6 January Thursday

Today is Nollaig na mBan: Women’s Christmas. Little Christmas. Twelfth Night. Epiphany. Today is all of these things. It is the official last day of Christmas and it is the day when all of the decorations and the tree should be taken down and everything except the holly should be removed from the house. Nollaig na mBan is supposed to be a day of rest and pleasure for the women who have done most of the work throughout the holiday season. The men of the house take over on this day and do any and all domestic jobs that need doing. The women are traditionally out visiting one another, sharing tea or dinner with female friends and family, but of course another year with Covid restrictions has put a halt to this ritual. Sharing a flask of coffee sitting on some stones after a winter walk in the mountains, or a shared park bench in the city, is more the order of the day.

8 January Saturday

I am walking across the yard in the dark and the rain. I am on my way to the sauna, wearing nothing but my dressing gown and carrying a little lantern. I am wishing that I was also carrying an umbrella. The ground squishes underneath my rubber clogs. There has been so much rain. There is so much mud. On the return trip, I am less bothered by the rain. My body is radiating heat. I feel impervious to the rain. I have to tread carefully because there are daffodils pushing up all over the place. They are already two inches out of the ground but there is not a snowdrop in sight. This is not the correct order of things. This is all wrong.

9 January Sunday

When a person says This Day Twelve Months, they mean a year ago today.  But if that same person speaks of This Day Week, they mean one week from today. I cannot figure out how these two expressions can be so similar but one implies going back in time while the other suggests the future.

12 January Wednesday

A farmer in Ardfinnan has two llamas in the field with his flock of sheep.  When he moves the sheep to another field for grazing, the llamas move with them.  The discussion locally is that the llamas function as protection.  A fox will not attack a sheep that has been separated from the flock if there is a llama nearby. I am not sure how much truth there is in this theory because llamas are not natural residents of Tipperary. Not one person can claim to be experienced much less an expert in the matter.

13 January Thursday

There are two kinds of names.  There are the names used as identifiers and the names used for address.  The identifier tells the listener about the person who is being discussed: Johnnie the Timber. Mickey the Boxer.  Pat Flan. Billy the Wood. Auntie She-She. I would never call Sheila Auntie She-She to her face. I would address her as Sheila, but if someone else speaks about her they call her Auntie She-She, so that we will know exactly which Sheila is being discussed. As for Mickey the Boxer, I do not know why Boxer is attached to his name, but it always is.  When I meet him on the road, I call him Michael. For years I thought one man was called Frankie the Wire, but eventually I learned that his name was Dwyer. It was  just a confusion because the whole name was said with a thick Tipp accent.

15 January Saturday

Breda and I walked up on Barranacullia. We walked around the mountain and down to the river and then up to the cairn on top. Wherever we walked the sheep ran along in front of us. Big lines of crushed up swedes had been poured out on the hill for them. They were interested to eat the vegetable matter but they were more interested to run away from us.

16 January Sunday

Simon boned out a chicken. He stuffed it with black pudding and rosemary and sausage meat and I do not know what else. When he was finished with the stuffing, he sewed it back up with book-binding thread.

17 January Monday

The light is lasting longer and later every single day. I enjoy taking a walk at the very end of the afternoon as the sky is going all pink and just as the sun drops. It is still light at five o’clock. Only a few weeks ago it was completely dark at five. A few times I have been caught out on a road when the light dropped faster than I expected. I should remember to wear a high-visibility vest.

