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. 

Leaving Tipperary, Redux

Last weekend we were in South Tipperary for my mother-in-law’s 90^th birthday party. Our house next door to hers has not yet been rented, so we camped out there, sleeping in the bedroom we had left furnished.

In March, leaving Tipperary and our house had been wrenching. In the minutes before locking the empty house for the last time, I had walked from room to room, trying but failing not to cry. My footsteps echoed as the sun cut across walls painted in colours we had so carefully chosen. I closed the blinds and curtains over views I had watched in all lights and weather.

But in the weeks since I had settled comfortably in Salzburg. Our flat by the wood, with its walnut panelled walls and ceilings and its views over the wood is peaceful, calm. Blackbirds and tits sing in its garden, their sweet music filling the air, rising into the office where I work or the living room as I read. Only last week I came up the stair and into the flat feeling the serenity of being at home. The longing I had for the house in Tipperary faded more quickly than I had imagined possible. On our drive from the Cork airport Saturday, I briefly felt nostalgic on passing a road sign in both English and Irish.

‘I’m back in another country where I don’t understand the signs,’ I remarked to Himself. But, in truth, I was less emotional than I had expected.

I had been up late the night before, unable to sleep, so my eyes burned with exhaustion. Arriving at our house, I made up the bed in our cheerful yellow bedroom and pulled the blackout blinds to take a nap. Pressing myself into the familiar mattress in the dimness of the familiar room, I felt it good to be there. ‘This is home. This is my bed,’ I repeated to myself as I tried to relax and sleep.

Later, refreshed, it was good to sit in my mother-in-law’s well-worn sitting room visiting with nephews over from Edinburgh and down from Dublin. It was good to have Sally, the Border Collie, roll over onto her back, and press her breastbone forward, her sole trick, pleading for a belly rub. It was good to walk the rough weedy garden, to see the pear and apple trees now in bloom, to explore the humid depths of the polythene house with its earthy perfume. In summer, it will be hot inside, the air fragrant with loam and ripe fruit, as insects buzz and ping against its taut plastic walls.

And it was good that evening to move through the crowded birthday party seeing friends, cousins and nieces and nephews, catching up while apologising for leaving so quickly we hadn’t had time to say goodbye to most of them. Stefan, the blind musician who plays for the area’s seniors at the Cahir Day Centre, played his guitar and sang, accompanied by his friend on accordion, the entire evening. They played old standards and traditional songs, including my favourite, Slievenamon. And The Wild Rover, the wildly inappropriate appropriate song another band had given us as the waltz at our wedding. And A Nation Once Again, the rebel song. We stayed late and left laughing.

Sunday, we took Sally up the track in the Galtees as we have done so many Sundays. We noticed the furled tips of the ferns rising through the bronze of last summer’s bracken. Tightly folded like green foetuses, they will open and within weeks the roadsides and tracks will be lined with fresh young growth. Tiny violets were vivid in the pale green moss lining the path we walked.

It was good to visit with family, some I hadn’t seen for a very long time. It was good to meet friends and neighbours, to keep alive relationships. But it is hard work living in a small community where families have lived side by side with other families for untold generations. Roots go deep, and recall can be long. The memory of slights or perceived slights can be as long standing as the moss-covered stones in the hedgerows.

When I failed to recognise a long-time friend of my husband’s family, prompting her to re-introduce herself, I felt obliged to shift into high gear as I engaged with her, as though this would patch over the insult. I should have known who she was, but in the crowded room, my glance slid over her as I greeted the woman next to her.

There are my husband’s many cousins, men and women he grew up with, whose personalities and faces he knows nearly as well as he knows his brothers and sisters. After 24 years of marriage and not quite three years living among them, I still confuse the women, the family resemblance being remarkable. Of the men, I search for names, trying to place all but the five or six I have come to know better. Had we stayed in South Tipperary, I’m sure names and faces would be recalled with more fluency, but building these relationships has been interrupted again. Rather than relaxing, I found myself working hard, wanting to avoid giving offense.

Another day  we had a meal at Kilcoran Lodge Hotel, the nearby country house that has hosted family parties over several generations. There we encountered family acquaintances my husband has known since childhood. I tried to gauge what I sensed was hesitancy in their greeting, the want of warmth, the pause before greeting us. They hadn’t failed to recognise us. I examined my conscience. Was it awareness of our slight, justified or not, of someone close to her? Was he remembering disagreements between his relations and ours? Conscious of the proximity of their table, we lowered our voices, muting the names we pronounce, hesitant of what may be overheard. In a community of 5,000, counting inhabitants of both town and countryside, one is always aware that there are no secrets and little anonymity.

