he will end up with 250 calves.

3 September Saturday

The kitchen door is a stable door. In fine weather the top half of the door is held open with an old dog lead attached to a coat hook. The traditional reason for a half door was to keep chickens out in the yard and not allow them, nor any other creatures running low to the ground, into the house. That is why I was surprised to enter the kitchen and to see The Black Cat rushing around the corner into the big room. How had she gotten into the house? I opened the bottom half of the door before I shooed her out. This is the third or fourth time we have found her indoors. It appears that she must be jumping in over the door. It is a huge distance to jump up and over, and then it is a long way down. I have various theories. Maybe she jumps from the outside table which is off to the left side of the door and then on to the top of the door. The top edge of the bottom of the door is narrow. It cannot provide an easy landing. It is akin to landing on a tightrope. I think it would be easier to miss it than to land safely. Maybe the outdoor table is the launch pad and the leap is sideways across the door and then a long drop to the stone floor. I would like to catch the Black Cat in action as she gets over the door. It needs to be soon. Once the weather changes, the top half of the door remains closed during the day.

5 September Monday

There is non-stop talk about the energy crisis. The energy crisis and climate change. The rising cost of everything and the onset of cold weather seem to be the only topics. The radio. The newspapers. The discussion around parked cars. The four prizes for the raffle tickets being sold in the shop are all for fuel: heating oil, two different sized trailer loads of firewood and two bags of coal. The days of cars, television sets and hairdryers as prizes seem to be over.

6 September Tuesday

We had been promised rain for several days. And we have indeed had rain in small amounts off and on since Friday night.  Yesterday we had torrential downpours and wild thrashing winds.  There are leaves and branches strewn everywhere. One pair of sunflowers in bloom were beaten to the ground. Apples are falling off the trees. I went out to collect some and I got soaked from the rain and the wet leaves and the drenched long grass, but I came in with a bucket full of apples that had been knocked to the ground by the winds. Today the rain has set in as hard steady all day rain. No matter how much we get it will take a long time for it to be enough. The soil is gulping it down. The land has been parched for too long. It will take many days of rain to make a difference.

 

The Fever Hospital

9 September Friday

I overheard the woman as she explained to someone on the telephone that a boreen is a small road that ends at a single house. I do not think this is correct but I felt it was rude to question her. She was not even talking to me. To be considered a boreen, a road or path should not be wide enough for two cars to pass and it should be unpaved. Usually it will have grass growing in the middle. Basically it is not much more than a cow path but it should be no wider two cows, or one cow standing sideways from nose to tail.

10 September Saturday

I tried to walk up the Mass Path to Johnnie Mackin’s, but one third of the way up, I was met with a complete blockade of growth. Nature has taken the path back. It will take more than me and my hand-held secauters to clear it.

12 September Monday

A man named Free was bemoaning that he misses going out for a pint. Free is short for Geoffrey. Free said that he likes to go to the pub. He likes drinking a pint in the company of someone he meets at the pub. He likes the meeting up with someone he did not know he would be talking to when he left home. He said that he cannot go to the pub anymore because the Guards are everywhere and he might be stopped after only one pint and then where would he be with no car and no way to get anywhere at all? He said that almost more than drinking a pint, what he likes is the chance to hear a bit of a story or maybe a lie. He claims that a lie is just as good as a true story, if it is told well.

13 September Tuesday

I drove Tommie to town and deposited him in front of the door at Dunnes Stores. Dunnes is his preferred shopping destination. I parked the car and fetched a trolley for him. I left him in the fruit and vegetable section. When I returned with my own trolley and with both my shopping bags and his own shopping bags, he was still standing where I had left him. A woman was talking to him intently. His walking stick was in the trolley and for now the trolley was his support. He introduced me to the woman and after a polite amount of time, I set off to do my own shopping. I peeked back at his location a few times. The woman was a real talker. He finally broke loose from her and started on a slow trawl for his messages. I caught sight of him here and there down the length of an aisle and I saw him chatting with other people. Before I got to the cashier with my finished load, the woman who had trapped Tommie for so long stopped me and started to talk. She told me everything that she and Tommie had discussed and she explained how she knew him and she kept me standing listening for too long too.
Eileen Condon cooks and delivers Tommie’s dinners to him every day. She provides mighty portions so he usually has enough left over for his tea. There is not a lot he needs at the supermarket but he likes to go because a trip to the supermarket is social as well as useful, and now, without a car, it is more important than ever for him to get a trip out of the house. He buys boxes of chocolates in case any children come to visit. He has developed a taste for smoked salmon so he buys that along with razors and laundry soap. Every purchase is carefully considered. I took our messages to the car in two trolley loads, first my trolley and then his trolley.  Then I drove over to collect him in front of the doors. He and another man were talking animatedly and blocking the way for anyone going in or coming out of the store.
On the drive home he told me that talking so much at the beginning of the shopping had confused him and he claimed that because of that woman, he lost his stride. He described each person he had met and how he knew them and he said that the last man he spoke in front of the store had been an Irish language teacher in the village and later at Rockwell College. He was happy to have met that man. Now that he was sitting down again, he said he was pleased to have had all the conversations and he was pleased to recount everything to me.

15 September Thursday

The Black Cat spend a lot of time up on the table outside the kitchen door. She no longer runs away each time I go near, but she always remains alert and ready.

19 September Monday

Greville came to visit us in his Ex-Library Van. It was de-commissioned from Leeds City Council. He bought the van and tore out the shelving and raised the floor inside for maximum storage. The outside of the van still advertises itself as a bookmobile. The inside is a work-in-progress but mostly it is woody wood tone rustic. He has a wood burning stove and a shower and a loo and a bed that flips down from the wall. He has a table with two benches salvaged from a London bus. The benches and the table are screwed into the floor.  Everything is either built in or made to be secured when the van moves. His son is attending the cooking school at Ballymaloe in County Cork.  He could not carry his special knives on the airplane, and he did not want to check them in with luggage, so Greville took the ferry and drove the knives over from England in his van. The van is too large and too low to drive down our boreen, so he parked up at the farm and slept there.

20 September Tuesday

After the many months waiting for my fractured foot to get strong, I have missed many regular walks. Now it feels like every walk is a new walk.  I still favor walking on hard even ground. We walked out the narrow lane toward Lady’s Abbey. The sun was warm. It has been a long time since I had been out that way. There was a lot of change to catch up on. Someone has cleared the land all around the the ruin of the old Fever Hospital. Someone else has thrown the old chair with the red velvet seat into the compost heap with dead flowers and other redundant grave offerings at the Abbey. All I could recognize was one leg and a bit of the old seat stuffing.

21 September Wednesday

Everywhere there are conversations about the economy and about the fearful shortages to come. The winter hovers ahead as a threat. People talk about The Squeeze. They also talk about squeezing their teabags to get an extra cup of tea out of every bag. It is kind of a joke but it is kind of not a joke. Dijon mustard is disappearing from the shelves of the supermarkets. I do not want to live without Dijon mustard. I love it.  I do not want bright yellow American mustard, nor do I want hot hot English mustard. I want French mustard. Dijon mustard. I want it for my salad dressings and for sandwiches. I need to know it is on my shelf. Between the pandemic shortages and the war in Ukraine, fertilizers have been in short supply. Who knew that most mustard seed is grown in Canada? Canada has been unable to produce the seed so there are empty shelves where there used to be jars of mustard. Not long ago I paid 45 cent for a small jar. Now, if I can even find a jar, it costs 2 euro 60.

22 September Thursday

I went for a walk after a morning of torrential rain. The afternoon was clear and bright. I found a puffball and carried it home. We ate it.

26 September Monday

A small van was delivering milk and dairy products to the shop in the village. The man unloaded some products out of the side sliding door and some from the back.

27 September Tuesday

I went out to pick raspberries for breakfast in a soft drizzle. I tried to pick quickly but the drizzle was deceptively heavy. I came in when I noticed my dressing gown was drenched right through to my pyjamas. I only managed 16 raspberries. Eight for each of us.

28 September Wednesday

After five days, Tommie is still waiting for his nephew to ring and tell him when he is going to drive Tommie to Dungarvan to visit his sister in hospital. She is 90 and unwell. Tommie tells me that his nephew is a man who does not have a Good Word. I did not understand. I thought maybe this meant that the nephew was a mean-spirited man who said unpleasant things. I was wrong. To say He Does Not Have a Good Word means that his word cannot be trusted. His promises are not reliable.

29 September Thursday

Loading up for a dump run tomorrow, I noticed something brown and furry and small on the ground. It was in the open doorway of the shed. I knew I would probably step on in as I popped in and out of the doorway, so I got the spade and tried to pick it up and move it out of the way.  It opened a tiny mouth and screamed.  It was not a dead mouse nor a dead shrew. It was a bat. Another couple of nudges and a couple more screams with bared tiny teeth and it swooped upwards and flew away.

All Asunder.

1 October Saturday

Jim has a way of presenting his vegetables at the Farmer’s Market. He makes them look like exactly what we want.

2 October Sunday

Sorting out the freezer is a job best done before winter sets in. The freezer is out in the shed so if I do not get an idea of what is inside it now, it will be too cold to spend time out there. Trying to figure out what is inside is more difficult when I walk across to the shed with a torch in the darkness. All frozen parcels look the same in the dark. Today I made a list of what is in there and I hung the piece of paper in the pantry, but I know that after a little while we will no longer look at the list. We will not cross things off the list as they are eaten nor will we add more things to the list. Soon there will come a point when the whole freezer must be emptied, scraped of ice and ancient food tossed or moved to the top and a new list made. It is a job I always approach with optimism. Carmel told me that the last time she cleared out her own chest freezer was in 2013.

4 October Tuesday

I met Tomás coming up the road on his quad bike. His herd of cows were plodding along behind him. They were going to his far field which is a one kilometer walk by road each way. I marveled that cows are such large animals to be walking such distances with ease. Tomás said, “If they are allowed to go at their own pace, they can just go and go.” I pulled over to allow them to pass. In truth, I did not have a choice. The cows took up the whole road. It is the kind of waiting in the car that I am required to do frequently.

5 October Wednesday

There is a hole dug deep into the grass of the meadow. The hole has been made by a swarm of wasps. There are hundreds of them swarming around the apple trees, making the path feel dangerous and impassable.

6 October Thursday

I pick apples and I make applesauce and I pick more apples and I make more applesauce. A pie. More applesauce.  I give apples away.  I give applesauce away. A good year for apples. Not so good for figs or plums.  Apples. Raspberries.  They just keep coming.

7 October Friday

I often use the word Doctor when I should be using the word Mister. I always call a dentist Doctor, but a dentist is not a Doctor. A dentist is never a Doctor. A dentist is a Mister. Some Doctors are called Doctor and some are called Mister. The Surgeon is a Mister but the General Practitioner is a Doctor. I am better at using the right form of address than I used to be, but I continue to get it wrong more often that I would like. Some of these people do not mind but some get upset and they correct me immediately. These people say “I am not a Doctor. I am a Mister.” They correct me so quickly that it is as if they fear someone will overhear them accepting a title which is not rightly theirs. I have never learned definitively who is who nor when who is who. And because everyone in this country is quickly on first name basis, the medical person very often becomes someone with a name rather than a title. My dentist’s name is Ryan.

10 October Monday

The sheep farmers who come down from the mountain always take time to chat at the petrol pumps in the village. These older farmers from up the mountain are never in a rush. They spend a long time talking to anyone they meet. Farming on the open expanse of the hills can be a lonely life. Traveling down to fill up a tractor and various containers with diesel is a Day Out.

11 October Tuesday

I drove Tommie into town for his shopping at Dunnes’ Stores. He likes our Tuesday trips and he likes that I collect him at 9.30 sharp and that we are back at his house with his bags in the kitchen to unpack in his own time well before twelve. He likes the pattern we have developed together. He likes suggesting which roads we travel and whose farms to drive past. Today he did not have so many standing up conversations with other customers in the aisles of the store, but on the way home he remarked that when you go to Dunnes’ you feel like all of the people who work there are happy that you are there. He punctuated every sentence with the expression You Know Yourself, which is just his way of saying You Know What I Mean.

13 October Thursday

Richie came to service the Stanley stove. He said he had To Take It All Asunder. Which he did. While vacuuming out one red box from within he found the messy remnants of a mouse nest. He thought the nest was old, and from well before the stove came to us. He thought maybe the stove had been in a shed for a while. He said Taking It All Asunder was the only way to learn everything about the insides. Before he left he asked us to keep an eye out for a woman who might like him. He said he is a good cook and he is handy with the jobs about the house, but he finds the long dark winter nights lonely ever since his daughter moved out to make her own home.

Mary on My Mind

Thursday 3 November

We were unable to land at Cork Airport. We tried. The pilot tried. The plane circled for thirty or forty minutes, bumping and thudding through clouds while waiting for the high winds to drop. The winds did not drop. Several passengers turned green. Cork Airport is located on a hilltop beside the sea. It is always windy. It was a terrible place to build an airport. After several announcements and a lot of circling, we were diverted to Shannon Airport. The landing there was wild and scary and bumpy. We all had trouble walking down the steps to disembark because the cross winds were pushing and gusting so hard against us.

Shannon Airport is a large, mostly empty, space. There is one shop and one restaurant/bar. The restaurant is not big. The rest of the building, on two floors, consists of cavernous unfilled spaces. Shannon never became the busy hub it was planned to be. There are few flights in and out of the airport. It is a two hour drive to Cork Airport. 130 kilometres. Coaches were being arranged to transport the passengers off our flight from Airport to Airport, but it was going to take a little while to get the two or three coaches organised. Everyone was hungry or thirsty or else they needed a strong drink to settle their nerves. Everyone from the entire flight went to the little restaurant. The restaurant was not expecting such a crowd in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon. There was very little food left. All of the tables filled up with people drinking tea or pints of stout. Some people stood up and some went to sit outside in the smoking section which was in the howling wind. No one stayed outside for long.

We did not avail of the Cork coach. We caught a bus to Limerick bus and train station, and then another bus to Cahir. We were about three hours later than planned getting home. As the bus dropped down the hill into Cahir, we saw Breda through the window at the SuperValu check-out. We knew what she was doing. She was buying milk and a few things to make our arrival more pleasant. She delivered us home to our cold damp house. The door was swollen and difficult to open and it was difficult to close. The Black Cat was waiting for us beside the kitchen door. I greeted her as Mary and I have been calling her Mary ever since. There were a lot of people named Mary on the Limerick bus. They called out to one another and always used each other’s names which was usually their own name too. I had Mary on my mind.

There was a small hammer in a holder above my head. Below the hammer was a sticker announcing the presence of the hammer. In an emergency, the hammer should be used to smash the glass.

Friday 4 November

I have spent most of two days in Cahir. The car needed work before I could have the yearly inspection done. The library was closed and the second-hand book shop run by the Lion’s Club was closed. There is one cafe and it is cold in there. They are economizing by keeping the heat turned off. There is no where to wait at Mike’s garage. It is open to the elements and it is cold. He left me there while he went to take care of the first of my two flat tyres. He asked me to Woman the Fort so that he did not need to lock the place up. I thought to make myself useful while he was gone. I asked if I should answer the phone while he was away, but he no longer has a land line. A small economy. He does everything on his mobile phone now.

Saturday 5 November

It has been raining for weeks. Lakes have replaced fields and the river is swollen wide and running deeper and faster than ever. Everyone is weary of the non-stop downpours. The word Desperate is said a lot. Even when the sun comes out and the sky is blue, the sun does not last long enough to dry the land. I was in the shop and I heard one woman asking another: “Sure, could we be any more depressed?”

Monday 7 November

Slugs usually disappear as the weather gets colder. But this November is not cold. It is mild and it is wet. It feels cold but that is not about the temperature. It is because the dampness gets into our bones and we feel chilled. When I put out a dish of food for Mary, the slugs are quick to climb up and over the plate. She is not bothered and seems well able to eat around them.

Tuesday 8 November

The waiting area for the NCT test is all new since last year. It is much bigger and there are large windows looking both into the inspection bays and out doors. There are three banks of four chairs each bolted to the floor. The seats are wide and long. The seats are too big for me. If my back is up against the backrest, my knees are unable to bend. My legs stick straight out. If my feet are on the floor my back is slumped awkwardly against the backrest. We can all sit at a safe distance from one another and if there is a toilet for use by the public, it is out of sight. We no longer have to sit gazing at the toilet and the sink if the last user fails to pull the door shut. We no longer sit knee to knee, but we remain as curious and alert to the goings on of everyone else’s car as we are to our own.

I forgot to bring my Drivers License or any other form of identification. I told the man that I had my library card with me. He sighed and said okay to that even though it has no photograph and it is not really an ID card.

The car failed the inspection test, so I spent another half day in Cahir. Once again the library and the book shop are closed. The river path and Inch Field remain flooded. I could not walk far in the sideways rain even if I wanted to. Mike replaced a wishbone on the right front side of the car and the suspension has been corrected. The re-test is scheduled for Tuesday.

Friday 11 November

It is so mild that the raspberries continue to ripen. There are not a lot but I gather a handful every day, between downpours.

Saving power

Saturday 12 November

There was a musical performance at the market this morning. It was cold and damp and the children playing the instruments did not look very enthusiastic. They had been drafted in to perform as a way to raise money for the local hospice.

13 November Sunday

Dogs were swarming everywhere. It is as though they were not separate four-legged beings but one single mass, like a liquid pouring across the grass and oozing this way and that. At first it was only about ten or twelve dogs. I saw them run up the track and then they came running back. Then they were rushing across the lawn and under the fence and into the field and back again. I ran out and shouted for them to GO HOME! GO HOME! GO! GO! GO! They heeded my voice and left as a pack rushing back down into the meadow. I could hear the noise of shouting up the hill. I could hear the sounds of the fox hunt. I hate the hunt and I hate how it spills over into our lives whether or not we like it. We have no choice about being surrounded by the mayhem on a quiet afternoon. I could not believe that horses and riders could even be moving up or down the Mass Path. The last time I tried to go up there it was completely impassable with overgrown vegetation. I was a small person on foot and I couldn’t get through the tangle of nettles and brambles. A horse with a rider upon it would have no chance. I went back into the house and suddenly there were horses in the yard, and riders running around and a pick-up truck arrived. There were six or seven men milling about and a few mounted riders and horses in Joe’s field. Some of the men were the ones in rough clothes: fleeces and jeans and hoodies with shovels or some other tools. These are the ones who clear the way and control the dogs and rush about. Others were the riders dressed up in full hunt kit with their little helmets and fitted jackets. The dogs were back. There were more dogs. Maybe forty of them. Maybe more. Maybe fifty. They were everywhere. There were no individual dogs just an oozing liquid mass of barking and baying. I ran outside and shouted at the dogs again while the riders in the field tried to direct the dogs to leave our yard but they were everywhere and the noise was getting louder. I shouted a lot and a man in a snug green jacket who was not on his horse explained to me calmly that they had not intended to come down this way but it is where the scent of the fox led them. I told him that the fox is wise and quick and that they will never catch him in such chaos and I said they should let us know when they were going to be in the area so that we do not feel like we are being invaded. He said the next time they might be in the area he would call and let me know. As he ran off, I shouted, “Well, don’t you want my phone number then?” And he shouted back “No. No. I will call!” meaning that he would drop by, of course, because no one says call when they mean to use the telephone because then they would say ring not call, and I know that but I was so cross that I forgot and anyway I doubt that he will call or ring and I will be angry and surprised again on another Sunday afternoon when the invasion happens all over again but probably with a different hunt.

Monday 14 November

We are being instructed by the government to think carefully about when we use electricity. The radio is full of helpful hints. The hours between 5-7 are to be avoided as much as possible which is difficult because that is when everyone is having their tea and children are being bathed and put to bed. We are also being told that it is bad to run the washing machine between those hours, but it is good to run the washing machine if it is a windy day because most of our energy will coming from the wind. This is silly. Wind turbines might be spinning like mad on a gusty day, but the electricity they produce is saved in batteries. Wind turbines do not provide electricity only when the wind is blowing.

Tuesday 15 November

We had finished our supper when the lights went out. The lights and all things electrical were gone. We lit a few candles and felt glad for the fire in the wood stove. There were texts flying back and forth between neighbors anticipating and predicting when the power would return, but then the telephone signal was lost too, so we decided that it was time for bed.

Wednesday 16 November

Today the entire world beyond the fence was completely white. The fog never lifted all day. It was bright but closed in all at the same time.

 

Thursday 17 November

Mary the Black Cat follows me. I think she believes that she is a dog. If I leave the house by the kitchen door, she moves away from the door quickly, and then she watches to see which way I am going. She reads my direction and bounds off across the grass in a bouncing kind of up and down movement. As she runs, she is less like a dog following me and not at all like a cat. She is more like a rabbit. She keeps her distance but travels with me in a parallel movement. When I am headed to the book barn she rushes off to the right to go down the high steps while I tend to turn left to go the longer and less steep route. We always arrive at the door at the same time. I go inside and she waits outside for our next movements.

Friday 18 November

I forgot that Friday morning is the day for many elderly people to collect their pensions at the post office. I heard two women talking and one said to the other that it used to be if she saw a man with a shaved head and tattoos she would be frightened half to death. The very sight of a tattoo made her fearful. Now she knows that it is probably just one of her grandsons and if it is not her grandson, then it is someone else’s grandson. Tattoos and shaved heads no longer scare her one tiny bit.

Saturday 19 November

I interrupted Tommie while he was listening to the 4.30 Public Service Announcements on Tipp FM. This is the daily report, accompanied by tolling bells, that announces any and all deaths in the entire county and lists details of when and where both the wake and the funeral will be held in the next few days. When he had finished listening, he crossed himself, and then he told me that he was warming a pie for his tea. It was balanced on the top of his radiator.

 

Ted Swallowed a Sock

8 December Thursday

The Newcastle Historical Society has produced a series of postcards to celebrate their ten year anniversary. The series is called A Snapshot in Time. Each card is a portrait of a local business. All of the businesses are small businesses. The cards seem to have been produced in tiny batches-maybe only 5 or 6 of each. I would like to have all of them but some of the images have run out already.  There must be 40 or 50 different cards. They tried to think of everyone.

9 December Friday

It is icy and it is cold. Such very low temperatures are not normal here. When these old houses were built the water pipes were not buried very deeply in the ground. I guess the trench for the pipe was dug by a single man with a shovel. The ground is full of shale so it would have been hard and slow work. The well is about sixty-five yards from the house. Digging a trench six to eight inches deep must have felt like it was deep enough. These days it is recommended that pipes be buried at least two feet down. I have filled 5 litre bottles with water in anticipation of the pipes freezing between the well and the house. It will not be the first time this has happened. I am filling bottles in readiness for the end of our water supply.

10 December Saturday

Pat the Fishmonger and Barry, who makes humus, and salsa and vegan peanut butter cookies, played music at the market this morning. They had never played together before, but they had a lovely time. In between numbers, Pat joked that everything at the fish stall was free while he was playing the music. He told people to go and help themselves. Barry needed a female voice at one point so he asked if anyone could sing the part. A woman stepped out from the audience and sang the song with him and then she went back to complete her shopping. It was cold and there were very few people at the market. The music made it feel like there was more going on.

11 December Sunday

The two black bulls were in the front field. The field rises uphill immediately so the bulls stood proud and tall above the ditch. Because of the added height of the steep field they look even more enormous than they are. From a distance they sometimes look like black silhouettes cut into the grass. Up close they look gigantic. As I walked towards them, there were 15 or 18 cows jostling against the bushes and against each other directly opposite the bulls on the other side of the track. They formed a long bumpy line. The cows were mooing and moaning and grunting and lowing in the direction of the bulls. The bulls were bellowing back across at the cows. It was loud and it was exciting to approach the conversation which was separated by a very short distance. All of the noise stopped as I walked down the boreen between them. It started up again immediately after I passed.

12 December Monday

Mary is looking well. When she first started hanging around she was scrawny and her coat was matted and dull. Now her coat is shiny and she is fat. Maybe she is pregnant. Or maybe she is just looking good on the extra food. For a few days there was a second cat. He sat up on the window sill and watched through the window at the movement on the television screen. He was hungry, too but Mary saw him off and he has not been back since.

13 December Tuesday

I had planned to take Tommie into town today to shop at Dunnes’ Stores. The fog is white and thick and visibility is poor. The roads are icy. Temperatures continue to be well below zero. We spoke on the telephone and decided that it was best to stay at home and to wait for better weather. Tommie says he is Kept Going watching the World Cup matches. He is enjoying it. He says that if he were a betting man he would put his money on France to win overall, but he says his favorite team so far has been the Japanese. He admired their speed. After talking about speed, he immediately changed the subject and discussed the merits of his walking stick and the security of using it. He has no doubt that triangulation is the best form of support.

