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 Whitworth 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.

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, “So–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.

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.

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