8 June Monday

A baby fox came to the kitchen door this morning.  The door was wide open. He was just walking into the house when I  appeared.  We were both startled.  He was gone almost before I had a chance to register his presence.

6 June Saturday

I was pleased to meet John as I walked through the woods on the river path in Cahir this morning.  He is walking a bit slower but he still has a steady pace. He continues to do his five mile walk but since March he is no longer doing it every day.  He now walks five days a week. He is feeling bad about not doing the full week but he said that he is feeling tired.  He is nearly 92.  He told me that he will never see 91 again and that indeed he does not feel certain that he will make it to 92.  Two weeks ago he traveled to Istanbul with his daughter.   He liked the architecture very much but he did not like the food.  He said everyone there had a new car. There was not an old car to be seen.  He would have liked to have seen a bit more of the traditional building methods but it was too difficult to go out into the countryside.  He said he was glad to have gone but he was more glad to get home and to have some normal food.  He was glad to return to his walking schedule.

5 June Friday

I am sitting upstairs in the cafe looking out at the ducks and the river and the castle.  I have the newspaper.  I have a coffee and a scone.  I have five new books purchased for one euro each from the Lion’s Club fund-raising bookshop.  I am waiting while Mike gives the car a service.  Another customer arrived with a problem before I did so he needs to take care of that car first.  I will have a longer wait.  The bookshop and the post office were my first stops.  Now I am here.

I am taking a closer look at the books I bought.  Two women sat across from one another at the little table in the bookshop.  There was a tablecloth and a small money box on the table.  One woman sat behind the table and the other sat across from her blocking all movement on that side of the shop. They each had large cups of tea. They never stopped talking for one second.  They went on and on in minute detail about anything and everything.   Actually one woman talked and the other just repeated things back to her like an echo. Everything was imperative. I was the only customer.  It was difficult to focus on the books in such a small space with so much talking. I do know quite a bit more than I want or need to know about the woman who was doing the talking.

There is one other table occupied up in this part of the cafe. It has been lovely and quiet while I have been sitting here.  The silence was just interrupted by a woman at the other table.  She made a phone call to a man named Frank.  She cancelled her twelve o’clock appointment for getting a tattoo.  She told him she was chickening out.

4 June Thursday

I learned a new word today. Perisher.  I am a Perisher.  I am someone who feels the cold.  I spent all day today pulling my sweater on and off.  It is not only the unseasonable strange weather, it is me.  It is normal to hear someone say that they are Perished With The Cold.  The word Perisher is a new to me.  Now I have this word so even if it does go from sun to cold and cloudy several times an hour, I can enjoy my new word.  Everyone else can wear T-shirts but as a Perisher I will always keep something warm near.

3 June Wednesday

It is still colder than it should be for this time of year.  The greyness is the depressing. Walking across Joe’s field, I saw The Fox outlined against the flat colour of the sky.  He was very close to me.  I stopped and he stopped and we looked at each other.  After a few minutes he moved off slowly up towards his woods and I continued over the hill.  When I mentioned this casual meeting with the fox to a neighbour she immediately wanted to know if it was Her Fox.  She has been worried about a fox loitering near her ducks and geese.  She described the fox to me.  She said Her Fox had a light coloured tip at the end of his tail.  I do not think Her Fox is the same as The Fox.  I always call the fox The Fox. I never call him mine.  Yesterday there were two foxes walking up the boreen just beside the house.  When they saw movement through the window one ran off in one direction and one turned and went back the way it had come.  I shall still call each individual fox The Fox, but I am happy to see that there is more than one.

2 June Tuesday

It used to be normal that if a person was at home, the door of the house was open. It was mostly the kitchen door that was left open but it could be another door.  It was a way of letting passing people know that there was someone there.  It was also a way of letting air into the house. It is not such a common thing now for lots of reasons.  Most people do not want to let all of their heat out.  Nor do they want passing people coming in.  It is not such a friendly world and not everyone who passes is someone that one knows. Most people are off at jobs so there is no one at home in the daytime anyway.