14 December Wednesday

Ted was unwell. He was not eating. He was simply not himself. After a few days, he was taken to the vet. The vet took an X-ray and suggested that maybe Ted had swallowed a sock. She said it is not unusual for a dog to get a wad of fabric caught in his stomach and that it can be painful. She said that if Ted did not pass the sock in the next day or two they would need to cut him open and remove it. It seemed a drastic solution. We have all been worrying about Ted and the sock but today the sock appeared in a bowel movement. The news spread along the road. There is great relief all around.

16 December Friday

Usually when I take the compost out to empty, I rinse my bucket in the nearby water butt. In this deep cold, the water is frozen solid. I may not rinse my bucket again until spring.

 

A Butty Yoke

22 December Thursday

Tommie and I went to Dunnes’s Stores for his pre-Christmas shop. We drove into town early to avoid any crowds. His knee was paining him so he did not enjoy the trip as much as usual. He was glad to have traveled out, but he was gladder still to get home. Once he was settled back in his chair, he was eager to tell me about those people he had met and spoken to in the supermarket. He met one man he used to know through hurling matches a long time ago. He said the man had played for a competing team. He said being on opposite sides made no problem for either of them. The matches had taken place more than seventy years ago.  He was happy enough to converse with that man today. Before I left, he told me that he was glad to be back at home with his dog.  The dog is a needlepoint that Margaret did many years ago. It is used as a fire screen in the daytime when the fire is not yet lit.

23 December Friday

The Farmers Market took place this morning rather than tomorrow, which is Christmas Eve. It was busy with an air of excitement although we were sorry that the cheese woman was not there. Keith had very little on his stand. He had a few boxes of eggs and some apples and a lot of beets. The beets looked shiny. I went closer to take a look. I thought perhaps he had polished them but even as I thought it I could not believe that was possible. They were not polished but they had been scrubbed clean. They had been scrubbed so hard that the skins were rubbed off and the beets did indeed look polished. He said that the beets had been heavy with clay and barely recognizable as beets. He said they looked like clods of earth, so he washed them to make them look better. Three years ago, Keith was selling beautiful tulips grown by his wife but he had cut all of the leaves off every stem. He said cutting off the leaves made the tulips last longer. I said that I wanted leaves on my tulips and I suggested he could just let people make their own decision about leaves or no leaves.

Keith has been selling flowers and vegetables and eggs at the Farmers Market for more than ten years. He works very hard but he is not a natural. He is not a natural grower, nor vendor nor raiser of chickens. He is always the last one to arrive at the market and the last one to get his tables set up. We all bring our egg cartons to him for re-use. He and his wife make a tiny little 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 may give the Best Before date, or it might be the day that the eggs were laid. It is not clear what the date represents. Making a tiny label for each box, one at a time, is at least as labour-intensive as the one-on-one visiting time he tries to spend with each of his chickens every single day.

26 December Monday

Whenever I open the kitchen door, Mary tumbles into the house. She sits out there pressing her entire body into the wood of the door. If it were sunny, I would think she is basking in the reflected heat of the door, but it is grey and bitterly cold. There is no warmth to be found from the wooden surface. I think instead she is listening and trying to be ready for when and if we remember to feed her. She does not appear every day now so I am not so regular about putting food out for her,  but if she does not eat it, the fox does.

28 December Wednesday

29 December Thursday

I have been keeping an eye on the Historical Society’s postcard supplies, purchasing a new one almost every time I visit the shop. I was delighted to buy two new ones today. One card shows Rose in front of the pub with some Scottish tourists and other one shows her with a crowd of local bikers.  They all like to stop there when they are out for a spin.

30 December Friday

The ground has thawed and there is mud everywhere. The bull in Joe’s front field stands for hours and hours ankle deep in the mud. If bulls have ankles? He does not seem to mind the cold mud.

 

3 January 2023 Tuesday

Breda’s horse died last night. His name was Levi. He had a stroke and he could no longer walk. He could not stand. They called the vet and she came to give him an injection to put him to sleep. Breda is heartbroken. Levi was a member of the family and he stayed on and on while various other horses and dogs and cats came and went. He was 36 years old and had been living with Breda for 25 of those years. I never knew that horses could live so long but I guess if they are healthy and well cared for, they do.

5 January Thursday

We had a bonanza load of post delivered today.  It is the first time we have had a delivery since 23 December.

6 January Friday

Epiphany. Twelfth Night. Little Christmas. Women’s Christmas. Nollaig na mBan. Today is the last day of Christmas and the day when all decorations and cards and trees and wreathes and lights and every single sign of the holiday period is supposed to come down and be stored away or thrown away. In counties Cork and Kerry the women go out to dinner together to celebrate all of the work they have done over the holiday. In the village, Anthony will move his Tyre Tree on its pallet into the back part of his yard and the greenery draped around it will die. It is the same this year as it was last year and it will be exactly the same again next year.

7 January Saturday

Teresa said her newly married grandson had traveled to Rome for his honeymoon and then got caught up in the Pope’s funeral.  She said it was not what he and his wife had planned for themselves.

8 January Sunday

A Butty Yoke is a short stubby kind of a person. It is not a complimentary way to describe someone but the description makes for a clear picture.

That Drainpipe of a Man

12 January Thursday

A commemorative stamp has been produced to celebrate the fifty year anniversary of Ireland joining the European Communities. There have been many articles in the newspapers and on the radio discussing the subject. There are a few gripes about the long arms of European regulations, but after watching the UK since Brexit, no one doubts that the decision to join was a wise one. Finding this glorious stamp at the post office today cheered up a gloomy grey and wet day.

13 January Friday

The rains have been torrential. The river has swollen hugely and fields are full of water. The road approaching the village is no longer bordered by fields. It looks like the mountains come right down to a lake.

15 January Sunday

If someone says she will meet me on Monday Week , she is not talking about tomorrow, the day after today, but the Monday after that. It is never Next Monday but always Monday Week.

16 January Monday

Joe has put numbers on some of his fence posts. Relief Farm Workers help him out for two or three weeks or months at a time. I assume the new numbers are helpful when he asks a lad to spread slurry on Field No. 8 or to move the fence wires to direct cows into Field No.12. When I think of it like this, the numbers make good sense. Each red number has the word PADDOCK printed above it. I hear people speak of fields and meadows but paddock is an alien word. Paddocks are not a word used in dairy farming. Paddocks are for horses not cows. Nevertheless, I am happy to have something new to look at and to read as I walk out. There is not much by way of print to read in nature.

17 January Tuesday

The top shelf in the Cahir library was not tall enough to put the books in right side up so they have just been crammed in with their spines at the top, and all I can see are the bottom pages. No titles are visible. It is no way to look for a book.

18 January Wednesday

Tommie went to Dublin once. He has never traveled any further from home, but he likes to tell me about Paris. He considers himself a bit of an expert on Paris. John is Tommie’s nephew. He is a long distance lorry driver and he rings Tommie from wherever he is. Wherever John is, if he is abroad for his work, according to Tommie he is always in Paris. He is in Paris if he is loading up with chocolates in Belgium or unloading his consignment of beef somewhere north of Paris or waiting to board a night ferry in the port of Calais or Le Havre. Whenever John is on the road, he is always in Paris.

Tommie tells me that John is a homebody and that he frequently bemoans the fact that he would prefer to be down any old muddy boreen than unloading his truck in Paris at five in the morning. Tommie does not have a mobile telephone.  He does not know anything about mobile telephones. When he speaks on his telephone he sits in the upright red chair right beside his small telephone table.  Even though he knows next to nothing about mobile telephones, he assures me that John has a really good mobile telephone. He is certain that it must be a very fine top of the range telephone because when John talks it sounds like he is right there in the room with Tommie.

Last week, John could not board the ship because the storms were ferocious and the seas were rough. That meant that he could not eat nor could he even go to the loo. He had to wait in the queue for hours and hours just in case they started to load the lorries. He did not want to be left behind. Once the lorries board the ship, there is hot food and a bed and a shower waiting for the freight drivers. Everything is included in the cost of crossing. Because of the storms, it took thirty hours before they could get onto the ship and when John returned to Ireland and unloaded his goods, he had to load up again and leave immediately because there was a schedule to be met. Tommie says that John is needed in Paris and that is why he is rarely at home.

20 January Friday

My workroom looks and feels like a storm has passed through. It has been far too cold to stay up in that barn or down in the book barn for long so I rush in and look for something and then I rush out again, leaving opened folders and boxes and little stacks of objects  and chaos in my wake. It is too cold to sit down for any period of time. This week I installed some pages of a book. I thought if they were up on the wall I could not avoid filling in the gaps of what I need to do to pull them all together. I thought I might trick myself to ease back into the project. These are the pages of An Inoffensive Man. An Inoffensive Man is an expression often used at funerals by a priest. I can never decide if it is a compliment to be called an Inoffensive Man, or if it suggests a dearth of admirable and noteworthy characteristics.  I put this book away a few years ago with good intentions but at this moment it is still nothing more than a series of disconnected stories about people I have met and about whom I know very little because I did not grow up here so I only know these mostly men at the end of their lives and what I know is what they have told me. It could all be lies.

21 January Saturday

The day was bright with watery sunshine. It was not really bright but it was not raining either. Two women stood on the footpath. One was giving out about the British Monarchy and the other one was her audience. The one said, “Those English people they loved their Queen. And oh, but then there was Poor Princess Diana. They loved her too, but Poor Diana was married to That Drainpipe of a Man. And now don’t you know but that Drainpipe is the King.”

23 January Sunday

Snowdrops are pushing up. I have been watching for them and today I see two have come into flower. I like the French word for snowdrops: Perce-neige which means to perforate or pierce the snow. There is no snow here for the green shoots to perforate, but the idea is the same. Snow. Mud. The promise of springtime is made visible in each green shoot.

The Dancing Place

12 March Sunday

Two black bulls are in Joe’s front field. They were standing around there like cut out silhouettes in January before I went away and they are still there. As if they have never been anywhere except there.

13 March Monday

On inquiring in the shop if they had any brown shoe polish, the woman and I began a conversation about the reduced availability of shoe polish and about the general lack of shoe polishing done by anyone these days. We agreed that the disappearance of shoe polishing activity probably is largely to do with people wearing sneakers or trainers, soft shoes that never needed polishing. She apologized for her own lack of shoe polish to sell to me and then she suggested, in a whisper, that I might try using Spray Furniture Polish. She said that she has used this method herself in the past and assured me that it works well. Still in a hushed voice, she said, “If I were to see you out and about with well polished boots, I would be the last person to question whether the shine came from shoe polish or furniture polish. The question would never cross my mind.”

14 March Tuesday

When Liam Harper needs an updated reading of our electricity consumption, he sends me a text and requests it. This happens several times a year. He used to leave a telephone message on the land line. Some weeks ago he sent a text and I told him that I was out of the country and that I would send the reading along as soon as I got home. He sent back a message saying Lovely! Enjoy! With little glasses of champagne scattered about. Back at home, I sent him the current reading: 81668. Smart Meters have been installed in local homes recently but we do not have one yet because we were not here when the men were going around doing the installations. For at least twenty-three years, we have reported our readings to Liam Harper, either by telephone or by text. I would not know Liam Harper if I met him on the road but I feel we have a certain amiable friendship. I asked Liam if the installation of a Smart Meter would spell the end of our regular chats. He texted back No More Reading with the Smart Meters! So, this current reading was our last. He added that he was delighted that we had a great holiday.

15 March Wednesday

There are daffodils everywhere. Daffodils. Narcissus. Crocus. Hyacinths. Forsythia. It is cold and often wet but it looks like spring, even when it does not feel like spring.  Primroses are blooming on the way up the boreen. And the wild garlic has arrived.

16 March Thursday

Ned arrived with a supply of fuel. I opened the window to pull in the extension lead and I plugged it in to the wall socket. Ned brings heating fuel on a small truck with a generator. The generator needs to be plugged into an electricity source in order to function. It is not possible for a normal size oil truck to come down the boreen so we always need to wait until Ned can come and then we must always be at home so that we can plug in the generator for him. We do the same ritual every time. He told me that he needed the ladder, so I went to the lean-to and dragged three ladders out and onto the grass. They were kind of tangled into each other and there were lengths of timber on top of them, so it was a struggle.  I could not pull only one out. I had to pull all three at the same time. The step ladder was too short. I took him one of the taller ladders, and he climbed up the banking to the oil tank where he cut away brambles with clippers before he started to fill. When he was finished, I unplugged the generator and handed the plug back out the window to him. Then we had tea and discussed the world. And we discussed Simon’s uncanny ability to measure volume. Before we ring Ned, Simon goes outside with a stick and he climbs up the banking and makes a measurement of the contents of the green plastic tank. There are no markings on the stick, nor on the tank. This time he did not even use a stick. Instead he just tapped the tank and listened to the fullness. Or the emptiness. When he arrives at the number of litres he thinks we need, he asks Ned to bring that amount. Today it was 750 litres. So far his estimate has never been wrong. Ned swears he has never known anything like it for accuracy. Before he left, Ned shouted to me that he had put the ladder away. When I went outside later, I saw that he had done so. Sort of. He threw the ladder down onto the grass with the other two, leaving them all for me to put away. It was even more difficult shoving them back into the lean-to than it had been to get them out.

19 March Sunday

I waited at Flemingstown Cross for the cows to pass. Flemingstown is not a town. It is just a name for a short area of road and land. It is a townland. There is no sign for Flemingstown. It is just a place with no specific edges, and we all know the name of it, which is how we are able to tell someone where we are or where something else is. There were two white tapes stretched across the road, one blocking my direction and another blocking the cul de sac to my right. The white tapes were tied onto bushes and even though they had no real physical strength or authority they were enough to let the cows know that they had to take a right, or my left, down Flemingstown. The cows plodded along single file to where they were being directed by this lack of choice. The boy on the quad bike following the cows looked very young. He dismounted to untie the white tapes and free the road again for traffic. I recognized that the cows belonged to Tomás O’Dwyer but I knew this boy was not a son of Tomás. He has five daughters.

20 March Monday

I walked down the street from Mike’s garage after leaving the car to be checked out. There is a gate in a break of the stone wall that leads into a field and often there is a small horse eating in the field. Maybe it is a pony. Today the horse was at the gate looking in the opposite direction from me as I approached on the sidewalk. I called out a cheerful Hello Horse! and he turned his head around and bit me on the shoulder. It was not a hard bite and it did not go through my coat. But it hurt and  it surprised me. I think it surprised the horse too. When I walked back the same way a few hours later, I had cleaned the horse saliva off my coat and I thought I might make a photograph of The Biter. He was no longer at the gate. I could not see him anywhere far down the muddy field.

21 March Tuesday

A elderly man stood in the center of the door to the shop.  Each time someone approached him to go in, or to come out of the shop, he made moves first left and then right and then left again.  He blocked the way in a kind of false confusion, threw out his arms and jiggled his hips back and forth. Each time, he announced with glee, “This is The Dancing Place!” I have heard this expression used before. It is used to define a busy doorway where people bump into one another as they try to go past one another or around one another. The idea of it being a Dancing Place is about the unintentional movement of two people together trying to move around one another. it suggests a dance. The man was reveling in the chaos of making a normally efficient doorway into a party. He was having a wonderful time.

22 March Wednesday

The top blew off one of the nut feeders. It blew off and it blew away. I cannot find it anywhere. I have now secured an oyster shell on the top of the feeder with the help of an elastic band. I may never find the original top but that is no longer a worry. This one is working well.

Leave the Hare Standing

4 April Tuesday

There was one aluminium milk churn in the trailer. It had the number 4 painted on it with red paint. I could not help but wonder where churns number 1, 2 and 3 were.

5 April Wednesday

The car died on Saturday. We thought it needed a jump start with cables and then we tried a push.  Nothing worked. Tom Burke came today and loaded it onto a trailer. The car has gone to the Nissan garage in Dungarvan to wait while they hunt for a replacement part.  Unfortunately the part is not easy to find. There are none in this country and none to be found so far in the United Kingdom.  The search is on throughout the rest of Europe. The small piece for the ignition must be replaced before the car can be re-programmed. This tiny little thing is manufactured in Ukraine and the factory that makes the part is not functioning now because of the war.

6 April Thursday

Breda saw the first swallow of the year today. Breda always sees the first swallow well before anyone else does because she focuses and pays attention and she is looking looking looking for the swallows to arrive. She has a calendar on which she marks her initial sighting every year. When she announces her first swallow, she usually reports on what day it was when she saw it last year too. Not only was she the first person to see a returning swallow once again this spring, but she saw two of them.

7 April Friday

When the doctor told me that we would Leave The Hare Standing, I had no idea what he was saying to me. I was not sure whether he said Hare or Hair. He was surprised by my confusion and said that it was of course Hare. The Hare has a sacred position in Celtic history. It is a mystical symbol of abundance, prosperity and good fortune. The animal is treated with great respect and it is never eaten. To Leave the Hare Standing, or To Leave the Hare Sitting is a way of saying that we will leave things as they are. We will leave well enough alone. It means that there is no reason to upset things. To Leave the Hare Sitting is literally to show the animal its due respect.

8 April Saturday

A bird has appeared in a garden on the walk down to Molough Abby.  It is an old, stuffed and moth-eaten bird. The entire chest feathering has been ripped off and hangs off the bird. Maybe it is a female pheasant?  It is hard to tell what it is, or rather, what it was.  It stands on a small broken branch on a wooden base.  It was made to stand on a shelf or a mantle piece but now it has been relegated to the garden along with a ceramic chicken and a plastic cat.

 

9 April Sunday

Mary the Black Cat comes down to visit and to wait for some food but she does not appear every day. Sometimes it is every third day.  Sometimes once a week.  She is looking scruffier than usual and her hair is matted down, but she is less obese.  I have seen two small black cats up near the farm so perhaps Mary has had a family.

10 April Monday

This weekend the village of Newcastle celebrated the 100 year anniversary of the death of Liam Lynch. Lynch was a General in the Irish Republican Army. He was shot in a skirmish in the Knockmealdown mountains where there is a monument to him. Every year, a wreath laying ceremony is held up there. For this centenary, there have been three days of events, with a Mass in the church, a pipe band procession, the laying of the wreath at the monument and a special bus to take people up to the monument. There were speeches and musical entertainment and a visit to Nugent’s Pub where Liam Lynch was laid out on a couch after he was brought down from the mountain in a bad way with gunshot wounds. From the pub, he was moved on to the hospital in Clonmel where he died later that day. Rose still has the couch in the same position as it was on the day that Liam Lynch was laid out upon it. The cushion has been repaired a few times. Rose is always willing to take interested visitors into the back room to view the couch. A commemorative plaque has now been placed on the outside of the pub. The Historical Society produced a postcard to celebrate the the role of the couch in this historic death.

 

11 April Tuesday

Terrible thrashing rain. ALL DAY. The only word for it is Desperate. Walking out of the house even a few metres is a soaking experience. The rain is coming from all directions and it is bouncing up from the ground. The boreen is like a riverbed with water rushing downhill and into the yard.

12 April Wednesday

Terrible beating buffeting winds. ALL DAY. The noise inside the house is deafening.The entire country is on Amber Alert. Trees and branches are falling and even the largest of lorries is being pushed around on the roads. People are being asked to avoid driving anywhere if possible. There is still rain falling but mostly it is the wind. The wind is savage.

14 April Friday

Ardfinnan is full of homemade chairs and tables as well as any number of decorations that have no practical purpose. The out of doors in the village is cluttered with things. Some are useful and some are just there. I was startled to see a canoe up high on a banking, with three shop mannequins. One is a child sitting in the canoe with a black dog on its lap. One a woman with a paddle, sunglasses and a curly wig. Standing behind the canoe is another woman, with a fishing rod and in a full waterproof fishing outfit. Her waders have been filled with some viscous black material. Tar? I think this is maybe to keep her standing and also to keep anyone from stealing her waders. The canoe is there to celebrate Ardfinnan’s position on the river as part of the Blueway.

15 April Saturday

Every year, Pat the Fish brings asparagus with him to the Farmer’s Market from some people who grow it in Wexford. It is not a large farm and it is not a long season. The asparagus crop only lasts for about eight weeks. Today is the third week. Only five more to go. Every Saturday, I buy three for four of the small bundles. I do not want to be greedy and take too much, but I love asparagus. I feel it is my duty to eat it as often as I can during this short growing season.

17 April Monday

The daffodils are already gone. As are magnolia, forsythia, narcissus and the flowering currant. But there are more visible blossoms everyday so we scarcely notice those that have died back. Dandelion. Stitchwort. Apple. Cherry. Plum. Primrose. Forget-me-not. Hawthorn. Bluebell. Lesser Celandine. Gorse. Tulip. And now, the bright star-like bursts of the wild garlic blooms.

19 April Wednesday

This is the time of year. The days are warmer and the nights, while still cold, are warmer too. Any time after dark, I walk into the bathroom extremely slowly. I enter quietly and I look around carefully. This is the time of year when slugs begin to appear. I am not certain how they get in. They are not visible in the daylight. They hide in dark places until night when they begin to ooze around the room. I can see the trails they leave across the mirror when the room steams up. I enter the room quietly and look carefully everywhere so that I can see a slug before I can be surprised by one. I doubt they can hear me but for some reason I feel a need to move very silently.

22 April Saturday

Heavy white wet fog over everything. The morning is thick with it and even with headlights on it is hard to see much of anything.

The Anxiety of Small Villages

25 April Tuesday

Christy announced that Anxiety is Not A New Thing. He was giving out about the way that Anxiety is receiving a lot of attention in the media these days. He said that you cannot turn on the radio without hearing a discussion about Anxiety. He told me that he spent his youth feeling anxious and that he is nearly 80 now. He said that what he felt then was The Anxiety of Small Villages. He said that the pressure was terrible and huge and that everyone felt it. He said, “You had to pair up and you had to find that someone soon, before everyone was taken.”

26 April Wednesday

It has been a complicated week and it is only Wednesday. We have been without water for several days. Every single thing is more difficult when there is no running water. For a short time, we had water from the hot water tank, but then that ran out. We had rainwater from the water butts and we purchased some drinking water. Every job took considerably longer than usual. We planned what to eat in order to reduce the washing up. We feared it was an electrical problem with the old pump that brings our water up from the well. We called the firm that takes care of these things. John said he would stop by this evening after he finished a job in Skeheenarinky. He arrived with another man and said that yes the pump had just packed in, due to age. Together they replaced it. The new pump does not look like much, but it cost a lot.

27 April Thursday

We got the phone call to tell us that the car had finally been repaired, so we drove to Dungarvan to collect it.  It has taken a month to locate the tiny missing part.  Unfortunately the man who tracked down the part somewhere in Europe was not there when we arrived so we do not know in which country the part was found.

29 April Saturday

The very sticky Robin-run-up-the-hedge is rampant. It is clumped onto every hedge and stone wall. It is everywhere in thick vertical mats. I rip it off in huge handfuls as I walk. There are new blossoms every day. Frothy cow parsley is lining the roads and paths. There are  lilacs, flowering chestnut, vetch, cranesbill, and even early elderflower along with masses of stitchwort and forget-me-nots.

30 April Sunday

A Tractor Run is planned. There is always a Tractor Run planned as a way to raise money for a worthy cause. The farmers who own vintage tractors enjoy an afternoon driving out in a slow parade along back roads from one starting place to a specified destination.  And those with brand new shiny tractors like to join in and show them off too. It is up to all of us to sponsor the tractors to make the money for the cause.

1 May Monday

Nellie announced that her cousin is in a tizzy about the upcoming coronation of the King in England. She said it is lucky that her cousin lives over there because there are not many people who give a fig about it over here. She said that her cousin will never be able to return to live in Ireland because she is completely obsessed by the British monarchy. Nellie said that this cousin moves frequently because nowhere is ever good enough for her, but no matter how desperate she is she will only ever move to a street with a royal something in the name. She said that her cousin is not the only one. She knows for a fact that there are a whole crowd of people in England who aspire to this kind of vicarious connection to the Royal Family. She said her address book is filled with scratched out royal-sounding addresses, all belonging to the same cousin at one time or another. She listed off a few from the top of her head: Princess Anne Lane. King Street. Castle Acre. Prince of Wales Crescent. The Queen’s Gate. Duchess Mews. Royal Rise.

2 May Tuesday

It is normal for me to see cows daily, but each spring I am both surprised and delighted by the appearance of the new born lambs. The fields are full of them running about.

3 May Wednesday

One older woman at the Gentle Gym wears noisy charm bracelets. I have always hated charm bracelets. This woman wears two of them on the same wrist. They make varying degrees of clatter as she uses different machines. If anyone comments on the bracelets or the clatter, she stops what she is doing and explains them, one charm at a time. There is one charm for each of her grandchildren and from what I can see, she has a enormous number of grandchildren.

4 May Thursday

I have been walking with Walker while Fiona and PJ are away. Today we walked up into Tom Cooney’s fields. Walker is terrible about chasing large vehicles and tractors when we are on the road but once we are in the fields, I take him off the lead. I left my red extendable lead by a tank with a green ladder at the bottom of the fields. It is not unusual to find jackets or hats hanging on a gate or on a wall. We all start off on a walk with things that we end up not wanting. It is easy to leave the thing somewhere and to collect it on the return trip.