There too are the entanglements of family, the decades-old hurts and jealousies always simmering that bubble to the surface under the pressure of special occasions. These require negotiating a landscape as treacherous as bog land lest one is forced to choose sides or listen again to accounts of past injustices. Also requiring effort are those personalities that rub uncomfortably, irritating like wool worn on a hot day, that must be borne with grace and compassion.

In Salzburg, for the first time in our marriage, we are living far from any family. Few know us here. I can slide into the crowd, invisible. Unlike in Ireland, the custom here is to ignore people you pass on the streets, to keep focussed on your own destination. People are friendly, but the community is less engulfing. Lacking, at least for now, the social and familial ties we have in Ireland, we have become less tethered, more able to focus on our own concerns.

Early Tuesday morning, the sky still dark, we emptied and unplugged the refrigerator, closed our luggage, and locked the house. As we drove the quiet road past the ruin of Whitechurch with its graves, past the big tree, past Millgrove and Tincurry, the headlamps of our hired car catching the gleam of the whitethorn blossoms in the hedge, I wasn’t emotional or teary. I was simply tired. I was ready to go home.

Leaving Tipperary

If autumn is the season of mists, so too, in Ireland this year, is spring. We awake each morning lately to a hard frost, temperatures below freezing and the rough grass surrounding the house stiff and white. White mist hovers above fields and hangs like a scrim over the mountains. The neighbour’s barns beyond the trees at the bottom of our garden are muted, as if behind gauze. In the early light, a rose-pink band rests just at the edge of the horizon; pale blue rises above it. Gaps in the row of towering Leyland cypresses reveal a blanket of white covering the field next to the house. Across the road and over the low, recently cut, hedge, the stubble of last year’s harvest is pale under the frost. Even as the sky brightens, the mist lasts the morning. Yesterday, as I drove down from Dublin, a pale faint haze obscured signs on the already-confusing web of motorway interchanges and roundabouts, making the drive –- the first ever on my own –- more stressful.

I was driving from Dublin, and on my own, because my husband left early yesterday morning for a meeting in Dusseldorf and then continued on to Salzburg in the evening. Except for return visits, it was his final departure from Ireland for the foreseeable future. He has ‘moved’, a reality that still hasn’t fully sunk in. I will follow him next week.

We drove up the night before and stayed in Bewley’s next to the airport. Before going, we went together next door to say good-bye to his mother, me staying only briefly so they could have some time alone together. She’s nearly 90, so we realise that for her, more than for most, each good-bye could be final. As I left her house and came through the lowering dusk back to our own, longing and sadness and a sense of profound loss overcame me. The line of our roof, neat and dark over white walls, the late sweet song of a blackbird, the tracery of still-bare branches silhouetted against the pale sky, all called me as tears brimmed. It was not so hard to leave California, where I had lived most of my life, as it is to leave this house and countryside.

In the car, we passed the ivy-covered ruin known as Whitechurch, a church so old that it was derelict as far back as the 16th century. Its churchyard, though, has received the dead in recent memory, and I thought how I must make time to visit it again in the next few days. We turned right at the Big Tree, the ancient beech carved with my husband’s initials as well as those of his brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews, and his parents, aunts and uncles before them. Beyond it, leading away from us now, the road rose up the hill we’ve cycled so often, with Sally, my mother-in-law’s border collie, galloping beside us. Just above the summit of the hill, the sky glowed deep rose-red, the darker horizon pressing low against it.

We passed Tincurry house on our right and Millgrove, the plain but handsome house -- it puts me in mind of Austin -- built by prosperous Quakers in the 18th century, on our left. Ahead of us, the Galtees lay shadowed blue against the slightly brighter sky.

‘Look,’ said Himself. ‘There’s a star above the mountain, just about to set.’

The road turned again, and a stand of trees stood between us and the mountain. When we had passed them, I searched the horizon but could see no star.

‘Where?’

He scanned the deepening sky, but --

‘It must have set already.’

And so we entered the new motorway and turned northeast, toward Dublin and away from Tipperary.