Today I went to the Breast Check Mobile Unit.  Every two years we women are sent an appointment for an X-ray.  The Breast Check Unit is a long trailer which is driven to the grounds of the hospital and parked there for a few months.  The truck part of the trailer drives away, then metal steps are put in place and the unit is open for business. Everything needed is inside. The big machines, the curtained changing rooms, waiting benches and a desk.  Everything is attached to floor and walls, so that when the unit is moved somewhere else nothing will be disturbed.  When I arrived this morning the door was closed.  The keys were hanging in the lock.  I opened the door and walked in.  Two women were there putting on their uniform tops.  They were not fully dressed yet.  One of them snapped at me and said that they were not open yet.  I said that the door was unlocked.  She said “Unlocked yes. But Not Open.  When we are open, the door will be open.”  I went back outside to wait for the door to open.

1 June Monday

The rusty metal things which the blacksmith scraped and prepped were all mounted on wooden blocks by Simon.  Sadly, not one of them is a success for printing.  Each piece looks fine on its little block.  To the naked eye they look flat and smooth, but as soon as we tried to print them the defects and the unevenness were all too evident.  After work on the Adana failed, I tried hand-rolling them with ink and doing individual prints by rubbing on the back of a sheet of paper.  That was a failure too.  They might have been interesting in any of these methods even with all of the defects.  They might have looked fantastic with all of the unevenness and bumps but instead they just looked messy and kind of ugly.  We are disappointed.  So far we have not found a new solution.

Source: somewordsforlivinglocally

31 May Sunday

We walked to the Abbey and down toward the river.  Wild wind sun rain wind sun cloud rain sun rainbow rain sun kind of weather continued during the whole walk.  The barley is thigh-high on both sides of the track.  At the bottom gate we spoke with four Frenchmen in full fishing gear.  They were getting ready to cross through the field full of calves to the riverbank.  They were surprised to see us.  We were surprised to see them.  We never see another person down there except maybe the farmer who owns the fields. They had extremely long fishing rods which flapped about in the wind.  They knew the rain was coming again. They spoke no English. We discussed the weather in French and then we all continued with what we were doing.  We all knew we would get drenched.  I had to change my trousers when I got home.

30 May Saturday

It was cold at the market this morning, but it was dry.  I spoke with the woman who sells knitted things.  A few weeks ago she made a tea cosy that looked like the front of a Volkswagon camper van.  She was very pleased with it. Everyone admired it. Since then she has made two more versions of the camper van.  She says she is trying to get the windscreen wipers right. I like the early version where the wipers are made up of several little stitches but she is working on a longer loop which does look more like an actual wiper.   She has three camper vans and a beehive and little Aran sweaters with buttons up the front, as well as some other styles of tea cosies.  They are lined up on two levels on her table.  They look wonderful as a group.  She rarely sells one.  She says that she makes tea in a mug with a teabag herself.  Maybe no one is using tea cosies these days.  She said she won’t make another camper van until she sells one of the ones she has already knitted.

It has been trying to rain since 11 this morning.  The weather report promised that it would rain all evening and into the night.  Evening is anytime after lunch so we knew the afternoon would be a wet one.  After returning from the market, I stalled on going out to do anything.  Simon rushed outside to do some jobs immediately before lunch.   I stalled and stalled.  It was cold and windy as well as threatening rain.  Just changing into my grubby garden clothes was something I put off.  A few minutes ago I walked down to the book barn and a steady soft drizzle was coming down.  I finally have my excuse not to go and work outside. Now I can settle to something inside.  It is a real relief.  We are so weary of this cold and gloom and sun and rain and no sun and the never-ending chill over everything.  It is not so many hours before the month of June begins and it is not very nice.

29 May Friday

I followed a car pulling a horse box for about 20 kilometres.  On the back of the trailer there was a blue net sack with hay in it.  The sack bounced and twirled as the car and the horse box moved along.  Sometimes the wind caught the hay and made it spin even more than the bumping along on the back of the trailer already made it do.  I could not help but worry if the horse inside the box had some hay to eat during his journey or if his supply was what I was watching bouncing and blowing away in small bits all along the road.

27 May Wednesday

The posters have all been taken down.  The feeling of exhilaration and celebration after the successful YES vote has all settled now.  For the weeks and days before the referendum the topic was never far from our lives.  Directly after the results no one spoke of anything else. People flew from as far away as New Zealand and Australia just to be able to vote.  It was the Yes voters who traveled.  I do not think the No people were as committed.  There were many stories being told.  People were both thrilled and proud to have voted for equality. Now it seems that it is time to move on and to talk about other things.