5 May Friday

Lashing, cold and miserable rain all day. Desperate.

I saw John in the shop. Tommie had asked last week if I had seen John lately because he lives up near us.  I said I had not seen him for many months but I reported that during Covid, John had grown a long beard and he had never cut it off. Tommie was surprised by this news. So when I saw John in the shop today, I told him about my conversation with Tommie and told him too that Tommie had been taken off the road and that as a result he feels he is a prisoner in his own house. John is walking with a stick because he has terrible back pain. Some of his discs are pressing on each other and there is nothing to be done for it. He just has to live with the pain. I asked him if I could take a photograph of him and his beard to show to Tommie and he said yes.

I found Tommie sitting in his dark red upright chair with no lights on and no fire in the grate. The room was dark and gloomy and quiet. Neither the radio nor the television were playing. The only sound was that of the beating rain. He was reclining in an awkward way in his chair. His hips were sort of hanging off the front of the seat. It looked like he was trying to lie down but the chair was so rigidly upright there was no give to accommodate his attempted position. This is the chair that was designed to be plugged in so that it could serve as a recliner. This is the chair given to him by the Health Service. He refuses to plug his chair into the electrical wall socket. I do not know if he does not trust sitting in a chair that is plugged in or if he has never had a chair that plugs in, so he feels there is no reason to begin now.

He marveled at John’s beard in the photograph. We wondered together how John might wash the beard. I thought it would be done in the shower, but he felt sure that John would not be a man for the shower. He would have to wash it in the bath. I told him that I had suggested to John that he come over to visit with Tommie in his house, but he spoke with authority when he said that John would not come to visit him. He said that John is not a man to go into houses.

6 May Saturday

One man comes to the Farmers Market every Saturday, but he never carries a bag nor a basket.  He buys a few things, like four potatoes and then he walks to his car with two in each hand and he places them in the boot. Then he returns and buys something else. Maybe a bunch of rhubarb and he returns to his car with that.  He makes many trips back and forth to his motorcar. Yesterday I saw into the open boot of the car as he placed a handful of leeks inside.  All of his purchases were lined up in a a tidy row.

8 May Monday

Mary the Black Cat has been coming down to eat but so has another larger cat. The larger cat is black with white markings.  Tonight I saw two more farm cats, neither of whom I had seen down here before. This is too many farm cats hanging around the kitchen door. Things have gotten out of control. I must stop feeding Mary because I can no longer be certain that it is Mary who I am feeding. I know that all the cats get milk at the farm and that their job is to be catching rodents to fill their empty stomachs.  I am sending them all back to the job of feeding themselves.

Driven Demented

12 May Friday

None of the farm cats have been fed at my kitchen door for three or four days now. There was a loud screeching battle two nights ago between two or maybe three cats. Mary no longer appears. She has been frightened away by the competition. Last night the big black and white cat hurled himself up against the door. He did this for several minutes throwing his entire enormous body against the door again and again and again. He made a big noise. After he departed, in what I can only presume was disgust, two other cats, mixed grey and brown, skulked around the door  looking up at me hopefully as I looked out at them.

13 May Saturday

Today is week number six of the fresh asparagus from Wexford. I cannot get enough of it. I buy lots and I savour every bunch. Every week after this one might be the last.

14 May Sunday

A man was backing up his trailer as I walked through the farmyard. The side of the trailer announced that whatever was inside was not for animal consumption. Before I could get around the vehicle, the man was out of the small van and signalling for me to look away. On the ground just inside the gate were two small dead calves in a clump. His job was to collect the bodies and take them away. He was trying to spare me the sight of the the corpses, but his gesture was too late.

15 May Monday

Liam has no near neighbours with whom he can leave a house key. His method has been to put his spare into a jar with a screw-on lid. The jar is then thrown into the bushes to be hunted for when it is needed. The extra key is for someone who might need to get into his house when Liam is not there. It is also useful for himself in case he loses his key or fails to find it in any of his pockets. The jar keeps the key from rusting. The system works well. It has worked well for years up until the other night, when Liam misplaced his house key. He was not worried because he knew he had the spare in the jar under the bushes. He found himself struggling to get down on his hands and knees to search under the bushes for the jar and once he had found it he was unable to stand back up on his own. It was lucky for him that that he was not alone and that Peter was with him. He is now trying to decide on a new easy-to-reach hiding place for his key.

18 May Thursday

The lanes are frothy with cow parsley.

23 May Tuesday

I have been admiring the number seven on the gate post for months. Some days I think it is a painted seven and some days I am convinced it is a piece of metal with a perfect shadow that just looks like a seven. Today I stopped the car to take a look. It is a seven.

24 May Wednesday

There seems to be a lull in the activity surrounding The First Holy Communions. Hairdressers have been booked solid and bouncy castles and parties schedualed all over the place. Now the wedding season is in full swing. There is always another reason to dress up and have a party.

25 May Thursday

I have been taking Walker out for walks again. As always, our preferred destination is Tom Cooney’s fields. We walk in the narrow paths made by tractor wheels through the barley. He runs way out in front of me, but turns every so often to make sure that I am still with him.

26 May Friday

Una was describing to the girl at the till all about how she had been on a Zoom call with her friend Louise in New Jersey when a swallow flew into her house and started swooping around. The swallow knocked things off the windowsills and thumped and flailed as it looked for a way back outside.  Louise saw the bird passing by the computer screen in Tipperary and she began to panic. She squealed: “How did a bird get into your house? Don’t you have screens on your windows?? Don’t you keep your doors locked?” Una told Louise that the bird would fly out again soon, but Louise remained in a frantic state about its erratic presence.  Una explained to the girl behind the counter that in the United States everyone has screens on their windows and that they lock their doors all the time even when they are inside the house. She said that they never let a bug much less a bird in. Una said that she only locks her own door when she goes to bed.

27 May Saturday

The woman looked like she was a the end of her tether.  She looked like she might cry or maybe scream. She screeched, “I’m Driven Demented!”

30 May Tuesday

Today was the day. I finally took Tommie to town. He has been waiting and waiting and wanting to go but he has had a bad chest infection and was unable to go out at all for two weeks. I think it was pneumonia but the doctor gave him antibiotics and sent him home, so he has just healed slowly on his own. Before I had helped him all the way out of the car at Dunnes’ Stores, a man shouted out a greeting. Tommie was delighted to be recognised and he walked taller for it. I got him a trolley and loaded in his shopping bags. He put his walking stick into the trolley and set off into the store while I went to park the car. He was stopped several more times by people who were happy to see him and to talk to him. He said that one lady talked his ear off but he said he could only hear half of what she said anyway. I drove him home on a meandering route and he was pleased to see how many fields had their first silage in and he was happy to see hay being cut. He noticed everything. We had to stop several times for large tractors and machinery in the road. He said he could have ridden in my motorcar all day but when we got to his house he collapsed into his chair. Tommie said he was completely worn out by the outside world.

31 May Wednesday

I make potato salad with a vinaigrette dressing, celery, diced gherkins, onions and hard-boiled egg. Most people make it with mayonnaise. Which is fine. Until I came to live here, I loved potato salad in most forms. Potatoes in Ireland tend to be floury. These are the potatoes that people like so these are the potatoes that are grown and sold. A Green Grocer will proudly announce: “These Potatoes Will Explode in Your Face.” It sounds scary but this is not a threat. Floury potatoes are considered a Good Thing. The problem is that floury potatoes fall apart when they are boiled or even steamed. They are no use for a potato salad, though no one seems to care. People make potato salad anyway and they do not mind that it is mushy. There are no pieces of potato in the potato salad. It is just a seasoned mush with nothing to bite into. We joke that the potato salad is made with mashed potatoes. Today I saw a a bowl in the deli section labelled Mash Potato Salad. It is no longer a joke but documented truth.

1 June Thursday

Mary is back. She seems to like the quiet. The other cats have given up on getting anything to eat from me so they no longer arrive to squabble around the kitchen door. Mary follows me around in the garden. She likes to be nearby. I am not even sure she is hoping for food. She just likes a visit.

2 June Friday

I accompanied Simon to his hearing aid appointment this morning. My presence was required as his Familiar Voice. I was asked to be there in order to speak some words to him without my lips being seen. I sat quietly in a chair in the far corner of the small room and I waited to be included, but I never was. At the end of the appointment Fergal invited me to come along to the next meeting if I so wished.

3 June Saturday

The Wexford strawberries are on sale on the main roads. This is the sign that summer has arrived. The painted strawberries are on signs and also on the sides of the little selling trailers. Every painted strawberry is different. Both strawberries and new potatoes are both being sold by but it is the strawberries that get advertised with a painted image, never the potatoes.

4 June Sunday

The days have been dry and warm.  Day after day of bright sun and heat and not a drop of rain. The fields are silent. Grassy places are looking more brown and less green. The broad creamy elderflower blossom is everywhere but there is no citric acid to be found in any pharmacy, so I am unable to make my annual cordial. The vegetation lining the roads has gone from looking lush to looking skeletal. Wild daisies are rampant.

Bucket of Brains

24 June Saturday

Tommie has been in the care home at Rathkeevin for two weeks. A second dose of antibiotics were not clearing his lungs and he was not getting better at home all by himself. Being cared for in the new environment seems to be helping him. He enjoys being served three meals a day and not having to do the washing up himself. He was looking much better today. There were two men visiting when I arrived, but after a short conversation to establish who I was, they left, one to visit his cousin Betty in another part of the home and the other to go and help his son with the milking. Tommie and I watched the last race of Royal Ascot together. The race was called The Queen’s Jubilee. He explained to me that it was called that still and probably would be called that forever, even though the Queen is dead. An outsider by the name of Khaadem won. The odds were 80-1 against him. Tommie asked me if I ever bet on the horses. He said he was not a betting man himself, and he never had been, but if he was that would have been the horse to bet on.

25 June Sunday

We woke up to find the big red umbrella blown off the pole that held it up. It was a mistake to leave it open overnight.

26 June Monday

I cannot pick the gooseberries fast enough. Between downpours the birds are stripping the bushes or maybe they continue eating the berries in the rain. I do not want to sit on my plastic box and pick berries in the rain. The birds have had a lot more than I have had so far and I do not think the berries are even fully ripe yet. The days have gone cool and damp. There is rain at some point every day.  Sometimes a little and sometimes a lot. On the one hand, there is Great Delight when a day is drizzly and grey and damp. People exclaim that they LOVE this weather, while at the same time there is a widespread fear that the summer might be over. Even while praising the soft damp weather the same people are moaning that the hot weather we have had is all we will get for this year. It is not even July and they are certain that the summer is over. Some people are even lighting a fire in the evening.

27 June Tuesday

We have had to restrict our driving to times when there is no rain. This is not easy because there continues to be some rain every day. Rain is not a surprise. A little or a lot, but every day there is rain and it rarely falls when expected. The tiny motor that makes the windscreen wipers work is broken. We need to have it replaced. Simon made a device for clearing the windscreen. He hoped that if he had a long enough pole, he could clear the screen with it while he was driving. It was not a good idea. The piece of wood on the device was rough and he got splinters in his hand. He would have gone off the road while trying to use it. Mike called today and said he has the new motor and can install it tomorrow, which is not a moment too soon.

28 June Wednesday

The house is in a state. Ollie buys the newspaper every day. He buys a newspaper and he reads it from front to back and then he lays the pages out on the floor. Day after day the papers pile up covering every inch of the floor in his small house. Ollie says that he spreads the newspapers around as a way to keep the floor clean. Rather than sweep up crumbs or muddy footprints, he just covers everything up with layer after layer of newspapers. He can no longer close the door in the sitting room because the papers are too deep. Walking across the floor is like walking on a mattress. The bounce of the many layers of papers makes every step into a bit of a wobble. Ollie is also a heavy smoker. His sitting room is full of large and deep ashtrays full of cigarette butts. He likes to smoke while he reads the newspaper and he likes to smoke while he watches television. He is rarely not smoking. The smell in the room is dreadful. Butts are piled like mountains in each ashtray. I cannot imagine where he might put another cigarette butt without the whole mountain tipping off and onto the floor.

29 June Thursday

A 25 kg bag of cow feed lay in the middle of the road. It must have fallen off a trailer. I could not drive around it so I got out of the car and dragged it to the side. The farmer who lost it will have to retrace his steps to locate where it fell off.

30 Friday

Tommy Myles’ butcher shop was hopping this morning. There was so much going on that I did not mind having to wait a long time for my turn. Tommy himself was standing at the little end table. He was in charge of taking the cash from customers while two other men cut up meat and chops and weighed things and then called out the prices to him. The three or four customers buying meat were all women. Four elderly men in the back end of the shop were talking and shouting at one another and at Tommy. I think the shouting was because none of them had good hearing. Three of the men were leaning heavily on sticks. One man said that he could no longer Stand For The Chat so he went outside and sat up high in his jeep with the window open. He pulled the jeep along the curb so that his open window was directly across the pavement from the open door of the shop. He tried to keep his part in the conversation going by shouting out his window but the men inside did not pay much attention to his contributions. They continued to talk loudly among themselves without him and every so often one of them would call out that he should ring up on his telephone if he wanted to talk with them.

1 July Saturday

Winnie works as a cleaner. She complained that she keeps losing jobs because she fails to dust anything up high. She says she is Not Able For It. Her customers cannot believe that she does not see the cobwebs or dust above her own chest level. She is oblivious to anything up high. She says that she does not look up because she gets vertigo and she thinks it is bad manners to faint in someone else’s house.

2 July Sunday

The three women were not traveling together but they were all three waiting for the bus to Waterford. When a bus pulled up, the driver let people off and then he closed the door and went into the back of the bus for a sit down. He did not let anyone onto the bus. Nor did he answer any questions. The sign on the front of the bus said Charleville which is in the opposite direction from Waterford. It is a long way in the wrong direction. The women considered the issue and then discussed when they had last been to Charleville. One of the women had never been there at all. They did not want go to Charleville, but together they worried the possibility until the driver roused himself from his nap and came to the front of the bus and changed the sign on the front to read Waterford.

4 July Tuesday

Two men stood outside the shop as they spoke about how very clever another man was. I did not know who they were talking about. They kept saying things about this man’s great knowledge and about his ability to solve problems. Each man tried to say something more definitive about the degree of smartness this man possessed. Each of the men was trying to be the one to have the final word. The last thing I heard as I walked away was that “He is A Bucket of Brains.”

5 July Wednesday

Breda and I walked down through the Long Field in late afternoon.  There was a break in the rain but we did not trust it to last. We wore our rain jackets tied around our waists. There were tractors and machines rushing around and cutting the grain. The cut fields looked like corduroy.

6 July Thursday

Torrential rain has been falling all day.  The slugs are out in force. Every evening, I find one or two creeping around the bathroom. And those are only the ones I see. Most of them are in dark hidden away places. Their trails appear all over the mirrors when there is steam in the room after a bath or shower, so I know they have been oozing around in the night.

The Long Shed

13 July Thursday

Peter and Davi arrived and tore out the messy mix-up of three or four versions of bedraggled string and wire fencing. They cleared the land and installed a new length of fence to replace what had fallen down six years ago. It was a job that has needed doing for a long time and now it is done. To accommodate the rising price of all building materials we now have a fence with two bars rather than with the traditional three. I cannot wait for the cows to reappear in Joe’s field so that I can look at them looking at me over a wooden fence.

14 July Friday

There was a gap in the rain. I walked the one kilometre up the boreen with my clippers wearing a pair of heavy gloves. I cut back brambles and thorny wild rose branches on the right hand side of the track as I walked. When I reached the tarmacadam road, I turned around and came back down cutting the other side. It started raining before I reached the top road but I continued with my job thinking that the drizzle would not last. It did last. The drizzle became solid rain and the rain became heavier and heavier. I was soaking wet by the time I reached the farm. I was even wetter when I got home. The rain and drenched clothing matched my mood of deep sadness because my friend Tessa died last night. Tessa died last night and I cried the whole way up the boreen and the whole way down again. The rain did not matter one bit.

15 July Saturday

Picking blackcurrants over several days has been a constant activity in between downpours and cloudbursts. Today the first batch of berries was gently cooking in a large heavy cast-iron saucepan. I turned the temperature up for one last blast of heat and I left the room and the blackcurrants burned. The terrible smell filled the kitchen. The whole mixture had to be thrown away. The pan is a mess and may have to be thrown away too. I am so distracted and saddened by my dear friend’s death that I cannot do anything right.

17 July Monday

There has been hard lashing all day rain along with gusty winds. Everywhere I go, I hear discussions about the drying of clothes. It is an enormous struggle. It is a struggle so it is a point of ongoing conversation. The Broken Washing Line is a problem. When the washing is hanging out and rain falls steadily, the clothes get wet and heavy. Then they get even heavier. Then the line snaps, and depending on the amount of mud below the line, the clothes or sheets must all be washed again. Some people own dryers. Many revert to The Long Shed in weeks of endless rain. The Long Shed is a stone building which might have been built for animals but now it adapts itself to any number of functions. There are two short sides and one long side built with stone. The other long side is open to the weather. There is no need for a door.  If a person owns a Long Shed, they are certain to have a washing line stretched along inside. The washing can be hung in the Long Shed and it will get the whipping of the wind but not the direct wetting of a cloudburst. Donal told me that he thinks it is nothing more than Blind Optimism that dries the washing in this country.

18 July Tuesday

The figs look terrific. They are large. They are large but they are as hard as rocks. I squeeze and test them every day but there is no softening of the flesh. These figs are not even good enough to cook. I am waiting and the birds are waiting but with the weather we are having this summer these figs may never get any closer to being ready.

20 July Thursday

I walked into the small car park near to Lismore Castle with my arms full of Cavolo Nero and two boxes of small tomatoes. I did not have a bag with me so I was balancing everything on top of my flat parcel and a book and I was trying to eat the delicious tiny tomatoes at the same time. An older woman came rushing over and asked if I was there for the Fish Man. I had to stop chewing in order to answer her. Before I could say that I was not there for the Fish Man, she pointed and said that a fifteen seat bus had parked in the place where the fish man always parks his van. She was worried about where he would park because his regular spot was taken. I apologised for my full mouth and I offered her a tomato. She studied them for a while and then she chose a small yellow one. She held it snug in her hand and she asked me what she should do with it.

21 July Friday

The calves are making a racket up in Joe’s top field. They are trying out their vocal chords and moaning and bleating all day long. They make a terrible noise answering one another, or talking over one another. It sounds like they are being tortured. They have been there all week. They do not stop their noise until complete darkness has fallen. They start up again early in the first light of dawn. I cannot hear the morning birdsong for the cattle noise. They are teenagers or maybe adolescents. They are young and they are exploring the sounds they are able to make. There is so much variation that I have been trying to find words to describe their emanations. There is a small bit of Mooing and sounds that one identifies with cows but there is Grunting. Bellowing. Moaning. Squealing. Squawking. Groaning. Grumbling. Screaming. Rumbling. Screeching. Except for the mooing it is not much like cow sounds, even though that is exactly what it is.

22 July Saturday

We took a punnet of perfect plums to Tommie and he started to eat them immediately even as he talked with us. He loves fresh fruit and he cannot resist it in the way that other people adore chocolate. He studied each plum for a few minutes before he happily bit into it. He exclaimed about how delicious and how sweet it was. On biting into the the fourth one, he said, “This plum is at the Top of its Game.”

23 July Sunday
There was a small red tractor parked in front of the shop. It was old. It had no windows in the sides nor in the back but it did have a windscreen. The owner had cut himself a thick chunk of foam to cushion his seat.

24 July Monday

The Parish News announced that Two First Class Relics are coming to Cahir on the 29th of the month. The relics are Padre Pio’s Heart and Glove Bandage and it is hoped that they will draw a large crowd.

25 July Tuesday

The bucket has been placed under the tap to catch drips and over-spills. The bucket has been carefully cemented into position below the tap, but there is no hole at the bottom of the bucket to direct water into a drain, or perhaps there was a hole but it has become clogged, so when the bucket fills up it overflows anyway.

26 July Wednesday

It has been many weeks now since the Boil Water Notice has been in place. Everyone is advised to boil their water before drinking it because of the endless rain. Run off from the constant downpours has contaminated the reservoirs. There are no free glasses of water in restaurants or cafes. Water must be purchased. I find myself surprised each time I am refused water. We have our water directly from our well, so we are free from the Boil Notice.

28 July Friday

There are always piles of things in the farmyards that I pass:  things ready to be used and others ready to gotten rid of. Sometimes the use of something looks obvious, but sometimes it is a mystery.

29 July Saturday

The Annual Mass Rock Mass is to be held today up in the Knockmealdowns. It is usually held in August. Or maybe it is usually in August because it gets cancelled due to bad weather until it eventually takes place in August. Anyway. It is supposed to take place today. Subject to Weather. Tractors and trailers will be available to take those people who cannot walk across the mountain to the rock.

30 July Sunday

It was nearly ten o’clock, but we had not yet turned on a light in the house. The television was on and the light from outside was just beginning to drop. It was dusk. I noticed a flapping and a flying of something over our heads. I thought it was a large butterfly or a moth. I pointed it out and Simon said that it was a bat. We tried to steer the bat towards an open window. I put on a hat. We moved it from room to room by turning out the lights in one room and turning them on in another. The bat went round and round and round high up along the ceiling never going anywhere near the wide open windows. I waved a long stick but it was useless. The bat ignored my stick and my directional encouragements. It took about forty minutes but eventually we got the bat to the kitchen and then the next step was out into the dropping evening light. Simon asked why I had put on my hat. As a child I was told that bats have a tendency to land in hair and get tangled and then bite the head and the person would get rabies and die. That was American advice. Animals in this country do not carry rabies, but my first instinct was to put on a hat even though my hair is far too short to ensnare a bat.

1 August Tuesday

Dungarvan Queens are the big news.  They are advertised with excitement as Balls Of Flour.  This means they will explode into a pile of dust on the plate, ready for copious amounts of gravy and butter to moisten them.  Balls of Flour do not excite me. They fill my heart with dread.

2 August Wednesday

Even when it is not raining the days continue to be grey and gruesome. it is not warm. It is not cheerful to wake up and to look out the window. The sun does break through between showers but there are no rainbows. Neither the sun nor the blue sky last for long. There is always the promise of more rain to come soon. Cloudbursts. Showers. Downpours. Drizzle. Mist. Lashing. Desperate. Bucketing. Mizzling. Heavy. Light. Occasional. Frequent. Persistent. The weather announcers try to use a variety of words in an attempt to distract us from the forecasts of more of the same.

Squeezing the Figs

10 August Thursday

Rain has been falling on and off every day and every night. We can no longer remember the weather being any other way. The sun comes out and the day is suddenly hot. Everyone relaxes. Hunched shoulders drop and people stand taller. Then it rains again and people crunch their bodies again in attempts to make themselves small while scurrying to get under cover.

11 August Friday

Rolls of Silage Tape have appeared on the counter at the shop.  It is a reminder to those farmers who need it to remember to buy it.  The silage is being cut and baled in between cloudbursts.  The men in tractors and large cutting machinery race from field to field during even the briefest of dry spells.

12 August Saturday

I am Squeezing the Figs. I run up the stone steps to get close to the higher branches where I can reach the largest figs. I make the trip to squeeze four or five times a day. There are not many figs this year and if one of them is going to soften, I want to be sure to get it before the birds do. They will rip open the thin skins and eat away at the fruit inside. I want to find each fig first.

13 August Sunday

These wet days are warm, so windows are open. Open windows become an invitation to slugs. I never really know if they enter the bathroom through a window or if they ooze up through the plug hole in the bathtub, or the sink. They just appear. At night. And always in a surprising place. I am never happy to find a slug in the bathroom. I thought that by now I had been startled by a slug in every imaginable and disturbing location. Tonight I grabbed the tube of toothpaste and found my hand squeezing a large slug that was stretched the length of the tube. Lucky for me, I did not squeeze hard enough to kill it nor for its body to ooze through my fingers. I scraped the slug off the tube on the edge of the open window and got on with the job of cleaning my teeth.

15 August Tuesday

So far the birds have had one fig. I have had three. There are a lot of small fruits that will never grow large enough to ripen. It is not going to be a large crop this year so I am keeping count.

16 August Wednesday

We thought the thrush in the garden was one thrush singing non-stop. Now we recognize that there are several voices. They sing and sing and sing all day. There is not a moment of quiet.

18 August Friday

A storm is coming. It promises to be a big one. It has been named: Storm Betty. One woman said she tried to go to Dunnes’ Stores but the car park was full because everyone is rushing to get their food shopping in before the threatened rain and winds and floods descend. There are discussions about whether to bring in the lawn furniture, or maybe just the cushions? Since we have barely sat outdoors all summer some people have already put their lawn chairs away. Some people never brought them out of the shed. What about small plants in plastic pots: will they blow away? And Hanging Baskets are another worry. Preparations are frantic. People are feeling uncertain because they might well be trapped by floods or they fear that their electricity might be cut off. They want to be ready for every possibility, so everyone is rushing about so that they are not the ones to be caught out by Betty. The storm has quickly gone from Storm Betty to just Betty. Everyone feels familiar and on a first name basis with her.