18 January Tuesday

There is a low table in the waiting area of the doctor’s surgery. It used to be in the middle of the room covered with magazines and looking like an ordinary coffee table. There are no longer magazines available for anyone to touch or look at and there are only four chairs in the whole room. The low table is now pushed into place in front of the counter where the receptionist sits. The table is made of heavy wood. It is about 22 inches by 36 inches. It is not something that is easily moved. My impression is that it was placed there to stop people getting too close to the receptionist. There is a sheet of glass in front of the desk to protect the receptionist. The glass is 4 feet long and there is a shelf with bottles of hand sanitizer along the length of it. The only part of the long area not protected by glass is one end, about 6 inches wide, on the far left. This is where the receptionist hands out receipts and where the bank card machine is placed for payments. As a result of the low table blocking the way and the narrow point of access in the glass protecting the receptionist, every person who comes out of the doctors’ offices immediately squeezes themselves into the the slot between the heavy low table and the radiator that is attached to the wall. There is only about 10 inches available to stand in, so most people do so with one leg in front of the other. We each stand kind of sideways while trying to maintain a normal transaction. Every single person moves into this awkward space in order to settle whatever business needs to be settled. The table is another annoyance in our current life and we all accept it without question.

20 January Thursday

 

21 January Friday

Another late afternoon walk, up the road in search of a short mud-free stroll. There was indeed no mud, but the further I went, the stronger the smell. Slurry was being spread in the fields I was walking past. The stench was terrible and the after-effect of the smell was a horrible burning at the back of my throat. The interesting thing was a bright yellow and black sign announcing: CAUTION/SLURRY SPREADING IN PROCESS. It was both a redundant and an unusual sign. It is not normal to find something to read when I am out for a walk, but the smell of the slurry and the noise of the tractor is ordinarily enough to alert anyone to the activity of spreading. We do not need to read about it. Along with the sign were a pair of metal ramps so that any vehicles were able to drive over the thick hose that is transporting the pumped slurry from a tank to the tractor moving around out in the field.

22 January Saturday

Walking to and from from the sauna tonight my torch lit up dozens of snowdrops in the grass. They are just coming into blossom. This is a cheerful sign. Nature seems to be back on schedule.

17 December Friday

The woman in front of me at the post office counter announced in a loud voice: “I have not bought a stamp since This Day Twelve Months, and today I bought three!”

18 December

It was not a cold day but yesterday had been bitter. The older lady at the farmer’s market was half-way apologizing for appearing in her long fur coat. She explained out loud to no one in particular that she thought the day would be as cold as the one before had been. She was obviously happy to be out wearing her glamorous coat. She had taken a lot of trouble. Her long suede gloves were immaculate and her wig was perfect. The coat had a high fluffy collar and similar fluffy cuffs. It might have been mink or it might have been fox. I do not know much about fur. I felt I had to comment on her appearance and she was happy that I had. It gave her a chance to discuss the coat. It had been left to her by her friend who died earlier in the year. The friend had lived in the United States for many years and she owned three fur coats. She brought them back to Ireland with her, but the weather was rarely cold enough to have a need for even one of them. They were city coats designed for attending the opera or a concert. This coat she was wearing was not meant for an hour at the farmers market on a Saturday morning in December but she confessed that she had no where else to go and it seemed a pity not to wear the coat. Wearing the coat was a way to honor her friend. She told me that her friend’s initials were sewn into the lining at the hem and she thought of her each time she looked at the carefully embroidered letters.

19 December

Every year Anthony brings out his tyre tree and he decorates it with fresh greenery. Every year I am happy to see it again. After twelfth night, he will return it to the back of the yard where the greenery will die as it sits on its pallet until next year.

20 December Monday

I cannot see for the fog. It is heavy and thick and white. It has settled all the way down to the ground. My walking takes me from one tree to the next tree. I lose each tree as I pass it. I lose each gate as I pass it. I lose the stone walls. I am deprived of everything. Everything disappears as I move. Each thing looms and then it evaporates. Where I am going is familiar because I have gone this way before but inside the dense fog every single thing is new. I can only see the most immediate next thing and then my eyes are searching through the whiteness for the next thing.

