Notebook Entry 2008

Co Tipperary

Sunday 5 May

After a grey, cool and changeable day on Saturday, yesterday was sunny, brilliant with colour and light, spring bursting forth from the vivid grasses and fresh young green in the budding trees. We had left the car in town overnight to take a taxi home from the pub – it’s what one must plan to do any more with the vigilance on drink driving – and so Himself dropped me in town to bring the car home. Driving home, I had both windows open, warm air caressing my face, blowing my hair against my cheek, light blinding as it glanced off black tiled-roofs, broad expanses of green fields stretching into the distance and from the upturned undersides of leaves. For the first time, I was out in a light-weight cotton knit top without wearing the thermal chemise I’ve worn since last fall.

At home I opened windows, letting in fresh warm air. I should say though that this warmth is relative – it was at most 16 or 17C – just 61 or 62F. In California, said Himself, I’d have been lighting the fire.

While we were roasting the chicken for Sunday dinner, I walked out the back and around the side of the house to toss out something – ‘into the ditch’ with the food scraps for the crows or other foragers – and suddenly there was a great flurry and swift beating of the air as a cock pheasant rose from the unruly tall grass and bore himself away at eye level, rich russet feathers ornamented with a flash of brilliant vermillion and intense teal blue, long tail feathers drawn out behind him, a visual coda.

After dinner I sat next to the open window in the dining room. The sun poured in over my shoulder, warming me as I sipped at the last of the white wine and reading sporadically. A blackbird sat in the budding mountain ash, his sweet clear rising notes as moving as the song of a concert soprano. Later, we took Sally the Border Collie for a walk up the road to explore the property over the road from us, ‘Ahern’s,’ as we all call it, though there are no Aherns there now. In fact, it is now unoccupied, which is what gave us the impetus to trespass into property that Himself hasn’t entered since childhood and I had never entered.

On old maps, it is marked as Garryroan house, Garryroan being the townland in which we live, our Irish address. (A townland is the smallest administrative district, a geographical segment that could be acres or miles. They are unmarked by physical boundaries: You just have to know where they are.) It must once have been a house or holding of some stature. We removed the tape barrier across the entrance, the barrier running between the wires of an electric fence, crossed over the cattle grid and started down the long tree-lined avenue toward the house.

Enormous stately beeches were just greening on the right; tall sycamores leafing out on the left. Beyond the hedges at either side, cattle grazed in the fields. The house sits in a slight  depression, so until we got about halfway along the avenue, I could only see the long ridge of its roof. At several  hundred metres long, the avenue is impressive. By the time the house was in sight, we moved to the right to say hello to three horses in a field to the side of the property, a mare and a half-grown foal and one other. The foal and mare stared at us intently, the foal coming close enough that I could just barely reach her to scratch her nose. The other horse was less curious; he angled his neck down and under the electric fence to tear at the fresh green ferns growing there before moving away. The mare and foal watched us, though, twisting their rubbery lips into funny faces at times. Sally crouched at the edge of the fence, watching them intently.

The house is an impressive but plain building, a long flat two-story plastered façade, roofed in old slates. To one side there is an extension, slightly lower and roofed in new tiles, with the same plain façade. It’s the setting and the relative size that makes it impressive. It’s not a large house – long but only one room deep for the most part –  but it’s larger for its time than the farm houses in the vicinity. At the back, part of it has been extended, adding depth to accommodate the kitchen and offices, I suppose. There are exposed stones though the plaster and holes, and the yard behind it is filled with rubble and detritus of construction. A modern block of stables extends from the back at right angles. Across the yard and parallel with the house is the two-story stone barn, also now falling apart but filled with old farming material and such. Beside that is the tall wide open-roofed cylinder, thick ropes of ivy stems growing up the old stone walls, a dove cote Himself has been told.

In front, the windows of the lower story of the main building are closed inside with old-fashioned wooden shutters. One window in the extension was uncovered. Through it we could see into the bare room and back window though which we had peered. The next window over is covered by a pink-and-maroon flowered curtain. In the deep sill, though, is a single dusty, down-trodden boot, faded brown laces snaking like a dispirited worm along the pink painted embrasure. It looked like a surreal display in a shop window.

We poked around the cluttered yard in back. There was a rusted decrepit bicycle, an expensive model with narrow racing tires. It had probably been left in a shed, we surmised. The remains of a metal wheel barrow were flattened as if crushed by a steam roller. Nearby, on the edge of a field, there was a shiny red, brand-new fertiliser spreader.