19 August Saturday

In this part of the country, we escaped the Betty’s battering without much damage. Some branches are down but no roads are blocked. Other areas lost electricity and there was some terrible flooding. Betty is already fading as a topic of discussion.

20 August Sunday

Mickey Nugent died this week. He died in hospital but he was brought home to be laid out. A neighbour asked Tommie if he would like to go to the wake, so he was driven up to the house on Friday evening. He said he felt like The Pope for the welcome he received. The warm greetings and the friends he saw made him even sadder to know that Mickey was gone. He told me that Mickey was the kind of friend who would Fill His Car before he drove off to any event.  He never headed off for a match nor a funeral with Empty Seats. Tommie was never unhappy to be taken on an journey with Mickey as he himself rarely felt confident about locating any place that he did not know already. Mickey was never bothered with such worries. He was Without Fear. Tommie said that Mickey was both a Generous Man and a Gentleman. He said that several times. I think he enjoyed the sound of the words together. Tommie had decided to stay at home on Saturday because his knee was so painful, but after he heard about all the musicians who arrived carrying their instruments into the church, he regretted that he had not attended the Funeral Mass. He was sorry to have missed the musical farewell for his friend.

21 August Monday

I have a note to remind myself to keep checking the figs, but really, I do not need a note. I am obsessed with the figs. I bring them into the house when there is just the smallest amount of softness, a mere suggestion of squeezability. The figs then ripen in the house slowly over a few days or a week. There is no hurry. Once they are inside the birds cannot destroy them. Once they are inside I am happy to wait.

22 August Tuesday

The compost bucket is an ongoing problem in this dreadful endless rain. We all commiserate about the weather. It is important to take the compost out when the weather is dry. It is not pleasant to carry it out in lashing rain and to open my compost heap especially with its sliding heavy cover that no longer slides with ease. Emptying the bucket before it is full is becoming even more of an issue since the handle broke. It is now necessary for me to clutch the bucket to my chest with both arms as I walk. If I wait until the bucket is full up, it is heavy and if it is raining too, I must perform a staggery kind of a run to complete the task.

23 August Wednesday

Lads is a collective noun. People are described as Lads. Not Mates. Not You All. Not Guys. The Lads might be a clatter of small children, or it might be a rugby team made up of grown men. The Lads might be out on a Stag Night or The Lads might be out on a Hen Party. The word Lads does not seem to be restricted to one sex or the other. It is just a word for a grouping of people where names are not the issue. I might be mistaken, but it seems that Lads is always plural. Not Lad, but Lads. As soon as I decide this, I find an exception.

24 August Thursday

This endless wet means that there is always mud and there are always puddles. As a result, whatever trousers I am wearing, I always have a smudge or a clump of mud on the calf of my right leg. This is where the back of my leg rubs as I step out of the car. The muck splashes up onto the bottom of the car as I drive through the farmyard. If it is a warm day, the smudge is on the back of my bare leg. If the smudge is a green-ish color, it is not mud, but manure. It is green because the cows are feasting on nothing but grass in their fields.

25 August Friday

I watched as a man opened the back of his vehicle to load up a new gas bottle. Another man carried the bottle out to him and then he sat down on the back of the car. The two men talked quietly for a while and then they loaded in the gas bottle. One man drove away. The other one walked to wherever he was going.

26 August Saturday

Breda and I consulted the weather and we picked a time. I walked out and waited for her at the end of the boreen and we drove up to the Boulders in her car. We figured we had two, maybe two and a half hours, before the next cloudburst. We tied lightweight rain jackets around our waists and set off with long strides on our walking poles. We walked 40 minutes uphill to the cairn, with the sheep scattering and rushing away from us. We dropped down towards the river, just as the sky opened and the rain bucketed down hard. We were unable to get our jackets on before we were soaked to the skin. We hoped it might be a short downpour but the rain kept lashing down. It was hard and it was heavy. There was nothing for it but to head back to the Boulders and the car. There was not one tree nor shelter of any kind. We could not run because there was so much mud. We lurched and slipped along as quickly as we were able. The rain never let up for one minute. It felt like hail. By the time I got home I stripped off every bit of wet clothing and jumped into a hot shower. When I came out, I saw Simon’s shirt and trousers hanging off the rail. He was not interested in my report of heavy rain. He had his own report. He had been sitting out in the sunshine where he fell asleep in his chair. He was woken up by the rain pouring down upon him. He got completely drenched in the short run back to the house.

28 August Monday

I could not pass the farm because the gate was across the road. I shouted around the gate to the man at the cattle crush and he shouted to Joe and Joe came and opened the gates to let the car through. He told me that they were testing the cows to see which ones were in calf. When I returned two hours later, I had to shout up the yard again and Joe came down again and let me drive across. I asked how many calves he was expecting and he muttered that he feared they would never be finished with the testing because he had to keep letting men or machines or me in and out of the yard or up or down the road.

30 August

We ate caramelized figs on a pancake. Now I am slowly collecting more. The indoor ripening system is working well. The birds are deprived and we are winning. I have picked buckets full of apples from the meadow, both off the trees and the windfalls off the ground. The freezer is not going to be able to accommodate all the fruit I am gathering. And now the raspberries are ripening fast. I need to go out and pick them every afternoon. Overripe wild damsons are falling off the branches in the boreen. The branches are too high for me to reach. Four years ago I parked the car on the corner under the tree and I used a ladder to climb up and pick the plums while standing up on the curved roof of the car. I no longer feel safe using this method.

1 September Friday

The man stood outside the station and he pointed to a tree. Everyone who walked by followed his finger and looked up at the tree. There were not a lot of people around. Some were waiting to board a bus and others had just gotten down off a bus. Some were just off the train. We all followed the man’s directive. We all looked up at the tree. I heard a cat miaowing. Every person responded to the sounds of the crying cat. Each person stopped and looked and looked for the cat in the tree. After some minutes, the man laughed and said, “It’s ME! I am the cat. The cat is me. Can you give me some money for lunch?” Most people gave him some money. They were impressed with his act of throwing his voice into the tree. They were appreciative of his talent of imitating a cat in distress and they were relieved that there was not a real cat in trouble. Not everyone gave him money. Some people rushed away, embarrassed to have been caught up in his trick.

2 September Saturday

We would not have bought the strawberries. They were pale and sickly looking. And we have too much fruit to eat at home. The girl at the market assured us that they were the sweetest of berries and they were only pale because there has been so little sun. She explained that we are all suffering from a lack of sun. She said they were delicious and that we needed to eat them all today or they would disintegrate into a mush. We began to eat them right after lunch and we did not stop until they were gone. The girl was right. They were the best strawberries we have ever eaten.

4 September Monday

I am picking raspberries every day. Some get taken to friends. Some go into the freezer. Most of them we just eat.  I am seeing the blackberries ripening all up the boreen and I am now feeling the pressure to start picking them too.

Minerals

11 September Monday

I cannot go near to the book barn without colliding with a bee. The honeybees in the roof are wildly busy.  They are making up for the many weeks of wet weather this summer. Even if I am working in the garden at a distance, the bees crash into my head and my body. I try not to swat at them because I know that makes them angry so most of the time I just stay away, except to walk in and out of the barn. Their entrance is right above the door so it is impossible to avoid them completely. Beekeepers everywhere are bemoaning the poor honey production this year because it has been too wet for the bees to do their job. All of our honey is all up in the roof, completely inaccessible to anyone.  The Clonmel Honey show is coming up in a few weeks. There is discussion and worry that this will be the worst showing ever. The Irish for Clonmel is CLUAIN MEALA which translates as Meadow of Honey. The Honey Show is a big event. But without honey it will be less of an event.

12 September Tuesday

Tommie is in the care home in Clogheen. First he went to hospital with his ongoing lung infection and while he was there he contracted the new variant of Covid. After two weeks in isolation, he has been sent to St Theresa’s but he is still not allowed any visitors. I send him cards.

13 September Wednesday

There are more spiders around than ever.  I learned on the radio that at this time of year the males are out hunting the females to reproduce and the females are all hiding. The reason for the hiding is not clear. There are enormous numbers of spiders on the prowl. I do not know how to recognize a male from a female. There are large wood spiders with hairy legs trying and failing to climb the slippery walls of the bathtub. There are delicate spiders with long thin legs like fine hairs and all kinds of quick moving tiny ones and along with the massive quantity of spiders there are huge droopy cobwebs in every corner of every room. They never talk about the cobwebs on the radio.

14 September Thursday

There is a tendency for any walking path in woods that is gentle enough for children and families to be littered with little doorways for the fairies. The small doorways might be made of painted wood, or the doors might be colored plastic. They give the children something to rush around and discover while they are out getting fresh air. I am not a fan of these little doorways. I hate them. There is never just one doorway. There are usually 20 or 30 in a given area. I avoid any place where the fairy doors have invaded. The window in the hardware shop has a display of little fairy figurines and several little doorways. Added into the mix is a variety of Fairy products, which have nothing to do with fairies. Fairy is an English brand name for washing-up liquid and laundry soap. It is difficult to decide which idea came first in this display.

15 September Friday

My mother never gave us carbonated drinks except when we were sick in bed, and then we were given a tiny glass of flat warm ginger ale. All soft drinks were called Tonic in New Hampshire, but we were allowed none of them, so flat ginger ale seemed like a treat. When I left New Hampshire, I learned to say Soda instead of Tonic. In some parts of the US people call it Pop. And some people call it all Coke, even if it is not Coca Cola, but another flavor of fizzy drink. When I moved to Ireland, my vocabulary had to adjust again. Even though I never drink these drinks, I need to know the correct word: carbonated drinks are called Minerals.

16 September Saturday

Everyone feels beaten up. Twenty-eight hours of straight heavy rain will do that to a person. The rain fell hard and heavily without a moment of pause. Many people said they never stepped outside their door once all day and all night. The roads were running with brown water. The water was full of topsoil rushing off the fields at speed.

17 September Sunday

For some time and in some places, milk cartons had pictures of missing children along with police phone numbers to ring if one spotted a lost child. It was something to read while eating breakfast. Now there is a Q-code on our milk cartons. If we click on the code we can hear the sounds of cows in the field. Or we can just go outside and eat our cereal. There are plenty of cows in either Joe’s field or the other Joe’s field. We do not need the recorded version.

18 September Monday

Raspberries. I am picking raspberries as fast as I can in between the cloud bursts. I am also picking blackberries, but my priority is always raspberries. I like raspberries more than blackberries and I hate for them to get soggy in this endless rain.

19 September Tuesday

The news is full of The Ploughing. Today is the first of the annual three day event. The radio has been noisy with excitement and anticipation for weeks now. There is new terminology to accompany the types of competiton: reversible, conventional, stubble, three-furrow and two furrow. This year the event is being held in County Laois. The location changes every year but the event is always plagued with bad weather, terrible backups of traffic and parking issues in places where parking has never before been a problem, free servings of Flahavan’s porridge, and lots of mud. It is the place where farmers from all over the country gather to see new machinery and to learn new methods for various jobs, and how to tackle the climate issues as European laws evolve. Politicians know that it is important that they attend The National Ploughing Competitions. They need to be available to answer questions and they need to have the right solutions to problems if they are going to have any chance to be re-elected. The Ploughing itself is a National Sport and the Irish winners will be rushing off to the European Championships in Denmark soon, along with their tractors.

20 September Wednesday

I like to see what is going on as I walk through the farmyard, but most days there is little to see. The road makes two sharp right angles and we call it The Dog’s Leg. High gates block off a lot of the activity. The machines get bigger and bigger and they do more and more of the work. People are less visible. Ann picks apples at this time of year, but she only picks once. The rest of the apples fall onto the ground and rot. Otherwise women are not visible at the farm. The newest farm worker helping Joe is named Rafael. He is from Brazil.

21 September Thursday

I have seen the young fox three times this week. Each time I have been walking in the boreen. When he sees me, he leaps high into the underbrush, and is gone almost before I can register his presence.

22 September Friday

The nights are cool and the mornings are misty and cold. Already the sun sets earlier and earlier, but there are plenty of flowers still in bloom. Daisies, honeysuckle, purple loosestrife, buttercups, rose hips, wild fuchsia and meadowsweet fill the hedgerows, and in the garden the roses, daisies, lavender and Lady’s Mantle keep blooming. Lady’s Mantle is perfect for this climate because it’s leaves look splendid with drops of water.

23 September Saturday

Today there was a Twenty Year Anniversary Celebration at the Farmer’s Market. The day was celebrated with lots of balloons and pennants and a group of musicians from The Cahir Men’s Shed. Their music was not lively. Everything sounded like a dirge and there were too many of them to fit under the little tent covering when the rain started. Pat the Fishmonger made little sandwiches for each customer with cream cheese and his smoked salmon.

24 September Sunday

Slugs abound. This wet weather is just what they like.

25 September Monday

Beautiful sunshine today after yesterday non-stop pouring rain. Yesterday was not a day to step outside if it could be avoided. I walked through the farm as a long truck was backing up to deliver wood shavings. This is what the cows stand on on top of their slatted mats. The driver dumped a huge load of shavings and now it will take a few days for Joe to move it all from that pile to wherever he stores it until it is needed for the cows. Then the driver will come and dump another load. Or two loads. The shavings in the yard smell wonderful.

26 September Tuesday

I visited Tommie today with a large bowl of raspberries and a jug of heavy cream.  He arrived home yesterday in the afternoon. He had been away for nearly five weeks. By seven o’clock he had had his tea and he told me that he felt depressed. He felt lonely and alone.  His neighbor  came over with two sausages on a plate and he told him to go away.  He did not know if the sausages were for him or if Pat just wanted to display them to him. He did not want to see Pat. He said he missed all of the nurses and the activity of people around him with food and cups of tea and smiles. His hair looks thick and shiny.   I told him that it looked nice and he said they were good to shampoo it for him at St .Theresea’s. He said he doesn’t bother with shampoo much himself.

28 September Thursday

Yesterday we were heartily thrashed by Storm Agnes.  I do not know why the naming of storms has gone from Betty to Agnes.  Why would we be going backwards through the alphabet?  The winds were fierce and a lot of people lost their electricity.  Even inside the house it was hard to think for the noise of the gusting wind. Today the winds are weaker but still blustery. There is nothing but the weather to focus upon.

Falling Out of My Stand Up

2 November Thursday

The house was cold when we got home yesterday but that was not surprising after several weeks away. The Stanley would not start. We did all of the things that we knew to do to make it function. Nothing worked. We even checked the tank out doors to be certain that the fuel had not been stolen. Pumping out the fuel from someone else’s tank is a serious but not unusual activity at this time of year. I rang Richie and he told me to open the bottom door and poke at a button there with the stick end of a wooden spoon. I did that, but nothing happened. He said that he is mighty popular at this time of year because everyone has heating issues, but he promised to make a trip up to check out our problem soon. We made a fire in the wood stove and went to bed early.

This afternoon Richie arrived. Everything there is to be known about Stanley Stoves is known to Richie. He used to work in the factory down in Waterford that built them. He keeps abreast of changes and new developments in the manufacture of the stoves. He enjoys being an expert. He took the large flat cooking plate off the top of the stove. He looked inside and said it was just as he thought: there was a dead starling inside. The bird’s body was blocking the hole where the flame should ignite, so the air and the gas could not meet. The starling was as hard as a rock.

He took it outside and threw it into some bushes. While he was out there he looked up at our chimneys and noted the crow guards on top. He called these The Chinaman’s Hats which he announced was probably not a politically correct name but sure he knew that we knew what he meant, didn’t we? He said the starlings are devils for getting in as they can squeeze through tiny openings. Once the bird got down the chimney and into the stove, it could not get back out and there was a lot of scrabbling of the fire insulation inside the Stanley. We could see the detritus  of the struggle. He said he has often found starlings in stoves, so they are not a surprise, but the biggest bird he ever found inside a stove was a crow. He still cannot believe that. He gave the Stanley a complete overhaul while he was here and then sat down and drank a cup of tea with us. He is still on the hunt for a woman with whom to share his life. His daughter is keeping an eye out for him and he asked us to look too. He asks this of us each time we see him. He says to mention that in his favor he is a good cook and that he enjoys cooking for someone else. He added that his house is warm and fully paid for. He will turn 60 next year and he says he would rather not get old all alone. He finds these long dark nights especially lonely.

3 November Friday

Simon found a man standing outside the kitchen door. He was tall and thin and he was not young. He was not a man we knew. Simon asked him if he had knocked the door but he said no. He had simply stood still and waited for someone to appear. He told Simon that The Hunt would be around on Sunday. The man in charge of The Hunt wanted us to be forewarned so he sent this man as there was a good chance we would be trapped here by the horses and the dogs and the activity in the boreen.

4 November Saturday

The stain reminds me that this is the season to buy mouse poison. I prefer poison to traps.  I am tired of finding squished bodies in traps. This stain is a small circle of blood. It is immediately outside the kitchen door. Earlier there was a chewed up mess on that spot. The mess was the head of a shrew that had been bitten a few times and then spit out. The body of the shrew was a few inches away. Harry told me that cats often kill shrews, but when they bite into the shrew’s head a bitter and unpleasant poison is released so they drop whatever they have bitten into. When a hungry farm cat kills a mouse, nothing is left behind.

5 November Sunday

I woke up early after a sleepless night plotting ways to blockade the lawn and the garden to keep The Hunt out, or at least to keep the horses out. It is impossible to keep the pack of dogs from going everywhere. They run in a group of 30 or 40 hounds. They are all running low to the ground, sniffing and barking and splintering off into smaller groups and then re-grouping. The rushing running dogs become a liquid mass. When they arrive following a scent, they are everywhere, and there is no controlling their movements. I hate The Hunt but I cannot hate the dogs.

I dragged a long ladder across one narrow access point. Then I parked the car in order to block the way to the lawn and I tied ropes across from the car door handles to a few trees. The opening down at the bottom of the meadow was the hardest place to block off. I used ropes, a long plastic pipe and a cardboard sign. The problem there is that there is a good chance the horses will jump in from Joe’s field and come across the lower meadow. By blocking them running in from one direction I am also blocking them going out again. I know that the Mass Path is badly overgrown so the horses will not be able to ride up that way. I was exhausted by my efforts. The long ladders are too heavy for me.

Simon was neither interested nor bothered by the imminent arrival of The Hunt. He did nothing to aid me in the blockading. He did not even want to listen to my ideas for keeping the horses off the land. I spent all day rushing in and out of the house, listening for the baying of the hounds. They never came. The fox led the whole circus somewhere else. It is dark now and I cannot decide if I am relieved or disappointed that they did not come after my sleepless night of planning, and all of the rushing around this morning. I hope that the fox evaded them. I hope the dogs did not corner him and rip him to pieces.

7 November Tuesday

Being in and out of hospital several times, and then in both Rathkeeven and Clogheen with his ongoing lung infection has been difficult for Tommie. As a result of his bad lungs, we have not taken a shopping trip together for at least three months. Maybe four. I took Tommie in to Dunnes’ Stores today. He never considers going anywhere else. He was waiting for me wearing a clean sweater and his suit jacket when I arrived to collect him. He had been up since 6. He had promised to make a shopping list but he did not do it. I got him headed into the store with a trolley while I went to park the car. He found the going difficult in the supermarket. Each time I found him in an aisle, he sent me off to find something he wanted but could not find. His legs were weak and even while leaning heavily onto his trolley, he did not find the going easy. I did a lot of running back and forth offering him choices and often arriving with the wrong things. How could I know that when he said he will eat any soup at all what he really meant was that he hates chicken soup?  The woman at the till recognized him and she talked and flirted a bit. He has been talking with this check out woman for decades. She remembered his wife Margaret fondly. He perked up with the extra attention but he was glad to sit into the car when we got to it, and he was happier still to sit down in his chair when I got him back to the house.

9 November Thursday

We have some firewood but we need more firewood. Johnny the Timber is all out of wood so we need to find a new source. We are all thinking about firewood: where to get some and how much to order and what kind of wood is best. We are stacking the wood and moving the wood and stacking more under cover and in good rotation of the other already stored firewood. We eye piles of timber in other yards.  We experience firewood envy. We do not use peat. We tried it many years ago but found it soporific. A peat fire puts me to sleep. The government has now banned the cutting and burning of peat for ecological reasons and many people are outraged. They consider the cutting, drying, stacking, gathering and burning of peat out of the bogs to be an inalienable right of every Irish person.

10 November Friday

A toothbrush seen on the ground in a busy city or town or in a train station or an airport is not much of a surprise.  People are always in a rush and people are always dropping things. A toothbrush spotted while out walking on the short stretch of tarmacadam road is a something to think about.

11 November Saturday

At first I thought that the small amount of green growth inside the wheel well of the car was just stuff that had been thrown up and inside while driving through the muck and mud at the farm.  Now I see that some of it is growing.  I have a healthy nettle growing out of the side of the car.

13 November Monday

The three dogs down at the McGrath farm own their bit of road. Some days they move when a motor car comes along but some days they do not move, not for cars nor for tractors. They watch a vehicle coming along and then they watch some more. They are interested in anything that might happen, but because not much happens, there is more watching than looking or chasing. If I toot my horn they might move, but they might not.  If they do move, they do not move quickly. Most days it is easiest to weave around them.

14 November Tuesday

Hazel announced that she loves nothing better than stripping the carcass of a cooked chicken. She loves getting every bit of meat off the bones before throwing them into a pot for a broth. She swears that the fat in the flesh keeps her hands lovely and soft.

15 November Wednesday

The morning is bright and crisp. From inside the house, the world looks wonderful. The fields are bright green. The sky is mostly blue. There are yellow and orange leaves on the trees. But one step outside and the world stinks. The smell of slurry pervades. I gag because the smell is so strong and sharp. It burns the back of my throat and it makes my eyes water. The smell is astringent and it hurts.

16 November Thursday

I nearly fell out of my stand up! I hear this expression often, but it never fails to delight me. Somewhere else a person would say that they were so astonished that they almost fainted.  Falling Out of My Stand Up is a much more exciting way to say the same thing.

Arrive & Jive

29 November Wednesday

The Aer Lingus flight from Boston was full of shoppers.  People might have gone over to celebrate Thanksgiving with family but it was obvious that the larger lure was for the long weekend of Black Friday shopping.  Every single person who boarded the plane was wearing new clothes.  Everyone was wearing new clothes and they were looking carefully at everyone else to see what they were wearing. New boots. New shoes. New trousers, belts and jackets.  New hats. The Must-Have item was  apparently a hooded sweatshirt. Two thirds of the passengers wore a brand new hooded sweatshirt. The passengers eyed one another, checking out purchases, as well as commenting and comparing places and prices.  There was a fair bit of bragging and oneupmanship. It was a hugely competitive atmosphere. And that was all before we sat down and fastened our seatbelts.

On arrival at Shannon at 5 am, the luggage carousel was full of enormous outsized suitcases.  The suitcases were so heavy that men had trouble dragging them off the carousel and pulling them up onto their trolleys. Some couples had four huge heavy cases between them, plus their carry-on bags. There was no doubt that the cases were full up with their shopping bounty. In comparison, our small lightweight cases looked like something made for dolls.

Shannon Airport is surrounded by its car parks. There is a short term car park and a long term car park.  Even at the furthest distance from the terminal building it is never more than a six minute walk to one’s car. For this trip, we decided to try the on-line car park because we thought it would be a cheaper option for the number of days away. When I am on my own I usually take the bus. After eating toast and drinking tea in the single restaurant in the terminal, I left Simon and walked out to the on-line car park.  Perhaps there is a courtesy bus that travels between this car park and the terminal but it was not visible when we parked, at about noon on the way into the airport for our outgoing flight, nor was it visible, if it does indeed exist, at that early hour.  I walked a kilometre to get to the car in the dark, seeing not a single person nor a  single vehicle. I was not surprised by the lack of bus service, the lack of outdoor lighting nor by the emptiness of the area. I was just glad that it was not raining. This is not an early morning kind of country.

1 December Friday

The same man who arrived a few weeks ago as the messenger from The Master of the Ardfinnan Hunt came again today. He told me that The Hunt will be around on Saturday. He said that they will be in the area, but that this time they will be without the horses.  It is difficult to imagine how this might work.  The dozens of beagles and other assorted dogs will run and rush around in their excited and frenzied pack but I cannot imagine how the men will be able to keep up with them on foot. The dogs are trained to come to the sound of the horn. I always dread the arrival of The Hunt but this time I am kind of curious as to how it will work.  I am wondering if the men will be wearing their snug fitting hunt jackets, jodphurs, high boots and their little helmets, or will they be in jeans and fleeces and wellie boots? I think that there is less chance than ever that they will catch the fox.