26 May Tuesday

The driving entrance to some houses is called an Avenue.  I think an Avenue usually has a tarred surface.  If not tarred, it is at least a hard surface.  An Avenue is not a dirt track with grass in the middle. An Avenue simply by its name suggests something a little bit finer and a bit wider.  An Avenue implies something grand.  I never hear an Avenue called a drive nor a driveway.  Nor is a boreen an Avenue. A boreen is too rough.

Our own boreen has become a tunnel.  It is horribly bumpy underneath and it is wildly overgrown on the sides and the top.  The cow parsley has come into its largest and most frothy and effusive mode.  The cow parsley is meeting itself at the top and making a canopy under which we drive and walk.  It is a fluffy tunnel. The blossoms touch the car on both sides and on the roof as though they are some kind of car wash.  An Avenue would never have anything at all touching a vehicle as it drove along.

Source: somewordsforlivinglocally

21 May Thursday

Tomorrow is voting day for the referendum on Same-Sex Marriage.  Both radio and television have been full of discussions and arguments.  The newspapers have been teaming with articles and essays. There are posters up on trees.  Polls report daily on the swings of the Yes, the No and the Undecided.  It has seemed clear that the Yes vote is way out ahead but I think no one dares to feel certain.  The rural vote is less positive than the urban vote. And now we are dropping into this day of silence from the media before voting begins.  The referendum is a huge thing in this old-fashioned but strangely progressive country.  It is a huge thing, period.

20 May Wednesday

Late afternoon sun.  Suddenly at 5.30 it is a beautiful day.  It is almost enough to make me forget the rain and hail and the broken heating system.  It is almost enough to make me forget how unpleasant it is to even be thinking about a heating system at the end of May.  We have had Thor staying for a few days.  It has been so nice to have a dog in the house again.  He is quite deaf so he follows us around because he needs to know where we are.  I find myself looking for him if I do not see him often.  I do not know who is following whom.  I took him out walking. We met Oscar.  Male dogs do not always get along very well but both Thor and Oscar are agreeable animals. They quickly fell into step together.  As a result of their exploring and sniffing, I made the walk much longer.  Thor would look back every so often to check if I was with them.  I could shout out a direction to Oscar and I could be certain that Thor would follow.  It is not possible to shout directions to a deaf dog but hand signals do work.  Oscar became the guide dog.  A guide dog for a dog. We all had a great walk yesterday.  We had another great walk today.  Thor is very small and Oscar is very big but somehow they managed to find a pace to satisfy them both. I was worried about Thor struggling through the cow parsley and the long grasses but he was so determined to keep up that no obstacle slowed him down.  It is so much better to walk with a dog.  Everything is better with a dog.

18 May Monday

Jo Hyland locks and unlocks the church and keeps track of the cleaning.  I do not know if she does the cleaning herself, but I think she does.  She is also the bell-ringer.  She pulls the thick ropes to ring the bells for Mass and for funerals.  She is a very small woman. She is described as being Low to the Ground. I just learned that she is 93 years old.  She will let her daughter or someone else unlock or lock the church if she is unwell or if the weather is wretched, but she will not allow anyone else to ring the bells.

17 May Sunday

We have eaten Lumpers!  Up until now my only experience with a Lumper was in reports of the famine.  It was one of the potatoes which suffered badly from blight. Because there were so many Lumpers planted at the time of the famine, they contributed to massive crop failure.  I understood Lumpers to have a bad reputation.  I have never seen a Lumper for sale in a shop nor at a market, so I was surprised when Simon arrived home with a bag of them.  He was excited.  My heart sank.  I feared that we were stuck with yet another bag of floury potatoes which would not behave properly. I feared that we would complain and moan through this bag of potatoes.  The Lumpers were ugly.  They obviously earned their name because of their bumpy and not beautiful appearance.  To our surprise, the Lumpers are lovely to eat.  They are a delicious potato with a great texture. They are not at all floury.  We cooked them in several different ways and each time the eating was pleasurable.  These Lumpers came from Antrim.  I wonder if we will be able to find them again or if their presence here was a freak.  If no one but us likes them, the shop where they came from might be tempted to say No when next offered a load of Lumpers.