We stood at the edge of the pasture behind the old barn watching the cattle in the field. A few watched us too – cattle are very curious and attentive to human watchers. A large black bull, though, intently sniffed the russet backside of a heifer, oblivious of our presence. I waited, hoping for some excitement, but it was left to my imagination.

Overhead, swallows swooped and soared, twitting through their balletic flight. They fill one with joy.

Salzburg, 6 May 2010

It's a rainy grey day, too wet and chill to bicycle, far from that warm spring Tipperary day. But last evening, cycling home along the river, I saw swallows dancing high above in the late golden light. 

The Birds

It's lambing time here in Ireland. It’s been weeks since we’ve out on our bikes, rolling through grey- and green-lined lanes, catching sight of sheep in the pastures. It's not going to happen now before we leave again for Salzburg. But when I went out this morning in the early quiet, just after 7, I could hear from across the fields the low bawling of the ewes and the higher bleating of their lambs.

I stopped and listened for a minute. It's warmer this morning, after several mornings of hard frosts and temperatures of -3 or -5. The sky, stretching back to where the horizon meets the blue Knockmeadowns, was heavy blue-grey. I stood on the step and listened thoughtfully, with rare attention: There were the bawlings of the sheep and the lowings of cattle and, over it all, the sharp cawings of the crows as they called each other from field to field. There was no low rumble of traffic on motorway or road, which is what we heard when we stopped to listen outside the flat by the wood in Salzburg. Just the sheep and cattle and crows and the sweet twittering of small birds filling the broad, strangely luminous, sky arching over the green valley from the Galtees to the Knockmealdowns.

I wondered where the lively bold robin, who flits to my feet when I come out with the seed each morning, had gone. He's been there every morning, sometimes two of them, through the hard frosts and snow. But they are solitary birds, I believe, and last spring they seemed to disappear from our garden at a certain point, nesting, probably, further down the bottom of the site in the dense hedge there. In fact, yesterday I watched a magpie lift high over the hedge with a twig in its mouth, then return and make the same journey with another twig.

This morning I again filled the bird feeders where the tits, finches and sparrows congregate and scattered seed under the low branches of the hedge for the blackbirds and thrushes. I cast it across the rough stone area that has served as our patio, where the doves and wood pigeons, the crows and jackdaws, Willie wagtails and magpies, hunt and peck out the best bits. I've done so every morning since the mellow autumn with its seeds and berries and late fruit turned to frosts and barren ground. The winter was so cold that even a cock pheasant took to stalking the ground, scrounging for seeds under the feeder. Last spring I scattered seed and filled the feeders until the summer was well established, but this year I won't be here. I can only hope the ground soon warms so the thrushes and blackbirds can root out snails and slugs from the uncultivated grass. From the hotel room in Salzburg, I fretted last week when I heard it was snowing in South Tipperary, fretted because I imagined the birds in vast white blankness, unable to forage for grubs and seeds.

Naturally, Himself points out that there have been birds for hundreds of thousands of years, and they have survived without Saint Lorraine feeding them, and they will go on surviving when I am not here. But not these particular birds, our birds, the thrushes and blackbirds that sang last summer as we sat in the warmth of a rare sunny evening. Not the pert bold robin that flits to my feet when I come out each morning. They are the birds I feed, not the untold generations of those birds that survived before me.

I had awakened early, tossing in the half darkness, worrying. My husband leaves tomorrow evening to return to the office in Salzburg. I’ll remain behind to oversee the packing and shipping and turn the house over to the estate agent. The finality of this week is closing in on me; we are really leaving this house. We will be once again packing all, or nearly all, of our possessions and moving them to another country. Now clothes hang in wardrobes or lie folded in drawers; now dishes and saucepans and casseroles are stacked in cupboards, and books line shelves. But Monday or Tuesday, possibly, there will be chaos as packers call me from room to room while they toss (or place neatly) all of it into packing cases and my stomach churns and knots. Then they will leave, and I will find myself in an empty, or nearly empty, house, rooms echoing, as I contemplate the luggage to be hauled to Dublin and into the hold of the plane, for a flight that hasn’t even been booked on a date still to be determined. The car hasn’t been disposed of. A tenant has not been found. Accounts haven’t yet been closed. I have no address to which to forward the mail. But by two weeks time, at the outside, I will be once again in Salzburg.