2 December Saturday

I took Tommie some of the small German stollen cakes that he loves.  It is only at this time of year that I can buy them. I try to take them to him as often as I can. The marzipan inside the stollen reminds him of Knocklofty House. He enjoys an excuse to talk about Knocklofty House. He was remembering the IRA kidnapping of Lord and Lady Donoughmore from the Big House in 1974. He said that there was no harm to anyone out of it all and that there was never even a ransom demand.  He told me that the couple were dropped off in the Phoenix Park in Dublin, still in their pyjamas after five days, and they had to be driven back home to Tipperary.  Lady Donoughmore had claimed that it was a wonderfully exciting adventure and she recounted the story about it for years.  Tommie said that she was a fine and spirited woman and that she smoked cigarettes.  He said that was the done thing at the time.

3 December Sunday

Once again the threat of the arrival of The Hunt came to nothing.  I heard the dogs in the distance up the hill in the direction of Donal Keating’s fields, but we saw nothing.

4 December Monday

Croan is going to bring us some firewood. He is our new source of timber.  He was not certain about exactly where we live so he asked me to text him our Eircode. When we were first assigned an Eircode, in 2015, the government was very polite about the new post code system.  Every house and every business was given its own seven letters and numbers.  We were assigned the code but we were told in the most agreeable way possible that we did not have to use it at all if we did not want to use it. So no one used it. It appeared that there was no reason to use it.  Slowly the Eircode has become essential.  Couriers as well as the post office, require it to locate addresses and increasingly the Eircode is typed into a phone or a GPS system to locate any business or home. We are less apt to find people driving around the roads in desperation looking for a person to ask about another person so that they can deliver something. The Eircode gets everyone to wherever they need to go. And now we are using it to get a double load of firewood delivered.

5 December Tuesday

Róisín paints Brown Furniture. It is what she does for a living. She goes to car boot sales and second hand shops and she buys up the old dark furniture that she says no one wants anymore. Sometimes the furniture is heavy and cumbersome, but sometimes it is just cheap lightweight stuff that has been heavily varnished to make it look sturdy and imposing. She tells anyone who will listen that no one wants Brown Furniture any more. She says it sucks the air out of a room. She is scornful when she speaks of Brown Furniture. Sometimes she strips the varnish off a piece and sometimes she merely sands it a bit, before she paints it in light pastel tones.

6 December Wednesday

It is raining hard. It has been raining hard all day.  The downpour is torrential.  There are rivers of water running down the road. There is news of flooding. We wanted peas with our supper.  The peas were in the freezer. The freezer is out in the shed.  I put on my rubber boots and a raincoat and a hat. I walked outside with a flashlight and an enamel cup.  The cup was for the peas.  I could fill the cup in the shed while standing beside the open freezer and that way I would not have to make two trips to the shed and back. If I did not take a cup with me I would have to bring the bag of frozen peas into the house and then walk back out again to return the bag to the freezer. Saving one round trip was an imperative considering the deluge.

8 December Friday

Pascal is the retired Garda who drives around the area delivering medicines and prescriptions for O’Brien’s pharmacy.  He delivers to people who cannot get out or to those who do not drive.  Everyone knows him and everyone trusts him. He knows everyone and if he does not know them, he knows how to find them. He is also always willing to do other errands if people need things.

11 December Monday

Every year the post office offers a free national stamp with every ten stamps purchased. This year there is a special booklet of twenty stamps with two free stamps in it.  In addition to the free stamp, there is also a free Christmas card with every ten stamps purchased. These are small gifts from the government.

The Cough Bottle.

19 December Tuesday

In these weeks before Christmas, there is not a till nor counter in any shop without a bowl or tub of individually wrapped chocolates on offer for each and every customer. It is a little gift offered by a shop to its customers. Cadbury’s Roses. Heroes. Quality Street. In the butcher shop in Ardfinnan, there is a tin of Celebrations. People take a chocolate and chew on it while they are waiting their turn. Then they take another one after they have paid. The same sentence is repeated in every shop: You can worry about The Waistline in the New Year!  The dentist did not offer me chocolate today, but he did give me a pen with his name and telephone number on it.

20 December Wednesday

After not finding Tommie at home, I rang around to find him. It was not easy.  Eventually I located him. He is back in the hospital. Today I went to visit. He is in a ward with three other men. All of the men had visitors. Visiting hours are a lively and noisy time. The fluids support stand at the end of his bed was a free standing device. There were no bags hanging on it, so I hung my jacket on one of the empty hooks. Tommie reprimanded me and told me that the nurses would not be happy for me to be using the stand as a coat rack. The nurses were in and out of the ward and not one of them seemed to notice my jacket. Tommie is never happy to disobey rules nor to question authority. I left my coat where it was. After he told me three separate times to move it, I moved it.

21 December. Winter Solstice.The Shortest Day.

Another day of wild and noisy wind. The wind has been thrashing us for days and days.  It never stops. The noise is deafening. Today the label on the post box blew off. The label was a piece of duct tape with the word POST written in thick black letters. The lid of the post box blew off too, even though there was a rock holding it down. The rock and the lid blew off together but the lid did not go too far. I now have a larger rock on top of the box. The duct tape has been blown far away. It has disappeared completely.

22 December Friday

A tractor tooted its horn as it drove past me on the road. There was a length of blue and silver tinsel dangling from the side mirror.

23 December Saturday

Seamus has plenty of old batteries around the place. Some are car batteries and the other larger ones looked like they had been for his tractor. He uses two batteries to hold up the drooping shed door and a few more are clustered around as a way to gather like with like.

24 December. Sunday. Christmas Eve.

Tommie has been moved to Rathkeevin. He is in a room with one other man. This man spends all day in the Day Room. Tommie does not go to the Day Room. He was in a cranky mood when I visited today. His legs are giving him a lot of discomfort. He said he hopes that no one comes to visit on Stephen’s Day as he wants to give the horse racing his full attention. I promised him that I would not be visiting on that day. He asked me to spread the word.

26 December. Tuesday. Stephens Day.

I walked out along the narrow road to Ladys Abbey in between downpours. Thick ivy has covered nearly every bit of the stone building.  The shapes of the ruined Abbey exist as things somewhere between topiary and architecture.

27 December Wednesday

A pigeon has been massacred and eaten outside the door to my workroom. It was the fox who killed, ate and left the mess.  There was nothing I could do except sweep up the remains so that I do not step in them. I threw the whole mess over the stone wall.

29 December Friday

Everything remains closed. Shops and businesses are locked up tight. Supermarkets, petrol stations and pharmacies are open, with restricted hours, but nothing else is open. The Twelve Days of Christmas go on for twelve days.

31 December. Sunday. New Years Eve.

The shelf in Marie’s sitting room was narrow. It was made out of a single piece of wood. The shelf was just wide enough for a single can. Lined up along this shelf were seven spray cans of air freshener. Each can offered a different scent, or flavour. The caps were all different colours.  Marie was proud of her selection of smells. She had them spread out with a little bit of space between each can, just to make certain that each one could be individually admired. She waited for me to say something about the selection of cans but I found myself speechless.

1 January. New Years Day. Monday 2024

I brought in three wheelbarrow loads of firewood this afternoon. Already I can hear a wasp buzzing around the room. He came in with the wood. The heat has woken him up and now he floats around in a sleepy stupor. He is dopey but noisy.  If I can catch him I will toss him out the door.  The cold will probably kill him but perhaps he will find his way back to some timber for more sleep.

2 January Tuesday

There is water everywhere. From a distance it looks like the Knockmealdown mountains drop directly down into a lake. It is not possible to see the far edges of the lake. The river is no longer a river. The river is part of the huge lake that covers every field in sight. It is beautiful but it is not good. There are swans on the lake where there are usually sheep in the field.

3 January Wednesday

I went to the pharmacy to get something for Simon’s cold and cough. I described his condition. The pharmacist said: “What you need is The Cough Bottle.” No one ever speaks of cough syrup. It is always The Cough Bottle.

4 January Thursday

I asked at the shop if they had any frozen spinach.  The woman at the till said No.  Not only did they have no frozen spinach but she said that they have never had any frozen spinach. She said I was the first person who had ever even asked for it.

6 January. Twelfth Night. Little Christmas. Nollaig na mBan. Women’s Christmas.

Today is the day for the tree to come down and the decorations and the cards and the wreathes to be put away or thrown away. If one has all of these jobs to do, the day is a busy one. The putting away and returning the house to how it was before the holidays can be a lot of work. At the end of this day, women are supposed to take time for themselves. To share food with other women and to have the evening off after doing so much work during the extended holiday. Clearing the way to take the evening off seems like a small reward indeed.

Harmless.

10 January Wednesday

Joe’s field stands two metres above the boreen. The boreen passes inches beside the house and the field sits above it. It is a peculiar situation. The machine cutting the hedges is roaring by at that height. It is necessary to look out the window and then to bend one’s neck upward in order to see the angled cutter crashing through the growth. The third time the tractor with its cutting machinery passes by, the side of the house is pelted with sticks and branches and thorny pieces of the hedges. It makes a racket. We can hear nothing in the big room until it passes. It feels like the house is under attack from something bigger than hail. The loud mechanical metallic chewing, tearing and spluttering makes it sound like something dangerous. Thwack. By the fourth time the tractor roars by, the sound is more even aggressive as the pieces being spewed at the house have been getting both smaller, and more plentiful. The hedge cutting man finishes the job in darkness with bright lights on the top and front of the tractor to guide him. After he departs, the silence is profound. I could go out with a torch and examine the scattered detritus, but I think I will wait until the morning.

12 January Friday

The man had only just been buried, so people were eager to say something good about him. The worst thing you can say about a man is that he was Harmless. That is a kind of insult. In the shop, I overheard several women reminding each other that Jack had been a great dancer in his day. When I reported this comment to Tommie, he told me Not To Believe A Word Of It. He said that Jack was not a good dancer, only that he himself thought he was. He said that Jack had spent his whole life two beats behind any music and that his wife learned to follow his lead even though she was well able to follow music properly herself.

20 January Saturday

The bathroom is cold. The entire house is cold but the bathroom is extremely cold. It is not a place to linger. The towel rack, made of copper pipes and built by our plumber friend, John, a long time ago, was intended to function as the radiator in the room. It is hooked up to the pipes where a radiator would have been. It is wide and generous, but it does not do much to spread warmth. I enjoy looking at it on the rare moments when there is not even one towel hanging upon it.

21 January Sunday

Two days of wild and battering wind. They are calling this storm Isha. There are multiple weather warnings as well as lots of rain. The rain is not falling but it is being blown in different directions by the endlessly gusting winds. Yesterday it was too wild to venture anywhere at all. Today I drove to the shop. On the way home, I had to stop the car twice to get out and drag large branches off the road. Neither branch had been on the road when I drove down to the village. Each had fallen while I was at the shop. One was large and heavy and I could scarcely shift it. The other one was not so big but it was large enough that I did not want to drive over it.

22 January Monday

All flights in and out of the country were cancelled yesterday because of the wind. Flights trying to land in both Dublin and in Belfast were re-directed to Paris. Thousands of people lost their electricity. We had our candles ready but we did not need them.

23 January Tuesday

Three plastic feed bags from the Italian firm Mazzoleni have been blown down from the farm over the last few days. They have arrived at different times. The bright white and red and black of the bags is cheerful and a stark contrast to the heavy grey sky.

24 January Wednesday

Today is calm. There is no wind. There is barely any sound at all. The world feels different. The sun is out, as are the snowdrops.

25 January Thursday

A letter for an appointment at the hospital always arrives in a sealed brown envelope with a piece of clear tape over the flap, for extra security.

26 January Friday

Another calm morning.  It would be beautiful except for the stench of slurry. I know when Slurry Spreading will happen because the big blue hose is visible in the farmyard.  I think it is used to bring the slurry from the holding tank into the mobile spreading unit. I do not really need to see the hose. The sharp smell tells me what is happening.

27 January Saturday

I repaired my cardigan. Again. This cardigan is old. It might be twenty five years old. It has stretched and drooped and it is now long and shapeless. It is big enough that I can wear it on top of any number of bulky garments. There are many small repairs. The sleeves were shredding a few years ago. I rolled the cuffs up a little bit and stitched them into position. Today I repaired another unraveling down the front that kept getting caught on things. It is not a beautiful repair but I am pleased with my efforts to keep the sweater going in this cold house.

28 January Sunday

Tommie had three outdoor hats laid out on the back of his armchair. He had three spectacle cases on the table in front of the television. He had three glasses of water beside him on the big table. One glass was half empty. He told me that he has been told to drink three big glasses of water every day but he does not enjoy drinking water so he avoids it. The three glasses were placed right beside him so that he could not forget.

29 January Monday

The word Mind is used frequently. It is used in the sense of taking care and watching out: Mind the Child. Mind One Another. Mind Yourself.

30 January Tuesday

My egg sizing device is one of my favourite things.  It is a scale for measuring one egg at a time: Small. Medium. Large. Extra Large.  I have a rubber egg which I keep in position on the little curved hand.  I think the purpose of this egg is to be hidden in a nest to encourage a chicken to lay.  I have no chickens so I keep the rubber egg on my sizing machine. Because the egg is rubber and lightweight, it frequently gets knocked off the little curved platform , and then it bounces away.  Sometimes I have several spent days looking for it, but it always turns up again.

A Fine Flat Acre

31 January Wednesday

The birds are voracious. The more frequently I fill the nut feeders the more they eat and the more quickly the feeders are emptied. I am always rushing to give them more even when it is raining and I should think they would want to be under cover.  They eat and eat and eat.

1 February Thursday-The first day of spring

I have walked greyhounds at PAWS, a local rescue facility for dogs. They sent each of us volunteers out with one dog at a time. On a normal morning, I walked four different greyhounds. There are a lot of homeless greyhounds because Coursing is a popular racing event in this country. I cannot call it a sport. After a dog passes his or her best racing days, it is retired. Cruel people cut off part of the dog’s ear where a number has been tattooed so that the dog cannot be tracked back to its owner. Many dogs get dumped on a road far from home, with or without a bleeding ear. Some of them get hit by cars.  A lot of them end up in rescue centers. The rescue places are full to overflowing with greyhounds. I have been told that some get sent abroad to live as pets. They are gentle and easy companions. The Italians love greyhounds. I love them too. I like to imagine a retired greyhound living out its life sleeping under the trees in a sunny olive grove. I miss having a dog. Each time I see the red van from the Greyhound Trust, I am tempted to give a home to an aging greyhound.

2 February Friday

Looking through the Farmers Journal is never dull. I enjoy seeing advertisements for machinery I have no use for and most of which I do not understand. I do like the idea of the Calving Cameras. It is not hard to figure out their function. A farmer can sit in the warm comfort of home while fully alert to a cow going into labour.

.

3 February Saturday

Simon spent the entire day at the hospital. He was there for eleven hours. It was not so much that he was poorly as that the health system is broken and there are simply not enough people to make it work efficiently. He was surprised to see a priest moving around in the Accident and Emergency ward. The priest was a middle-aged black man wearing a long grey cassock and moving from person to person asking if they would like The Blessing of the Throat. He was carrying two fat white candles which he held crossed against a person’s throat as he said the blessing. Simon refused the blessing, but he watched with interest as every other person, including the nurses and porters on duty, accepted the offer. We are always reminded that this is remains a heavily Catholic country.

4 February Sunday

Breda, Siobhan and I drove up into the mountains.  We had decided on the route just off the Mount Mellary road, at the Tipperary-Waterford border. We could have walked right and climbed straight up but we went left, through a broken gate and continued up a just visible track and then circled around the hill in a large loop that took us off a recognizable track through thick heather and lots of mud. It was difficult and slow going with a strong wind against us on the uphill part, but the day was clear and dry and beautiful.

5 February Monday St Brigid’s Day Bank Holiday

This is only the second year of the new three day weekend celebrating St. Brigid. Her official Feast Day is 1 February which is the First Day of Spring. She is regarded as the patron saint of dairy farmers, cattle, midwives, babies, computers, blacksmiths, and beer. She is one of three patron saints of Ireland and the first female saint to be celebrated with a national holiday. It seemed an auspicious day to walk up to Lady’s Abbey.

6 February Tuesday

Torrential rain all day. It is difficult to think. The rain from inside the house sounds loud. When inside an automobile, the sound is impossible. The roads are running with water and floods are promised.

7 February Wednesday

The boreen is lined with dry stone walls on both sides. There is growth both over and through the walls. The stones are barely visible. When a rock falls out and onto the track, it is not possible to drive around it. The boreen is too narrow. It is too narrow for both a stone and an automobile. The only solution is to get out of the car and to move it, if I can. If it is too heavy, I roll it along to a gap where it might rest until someone stronger comes along. Stones tumble out for any number of reasons. A lot of heavy rain can cause a section of wall to loosen. A fox, a badger or a cat using a regular path through the hedge and wall as it moves into or out of a field can cause a stone to be dislodged. Today I walked up and found that a medium sized stone had rolled down, probably because of yesterday’s all day torrential downpours. I picked it up with two hands and lifted it up over my head to heave it over the hedge. It hit the thick dense branches, bounced back and hit me hard on the shoulder. I am lucky that it did not hit me in the head. I spent the rest of my walk, with a sore shoulder and upper arm, working on a murder mystery in my head. I was trying to figure out how the victim could be hit by a stone in a similar manner and killed, and the ensuing confusion about who threw it at them.  I gave up before I got back home. I decided that such a death would be considered a suicide, or perhaps a death by misadventure, rather than a murder.

8 February Thursday

Yesterday I drove Tommie into town for a shopping trip at Dunnes’.  The day was bright and dry.  It was as unlike the day before as it could be. Tommie was happy to be traveling out in such perfect weather but he was not prepared for the outside world nor did he remember a shopping list. Walking into the store made him feel confused. He forgot what he wanted to purchase and his legs were too weak for the necessary standing and walking. I ran around and up and down the aisles fetching the things he wanted and returning them when I got it wrong. It is hard to locate the right kind of foot cream in a brown container that starts with the letter A, or the correct kind of soup when he says that he likes all soup but really that does not include tomato soup or chicken soup. It means that he only wants leek and potato soup but how could I know that if he did not say it. It was an exhausting trip for both of us. I drove him home with a different and slightly meandering route so that he could view changes in the neighborhood and ask questions about things. We pulled over and watched the work being done around the land of the cottage once lived in by Liam Boyle’s mother.  He called the land A Fine Flat Acre and informed me that Liam had a piggery a corner of the land at one time.  When I got him back into his house with his messages unloaded and spread out on the counter in his kitchen, he announced that his Bad Knee is A Friend For Life. He said that he needs to give up any possibility of it ever getting better.

9 February Friday

Taking the walk up the Mass Path after so long has been wonderful.  It was so densely overgrown in the autumn that it was impassable. Now a lot of the brambles and tangles have died back.  Some hunters have been through and they whacked their way through the vegetation. There is a lot of deep mud as well as a few fallen trees to crawl underneath, but the favorite circuit that I call Going Around is an option once more. I took one heavy fall into the mud. Next time I must take a stick to do my own whacking and to avoid landing in the mud. Again.

10 February Saturday

I miss the presence of language which people in towns and cities take for granted, or perhaps they find it annoying. There are plenty of signs in nature but there are rarely words to read as I walk the fields and lanes. There is plenty of machinery to look at. I am curious about a lot of things because I do not know what they are being used for or what a covered trailer is carrying. I am curious about these functions but not curious enough to ask questions to find out about them. I just enjoy being curious and considering my own solutions.

Weather is Not Everything.

11 February Sunday

We stood in cold bright sunshine waiting for the bus. We were early. A school marching band was practicing for the St Patrick’s Day parade. We watched them through wide cast-iron gates. A clump of tiny girls with blue and gold pom-poms came first. It was good to know that they have another 5 or six weeks to get better. They were completely chaotic. They needed a lot more practice. Then came the band, followed by older girls with full sized flags. They twirled and waved their flags, marching with high knees, and sweeping the ground with the fabric of their flags. A woman stood beside me and pointed out her grandchildren, as well as assorted nieces and nephews. It appeared that she was related to half of everyone and proud of them all. They circled the old army barracks three times before the Dublin bus arrived and we all got on, leaving the marchers marching.

12 March Tuesday

Some bus journeys are noisy, with chatter and laughter and music and the pinging noises of mobile phones. Some bus drivers keep the radio turned up loud for the entire trip. Today’s bus was a quiet bus. The driver barely spoke to people as they boarded. He was neither a talkative nor a welcoming driver. There was not much conversation among the passengers either, and what conversation there was, was subdued. As we traveled south from Dublin airport, our driver pulled over at the side of a busy road. The place where he stopped was not a bus stop. He walked to the center of the bus, down two steps and into the teeny toilet.  He did not say a word.  We waited. We waited for a long time. The bus was completely silent. No one spoke. Eventually the driver came out of the toilet and he went back to the front of the bus, sat down and drove away. He never said a word. Neither did anyone else.

13 March Wednesday

Joe explained that the woman was a small woman and that she was Low to the Ground, but he added that she was a fierce lady with a dangerously quick temper. For emphasis, he added: She’d eat you without salt!

14 March Thursday

After making a house call, the doctor told him that he must go to the hospital, but Tommie said that he had had enough of hospitals and that he would prefer to stay at home. The doctor told him that he is Dancing Close to the Rim, but finally agreed to allow Tommie to stay at home. He has returned three times now to check up on his patient. Tommie told me that he is not a whole lot better, but that he is no worse.

15 March Friday

It had been a lovely day. The sun was out and there had been no rain and we all felt a bit of hopefulness. In this atmosphere of weather optimism, almost everyone had come out without wearing enough warm clothing. Michael Hickey died on Wednesday. We attended his wake in Cashel today. The line of people waiting to pay their respects stretched all the way up the street. The pavement was full. Everyone was talking quietly to the people around them. People left their place in the queue and went to speak to other people along the way. The forward movement into the building was slow. The late afternoon was cold and getting colder, but no one complained about the wait. The shock of Michael’s untimely death was foremost in every single conversation. He was too young. Too healthy. Too funny. Too full of life and vigor and plans and always full of his usual questioning manner. The word tragic was frequently used.

After an hour, we finally entered the hallway of the funeral home where we signed the book of condolences and we waited some more. I was distracted by a model of the funeral home itself. It had been built by a 92 year old man and painted by someone else who was related to the family of undertakers. There was a small sign on the front of the building explaining these facts. I was impressed by the model and I pointed it out to those around me. No one seemed particularly interested but I did feel that Michael himself would have had something both funny and appreciative to say about it. He would not have failed to acknowledge the model building. It had an extremely steep pitch on the roof. I made a note to myself to look at the actual roof of the building when I went outside. And I wondered if there was a tree beside the building, mirroring the one painted on the side of the model. When we finally entered the room where Michael was laid out in his coffin, we spoke with Ute and her two sons. She consoled and thanked every person graciously for coming. It was as though it were her job to give kindness and sympathy rather than to receive it. She gave each person a careful and personal amount of attention which is why the line was so slow to move. Not one person minded the wait.

16 March Saturday

I did not know what the structure was as I approached it. From afar, it looked like a bit of mad archway architecture but it had never been there before. It was not until I smelled the stench of the slurry that I understood. The hose for carrying the slurry from the tank to the fields where it was to be spread, had been lifted up and off the road with a digger extended upwards. Cars and people could pass under rather than driving over the hose. It was high enough that even the big milk tanker could pass underneath without a bother. Sometimes metal ramps are placed on the road to prevent and guide cars from driving over the actual hose. This was a much more exciting solution.

18 March Monday Bank Holiday

Everyone is weary of the rain.  It falls endlessly and even when a day begins clear, the dryness does not last. The rain arrives in gusts or drizzles or torrential downpours. It is soft or it is hard and noisy. It arrives in all forms but what it does not do is stop.  There is so much mud and there are such big puddles. As both a topic of conversation and a state of being, we are all tired of the rain.

19 March Tuesday

Burke’s Ironworks in Cahir has painted black gateposts on the outside of their building. On the wall, they then attach examples of their cast-iron gates. The real gate is attached to the illusion of a gatepost. Sometimes a gate is removed and delivered to a house or a farm and then the posts stay empty for a while until a new gate is fitted onto the wall.

20 March Wednesday

The doctor told me that she is originally from Iraq, but that she has been in this country for twenty-three years. She feels that this is a good and gentle place to be. There have been no wars and she feels certain that there will be no wars. She said Ireland is A Safe Place to Live. She said that safety is the best thing that anyone can hope for. She has never been back to Iraq and she said that she will never return. She has no family there any longer. She is happy to be here even though the weather is damp and often grim. She finished by saying that weather is not everything.