21 December Tuesday

The local holiday clean-up seems to be proceeding as normal even though government warnings tell everyone to reduce their contacts and not to gather in groups.  I overhear the yearly conversations repeated about what has been done and about what has yet to be done. The flurry of activity is manic. The Omicron variant cannot stop all of these rituals. Getting the tree and its decorations up is just one thing. Festive evergreen wreaths must be taken to the graves of the family dead and the gravestones must be scrubbed clean. The car must be washed both inside and out, and the house must be cleaned and the windows washed even though most people will not allow anyone into their homes. There will be no one to see all the hard work. A trip to the hygienist for a cleaning of the teeth and a fresh haircut are essential to guarantee that everyone looks good in their photographs.

24 December Friday

Every year I get out my mother’s red tablecloth on Christmas Eve and every year I swear that this is its final year and I promise myself that this will be the year that I throw it away at the end of the holiday.  Every year we remark on the small red rounded iron-on patches and my father’s cigarette burns and the stains and the holes and melted candle fat. This table cloth is a mess. Every Christmas we say that this table cloth has had a long life but Enough is Enough. In the last few years I have laid a red and white checkered picnic cloth across the middle of the table so that the old red cloth only pokes out from around the edges. It is more difficult to see the wear and tear. The red checks look like summer. The checkered tablecloth does not look even vaguely Christmas-y but it covers a multitude of damage and of history.

27 December Monday

We walked out the road to Lady’s Abbey and as always, I stopped to look for the chair with the red velvet seat. It was no longer in the little room where it sat for so long before someone tried to set it on fire. I thought the area must have been cleaned up and the chair removed along with the rest of the burnt mess, but the chair had only tossed into an alcove on the side of the Abbey along with a lot of branches.

 

28 December Tuesday

Someone sent a card using last year’s postage stamps which marked The Christmas Day Swim. The swim is a big part of the celebration for anyone who lives near to the sea and since this country is an island there are a lot of group swims in the morning. The Christmas Swim is as much a part of the holiday as anything else.

1 January 2022

During Storm Barra, plastic feed bags blew down the boreen. One bag was stuck up a tree. I tried to reach it, first with a heavy stick and then with a rake. I could not get anywhere near as there were so many brambles and also because the tree was up on a precarious banking. I decided that I might have to wait for another kind of wind to catch it. It annoyed me every time I saw the white bag stuck high up in the branches. Last night we had more wild winds. The final winds of the year. Noisy smashing gusts woke us over and over all night long. This morning I found that the plastic bag had been blown out of its tree and that two others just like it were scattered down the length of the boreen. I walked along and collected all three and put them in the lean-to for eventual removal to the recycling depot. MAZZOLENI printed on the bags offered me the idea of a little bit of travel in these restrictive times. I like the idea of the Dry Cow Feed coming all the way from Italy to feed Joe’s wintering Irish cows.

 

3 January 2022 Monday

Double barrel, solid with concrete.

24 November Wednesday

Tommie is extremely clear about when he does not want to be disturbed. Sunday morning is an important time to him. He does not want to have to answer the door nor the telephone when the television priest is performing Mass. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, there are always matches being played on the television. These matches are as important as the Sunday Mass is to him. They are so important to him that he feels that everyone he knows should know this and they should neither stop in for a visit nor ring him on the telephone. He feels that anyone who knows him should know about these times and that they should know better than to interrupt him. He told me that last week a woman called to visit and she came right in and sat in the old chair that used to be Margaret’s chair and this woman talked to him in a great big long gust for half an hour while the match was playing on the television. He did not listen to what she was saying and he did not turn down the volume but he swears that the woman did not take one single breath for the whole time that she was talking. He says that he has no idea who she was but she seemed to know him so he let her talk and then when she was done talking she said good-bye and she left. He was still annoyed about it when he told me and at that time this interruption was already five or six days ago.

25 November Thursday

The house is on a corner. The upstairs windows are undamaged. None of the panes are broken although the house looks like it has been empty for a long time. The single downstairs window has been covered with plywood and painted to look like the other windows. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make sure that the panes were delineated as six over six, just like the windows upstairs. I think the painter used masking tape to mark out the dividers between the glass.

