Die Wäschespinner

After several days of rain, grey clouds and chill, it’s a bright, sunny day with just a few full white clouds. The trees in the wood next to the house are now fully in leaf; they tower against the sky, fresh green dramatic against the deep blue. From this first floor flat, even as I crane my head back, they rise so high I can’t see their tops. From within their hidden depths, birds celebrate the beautiful spring day.

During a phone call just now, my sister-in-law in Ireland and I compared notes on the weather. ‘It’s the first good day all week. Up and down the street,’ I said, everyone’s got wash on the line.’

‘I know,’ said she. ‘On mornings like that, I look around and say, “Now what can I wash?”’

‘Exactly! I do the same. Today I have the sheets and the bath towels hanging.’

And I do. The line is full of flapping yellow towels and white sheets, pale sails of a ship in a vast emerald sea. Standing at the window and looking down on them in the lawn below, I am filled with a calm joy. The sheets fill and billow, the four-sided wäschespinner whirls, and diamond-shaped shadows dapple the grass.

The clothesline is new, put it up a few weeks ago. Himself dug the hole, mixing and pouring the concrete, then carefully carving our initials and the date into pale-grey mass. I stood by, impatient to use the new line.

The fact is, this is my first clothesline. I can barely remember the clothes hanging outside the kitchen window of my childhood home. I must have been nine or ten when my mother got the automatic tumble-dryer, and after that, I don’t remember her using the clothesline. From then until we moved to Ireland three years ago, the main part of my laundry went into the dryer. Delicates and things that might shrink, of course, were dried on hangers, but that didn’t require a clothesline.

It’s indicative of the casual use – waste – of fuels that is a part of life in America. A neighbour told me when we first moved to Thousand Oaks, California, that there was a city law against clotheslines. I don’t know if she had her facts straight, and I never investigated. What would they do, anyway, give you a ticket if your laundry offended your neighbour? However, in 17 years living there, I never saw a clothesline full of wash. Whether there was a law or not, hanging laundry on a line just wasn’t done.

It’s ironic, really. In Southern California, we suffered through hot dry summers stretching through October, basked in the sun on Christmas Day, had barbecues on New Year’s Day, and restricted our watering because of years-long droughts. In Ireland, where rain may arrive at any moment, any time of the year, many only reluctently use their tumble dryers. If laundry hung on the line is caught in a rain shower, it is shrugged off as a ‘second rinse.’

In Ireland, though, we never got around to putting up a clothesline. I couldn’t decide where to put it – oh monumental decision! – and my mother-in-law, living next door, graciously allowed me to use hers. It was only about 50 metres from our back door, and we were back and forth between the two houses frequently anyway.

So when we moved to this flat a year ago, it was the first time in my life I had access to neither clothesline nor dryer. For the past year, I’ve been hanging my wash on a tublular stainless steel clothes horse, setting it up in the garden on good days or in the utility room where the boiler roars on bad ones. About a metre high and extending about a metre and a half wide, it did the job adequately. But never, until now, could I wash several loads on a single day. Never, until now, could I wash and hang the large bath towels and the sheets all on the same morning.

This evening when I take down the laundry, the socks and towels will be a little stiff, without the fluffiness that comes from a tumble dryer. The sheets and tea towels, too, will show some creasing, turned in at the corners and imprinted with the impression of the clothes pegs. They will be also stiff and slightly awkward to fold. But they will smell as sweet and fresh as the green of the leaves against the blue sky, and bring with them the sun of this May day. Mundane as this is, it is for me a source of quiet joy.

Agency

Last week’s snow still piles the sides of the street and blankets the wide fields behind our house. It lies in jagged heaps on the frozen fishing pond seen through the houses across the way. The wood to our side is a tangle of grey-brown trucks and muted dark foliage screening a white floor. From my window, every so often I glimpse brighter colours as walkers crunch along the path through its trees. Under a pewter sky, the bright colours moving in the gloom catch one’s eye.

It’s been very cold, not rising above -1 C in the daytime and dropping much lower overnight. Bundled up in heavy coat with a scarf wound high and tight, I ventured out on my bike last week and again yesterday, rolling very slowly over the slick patches along the path by the river, wary lest the front tyre should suddenly fly from under me. Especially treacherous is the incline at the top of our street where several householders neglect to shovel their share of the street. The ice there accumulates inches deep. Even with gravel strewn over it, I couldn’t trust it. I dismounted and pushed the bike the 10 metres or so, worried in the event for my footing.

In these cold and frequently dark days, I’ve been considering the species of lassitude to which I’ve too often succumbed. Some time back I stumbled across a word, velleity, defined as the lowest degree of volition, a slight wish or tendency of mild degree, a ‘wish too slight to lead to action’. I copied out the definition because it seems a nearly perfect description of my own level of volition at times like this. This frozen winter seems to, at times, reduce my motivation to that level of personal agency.

And, more recently, I followed a link from Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish, to a commentary by Sam Rocha at Vox-Nova, in which he writes of boredom he suspects drives some of our frequently aimless ramblings through the rooms, corridors and antechambers of internet blogs and news sites.

‘I ask,’ Rocha writes, ‘(myself first and foremost): What is boredom but loneliness, alienation, lovelessness, and the desire for something to occupy the time in a way that puts those stark realities at a distance? What is boredom but not quite feeling at home in the place you are?’

Too often, I, your Spy, fumble around in this narrow small room of this blog, writing in spurts, at times with enthusiasm, delighted with the spectacle that surrounds me, at other times more halting and introspectively. Does the rise and fall in my volition — the attacks of lassitude or velleity — relate to the sense that sometimes I am not entirely at home in the place where I am?