21 March Thursday

I saw the first primrose today. My initial thought is that it is early but then I think that I think this every year. In spite of all the rain that has been falling almost without cease for three or maybe four months, a lot of things are suddenly in flower. The magnolia tree up at the farm is glorious. Primrose. Stitchwort. Gorse. Lesser Celandine. Dandelions. Flowering currants. Fruit trees are in blossom. There are many late daffodils. Wild garlic is everywhere with its shiny long leaves. No flowers yet but the fresh smell and taste is added to everything we eat.

23 March Saturday

The Madonna in the corner of the car park at the supermarket has been given several bunches of flowers wrapped in cellophane.

25 March Monday

Dalton’s Tyres have a waiting room that is made to look like a log cabin from the outside. Sometimes the door is wide open and sometimes it is closed to keep the heat inside for the person who is waiting to get their tyres replaced or for their wheel alignment to be completed. Inside, a small electric heater warms the cabin, and a television is always on, with or without any sound. There is a couch, a big chair and a stack of car magazines on the coffee table. It is bleak while it is trying to look like home.

26 March Tuesday

Siobhan and I drove past the field where Jackie Murphy’s lambs are grazing. We knew they were his sheep because there were two llamas in the field with the sheep. He is the only sheep farmer around here to have resident llamas. They are there to keep the foxes from attacking the baby lambs.  As a method, it works. He has not lost a single lamb since the pair of llamas have been on duty. I wonder if they will reproduce and that there will soon be more llamas.

27 March Wednesday

The Christmas poinsettia is now outside.  I had the idea that I could keep it going and growing in the house until the weather was warm enough to put it outdoors but I now accept that it is not meant to survive. A seasonal plant with built in limitations. I put it on the table near to Simon’s words.

28 March Thursday

“There’s going to be a Famine!” This is what Michael shouted to me across the passenger seat of his little van. The seat held a big green bucket that had recently held some form of animal feed. It was now empty, damp and needing a wash. I had pressed myself into the undergrowth to allow Michael’s van to pass but he did not pass, instead he had stopped and opened the window. He shouted some more. He said, “There is a crisis coming! The fields are too wet and the mud is so deep that machines cannot drive out over them. No one can plant potatoes. Or oats. Or grass for silage. No one can plant anything and if nothing is planted there will be nothing to eat. There will surely be a famine if this rain doesn’t stop!” He repeated his message about the impending famine a few more times, then he shook his head, saluted and drove on down the narrow lane.

30 March Saturday

We all hoped that Pat would have some asparagus on his table at the market today, but it is a bit early yet.  I came home with leeks and rhubarb.

After The Grand National

4 April Thursday

A second bright day. There is rain forecast for later but right now the day is bright and the sky is blue. The cows have been turned out and it appears that every field is full.

5 April Friday

I have received a summons to appear for jury duty. I sat on a jury some years ago and after that I was given a piece of paper saying that I need never do it again. The day that I was selected for that jury, I met an older woman in the car park who recognised me from the morning of jury selection. She had been among the initial group but she had not been chosen. She was deeply disappointed. The woman was nicely dressed. She wanted to appear tidy and respectable and reliable. I felt she was lonely and perhaps hoped for the activity of sitting on a jury with a group of people as a way to fill her days. She said that she was envious that I had been chosen. We talked for a few minutes and then she wished me luck.  As she turned away, the woman said, “And you, you are not even Irish.” I was not sure if I was meant to hear this. Nor was I certain if her comment was simply an observation or if she felt that someone born in the country should have priority in these situations.  I decided not to ask what she meant.

6 April Saturday

Storm Kathleen is bludgeoning us. We have been warned. The sound is endless and interrupted only by lashings of hard beating torrential rain. I watch the bird feeders being blown left and right and waving in the air fully horizontal. The birds hold on and they keep eating, no matter which way the feeders are blown.

8 April Monday

Forget-me-nots. Robin Run the Hedge. Honesty. Bluebells. Ferns. Harebells. Grape Hyacinths. Apple blossom. Wild Garlic flowers. Every day there are more spring flowers and plants to see. There are ones that I know and others that I do not have names for.  I am happy to see them all.

9 April Tuesday

The bright red board with yellow squares around the edges is in position to alert and to prevent anyone from backing into the structure behind it. I do not know what it is protecting but it is at the petrol station, so it is something to do with fuel.

10 April Wednesday

A shallykabukie is moving slowly across the window. I would not have noticed this snail in its striped shell except that I have been running to look out the window at the men above in Joe’s field. The men are replacing the utility pole. A few hours ago we lost our power. Looking on the ESB app, we found out that 452 houses had lost their electricity. The engineers were looking to locate the problem. Within the hour, 451 houses had their power restored. We remain without electricity. The pole beside us has fallen down. Its bottom is completely rotten and the weeks and weeks of unending rain meant that there was no way for it to remain standing. The afternoon is windy but dry. Eight men and two big JCBs arrived to do the job. Every so often, I run outside to watch and report on their progress.  Sometimes I just look out the window. The shallykabukie keeps making its way slowly across the window. By the time the electric is restored, it still has a long way to go.

11 April Thursday

The display for Signed Prayer Cards is large, and it is new. Twelve cards are on display for seven euros each. I asked Stacey why anyone would want to buy a card that is already signed by someone else. She explained that the cards are signed by the priest and also by the sender. The card is a guarantee to the recipient that the priest will mention the death or the illness of whoever the card is sent to during his next Mass. The priest will get everyone to pray together for that person. All for seven euro.

13 April Saturday

Breda told me that she saw the first swallow on the 9th. I have yet to see one myself, but I am on the look-out.

15 April Monday

Everyone is discussing The Grand National. Irish horses did very well on the day. Everyone is proud. The whole country is proud, even those who do not regularly follow the horses. A woman in the shop was thrilled that a horse named I am Maximus won Big. She announced to everyone in the shop that she should have bet on that horse. She was as excited as she might have been if she had actually bet on the horse. She said she should have bet on that horse because her dog is named Maximus. She said she would have bet on that horse if she had known his name and if she had someone to place a bet for her. She said that she had never before bet on a horse, not even once in her life and she did not even know how to place a bet but if she had known about this horse with the same name as her dog she would have surely bet on it and then she too would have won Big.

16 April Tuesday

Anthony told me that Mena was away in France for The Bones of Two Weeks. She might have only been away for eight or nine or ten days but by saying The Bones of Two Weeks, he meant most of that time. The implication is that there is not much left of two weeks by the time she returns. He could have said that Mena was away for a little more than a week but he did not. Mena is short for Philomena.

17 April Wednesday

I set off up the Mass Path.  I was pleased at how much drier things were, but then I stepped on a mossy rock and it was too slippery to hold me. I fell flat into the mud. I landed hard with my whole body. It was a thump that took my breath away but I felt proud that I had been able to keep my face from landing in the mud. I turned around and went back home. I was too wet and cold and heavy with clumpy mud all over my clothes and my hands to continue.

18 April Thursday

Five, maybe six, days now without rain. We are all reeling with pleasure. It is cold. The wind is sharp. But it is dry. Ploughing is being done in all directions. The tractors race along the roads from field to field. Everyone is in a hurry. Every field without cows or sheep in it is being prepared for planting. The whole district feels busy.

19 April Friday

Today I received notice back from the Courts Department. The letter excused me from Jury Duty with the expression: “on foot of the summons served on you…” I have been thinking about this terminology all day.

20 April Saturday

In my life, there continues to be a mix-up between the words call and ring. I always make the mistake of saying that I will call someone and they respond by saying: “Oh, no need to call! Just give me a ring.”  To call is to drop by and visit. Calling in on someone means they will be obligated to offer tea and maybe some biscuits. A call demands etiquette. A quick chat by phone is something else. When someone says that they tried to ring and the phone Rang Out, it means that no one picked up the incoming call. It rang and rang and there was no answer. When a number Rings Foreign, the person ringing can tell that the telephone is out of the country. I seem to be the only one who does not understand how the dial tone sounds different when the person at the other end of a phone line is abroad.

The Egg in The Window

17 May Friday

I was feeling deeply exhausted with a terrible headache and all kinds of muscle aches.  I finally decided that I was suffering from more than ordinary jet lag. I took a test and discovered that I had Covid. It seems unfair that I strolled all the way through the many months and years of the entire pandemic in Full Health and now I get this nasty variant that is making the rounds. I cannot write more. I must go and lie down.

20 May Monday

Simon has it too. No wonder we all worked so hard to avoid Covid during all of those many weeks. We are both feeling horrible and not really knowing how to identify one kind of discomfort from another. I must go and lie down.

22 May Wednesday

It is a month ago today that we heard the cuckoo. I had taken Barbara up into the Knockmealdowns to walk across to the Mass Rock and I promised her that if we were lucky we might hear the Cuckoo. We were lucky. Over the next few days, we told every single person we saw about hearing the cuckoo, and everyone we told was pleased and a little bit envious. There is an extremely short period of time in which to hear the cuckoo. Increasingly one needs to be far away from people and civilization, preferably in the mountains at the exact right time. Tommie told us that he had not heard one for fifteen years, or more.

24 May Friday

Each morning, I am woken up by birdsong. This is a good thing. They are busy and noisy all day long.

25 May Saturday

I am finally able to read again. It was impossible to read much of anything with the throbbing Covid headache. As always, I turn to the Maigret books of Georges Simenon when I am feeling fragile. I have devoured six in the last three days. It does not matter how many times I have read or re-read them. They always engage me. I must go and lie down.

27 May Monday

Other victims of this strain of Covid told us that we must expect that it will take at least three weeks to get over the deep fatigue. I did not believe them. Or I did not believe that I would fall victim to such debilitating exhaustion. Now I believe it. I am forced to believe it. I must go and lie down.

28 May Tuesday

Jacinta brought us a bottle of Vitamin Tonic from Maher’s Pharmacy. The owners make their own tonic from a special family recipe.  I have no idea what is in it but it tastes like root beer.  Jacinta promises that it will help to Put Us Right.  I am willing to believe anything if it makes me feel better.

31 May Friday

We have slowly been crawling up and out of the endless feeling of weakness. A small wander around the garden is plenty.  I can accomplish a few short jobs and that is all. Every day is punctuated with naps. Every time I feel that I am fully back to normal, I am overwhelmed with both physical and mental fatigue. It is an uphill battle. I must go and lie down.

1 June Saturday

The gooseberries are not ripe, but they are ripening. They are hard and not ready to pick yet. I hope they do not ripen too quickly. I know that I must watch them carefully. Last year the birds had many more of them than I had. I do not have the energy yet to go out and fight for my share.

3 June Monday

The day has been in and out with every kind of weather. Believing it to be a great drying day, I hung out a laundry. Torrential rain fell in the middle of the afternoon. The rain stopped and then the wind began gusting. The washing line snapped with the combination of the extra weight of sodden garments and turbulent surges of wind.

4 June Tuesday

Mary, the black cat, never comes down from the farm looking for food any more. The big black and white cat who used to fight her for scraps arrives, as does a bad-tempered tortoise shell cat who is happy to fight with the black and white one. I do not have names for these two. I do not like them well enough to give them names. I rarely put out food for them anymore. They can go up and drink milk and catch mice at the farm which is what they are supposed to do anyway. Two magpies swoop down to check out any dish that is left outside. When one of the magpies eats, the other one sits on the table watching and then they change places. Simon is as delighted with them as I was with Mary. He wants to make a bread and butter pudding for the magpies.

5 June Wednesday

Maura is old and she is not very well.  Her two younger brothers came to visit her recently because she might not live much longer. They wanted to say their goodbyes.  One of the brothers lives somewhere in England. Near Gloucester, I think.  The other brother has lived as a missionary priest somewhere in Africa for forty-six years. One morning the priest cooked breakfast for Maura.  It was an egg fried in a square hole that had been cut out of a slice of white bread. He called it The Egg in The Window. It is the only thing he knows how to cook.  Maura said the egg was overcooked, but she ate it and pretended that it was delicious.

6 June Thursday

Applications forms are now available for anyone wishing to enter the Clonmel Show. As always, I peruse the categories eagerly. My favorite is No. 21. 6 Fruit Scones

7 June Friday

Today is election day all over Europe. We are voting for local councilors, as well as for Members of the European Parliament. I knew there were a large number of people running for these offices. We have received pieces of paper every day. Each piece of paper has been the exact same size with a photograph of the candidate as well as information about their party, or their independence from any political party. Some times the information was in both Irish and English. Sometimes the piece of paper was delivered to the door by a candidate, but most of them arrived with the postman. With two voters in the house we received two of everything. Signs with faces have been posted on trees and on telephone poles. Their presence changes our landscape. I am ready for these faces to be gone. We went down to the grade school in the village to cast our votes. There were at least 25 names on the MEP ballot paper. It was printed on a very long sheet of paper. I liked that each person’s profession was listed: Nursing Lecturer, Architect, Bricklayer, Barrister, Farmer, etc.

8 June Saturday

I am feeling better and stronger every day. I am taking fewer naps. I do not feel all the way well, but the terrible weariness is finally fading.

11 June Tuesday

Last night, Breda convinced me to join herself, Siobhán and Jean for a walk in the mountains. She promised that it would be a gentle walk, and not too long. I said yes. I fell asleep wondering what I might take with me for my lunch. I knew we had no more bread, so I could not make myself a sandwich. In the morning, I changed my mind and said no. I did not know if I could make a two and a half hour walk. I did not want to slow the others with my weakness. Then I said yes, and off we went. We started at The Vee, just to the right of the painted arrow, and we climbed steeply for a bit.  When the path evened out, we walked along the side of Sugarloaf. We passed close by the Grubb Monument, which is the tomb of Samuel Grubb, a lapsed Quaker, who died in 1921. Before he died, at the age of 65, he designed a beehive shaped stone grave for himself. He said that he wanted to be buried standing up straight so that he could keep watch over ‘his people’ and ‘his fields’. He was indeed buried vertically, but locals claim that the men doing the entombing placed him into his grave upside down, so that his head is at the bottom, not at the top. He was not as popular with the masses as he thought he was. It is said that his dog is buried with him.

We continued down as far as Bay Lough and ate our lunch by the lake, the hills covered by masses of rhododendrons just coming into blossom. I returned home completely exhausted, but for the first time in weeks, it was a good kind of tired not the debilitating kind.

14 June Friday

Rain. Hail. Sun. Rain. Cloud. Rain. Hail. Hail. Sun. Hail.  Another day full of rapidly changing weather. It is not the same for more than a few minutes at a time.

Elderflower Cordial 2024

19 June Wednesday

The tortoise-shell farm cat has had kittens and they are living under the woodpile. Or in the bushes beside the lean-to, or in some section of the lean-to, but maybe not under the firewood. The kittens flee when I approach and the mother snarls and hisses at me. It is my lean-to full of my recycling buckets, paper piles and containers, as well as the firewood, but for now, this cat seems to think it is all hers.

20 June Thursday. Summer Solstice

Today is the Longest Day. The Shortest Night. There is a full moon promised.  The radio assures us all that we will not see another full moon on the Longest Day for seventy years.  I will miss this full moon because I will be asleep well before darkness falls. I will miss the next one too.

21 June Friday

Joe’s cows now wear collars. He told me that the cows have a chip embedded and that he can read all kinds of information about the cow and her health just by looking at his smartphone. He can measure how many kilometres the cow has walked, how much she is eating and if her tummy is giving her trouble. I am uncertain about the chip in the cow and about the function of the collar. Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe the collar contains the chip. Some of the older cows do not have a chip so they have been given a second yellow number tag in their ear as well as a collar. It is modern technology. A farmer needs only a smartphone and he can be fully informed about his herd without going out in bad weather.

22 June Saturday

Mam is what children call their mothers. Not Mum or Mom. Not Mummy or Mommy. Here it is always Mam, or Mammy. Or more formally: The Mother. Today, while in town, I saw a display of colourful plasticised messages on fake slates to put on a grave. Even after many years in Ireland, the word Mam surprises me.

23 June Sunday

The grass roof on the book storage and studio shed is in full bloom.  There is a tall blue wild flower growing up there among a variety of grasses.  The birds must have dropped the seeds there and every year there are more of these flowers.   I never see them anywhere else in the area, so I must assume that the eco-system on the roof is exactly right for this plant.

24 June Monday

My annual elderflower cordial has been prepared. Two batches. Immediately after I finished labeling my bottles,  I began to worry that I might not have enough cordial to last us through the winter. This obsession repeats itself every year. There are hundreds of the huge creamy white blossoms visible everywhere in the landscape.  I wake up in the morning in a panic wondering if I really do need to make a third batch.

25 June Tuesday

The building was built into a hill. There was a small café on the first floor with tiny tables scattered around outside, mostly along a narrow stone patio and on down the hill. The tables hugged the side of the building. We found a table out of the wind and right next to a window. After we ordered our food from the waitress, we looked into the window and saw that the room we were seeing was not the interior of the café, but the kitchen. It was downstairs from the café. The kitchen was further down the hill, as we were. We watched as our waitress walked down some steps into the kitchen. She put on a net hat and a long apron. She prepared our toasted sandwiches and a pot of tea. When everything was arranged on a tray, she removed her apron and her hat and walked up the stairs from the kitchen and came out the front door of the cafe and down the hill to serve us.

26 June Wednesday

If he sees something—an open padlock on a gate or a faded hat on a car seat—he has to take it. He is well known in the village for his pilfering. He has to take a thing because he can, not because he wants or needs the thing. Anyone leaving their motor car close to where he lives is always careful to lock it. Anyone who keeps a jar for the small brown coins has come home at least one time to find the jar empty.  He is known to step into a kitchen through the back door and to pour the coins into his pocket, then leave the jar to be refilled. No one, except his brother, ever enters the house where he lives. I imagine the rooms piled high with the things he brings home, but for which he has no use.

 

27 June Thursday

The fields and roads are full of tractors and combines and large machinery that I cannot name. Silage is being cut and bundled into plastic-wrapped bales. Usually the bales are black but today I saw some bright white ones. The bales are piled in the middle of fields or on the edges of fields near to a road waiting for collection. Some of the bales are piled beside a shed, or inside a shed. There are bales everywhere.

28 June Friday

I feel sad each year when the Cow Parsley passes. The white froth of the blossoms lines the roads and makes every journey feel thrilling. Now we are left with a dry, skeletal look to the verges. The Giant Hogweed grows taller by the minute. It is an invasive and horrible weed and if the sap from the stems gets on skin in the sunlight, it causes a painful blistering and weeping rash that takes many months to go away. The wide white flowers have none of the delicacy of Cow Parsley. People call it The Russian Weed because it is understood to have moved across Europe from Russia. It is tall. It looms on thick sturdy stems. It is threatening. Russia is blamed for this invasion.

Bog Cotton is another name always used in place of a proper name. While Russian Weed is mentioned with distaste, Bog Cotton is said with delight. It looks like a small tuft of sheep’s wool caught on a stem. I am told people used to collect the Bog Cotton to stuff their pillows. I can see that it would take a lot of Bog Cotton to fill up a pillow, even a small pillow. Cotton Sedge or Cotton Grass is the actual name and the name is not so different, but because Bog Cotton grows in the dampness of a peaty bog, it is always called Bog Cotton.

29 June Saturday

There was a busload of German tourists at the Farmers Market today. At first I thought they were Dutch but when I heard them talking I knew they were German. Their bus was a small bus. A mini-bus. But it was a full bus and the Germans had already been to the castle and for thirty or forty minutes before they all got back on their bus, they walked around the market admiring, discussing and photographing things. They called to one another and pointed out things not to be missed.  They all spent a long time looking at Ned Lonergan’s carved wooden bowls and egg cups.  Then one woman shouted and they all ran over to where she was. They were photographing the two nettles growing out of each side of the back of my car.  One is small but the other one has grown long and leggy. Every single person was checked before they got back on the bus.  If they did not yet have a photograph of my nettles they were sent back to get one. It had become a requirement that they each have this same souvenir photo.

30 June Sunday

I heard Simon shouting.  He was shouting at the cattle in the yard.  There were seven of them.  We thought that they had broken in from the adjoining field, but we were wrong. They had jumped over a fence from Joe’s upper field and through a space that had been opened up by yesterday’s enormous messy clearing of the ditches. They hopped down a steep banking onto the track. From there, they went with gravity, running downhill and into our garden.  The drop from their field was more than a meter.  I do not know why they did not break legs on the jump down, but they were young, frisky and nimble. We chased them up the boreen and I left Simon with a stick to guard the break-out place with orders not to let any more of the cattle jump.  They were mooing and moaning and shrieking at one another from the herd  in the field of one Joe across to the herd in the field of the other Joe. I reached the farm with the seven rushing ahead of me. They took off toward the road.  I was dialing numbers and trying to reach someone anyone on several phones, leaving messages and quickly dialing another number.  I ran in and knocked the door and went shouting into the open doors of the barns. There was no one anywhere.  I rushed back to try to distract the cattle from running to the road where they might be hit by a car.  They had already come back, perhaps to find me. As a group, they jumped up on a shelf of mowed grass about a metre off the ground and huddled there waiting to see what we might do next. I opened one gate into a field and closed off two other gates to try to contain and direct them. Cows do not come when called.  It is better to be behind them than in front of them. I knew this much. I hid off to the side in some bushes to encourage them to go through the open gate.  After about thirty minutes of this game, Joe appeared and he directed me and together we drove them through the open gate.  I walked him down and showed him where they had broken out and left him to sort out his fencing problem.

1 July Monday

Twice a day, the local radio station, Tipp FM, reads out the Public Service Announcements. These announcements are the reporting of deaths in the county. Each name and place of residence is read out, followed by the time and location of the wake and then the location of the funeral and burial on the following day. Married women are always listed first by their married name, and then by the name they were born with. This is done using the French word Née: Lily Crosse Née Tully, but the word Née is never pronounced like the French Née. It is pronounced strongly like KNEE, as if the word is capitalised and must be said loud: Lily Crosse KNEE Tully.

2 July Tuesday

Bernadette and Noel love toast. They do not eat bread unless it is toasted. Even bread that has been baked fresh in the morning and that is still warm and fragrant from the oven is toasted. So great is their dislike of eating untoasted bread that they own two toasters. The two toasters sit side by side on the counter top. They are terrified that if their toaster breaks they will have no toast. By owning two toasters, they can rest assured that they will not be caught short.

3 July Wednesday

The mother cat and her three, four or five kittens may have decamped. Up until now, each time I went under the lean-to to put things into bins or to deposit newspapers, cardboard, bottles, or plastics for recycling, the mother has bared her teeth and snarled at me. This is the same mother who comes whining and screeching at the kitchen door looking for food two or three times a day. This is the mother who have I resisted giving a name because I just do not like her enough to name her. I call her Mother, but I do not use the name in a friendly nor encouraging way.

5 July Friday

The weather continues to be unsettled. It is grey and overcast. It is not cold but it is certainly not hot. It does not feel like July. I took a bowl outside this morning and filled it with raspberries. I was wearing my pyjamas, determined to pretend to myself that this was a lovely early summer morning. Reaching deep into the leafy canes to get the ripest berries, I touched the back of both hands with nettles. All day I have been miserable with the tingling of nettle stings. The raspberries were gone by the end of breakfast, but the stinging lasted all day.

 

 

 

The Passing of the Plums

31 July Wednesday

I am picking black currants. I pick one huge bucketful and then I pick another huge bucketful. Black currants. More black currants. I am not filling bowls. I am filling buckets. The branches are so heavy with the shiny berries that they are dragging on the ground. I have given away a lot and we have made a beautiful rich sauce that we are pouring onto everything. We eat fresh handfuls of the currants on our cereal in the morning. I only grow the black ones. The birds have no interest in them. Birds go mad for red currants and for white currants, but they ignore black currants.

We made the sauce and froze a lot of it in small containers to bring out and eat in the coming months. I have bags and bags full of currants in the freezer. It would be nice if I made jam, but I am not a jam-maker, but I consider this every year.

While picking the currants, I sit on a plastic box, with a cushion and I listen to a novel being read to me on my telephone.

Sometimes I do not listen to anything. I just think. Today I was reminded of a young man who was invited to house-sit for some friends one summer. He was told instructed by the couple that he should help himself to the fruit and vegetables all ripening in the garden. The lady of the house emphasized that the black currants would be ready any day now and that he should be sure to enjoy those.

When the couple returned from their holiday they saw that the black currant bushes were still heavily laden with fruit but that the branches had been stripped of every leaf. In the freezer was a large quantity of white sorbet made by the young man.  It tasted intensely of black currants. Apparently the taste of the currants is more intense from the leaves than it is from the fruit. I often think of this, but as well as not wanting to be a jam-maker, I am not interested in making sorbet, though I am happy to eat it if someone else makes it.

1 August Thursday

Simon has many medical tests scheduled. He is required to have bloods taken and analyzed before some of the tests can be done. He went this afternoon to the nurse, had his bloods taken and then he was told that he had to take the samples up to the hospital himself because the blood for the day had been collected in the morning and if he did not take his to the hospital himself it would not get there until tomorrow, which would hold up everything. After explaining where to go to deliver the blood inside the hospital, the nurse gave him a second sealed plastic bag and said, “Since you are after going up there, you can take this other lady’s blood too. She does not drive, so she was not able to deliver it to the hospital herself.”