Source: somewordsforlivinglocally

15 May Friday

I went to catch the 3.45 post.  The village was full of cars.  I parked at the bottom of the bridge and walked in. I thought the cars were lined up for a funeral but I knew that funerals are always always at 11 in the morning.  This was not the right time of day for a funeral.  People were standing in front of the church and across the street in front of the shop and facing the church.  Everyone was talking but there was not much sound.  It was quiet with the waiting.  I nodded and spoke to people as I went along and into the shop.  The entire side of the street in front of the church was blocked off with striped plastic tapes.  I went into the shop and posted my parcels.  By the time I had done that, the lights were turned off, the shades were pulled down and the door was shut.  Kieran pulled the grating halfway down.  I was trapped in the shop.  I did my photocopying in the dim light.  The three of us talked in low voices even though we were inside the shop and we could have spoken in normal voices.  The man who died was 85 or 86 and had been poorly for 14 years.  For the last 8 years he had been badly taken with Alzheimer’s.  He had a large family.  I did not know the man and I do not think I know his family.  I might know some of them by sight but this was not the time to find out.  He had six or seven daughters and one son and they all had children and then there were some great-grandchildren too. The reason that the funeral had to be so late in the day was because they were waiting for the sister of the deceased.  She was 84 herself and had to take several planes to get here from the western provinces of Canada.

When the hearse arrived all of the striped tapes were quickly removed and the family was able to park all along in front of the church.  We watched from a small unshaded area of the window.   Dozens and dozens of floral wreathes and bouquets were taken out of the back of the hearse.  Each one was handed to a young girl.  There were lots of little girls in bright outfits.  In no time they were each holding flowers.  When the coffin was carried into the church, the girls and their flowers followed close behind and then the rest of the family went in and then other people filed in.  Not everyone went into the church. There are always some men who stand outside and smoke and speak among themselves while the service goes on inside. Other people simply take their leave after the coffin has been carried into the church.  That was when I slipped out and under the grating and headed back to my car.  In the thirty minutes or so that I had been in the shop, another 8 cars had pulled in and parked behind me. Cars were parked right up the side of the narrow bridge.

11 May Monday

I am obsessed with the recorded announcement: STAND CLEAR. LUGGAGE DOORS OPERATE.  It repeats again and again for the entire time that the luggage doors are open.  The doors swing upward from the side of the bus whenever there is a stop and when someone needs to get something out or to put something in under the bus. Underneath is the storage place for baby prams, suitcases and other cumbersome packages.  Each time I listen carefully to the announcement.  There is something wrong with the sentence.  I feel certain it should say LUGGAGE DOORS OPERATING or LUGGAGE DOORS ARE OPERATING. I listen hard to try to hear if I am missing a syllable or a word.  I have listened so hard and so carefully so many times that I now find myself saying the words along with the announcement. I repeat the words at exactly the same speed as the recording.  It is more intoning than speaking the words.  If they are repeated ten times I chant them ten times.  I harbour a fantasy of everyone on the bus repeating the words along with me and along with the announcement.  It would be a quiet kind of joining in.  When the announcement stops and the doors return to their closed position, everyone will continue reading or texting or sleeping and not one of us will refer to the chanting which we did together.  The next time the door opens we will all do it again. And again.  All the way to Cork or Dublin or wherever the bus is going.

10 May Sunday

It is crazy weather.  The sun is out most of the time.  The rain is lashing down most of the time.  The sun does not disappear behind clouds.  The rain just falls hard and then not so hard and then just a little.  The rain continues without cease.  The birds keep singing.  Sometimes the noise of the rain on the roof of the big room is so loud that it is difficult to hear myself think.  But beyond the sound of the heavy rain the bird song breaks through.  The wind is gusting and blowing all the time.  The wind never stops either.  Nothing stops.  Rain. Sun. Birds. Wind.  Nothing stops so nothing else stops.

9 May Saturday

As I walked toward the entrance of the market, I saw a man walking away from the market.  He had four leeks in his left hand.  He had nothing else.  He carried neither a bag nor a basket.  I could hardly believe that he came to the market just to purchase four leeks.  I have been thinking about him all day.

8 May Friday

A cardboard box had been cut open and flattened out on the ground.  On top of the cardboard there was a brown rubber backed door mat.  and the whole thing was topped by an orange rubber traffic cone.  I thought it was all covering up a hole in the tarmac, but instead it was covering up a spill.  Someone had dropped a bucket of paint.  Sky blue paint oozed out from the edges of the cardboard.  The apparatus and the traffic cone were in place to protect customers to the shop from stepping out of their car and right into the pigment.  After three days the cardboard and the carpet have been removed.  What remains is a sky blue shaped mess with orange cones on either side of it. I assume that the cones are still there because if the paint was oil based, it might still be wet.

Source: somewordsforlivinglocally