Summer Skies

While it would be gross fabrication to say I miss the U.S., it would be mere exaggeration to say I am homesick for Ireland. We followed the Queen’s recent visit with uncanny fascination, surprised at the waves of emotion that overcame us at the reconciliation and mutual respect that arose from the ceremonies. I regretted that I could not stand near the motorway running between Cashel and Cork to see her motorcade pass – until I realised they made the journey by helicopter. Still, in my mind’s eye, I stood at our sitting room window in Tipperary and saw – across the pastures of Tincurry – her Range Rover glide through the landscape, past the gaze of Galtymore.

Likewise, we would have liked to have been there to see the crowds welcoming Obama, though, as it happened, we were in Italy during his visit. As well, when Tipperary recently beat Cork, its long-standing nemesis, in the first test of the summer-long hurling national championship, we wished we could have been watching the match from the comfort of the Garryroan sitting room.

Those are public occasions, of course. The twinges of nostalgia, those passing moments of longing, more often come in the odd, private moment. Weeding the garden in the stillness of an overcast afternoon, the breeze soft and pregnant with rain, the clear trill of blackbirds the loudest sound I hear, I am put in mind the long, overgrown garden at the back of my mother-in-law’s house. Looking up, I notice the swell of currents and ripening raspberries on the bush, and I wish, once more, that she could have seen our garden here.

I recall also the low rolling hills of Ireland, green fields cross hatched by deeper green hedgerows and grey clouds swelling on the horizon. Perhaps the memory is triggered by a photo; perhaps it comes suddenly to my imagination. The Austrian landscape is beautiful, its wide open meadows spreading against the soaring Alps breathtaking. The ancient onion-domed steeples and charming villages, dignified in these vast spaces, still astonish me. But my response to the Irish landscape, whether imagined or seen, is instinctual, as if primordial. It’s the quickening recognition that draws one toward a long-missed loved one.

It’s not just the landscape I miss, of course. I think of languorous warm Sunday afternoons, when, dinner dishes done, we wander aimlessly. Waiting, perhaps, for the Sunday match to begin, we sit in the glassed-in porch of my mother-in-law’s house, where, overheated by the welcome sun, acrid dust rising from the elderly brown cushions competes with the sharp scent of geraniums. Or we drift to the long tunnel of the polythene house, where the interior temperature rises a good 10 degrees higher than the cool afternoon. Flying insects ping against its taut surface; the air is rank with humus and sweet with ripe peaches and apricots. Rusted tools, rough twine, unspooled in irregular loops, faded boxes and broken crockery litter the tottering timber table. A drumming flutter beats against the plastic in the corner as a thrush, frantic, finds her way out the opening at the far end.

Later, in the long evening, we sit outside, if we’re lucky, to watch the colour drain from the light over the tips of the towering hedges. We try to distinguish the music of the thrush from the melody of the blackbird. Overhead, swallows and swifts dance their soaring song, filling the sky with swooping arabesques, their high chattering cries hanging in the air. They fill me with contentment.

We see no swallows from our veranda in Salzburg. I spotted, last summer, a few over the Salzach as I cycled along it in the evening. They flitted over the river, dancing from current to current just above the water, their cries muffled by the roar of the water. But they do not dance over our garden.

So it was with exhilaration I listened to the high shrill twittering of a sky full of swallows above the basilica in Padua. They soared too over the campos and canals of Venice, filling the heaven with their shrieks, weaving an elegant ballet against the fading blue light, blue reflected and intensified by the mirror-like waters below. In the heat of an Italian evening, I saw the swallows and thought of Ireland and home.

View of the Galtee Mountains from Garryroan, South Tipperary, Ireland
Photo by Lorraine Seal

Landscapes

Late last week the weather turned spring-like here, the days warm and bright, soft air drifting in through open windows. It reached about 18 or 19 C yesterday, too warm for the wool sweaters that are all I brought with me. The mountain that’s closest to us, seen through the windows of our hotel room, is green, its snow entirely melted. The towering alp to the northeast though, the other side of which we saw as we drove from Munich, still rises white against the blue sky.

The close mountain is about as tall, relative to our position, as Galteemore, the tallest of the peaks in the Galtee Mountains, as seen from our windows in South Tipperary. The summits of the Galtees, though, were stripped of their forests millennia ago, cleared for cultivation, and through erosion became, over time, boggy heath land. The mountain seen from the windows here in Salzburg are still forested at its summit, deep pine green and faded brown conifers in the early spring. Here and there, halfway down, are large grassy clearings with isolated buildings. The clearings are steep, steep as those in the wild Connemara mountains in the west of Ireland, where highland sheep graze on spindly black legs in nearly vertical pastures.

I see no sheep on this mountain, only the occasional flash as the sun glances off a passing car on a road not visible from here. I will miss the now-familiar green meadows when we move this weekend to our flat by the wood. The mountains are more distant there.

I’ve been struggling with how to describe Salzburg and the surrounding Bavarian countryside. What does it look like? Why or how is it different from Ireland? Or the Mediterranean landscape of Southern California, also split by mountains? I’ve compared Salzburg’s mountains to the Wasatch in Salt Lake City, but they’re similar only to a point.

The landscape and the architectural aesthetic is so different from these that it’s as though I have no words, or am only now beginning to find the words, to write about it. Away from its historic centre, Salzburg is not particularly remarkable. Its buildings are low – no office or tall apartment blocks here – a bit blockish and fairly modern. Parks and green space are plentiful, and many are dotted with schlosses – grand houses of the past. A long narrow park with a path through it is lined with these schlosses, set far apart. Along the river opposite the Altstadt, a 10 or 15 or more large, square-but-gracious-looking pastel-painted schlosses sit side by side.

The river, the Salzach, is wide and shallow, at least where I’ve peered into it. Its waters flow north in gentle ruffles and are pale, pastel green-blue, through which I can see stones on a sandy bottom as through pale blue glass. It’s very different from the deep bog-brown smooth-flowing River Suir that runs through Cahir, rising fish glinting in the late sun of a summer evening. Thickly leaved horse chestnuts and beeches clustered on its banks are reflected on its mirror-like impenetrable surface. The rocky banks of the Salzach, by contrast, slope steeply down to the river and are nearly bare.

As a Californian, used to muted earth-toned and pastel buildings, I was impressed by the use of colour in Irish towns. Colour is even more evident in the cityscape of Salzburg. Buildings are painted deep, saturated and bold colours. Just from my window on one small neighbour, I see apartment buildings painted salmon, saffron, lemon yellow and rich sky blue. The white house across the way has a purple door and mailbox; even its chain link fence is painted purple. The office building next to it, also white, has window frames of magenta. The schlosses, as I mentioned, are pink, yellow, blue and gold. In the Altstadt and the surrounding distracts, rococo facades are also painted pastels with filigreed ornaments in contrasting colours.

In the country side, buildings are timbered, often with hipped roofs decorated open-work gingerbread shapes. Churches in country villages rise in tall, narrow austere blocks, with vertical thrusts of steeple attached on otherwise unornamented front walls. Many of the steeples bulge with onion-shaped bulbs just before their pinnacles. So unlike the stone churches of Ireland, they still startle me when I see their masculine silhouettes dominant in the landscape.

In memory, Ireland seemed comfortable and emotionally accessible from the first time I saw it. Although new to me, the landscape seemed natural, familiar to my psyche. Here, the landscape seems exotic, and though I once had the vocabulary of art and architecture, now I stumble, searching for words now lost to me. Like German, the landscape is not disagreeable; it’s just pushing me to find words to express meaning.