2 August Friday

The electric stove is not working. We blow fuses each time we try to use it. The electrician is on holiday in Canada. Any and all cooking must be done on the barbecue.

3 August Saturday

Once again, the morning is warm and bright. Discussion on Tipp FM was on the subject of sun screen for tractor drivers. There were a lot of handy tips for both farm workers and tractor drivers. One was not to leave your bottle of sunscreen on the dashboard of the tractor, but to keep it in one of your pockets. Another was to wear a hat all day both inside and outside of the tractor’s cab. If it is too hot for a long sleeved shirt, it is important to keep the arms well coated all day long. I am not sure why this advice is targeted only for farmers.

4 August Sunday

The plums from the Apple Farm are reaching the end of their season. Sadly, it is a short season this year due to the long wet springtime. I took a bowlful to Tommie. He loves plums. He loves most fruit. In less than a minute of me placing the bowl on his table, he had one of the plums in his mouth. He held the second plum up in the air between his thumb and his finger and he said, “These plums are at the Top of Their Game!”
He says this every year about the plums from The Apple Farm. Each time he ate a plum he placed the stone into the left hand pocket of his old cardigan. The front of the cardigan looks pretty good but both elbows are completely worn through. His plaid shirt underneath is exposed both halfway up and halfway down his arm. He told me that the elbows are no longer good for much, but that the pockets are just fine.

5 August Bank Holiday Monday

I have been studying the apple trees below in the meadow. Every apple on the lower branches has been eaten as have the leaves. My first thought was to blame another break out of cows, but there are no dollops of manure nor any big holes from the heavy hooves of cattle. And there are no apples on the ground. I do not think cows even like apples. It took a while to realise that it was the work of deer. We have never had deer around until this year but I have seen one running in and out of Scully’s woods. It must be the one who is eating the apples.

6 August Tuesday

Mike is closing up his garage at the end of the month. He has lost interest in repairing cars and the increase of both digitally programmed cars and electric vehicles is making his work harder and harder. It is too expensive for a small garage to invest in all the necessary equipment.  He might train as a paramedic. Or he might drive a bus. I will miss going to his garage and looking at all the bits of things he has around. Next week someone is coming to take away all of the old wrecks he has used for parts. His neighbour used the stationary cars to position his beehives for a few summers.

8 August Thursday

The shallow water butt is empty. This is a rare state of affairs. The moss around its edges has died. The bottom was full of some manky old sludge. This morning I scooped all of the sludge out. There is nothing to do now but to wait for some rain to refill it.

9 August Friday

Dote is never used as a verb, but always as a noun. A Dote is a cute person. Someone who is adorable or at the very least in possession of a sweet temperament. A Dote is usually female though a young child is often A Dote, be it male or female.

10 August Saturday

I delivered fresh strawberries directly from the Farmers’ Market to Tommie today. Together we lamented the Passing of the Plums. Even while expressing sadness about the need to wait until next year for more of those perfect plums, he dove right into his punnet of strawberries. He pulled the green hull off each strawberry before he popped it into his mouth. He lined the green parts up along his left leg. They looked like a little parade. We discussed the Olympics and the many medals won by the Irish this year and about the events that we enjoyed as well as those that we did not enjoy. He thought the athletes were all amazing and wonderful, but said that he would not be happy to sit down to talk with any one of them. He said, “Sure, they have no conversation but for themselves.”

 

11 August Sunday

The first load of wood shavings have arrived to be moved and stored for the winter cattle platform. I can hear the sound of the tractor going back and forth. The smell when walking through the yard is wonderful.

12 August Monday

We neither exit nor enter the book barn without accelerating. The beehive in the roof and just above the door is home to a big and busy swarm of honeybees. They do not bother us, but the noise of their buzzing makes us rush to get past them. The doorway is no place to linger.

13 August Tuesday

Before Brexit, a great many second-hand cars were imported from the United Kingdom. It was easy to drive a British car into the country and then to re-register it here. Since Brexit, it is impossible. The process of importing is so convoluted and so expensive and must involve so very many different shipping and customs agents, that it is now cheaper and more direct to import used cars directly from Japan. Like the Irish and the British, the Japanese drive on the left so their cars are right-hand drive and fit easily into life here.

14 August Wednesday

I am still picking black currants. The bushes keep producing. I go out every morning and gather enough for our bowls of cereal or porridge. The sharp tartness is a great way to begin the day.  I will be sorry when they stop producing, but I will be relieved to stop picking them.

15 August Thursday

I thought it was just me. I was sitting in the plastic chair with my feet flat on the ground and the edge of the chair snug behind my knees. There was no way I could lean my back against the back of the seat. If my back was straight then my legs could not bend. They would stick out straight into the room. I thought it was just myself sitting in this slouch but as I looked around I saw that five of the six other people were also slouched in their seats. One small girl was sitting cross legged on her chair. Perhaps this is the solution I should try. The chairs are new as is the whole waiting area for the car inspection place. The seat of the chairs are too deep for most bodies. A lot has changed about the ritual and the waiting at the NCT but when the inspector set off in my car, he tooted the horn as he drove around the corner and into the inspection bays. As a constant, the tooting of one’s horn is a cheerful way to begin the National Car Test.

16 August Friday

On Wednesday, I had the car washed in Ardfinnan in preparation for my inspection on Thursday. The man who washed it for me was a Ukrainian from Odessa. He trained as a Vet but he works here on a farm and part-time at the car wash because his English is not yet good enough to to get qualified to work as a veterinarian here. He is glad to be in this country because it means that his family is safe. Yesterday evening, I was walking down the road and a man on a small moped stopped and started to talk with me. He was from Pakistan and he told me many things about the army and the strength and importance of community there. He took off his helmet so that he could converse better. He is working as a farm labourer at different farms and finding life in rural Ireland very lonely. He told me that he has begun stopping every time he sees someone on his journey home. He wants to practice his language and he wants to meet people. His name is Zamann. It is unusual to meet people from other countries when going about my daily business in Tipperary. After these recent conversations I feel like I live in the world, not just in my valley.

The New Door

19 August Monday

Buffaloes are being bred and raised in County Cork. This is not news.  It has been going on for some years now. The mozzarella cheese that is being produced from their milk is wonderful. Some Italian producers came over to advise and to see how the project was going when it was first starting up. They declared that the mozzarella produced here is superior to their own. They said that buffaloes are better suited to the climate of Cork than they are to the dry parts of Italy where they have been being raised for years. I have just discovered the yoghurt made from the buffalo milk. It is a bright white. It is whiter than any cow’s milk yoghurt. I wonder if more farmers will be interested to switch from cow to buffalo herds.

20 August Tuesday

The bad-tempered feral cat and one kitten have returned. I thought they had decamped up to the farm. There were four or five kittens in the litter, but now there is only the one. I do not know where the others went. Maybe the fox ate them. The one remaining kitten follows the mother wherever she goes. The mother hisses at me outside the kitchen door. She wants food but she cannot be civil in order to get it. The enormous black and white cat arrives every few days and beats up the mother. The noise of their fighting is terrible to hear. The kitten watches.

21 August Wednesday

Is he feeling better in Himself? This is a way of asking how someone is doing, especially if they have been unwell recently.

22 August Thursday

The old door came from the Car Boot Sale in Fethard. It was a normal door made of heavy wood. Simon bought it for 5 pounds in 1997. He sawed the door in half and cut out a square hole for a window. He did other adjustments to make it function as a two-part stable door. It has lasted all these years, but now it is rotting from the bottom up. It has been rotting away for several years. Each winter we expect an invasion of mice through the bottom of the door. Mounted over the door is a glass windscreen from an old Ford. We think it is from a Ford Cortina. We found it above at Johnnie Mackin’s, among his multiple old broken-down cars and his spare parts Held In Reserve. T.J., the blacksmith, made some brackets to hold the glass in place. The windscreen serves as small protection from the rain, but only if a person is standing right up close to the door. We are waiting for the new door to be completed and to arrive. It will be sad to see the old door depart, but it will be good to have a door that is not decomposing. The glass visor will stay exactly where it is.

23 August Friday

I found some old postcards at a newspaper shop. The shop was badly lit.  There was not any light at all except for what came through the front window and since it was an overcast day, there was not even a lot of that.  The cards were old, dusty, and curled up. The rack was old and dusty too. I had to wipe off the sticky dust off the cards with a damp cloth when I got home. I like that the men fishing on this boat are wearing shiny street shoes and the man steering the boat is wearing a dress white shirt. There is not a bit of waterproof protection on any of them. Wearing such shoes would be both ridiculous and dangerous on a fishing boat. I like this card too much to send it to anyone. I shall have to keep it.

When I went to pay for my postcards, I found the owner of the shop leaning over the counter. On first glance, I thought he had collapsed and that his head was resting face down on the counter. I thought there was something wrong.  Instead I saw that he was holding a magnifying glass that was as big as a dinner plate. It was an inch or two over the open newspaper and his head was an inch or two from the magnifying glass. He was reading.

24 August Saturday

The handle from the old door is made of cast iron. Tommie told me that it is part of a Pulper. He said that when he was Coming Up, every house had a Pulper. He explained that there was a heavy wheel that had to be turned in order to mash up the turnips for animal feed.  He said it was sometimes called a Masher or a Mangle. There were two handles like the one we have, one on each side. When the turnips had been thoroughly mashed, two people lifted the container out, one person on each handle and together they carried the mash out to the animals.  He enjoyed telling me about the work and about the pile of turnips waiting to be pulped.  He said this was a job for the young ones and that it was a job that had to be done every single day. For as long as we have had this door, this has been our handle.

25 August Sunday

At this time of year, we are plagued by tiny insect bites. We never see the insects. Nor do we hear them. The insects bite at night and their bites itch and itch for days. I am convinced that they are the bites of tiny spiders. After a few weeks of these bites, the season is over and there will not be another bite until next August. Last night I turned on the light and found a huge wood spider on my pillow. I trapped him in a cup and threw him out the window. These are the spiders that I usually find in the bathtub. They crawl up the drain from outdoors. I am used to that and it does not disturb me to find one in the bathtub. I was not happy to find such a large spider on the bed.

26 August Monday

Take it Handy! is the expression used instead of Take it Easy!

27 August Tuesday

I walked around Cahir yesterday while the last few things were done for the car re-test. I have spent a lot of time in Cahir. The endless tweaking of the car’s problems and the rapidly evaporating state of Mike’s garage have not made things easier. I had to go to Dalton’s to get my tyres checked and to get my headlamps aligned before the re-test. I wandered around the Old Church and saw a good, though damaged, head carving that I had never noticed before. The head has huge ears. I passed the test and drove home relieved.

29 August Thursday

The new door was installed today. It was a difficult job because nothing in this house is straight or even. The old frame was as rotten as the door itself. It took from 8.00 in the morning until 6 o’clock, and still the inside edging has not yet been fitted. That will be done later. There was a large amount of cement cutting done to make the new frame fit. The dust was terrible. Philippe and Shane put up a curtain of blankets to stop the dust from going everywhere but it managed to travel anyway.

The new door is again a stable door in two parts, this time made of French Oak, and it has the same old locks and the same window glass as the old door. One handle has been re-installed. We re-used what could be re-used. The Pulper handle may or may not get put back into service.

30 August Friday

Bunny spent years as a lorry driver. He claims that he has driven every inch of every road on this entire island.  He refuses to take his holidays here because he does not want to go somewhere that he could drive to and back home in one day.  He does not consider that Getting Away.  I mentioned Donegal as being far away and a very long drive, but he scoffed at that and claimed he could drive there in four and a half hours, and four and a half hours back. By his standards, that was not far away enough to be A Holiday. This year he is going to Germany and he is traveling on an airplane.  He cannot go by boat because he gets seasick.

31 August Saturday

Years ago, Tom Browne did a lot of work for us.  One day, he wrote our initials in a piece of concrete: S.E.  Tom has been dead for at least 15 years. Finding that piece of concrete wedged in a bit of the old wall today made me think of him.

1 September Sunday

There are more black currants to pick every morning for breakfast. They never stop. Now the raspberries are ripening daily and with increasing speed, as are the figs. I check the figs every day, sometimes twice a day, because if they show the smallest suggestion of softening, the birds attack them. It is better for me to bring them indoors to ripen than to leave them outside where they will be ripped open.  I am also cutting back the lavender. I have two buckets full that I am tossing and turning to help it to dry, and so far I have barely made a dent in the crop.

2 September Monday

I had one of those days when I used the word CALL when I should have said RING and the use of the wrong word got me into trouble. Poor Tommie waited all day for my visit. Sometimes the incorrect word just slips out of my mouth. When we spoke on the phone at the end of the afternoon, he was petulant and told me that I have lived here long enough to know the difference between the two words. It is not up to him to know how people speak elsewhere. This is where he lives and this is where CALL means to drop in or to make a visit. RING is the word to use when speaking of a telephone conversation. A few minutes later, he apologized. He said that he has slept badly for two nights so he is feeling peevish. He said that he should not take his fatigue out on me.

Minced and Moist.

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.

Hoof Proof Buckets

8 October Tuesday

The leaves on the corner of the grass roofed shed are turning yellow.  I call this the Potato Vine but I know it is not the proper name. It is a climbing plant in the Solanum Jasminoides family but I never remember its exact title. The white blossoms are my reason to grow it. The official name does not matter much to me.

10 October Thursday

“I’ll take a cup of Tea In the Hand.” This is what a person says when they are in a hurry, particularly if they are working. Or he or she might say, “A cup Out of the Hand.” In the Hand or Out of the Hand, both mean that the cup of tea will be accepted, but that it will be drunk from its mug while standing up. This is not a take away tea in a cardboard cup.  Nor is it a cup of tea accompanied by a biscuit or with a slice of bread and butter. This is not sitting down for a cup of tea.

11 October Friday

Cate told me about a sheep farmer who died recently. She said that before the burial, his family filled his coffin with wool.

12 October Saturday

Last Saturday, the food and health inspectors were at the Farmers’ Market. They went from stall to stall asking questions. They examined each refrigeration device. While I was at the organic vegetable stall, the man even asked to look underneath the table. He carefully took down the names of the two young French girls on duty. I wondered if he understood that they were part of the WWOOFER (World Wide Organisation of Organic Farms) scheme and might well be somewhere else working with a different organic farmer in a different county or even another country by next week. There were two or maybe three inspectors with clipboards and pens going around and each time I reached a table ready to purchase something there seemed to be an interrogation going on so I wandered away and hoped that a different table would have already been examined so that I could buy my vegetables or fish in an uninterrupted interaction. This Saturday the vendors are still talking about the awkwardness of last week’s inspections.  And one of the inspectors was there as usual.  Today she was there as an ordinary shopper with her market basket, and without a clipboard.

13 October Sunday

There is always a new version of a product that I would not have considered. Yesterday I saw a display of Hoof Proof Buckets at the Coop. They are on sale.

14 October Monday

The Whitfield Hospital is in Waterford. People go there for specialised treatments and diagnoses. A lot of people attend for cancer treatments. The car park is always full. It is always full and every car has someone sitting in it. Everyone who goes to Whitfield is driven there by someone else because they are usually not well enough to drive themselves home after whatever treatment they have. I say They but I include myself in this grouping of drivers. Us drivers could go somewhere else but we tend to stay nearby. We none of us know how long our passenger will be and we want to be ready for when they need to be driven home. We go into the entrance hall of the hospital and we use the toilets and we get ourselves a cup of tea or coffee and then we return to our cars to wait. Some people read a book. Some read a newspaper. Some sleep. A lot of people look at their phones. In fine weather, an older man will lean on his car with his tummy pressed against the door, and his elbows on the roof. Standing out of his car like that shows that he is available if anyone cares to have a chat.

16 October Wednesday

Walker and I have been out together three times this week.  When I open the gate, he races out of the yard and then turns to look back at me. I stretch my arms and point first left and then right. He decides and swings first his head and then his body in his choice of direction. Today it was right. We headed for Tom Cooney’s fields. Walker was distracted on the way down hill by a dead rabbit on the verge in front of Sean and Elvira’s house. We left the rabbit and walked up the farm track as far as the green barn. The fields all around had been ploughed and planted, so I did not think we should go any further. Walker was unusually eager to go back the way we had come. I could not understand his rush to turn around. When we walked back up the small slope I understood. It was the rabbit. He was rushing back to check on the dead rabbit. He did no more than to sniff the corpse up and down several times. He did not try to eat any part of it. He just needed to know it was there and that no one had disturbed it in his brief absence.

17 October Thursday

The woman in front of me had an enormous box to post at the Post Office counter. The postmistress assumed that the woman was sending eggs again. She confirmed that she was indeed posting eggs. The woman explained that the eggs were peacock eggs and that people who want to raise peacocks are willing to pay a high price for them. The eggs need a large amount of padding inside the package so that they do not break on route. Her parcels are always large but always light .

18 October Friday

There are terms that evolve and everyone knows what they mean so the rest of the information can be left out. Lately, I have noticed the use of  The Middle Aisle. Lidl and Aldi are discount supermarkets owned by two German brothers. In the two central aisles there are specials on offer, stacked high. The offers change every week. It might be tools or back to school equipment or maybe gardening or kitchen or welding equipment. Whatever is there is there in a finite amount and when it is gone there will probably not be any more of that thing. People rush to buy electrical tools when they are announced. If an item has been purchased from The Middle Aisle it is just that. It is a bargain. There is no need to mention the name of the store.

19 October Saturday

It is good to have a new cheese stall at the Farmers’ Market. Most of the cheeses on sale are Irish cheeses, from small producers, including many that we have not seen before. The people who run the stall live in Lismore. They drive over the mountains to do the market. The Lismore Market is now closed for the winter, but they do one in Dungarvan and maybe another one in Youghal. It has been a long time since there was a woman who did a cheese stall at our market, but she always told people that she did not like cheese and that she never ate it herself. She was not a good advertisement for her products. On her final day at the Farmers’ Market, she said she was retiring because she preferred to play golf on a Saturday morning. On that last day, she told me that her name was Catherine not Kathleen. I had been calling her Kathleen for years. I do not know why she waited so long to correct me.

20 October Sunday

There are many jobs to do before the winter sets in. Firewood has been delivered so it must be stacked in the lean to and in the house. It is all ash, good and dry, but heavy to handle. I must snap off all but the tiniest figs from the branches. The raspberries are nearly gone. I continue to get a small bowlful every other day but they are not sweet. The acidity gives a different pleasure.  Soon I will need to put out some mouse traps and maybe some poison too. The small cat and his mother and the big black and white one skulk around the kitchen door all day. I wonder if they will serve as a deterrent to the mice.

21 October Monday

Storm Ashley hit the country yesterday. Counties on the Atlantic coast were hit the hardest, but even here we had an Amber warning in place until three in the morning. Everyone hunkered down. Lawn furniture was put away, as was anything else that might be snatched up by the wind and smashed into something else. Candles, matches and torches were placed on tables in easy-to-reach locations. The winds were wild and noisy all day, and well into the night. The rain came in gusts and it pelted in every direction. What it was not doing was falling from up to down. The rain was everywhere and during the intervals when it stopped the sun came out and there were rainbows. Sometimes there were rain and rainbows at the same time. There was always wind. The wind never paused. Coastal locations were warned of surges. By this morning the radio was full of reports of flooding and of the number of houses that lost electricity. We did not lose electricity nor trees nor slates off the roof. There are a lot of branches to pick up and there are odd things to be found in odd places.

22 October Tuesday

I went to visit Tommie in the Rehabilitation Unit of St Patrick’s Hospital in Cashel. He was in the physical therapy room when I arrived. They allowed him out to have a brief visit with me. We sat together in the bright sunny visiting room Wearing a bright red sweater, he looked much better than he had in the hospital. He is no longer on oxygen, but he still is not allowed toast. I do not understand this diet he is on and he does not understand it well enough to explain it to me. Tommie told me that the food served on The Unit is very good but he explained that “When you share food with Strangers, they‘ve got a little bit of you.” By strangers, he means anyone who is not family, but he said that at his age his whole life is already in the control of others. He also explained to me that being old means saying Thank You a lot.He was interested to know if I found the driving difficult going through the various roundabouts needed to drive to Cashel. He considered the journey a massive undertaking and could not believe I had come so far and all alone just to see him. It is only about twenty kilometres but to his mind, it was far. He was eager to discuss a possible trip to Dunnes’ together after he returns home, so that he can buy some Christmas chocolates for gifts and a bottle of whiskey for Pat Flan. At that point the physiotherapist arrived to collect him. She said that he would have to keep working on his leg exercises if he is planning a shopping trip to Dunnes’.

23 October Wednesday

As well as walking Walker, I have been taking Jessie out. We go up the track that Breda and I call Murphy’s Lane although I am not sure that it has anything to do with anyone named Murphy these days.  Jessie loves to race through the stubble and to scout around the edges of the fields for rabbit holes.  I like examining the old wreck of a house and the shed with the triangular windows.

25 October Friday

People arrive at one of the two shops in the village and they load something into the boot of their car or into the back of a truck. Bags of coal or bags of potatoes.  Gas canisters. Kindling. Blocks. Fence posts. Then they might have a conversation with someone else who has stopped to get something.  And then with another person. Eventually they make their way into the shop and tell someone behind the counter what they have taken and they pay for it. Farming can be a lonely life.  For a lot of people, not only for the farmers, coming to the village to buy petrol is as much about meeting someone to talk to as it is about replenishing supplies.

Out From Under

28 October Bank Holiday Monday

Twelve or thirteen hounds ran down the track.  They raced around the house three times and then around the book barn and the tool shed another two times. They were barking and baying as they ran. As a mass, they jumped up the banking and disappeared into Joe’s field. We neither saw nor heard them again. We never saw a hunter nor anyone with a gun. We did not see any humans all day.

 

29 October Tuesday

The herd of young cattle in Joe’s top field rushed over to look at me as I walked by. The noise of that many large animals running was thunderous. Running as a crowd made them appear strong and fearless, but they stopped abruptly when they neared the gate where I was standing.

30 November Wednesday

I went to the Chinese acupuncturists. The man and woman work together. She speaks English and he does not. After having me explain things to her, she repeats everything to him in Chinese. He inserted needles and left me in a darkened room for about an hour. He hummed a little as he worked but the only thing he said was: “Okay Lady?” After removing the needles he gave me a vigorous massage and then repeated: “Okay Lady?” giving me a little tap on my foot to let me know that he was finished.

31 October 2024 Thursday

Walker and I walked up to the Green Barn. Whatever has been planted in the the fields is growing fast.

1 November Friday

I went into a shop in Cahir to buy a newspaper. There were two young priests waiting for toasted bacon sandwiches.  They also ordered coffee and picked out a selection of chocolate bars. They were wearing long white robes and sneakers. One priest said to the other that he loved the big pockets of their robes because he is always hungry.  He likes to carry a supply of chocolate.

2 November Saturday

The feral cats scream when the kitchen door is opened. The feral cats scream when the kitchen door is closed. The young one, who is no longer a kitten but not yet a full grown cat, is omnipresent. The big black and white bruiser arrives frequently, but the young cat’s mother rarely makes an appearance. I was on the verge of giving the small cat a name. I have grown fond of her. I think of it as a she but I have no idea of her sex. She sits on the pillow and she sleeps on the pillow and she is rarely not on the pillow on the bench. But now this screeching has begun. I thought it was a demand for food but once it has started the screaming and pushing at my legs and the door do not stop. The small cat screams as though it is in danger or in pain. She should be up at the farm catching rodents and drinking milk.

5 November Tuesday

We visited Tommie at St Patrick’s. He was not looking as robust as the last time I saw him. Maybe it was just because he was not wearing his bright red sweater. He was happy for a visit though he told us that he had had a niece down from Dublin earlier and he said she wore him out. He claimed that she never stopped talking for two solid hours. He told us a long rambling story about having worked under a bus for his whole life. He said he was never once Out From Under The Bus, not until the very last day of his job. He said he was happy to know that he need never again work under a bus. I knew he had worked as a farm labourer from the time he left school at 14. I could not make the connection with the word Bus. I am certain that Tommie has never ridden on a bus. He told me that once. It took time for me to understand that he was not saying BUS but BOSS. He was glad to be Out From Under the Boss.