It’s all very exciting to discover another way of living and to learn, however poorly, a new language. But there are days when I’m not entirely sure who I am. I wander the city, eyes wide with fascination at its beauties, but then resent being mistaken for a visitor. Someone stops me to ask directions, and I fumble, pointing and trying to find the words, and another passerby stops to intervene and delivers them in fluent German.

‘You can tell them you don’t know,’ Himself gently reminds me.

But I want to be able to help, long to show even simple competency. Being reduced to child-like inability to give directions, to communicate on the most fundamental level, challenges my sense of who I am.

This is not to suggest I want to leave Salzburg. Though I  felt a wave of homesickness looking at pictures of Tipperary in a calendar sent by my sister-in-law, I doubt at this point I would feel more at home in Ireland. Nor do I have the slightest desire to return the United States. No, what is required is continuing work — to learn German, to make a discipline of writing, here and elsewhere, to explore Austria and Salzburg to make the less familiar more familiar.

In fact, every so often, while riding the bus or waiting in the physical therapist’s office, an extraordinary feeling of well being comes over me. It is a sense that combines warmth and peace with something like the comfort of a maternal embrace. I look up a the pale light coming in a window and feel, suddenly, at home.

I mentioned it to Himself, who tells me he’s experienced the same sensation. There’s no way for us to know, at this point, how long we will have the chance to make our home here, but we’d like to think it will be for a long time.

Occasionally another expat American will tell me that Salzburg is a bit parochial or that there is a kind of snobbishness in some elements of life. For the time being, though, it is big enough so that the former hasn't struck us, and, in our ignorance, we are shielded from the latter.

What’s more, we are very very lucky in our neighbours here on Katzenstraße. Edith and Hannes, Sigrid and Gerald and their daughter joined us for dinner here on Saturday. After spaghetti and salad, we sat with our wine and schnapps listening to music and talking — switching from English to German and back — late into the night. Their warmth and acceptance has given us a social life we would not otherwise enjoy. The field, the pond and the wood may be frozen, but inside the radiators strum, tick and pump out warmth.

It’s good to be at home, here in the wood-panelled flat, at the end of Katzenstraße.

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.

Clench. Unclench.

The month is half over, and by the end of March – six weeks – we expect to be not so much settled as resident in Salzburg. Perhaps we’ll be in a short-term self-catering flat. Or, if things go well next week, it’s possible we will have found an apartment.

But wait. Even if we’ve found an apartment, when will the container packed with furniture and household belongings arrive? It was almost exactly three months from the day the Spanish-speaking crew packed our belongings one August afternoon in Southern California until the two men with Cockney accents unpacked them here in Co Tipperary, carrying the crates across a muddy yard under a pewter-streaked sky. Rather than crossing an ocean, however, this time it’s only a ferry trip and onto a train or truck to travel into the heart of the Continent.

Time expands. We’ve been waiting nearly three months for confirmation of the job, anxiety all but paralysing us as we drifted through the winter days. I sat in the quiet of this comfortable, secure house watching the clouds rest on the heath-covered peaks of the Galtee Mountains to the north, thinking. The three years in this peaceful countryside – peaceful, not quiet, for tractors rumble by, sheep bawl, cattle low, and crows scold – stretch out indeterminately. From the light-filled windows of the bedroom, I see the undulating silhouette of the Knockmealdown Mountains to the south, calm and blue across the valley farmed for centuries by my husband’s forebears and those of our neighbours. (How many centuries? There is a 5,000-year-old burial cairn, a heap of stones piled as high and wide as a two-story house, standing in a field two pastures over.) Seasons change, light and colours shift, the days drift onward like the clear bog-brown water of the streams and rivers that wend their way through this green land.

Time contracts. I lie in the early morning dark, stomach suddenly clenched, remembering the August afternoon not even three years ago, shimmering heat distorting the blue mountains seen across another valley. Even after weeks of trying to plan, I stand paralysed, surrounded by a whirlwind of activity, as the removal men sweep away books, clothes, bedding – our houseful of belongings – and load them onto the truck. So much stuff! How much can we afford to take? What goes in the luggage, what goes in the container? What stays, relinquished with the finality of never coming back? (The men, eager to get away that Friday afternoon, work faster than I can think. And then, after they’d driven off – Where are the passports? They were right here, on this shelf, the shelf – and I see, as from a distance, the gesture, my arm flung back as I indicate the shelf – ‘All this goes.’)

It will be like that very soon. Only a day after we contacted the estate agent about renting this house, he showed it to a prospective tenant, even in this slow market. How soon will it be available, he asks. Kathleen, the agent in charge of shipping, wants to know when she can schedule the survey of the house, or, more precisely, of the items to be shipped. How can we say when we haven’t even an idea of what size apartment we’ll be able to afford? This day next week we’ll fly to Salzburg so Himself can formally begin work and we can look at apartments. Only then will we begin to know how much space we may have.

Then we’ll come back to the questions. What goes? What stays? What goes in the luggage, what goes by air freight, what goes in the container? As I move through the house now, my eyes light on small items, things I rarely notice – an ornament, a vase, my great-grandmother’s gift to my grandmother, the small strawberry-patterned plate that belonged to my mother, gifts of the long ago, memories. The shelves of books, read and unread. Densely written notebooks, set aside and unregarded. Dishes shipped six thousand miles, some not used since. So much stuff. Does any of it matter?

Time contracts, then expands. A week to wait, unable to move, until we leave. A week until I see Salzburg for the first time. A week of uncertainty, of watching the clouds snagged on the amber-and-violet covered peaks of the Galtees. What should I be doing while we wait out the week? Only a week. My stomach clenches. So much to organise. So little time to think, to say goodbye. I know I should be doing something.

What?