27 November Saturday

I had a little cold and I was at the doctors surgery. I was not there because of the cold, but when I sneezed a tiny little sneeze the receptionist rushed out from her cubicle and shooed me outside. I was the only person in the waiting room and I was wearing a mask but she shooed me out the door anyway and she told me to go home. She said I could not come in and she promised that the doctor would phone me later. He did telephone me and he told me that I must have a Covid test. He said that things have gone so rampant and contagious in the area that they can take no chances. I was certain that I did not have Covid but I had to drive to a shed on the Fethard road at seven the next evening and I was given a PCR test while I sat in the car. I was also given a box of fifty masks and told that I would receive my test results within 48 hours. When I got the text telling me that my test was negative, I was completely relieved even though I had been sure that all I had was a very mild cold. I still have the little cold, but it is getting better.

2 December Thursday

Yesterday Fortnight means two weeks from yesterday. It is a common expression used to project a time two weeks in the future but not from today. It is always marked from yesterday.

Monday Week means a week ago Monday.

Half Two. No one says Half Past Two, nor do they say Two Thirty. It is always Half Two.

3 December Friday

Michael O’Sullivan the musician and composer was born in Clonmel. The house he lived in, or the house he was born in, now houses an insurance company called O’Sullivan Insurances. The building and the business might belong to his brother or his cousin or another of his relations, or it might not. Opinions and theories seem to vary greatly. I have not been able to ascertain if any of it is fact. When ringing the insurance company office it is not unusual to be placed on hold. The music played while waiting for a human to answer is one of Michael O’Sullivan’s compositions, performed by himself. Which might mean something, or it might not.

4 December Saturday

A Cattle Crush is an alley that a farmer builds to encourage cows to keep moving but to move in a single line. Mostly it is to get a cow into a safe position to be taken care of individually. It is used when the cows need injections or new ear tags or any old thing where the farmer needs to address an animal’s issues one at a time. Sometimes a Cattle Crush is made of fencing and sometimes it is made of cast concrete. Sometimes the side of a barn is used for one wall and fencing is used for the other side. The Cattle Crush beyond the Abbey has not been used for animals for as long as I have been using it. We open the little gate and walk through it on our way to the river.

7 December Tuesday

For two days the radio was been full of the approach of Storm Barra. Now it has arrived. Coastal areas are all under Red Alert. We only have an Amber alert. We have been sitting inside with rain and wind beating on the house from every direction. It feels like the roof might blow off. The bamboo is blowing itself horizontal. I went down to the barn for a bit of book-packing but it was too cold to stay down there for long. Branches kept flying and smashing against the windows. When I gave up my work to return to the house I could barely open and close the barn door. The wind was stronger than me. We heard on the radio that there are gusts of up to 132 km an hour in County Clare. The birds are going mad for the nuts. They are swarming all over the feeders while the feeders themselves are rocking and flapping in the wind. They need refilling but I cannot see the point of going out as the nuts would just fly away with any attempt to scoop them out of the bucket and into the small openings of the feeders. It is not only slates and chimneys and branches crashing around. The radio tells us that trampolines and lawn furniture are blowing and flying all over the roads and across fields. This is not a day to go out and empty the compost.

8 December Wednesday

Last night I filled buckets and bottles and pitchers with water. I knew that if our power failed we would have no water because the generator that pumps the water from our well is powered by electricity. Without electricity we would not be able to flush the toilet nor brush our teeth nor do any of the dozens of things that we expect to do with running water. There were multiple texts back and forth between neighbors as we checked in with one another. I laid out candles and made sure that the torches were fully charged. By bedtime, we had still not lost power. The wild blustery wind had not stopped once, not even for a minute. The noise of the wind filled the air and it filled our ears. I was so prepared for disaster that I think I was a little disappointed that my preparations were not needed. We have lost the internet, but we did not lose our electricity.  All day today we have continued to be buffeted and beaten but the sun is shining and the rain has stopped. We now know that the end is in sight. The radio assures us that this storm is moving eastwards.