6 November Wednesday

The day began grey and overcast. It promised to continue like this. The weather would not improve. Heavy cloud cover made everything feel sad. I did not know what to do with myself. The one thing I knew that I did not want to do was to talk to anyone. I did not want to talk and I did not want to listen. I decided to walk up the Mass Path. I have been unable to get through there since the spring because it has been heavily overgrown, and branches and trees have blown down. I decided the struggle of trying to go up there would be a good distraction from the ongoing and endless reports of results and analysis. Taking work gloves, secauters and a thorn-proof jacket, I pulled on my wellie boots and set off. Right away at the bottom, by the stream, I had to climb over and through a fallen tree. There were a few moments of clear walking but most of the journey was slow and difficult. I cut brambles and boughs out of my way in order to keep moving uphill. I got as far as Johnnie Mackin’s orchard, or to the part of the path that runs alongside the orchard. The path ahead was blocked for as far as I could see. There were apples on the ground, some rotting and some looking still good enough to collect. I thought I might return with a big bag. The smell was fetid. I could not go any further. The way was heavily tangled and overgrown. I considered climbing up the banking and into the orchard and continuing that way, but I quickly saw that that option was almost as bad. I turned around and started back down the hill towards home. I stepped on a mossy rock and crashed to the ground. I wrenched my shoulder trying to break my fall and I fell heavily onto my hip. I lay in the wet leaves and mud and I caught my breath. I wondered if I had broken my hip even while I knew that I had not. I burst into tears. I was not crying about the physical pain. I was crying about everything else. I was weeping in fear and disappointment and rage. I cried. I sobbed. Eventually, shaking with the cold and the wet mud soaking through my trousers, I stopped crying. I got up and continued my way back down the treacherous path.

 7 November Thursday

While grabbing a clump of purple sage, a bee stung my left index finger. The bees and their activities are dying back but some are still flying around to get what they can from the plants. They stop and rest often. Which is why the bee was in among the sage leaves. It stung me when I grabbed it. My finger is now swollen and tight and it feels like it might explode.

8 November Friday

I thought it would be my hip or my thigh that would hurt but it is my shoulder that has retained the memory of my fall. Today, I can barely lift my right arm. It must have taken the whole weight of my body falling as my arm reached out to catch myself.

9 November Saturday

The geese are all over the castle car park at the market. Some days, like today, they refuse to go back into the water. By the time they have returned to the river the tarmac is a slippery mess.

11 November Tuesday

The light is terrible. It is the same white light all day. There is no sun and there are no shadows and there is no variation from morning until the end of the afternoon. Day after day. Every day is the same. A heavy white cloud cover sits over everything. It is bitterly cold. We cannot see any further than the fence through the fog. There is neither background nor any view behind even the most familiar things. Night falls early and the darkness is complete. There are no clouds, no stars and no moon. The dense fog sits heavily on the land and on our spirits. The cold and the fog are the only topics of conversation.

12 November Tuesday

I continue to sand the table. Over many years, the light from the skylight has made the varnish break down into a gummy surface. Newspapers stick on the table and they tear as they are lifted.  Kieran tells me that this is what happens when the surface has been exposed to too much sun over a long time. The top surface has mostly come off but now I am trying to make it all into an even tone. Some of the old varnish is hard to remove. I keep thinking I will get an electric sander on the job, but I only think about it. I do not get around to getting one. I just keep working away at small mottled areas. I am now using the Japanese sanding device which is made of a lot of bristles tightly bound together with strong cotton rope. The working method is to hold the bundle in both hands, one hand on top of the other and to push and pull along with the grain of the wood. It is satisfying work, but it is slow. Maybe in the spring I will finish the surface off with an electric sander, but for now I continue to push and pull.

13 November Wednesday

Fergal sent Vinnie to collect the book shipment. The door to my workroom was open while he loaded 27 boxes from the room to his van. When he was finished, I closed the door and went into the house for lunch. Later I took a walk with Breda in the bitterly cold white fog. We wore reflective vests over our jackets. The few cars or tractors passing us all had their head lamps on and they drove slowly. It was 6.30 before I went back up to my room to look for something. The small cat, who I am now calling Ruth, was in there. She started screeching the minute I walked in. Had I not left something behind she would have been in there all night, warm but even hungrier than usual. She knocked a box of nails and a lot of papers onto the floor. As soon as I go outdoors she follows me from building to building and waits patiently outdoors.  Maybe she thinks she is a dog, but dogs do not scream.

The Pure Drop

16 November Saturday

Between ourselves, we called him Johnny the Timber. He has delivered trailer loads of firewood to us every year. He also cleans our chimney, although these two jobs are done at different times. He would never bring us firewood and then hop up on the roof to clean the chimney. He cleans chimneys on Saturdays. Top down. He no longer has any timber to sell, so we changed his phone number name to Johnny the Chimney. His Monday to Friday job is as a Postman. So he could also be listed as Johnny the Post, but he is not our Postman so it is best to keep his name tied to the Chimney. Our postman is Derek.

17 November Sunday

The names of places do not change even when they change.

Nugent’s bar is called Maryanne’s by the locals.  Maryanne was Rose’s mother and she ran the pub for decades until it became too much for her and Rose and her husband Davey took over. Maryanne made change in a metal box. She was the only one allowed to go into the box. She held the key and she kept it in her pocket at all times. The name Nugent’s is painted on the front over the window, but it makes no difference. People still speak of meeting down at Maryanne’s for a pint.

The Regional was the name of the big hospital in Cork. It is now Cork University Hospital (CUH ), but if you ask any taxi driver in Cork city to take you to The Regional, you will certainly be delivered to CUH.

The Roundabout was the name of the bar in Ardfinnan. A roundabout is a traffic circle. There is only one roundabout in the village so it is a simple thing to know which bar is being discussed. The bar has been called The Pure Drop for at least twenty-five years. The name, referencing a line from Edmund Spenser’s work The Faerie Queen, is painted in big red letters on the car park end, but most people call it The Roundabout.

18 November Monday

We bought two sorts of blue cheese both made in the Glen of Aherlow. One is called Cool Paddy and the other is Cool Mary. The lady at the cheese stall wrote the name of each one on the paper in which she wrapped the cheese. We took them home and tasted them and decided that we liked each of them equally well. Having them both out on a cheeseboard at the same time meant that they got mixed up. It is only Monday and they are already separated from their names. We know that Cool Mary is made from sheep’s milk and Cool Paddy is made from goat’s milk. I cannot taste which is which.

19 November Tuesday

Each time I cut a rose to bring it into the house, I am certain that this rose is the last rose of the year. Each time I am pleased to feel that I am saving this final blossom from death by a sudden hard frost. A few days later, another rose comes into bud on a different rosebush. Each rose may be a late rose, but none of the roses are the last rose.

20 November Wednesday

Tommie is back at home. He is feeling better in himself, but his legs are not. He says that his knees are not keeping up with his spirits. He is not doing the exercises the physio gave him to do and he is not sleeping well. He does not feel Able for a trip to Dunnes. He would like to buy some boxes of chocolates and a few bottles to give as Christmas gifts, as well as some razors for The Shaving.  I said that we can make a list and that I will go to the shop to buy things for him. I dislike shopping at Dunnes and he loves shopping at Dunnes. I will do the shopping for him and he will feel sad that he has missed a favourite outing.

21 November Thursday

There was snow falling when we woke up. Everywhere was beautiful and white and silent. It was a heavy wet snow, so I knew it would not last. But for little while the white mountains and hills made it look like we had been transported to Switzerland. I drove down to the shop carefully. There is no such thing as snow tyres here and most people have no idea how to drive in icy conditions. As I crossed the little hump-backed bridge into the village, I remembered the signs in New Hampshire, always warning that a BRIDGE FREEZES FIRST. I have never seen such a sign here. I doubt that this fact is common knowledge. Things rarely drop to freezing.

22 November Friday

The candidates for Tipperary South in the General Election are everywhere. The candidates and their helpers are knocking on doors, and paper publicity arrives daily with the postman. The run-up to the election is only three weeks so everyone is busy getting their message out. There are posters up on trees and utility poles. Mattie McGrath seems to be the only one who owns a home-made tent-like trailer with his name and photograph on two sides. It is parked in various spots around the county. Just as we grow accustomed to seeing it in one place, it is gone. Its absence becomes a surprise. It will re-appear somewhere else for a few days, before being moved again. In these days building up to the election, I find myself rushing about saying, “Chicken Brennan. Chicken Brennan.”  This is the name of another candidate who is running for office.  His name is Michael “Chicken” Brennan. His posters on the utility poles make me smile. Michael Brennan is a common enough name, so if most people know this man as Chicken, it is wise to have that name on the poster so that people know which Michael Brennan is running for office.

23 November Saturday

Because the new kitchen door is so tight and well-fitted, we feel no drafts. It is a surprise how much warmer the room is. I no longer need the long curtain that used to hang up over the door at night specifically to keep the winds out.  I cannot bring myself to get rid of the small hooks that Simon cut out of oak a long time ago from which to hang the curtain rail.

24 November Sunday

Edel described the dog as Gentle Out.  She said that he is the easiest and most docile creature she has ever known and that he is a Pure Dote around the children. People often say that someone is Happy Out, but this is the first time I have heard Gentle Out. The meaning is easily understood.

25 November Monday

Heavy rains fell all weekend. We hardly noticed the rain because the winds were so fierce and so unending. We could hear the thrashing and blowing everywhere inside the house. There was no escaping the brutal noise. I was surprised to see that the fields all around the village have disappeared. The fields have disappeared and so have the sheep that were grazing in those fields.  Everywhere is replaced by lakes.

26 November Tuesday

Ute corrected me about the two German brothers who own the discount supermarkets Lidl and Aldi. It turns out that I was wrong.  We all believed that these two men are brothers.  The two men are indeed German, but they are not brothers. They are competitors, and both stores have special offers now known as The Middle Aisle. That is where the similarity ends.

27 November Wednesday

Ruth the Feral Farm Feline never seems to get any bigger. She is petite. Tidy. Every morning I find her outside the kitchen door playing soccer by herself with a wine cork. She is good with her feet. This is a delightful game to watch, but it is dangerous too. Each time I step outside there are wine corks in funny places on the path waiting to send me flying.

28 November Thursday

Clothing Banks are located near Bottle Banks, or all alone at the remote edges of car parks. They become stuffed full to overflowing with used clothing. When the small hole is so full that nothing more can be deposited, clothes must be left in bags on the ground. Whenever this happens, people come along after dark and rip open the bags to see if there is anything that they want inside. This activity is usually blamed on the Traveling Community but I do not believe that they are always the guilty party. It is rural tradition to blame any and all anti-social behavior on the Travellers.

29 November Friday Election Day

We voted down at the elementary school. The children had the day off school in order to accommodate the polling station. Campaign posters everywhere are looking bedraggled and some are torn.  The ongoing wind has not made this electioneering easy. I asked Tommie if he had received his card in the post to allow him to go and vote. He was outraged.  He said, “I do not need a card. I have never needed a card. The people down there know me. They all know me.”

Not Knowing

6 March 2025 Thursday

We were at BusAras, waiting in front of Door No.6 for the Cork bus. When it arrived, passengers disembarked and then the driver got off and ran into the station and right past us. He waved to the bus official at the door but he did not stop. He continued running to the far side of the station and down the stairs. The official turned to the twelve or fifteen of us standing in the queue and he explained that the driver needed a pee. He said that it is a long drive all the way to Cork so it is essential that the driver go to the toilet now. He suggested that we would all be well-advised to have a pee ourselves before we get on the bus too, because this bus has no toilet and there would be no rest stops along the way. He gave us much more detail than we needed but he seemed to enjoy having an audience and the chance to be the person with something important to say.

7 March Friday

Yesterday, as we waited for the bus in Dublin, an elderly man sat down beside me. He assured me that his friend, who is a clairvoyant, has assured him that Donald Trump will not last for two years in this term as President of the USA. She told him that it might be because of death or it might be that he just gets sick of the job. She is not certain of the reason yet. He told me that this clairvoyant is never wrong with her predictions. I am trying to hold this thought.

9 March Sunday

There was a frenetic clamor of barking, braying and howling up in Scully’s wood.  I know this is not the time of year for The Hunt so I wondered what was going on.  I worried about the fox. As I drove up the boreen to go and collect the Sunday papers in the village, I met a man I had never seen before walking along whistling and calling out.  I asked what he was looking for. He told that me his dachshund, Ernie, was around somewhere.  I told him about the noise from the woods and he said, “Yes. That will be Ernie. He will be with the rest of the hounds.  They are chasing rabbits.”

11 March Tuesday

We have one warm and bright day and the next is cold with bitter wind.  Everyday is different and everyday is a surprise. Yesterday I ate lunch sitting outdoors by the kitchen door. Today I am unable to step out without a scarf and hat and gloves.

12 March Wednesday

Occasionally things blow down from the farm when the winds are strong. Sometimes I find an escaped empty plastic feed bag. Today I picked up a shiny silver package to throw away when I reached home. It had contained a Vaginal Delivery System for Cattle. This is a first.

14 March Friday

I went to visit Tommie in the hospital. He said he was happy to see me although he was terribly weak. His oxygen tube was hanging off his lip instead of being in his nose. I helped him to get it adjusted and then we talked a little. He was unable to project his voice. I sat near to him on a stool and listened carefully. His rasping lungs were louder than his voice. He told me that he did not think he would get out of there alive. A priest came by wearing a long narrow scarf. I believe it is called a stole. It was bright purple. The priest was short and black and round. He read Tommie’s name off the sign above the bed and then asked in a loud and kindly voice: “Would Thomas like to receive a Blessing today?” Tommie said yes and the priest performed his ritual. He turned to me and asked with his eyes if I too wanted a Blessing but I shook my head No. Tommie kept telling me that he was glad that I had finally come Home. I left when his eyes started to close. He was ready for a nap. I promised to return next week.

15 March Saturday

I recognize the things that are flowering, but often I do not know their names. I have come to accept that I do not really care if I know their names or not. If I really wanted to know I would look them up when I got home, or I would get an app to provide myself with an immediate answer but I am okay with the Not Knowing. I am happy for things to appear every year at the same time just as I appear every year at the same time. There are dandelions, primroses, and Lesser Celandine as well as masses of daffodils. The wild garlic is pushing up too.

16 March Sunday

I am short. This is not new. I have always been short. I now resort to using a small stepladder in the house since the last time I jumped down off a chair I broke a bone in my foot. The stepladder is more cumbersome to locate and to drag around but it is safer. This morning I climbed up the two steps to reach the bag of porridge oats. My head, up near the low ceiling, was immediately covered with a thick coating of cobwebs. I could store the package of oats somewhere else, but this is where we have always kept it. I can easily stand on tip-toes to return it to its shelf, but when the package is new and full, it is a tight fit on the shelf. That is when I need the ladder. And now all of the cobwebs are gone, so the problem is less pressing.

18 March Tuesday

We were delighted to see the first rhubarb of the year on Keith’s table at the market. We bought it. We cooked it. We ate it. It was delicious. It is good to know that there will be more and more rhubarb in the weeks to come.

19 March Wednesday

I was out for a walk and I met Yolanda on the road. She is Australian and I am American. We both turned off our phones in order to chat for a minutes in the bright sun. She had been listening to an opera from Milan as she walked. I had been listening to a novel set in Tasmania. We laughed at this international moment. My phone rang. It brought us back to Tipperary. I was sad, but not surprised to receive the news that my dear friend Tommie is dead.

20 March Thursday

In the shop, there is a lot of discussion about Tommie. The news of his death is spreading. Without exception, people agree that he was A Real Gentleman. That he was a gentle man. That he was A Great Man for the Chat, which means that he always had time or that he always made time to talk with whoever was there for a conversation. Tommie left school young and worked as a farm laborer all his life.  He did jobs for people and helped wherever he was needed.  No one has a bad word to say.

21 March Friday

We went to Tommie’s wake. I did not like seeing him laid out in his coffin in the middle of the room, though I was glad to see that he was wearing his gold Pioneer lapel pin. He was so proud of that pin. His hands were clasped around his rosary beads. We shook all the hands and spoke to all of the extended family who were lined up against the three walls. We heard the news that Tommie’s old friend Aiden died today. Then we drove home and had supper.

22 March Saturday

We decided not to go to the Farmers Market this morning because Tommie’s funeral was being held at eleven. I picked Breda up and we drove together down to the village. She did not want to go alone. She said she wanted someone to Take the Bare Look off Her. The area all around the church was full of people, and it was still early. There were twenty-five, or maybe thirty, men and boys, some in their hurling uniforms, waiting on each side of the road at the base of the bridge. As the hearse carrying the coffin drove over the bridge all of the hurling players, young and old, started walking slowly into the village on either side of the vehicle. Tommie had been an avid sportsman. He would have loved being accompanied to the church by this Guard of Honour. The athletes stood in two long lines as he was carried into the church, followed by the family, and then by the rest of us. The church was packed. By the time the burial was being performed in the churchyard, the rain was bucketing down. People began to leave because it was simply too wet and too cold to stand around.

24 March Monday

Someone drove their car into The Hair Den. They must have been traveling at a great speed when the car crossed the road to hit the corner of the building. I heard that the driver had a bloody lip but was otherwise unhurt. No one is mentioning the name of the driver, but almost everyone knows who it is. I do not know who it is. Besides the smashed corner which took the impact, the building has horizontal cracks along the front. The consensus is that it will be many months before it can re-open for business.

 

A cut of tart

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.

The Fly Curtain

4 May Sunday

A lovely sunny morning. The doors and windows were all open. I rushed in and out doing jobs and then stopping myself from doing jobs and making myself sit down outside to enjoy the perfect weather and the birdsong.  A swallow swooped in and raced around the big room. I closed some doors, opened a window and encouraged it to fly out again. I continued with my day. The swallow did not go toward the open window and it did not go back out the kitchen door. Instead it flew hard and fast into one of the large windows that is all glass and offers no opening. I thought it would knock itself out. I was waiting for it to either depart, or to knock itself unconscious. I had a colander at the ready to trap the dazed bird and to carry it outside but it did not do either thing. It just kept flying up high and sitting quietly on a wire while it decided on its next move. After a few hours I went and got a stepladder. My plan was to open the skylight and to encourage the bird to go out that way when it felt the air coming in through the window. But I was too short. Even at the top of the ladder, I could not reach the opening of the skylight. I went back to my other jobs and each time I heard the hard thwack of the swallow as it crashed into the window once again, I ran in to collect the stunned body. But each time there was no body.  The bird was alert and back up high. Maud and Peter arrived. After our hellos, I asked how they felt about ladders. Peter said he would have nothing to do with them. In contrast, Maud said it was not a problem and she scurried up the steps to open the skylight. We went outside to drink tea and to eat her lovely cake. When we came back into the house, the swallow had departed.

6 May Tuesday

I spent a long time hunting for and then finally locating the fly curtain. It is ugly, but I put it up in front of the back door so that not only will insects be dissuaded from coming in but hopefully the birds will too. I can now keep the top half of the stable door open all day to let in the air. The fattest of the farm cats takes no heed. He jumped through the fly curtain right up over the bottom half of the door and into the kitchen. My shouts terrified him and he jumped out again. I hope he is too fearful to try this again.

7 May Wednesday

The roads are lined with frothy cow parsley. There is so much cow parsley, stitchwort and so much blossom on the hawthorn trees that this whole world seems to be a celebration of white flowers. Everyone talks about the quantity of blossom as well as about this ongoing stretch of sunny days.

9 May Friday

Simon was in a room with three beds. The other two men had strong Tipperary accents. He could not always understand what they were saying. Perhaps they had trouble understanding him too. Each time I went in for a visit over the ten day period, the man in the bed nearest the door told me that that he was going home tomorrow. His name was Noel and he did not have any teeth. He said that being in the hospital was like being in prison. Every day Noel gleefully announced that he was going home tomorrow and every day he was still there when I next returned. As Simon left the ward to come home today, Noel made his same pronouncement and waved goodbye merrily.

11 May Sunday

The gooseberries are not even close to being ripe but the birds are  eating them. They are stripping the branches of both leaves and berries. It is a competition to see who will get the most berries.

13 May Tuesday

Two women were discussing the new conservatory recently built by someone else. In these cash-strapped times, this is less common than it was a few years ago. People build a conservatory onto the side of their houses. It is important to situate it in a such a way that every single person passing the house can see it. It is important for other people to know that a conservatory has been built. There is an element of bragging in all of this. If a conservatory is put onto the back of the house, it will be private but then no one can see it. It seems that all of the glass makes people nervous. They do not want to sit in the conservatory because then anyone who is passing can see them sitting there. Because it is not private it ends up being empty. People sit elsewhere in the house. They sit where it is darker and where they cannot be seen by anyone passing. A conservatory sometimes has carefully chosen furniture in it, but even then it rarely has people in it. Increasingly, the conservatory is a place with a washing line. Making people envious because you can afford a conservatory while they cannot afford one is contradicted by the fact that you have merely built an expensive version of the Long Shed for drying your washing.
The saddest conservatory is one I viewed from high up when I was on a bus traveling down from Dublin. It was completely empty except for a drooping washing line loaded with underpants and socks, pyjamas and t-shirts. Everything on the line had once been white. From the bus everything was a dreary shade of grey. All of this was on view in the place where no one wanted to sit because they found it lacking in privacy.

14 May Wednesday

I am picking gooseberries every day even though they are not fully ripe. Most of them are hard. If I do not get them now the birds will win again. I trust the berries will be fine once they are cooked.

15 May Thursday

It was during the winter of 1998-99 when I installed my envelope interiors in what we now call the Envelope Interior Room. The walls had been plastered by Tom Browne, using the soft grey plaster that is no longer available. These days plaster is pinkish in colour and it is called Thistle Plaster. I do not know what the grey plaster was called. Just plaster. I drew squares with pencil directly onto the unpainted walls and then, slowly, over many winter weeks, cut and tore and pasted my interiors within the squares. I have just this week finished the long overdue job of repairing and replacing the majority of the interiors. Many were faded and some had grubby edges. I re-used a lot of the ovals that we had chopped out on the Adana press for an exhibition in Aichi, Japan in 2008. I am so happy with the final result here. The fresh and crisp appearance of the interiors looks sharp. I cannot stop looking at the walls. I make a point of wandering in to the room often just to admire my efforts. My eyes bounce around following a colour or a shape. There is none of the regular repetition of wallpaper. This order is floating and flowing and never completely predictable. My grandmother’s handmade quilt looks perfect…as if it were planned.

16 May Friday

Buttercups are now rampant. The hedgerows are full of wild honeysuckle. The cow parsley is dying back and going skeletal. Elderflowers are displaying  creamy polka dots in the landscape.

17 May Saturday

Whenever I leave the house by car, wherever I am going, it is imperative that I allow extra time for the journey. I may be held up in the farmyard by cattle crossing to or from their fields into or out of the barns. If the cows are crossing I can do nothing but wait and watch them. Joe has a lot of cows. Once out of the farmyard, I may meet a tractor in the road. Or someone else’s cows may be crossing a road from field to field. I can never anticipate what might be in my way and the time planned for travel is never what I expect.

18 May Sunday

It has been three weeks of hot dry weather. The farmers are desperate for rain. I would be happy for this weather to continue for three months.

19 May Monday

Lena was sad to learn that her brother had died so far away from home. She was devastated that his body had not been driven down the roads where they lived for one last time. She felt sorry that he could not say good bye to the farms and fields that he had inhabited while growing up as he took this final journey. When she learned that he had been cremated in that far away place she smashed her forehead on the table, with her hands flat on the table at either side of her head. She moaned as she banged her head repeatedly. She said over and over again: “How could they burn that beautiful body?”

20 May Tuesday

Jacinta brought over her steam cleaner. I do not know what kind of cleaning it is intended for, but she loaned it to me to defrost the freezer out in the shed. It was wonderful. I had a marvelous time blasting steam at the great chunks of ice lining the interior. Instead of chipping away for hours with the whole top half of my body leaning into the freezer, I had finished the job in less than an hour. I was eager to do more. While I was working thunder and rain began. The thunder was loud, but there was no lightening. The downpours were tremendous. The rain bounced off the hard dry ground. The noise of the rain beating down on the metal roof of the shed was deafening.  I was trapped inside for a while but that gave me time to go through all of the frozen food and to sort and list all that was going to be put back inside. I cannot believe how many containers of black currant sauce we have. Simon will never look at this list, but I will.

21 May Wednesday

The all day and all night rain is the only topic of conversation. We needed it and we got it and everyone is happy, if a little overwhelmed by the intensity of it all.

23 May Friday

There is young life everywhere. Tiny lambs chase their mothers through fields.  Joe’s calves are no longer drinking from the teat trailer, but are now out grazing in a skittish group. I met Siobhan in Ardfinnan for a short stroll. There are new tarred paths all around the playing field and along the river. Trees have been planted and new benches positioned for sitting. She told me all about the two baby geese that are the talk of the village. The rest of the geese make a tight circle around them and no one can get close. I did get to see the protection ring but could only make out a tiny bit of golden fluff in the midst of the geese. The whole gaggle is chased in to a tiny shed at sundown to protect both the geese and goslings from the fox.

24 May Saturday

We are still buying the Wexford asparagus at the market. It seems to be lasting longer than ever before. Each time I get some, I feel it is a bonus.

25 May Sunday

The expression Happy Out is used often. It just means that someone is in a cheerful mode. I used to think this was the only use of Out with another word. I know now that people say Gentle Out when describing a biddable dog, or Glad Out when one is all-round pleased, but I still do not understand why the word Out is included.