8 June Wednesday

The woman went into the toilet that was just across the narrow corridor from where we were sitting. There were three other people besides myself. We were on chairs waiting to be called for an X-ray. The woman closed the door and then she opened the door. She closed the door again and then she opened it again. She closed it for longer and then for a shorter time. We all watched. She was hoping and expecting a light to go on inside. She stuck her head out the door and announced to us all: “I’ll be needing some light in here to be doing what I need to be doing.”

9 June Thursday

There is a dead rodent underneath the bird feeders. It is too small to be a rat. It might be a mouse. It is probably a shrew. The head is missing. The black cat from the farm is sitting on the wall nearby. He may have been the killer but he does not seem interested to eat whatever it is. It makes me question his hunger. He is scrawny. His neck is extremely thin. He looks desperate and starving even on a good day. If he is as hungry as he looks, he would eat that rodent.

21 June Tuesday

When Frankie answers the telephone he does not say hello. Nor does he say his name. He says “Well.” It is not a question. It is just the word, followed by the wait for whatever comes next. He also says this as a greeting when he meets someone. He snaps his head in a sharp little nod and he says, “Well.” He is not the only person who says hello like this.

23 June Thursday

Ferns are falling. They are weighed down by themselves. They are making the boreen more narrow by the day. Maybe it is the rain that is making them drop.

24 June Friday

The black cat comes down from the farm at regular intervals throughout the day. If I look out the door, he crouches on the path and catches my eye. I know he is hungry and he knows that I know he is hungry. Sometimes I put a few scraps out on a dish. He runs away when I step outside but as soon as the door is closed he returns and gobbles whatever is on offer.

25 June Saturday

Creena was driving past the church. She crossed herself when her car was directly in front of the church. She always crosses herself when passing any church. This morning she was driving and crossing herself and taking a left turn for the shop all at the same time. Then she saw another car coming towards her and she waved to the person in the car. She was not certain who it was in the other car, but she knew that not waving would reflect badly on her if it was someone she knew and someone she failed to acknowledge. She always salutes everyone just as she always crosses herself on passing a church. She was waving and driving and crossing herself and turning all with the same two hands. I watched from my parked position. Everything happening at the exact same time. I marveled that there was no collision.

26 June Sunday

Mickey responds with hearty agreement when someone says something that meets with his approval. He declares : “NOW you have it!” with the emphasis on the word NOW. He slaps his leg whenever he says it.

27 June Monday

People are dressing for summer because it is summer. There are people walking around in sleeveless dresses and shorts and T-shirts. Bare legs and sandals. We are wearing sweaters most of the time. Sometimes the sweaters are cotton but often they are heavy woolen sweaters. Every evening we consider lighting a fire in the wood stove.  It is not warm and it is not sunny and it does not feel like summer. There has been a lot of rain. Every conversation includes rain. Before the rain. After the rain. During the rain. The sound of rain. The threat of rain. The promise of rain. The clearing of the rain. Heavy rain. Light rain. Drizzles and downpours and desperate lashing. It is cold and it is wet. It does not feel like summer. It is disheartening and bleak. We might have a few hours of bright sky and sun but then it rains again. 6 or 7 or 10 times a day. It is impossible to do much outside because it has always rained recently so everything is wet. The garden is bright and green with weeds and growth.

28 June Tuesday

I am keeping an eye on my gooseberries. The branches are heavy with fruit. It is a yearly contest. I need to be ready for the moment when the berries are ripe and hope that I notice their readiness before the birds find out.

29 June Wednesday

I visited Tommy yesterday. His knee is painful and he can only walk with a stick. Sometimes he uses two sticks. He wants to go to town to do some errands. He and I have been discussing this trip to town since before Christmas. I do not think that he can manage walking around in Dunnes’ Store but he is determined to go there. He also wants to visit the men’s clothing store. He wants to buy himself a pair of new trousers and two new sweaters. We have made a date for next Tuesday. I am to check in with him on Monday to see if he feels Able For The Outing. Already I am worried about dropping him at the door of a shop while I go to park the car and then rush back to locate and assist him. He told me that his electric kettle is broken and that he is using an old and dangerous one that he found in a cupboard. The substitute kettle does not turn itself off when the water has boiled. It just keeps boiling and boiling until the plug is pulled out of the wall socket. He has already dropped it once because the handle got too hot to hold. He wondered if Dunnes’ Stores would take it back and replace it even though he has no receipt and the kettle is at least twelve years old. This morning I took him an spare kettle that we had here. I had tested it to make certain that it was safe. This made him happy. I too was happy knowing that he will not be dropping boiling water down his legs when what he needs and wants is a cup of tea.

30 June Thursday

Farms keep cats around to keep the rodent population down. These cats are not pets. They are usually inbred so they not the smartest cats. The idea is to keep the cats hungry so that they will be eager and efficient hunters. I should not feed the black cat when he comes roaming but I cannot help myself. He is so thin. He will eat anything I put in the dish. He eats pasta and vegetables and cheese. He eats things that I do not expect a cat to eat. He sits for hours under the bird feeders waiting for the possibility that a bird might drop to the ground. He stretches out on the table where I keep the water dish for the birds. I doubt that he believes he will catch a bird but when I put out bread crumbs for the birds he is the first one there to eat them. I know that if I give him a name I will be committed to this animal.  For now, he is just The Black Cat.

6 May Friday

It has been raining, sometimes hard and sometimes gently, all day long. The rain has been washing the wall. Yesterday we asked our neighbors if their walls and windows looked like ours. We were standing in front of the east wall of the house, just outside the kitchen door, when we asked the question. The wall was splattered with bird droppings. The excrement was white and splashed as though from a great height or at great speed. Or both. There were lashings of it all over the windows and all over the walls. It was not a few instances of excrement. It was a massive amount. The whole wall suggested an explosion. The neighbors looked at our wall in disbelief. There is no such explosion happening at their house. Not on any walls.

7 May Saturday

I sat in the car waiting for someone to arrive on the bus from Cork. I was early and the bus was late, so my wait was longer than normal. A man came and sat himself on the wall in the sun. As soon as he sat down he took off his right boot. He waved his leg around a bit and then he just rested his stocking foot on top of his other foot. He talked to himself the whole time. I was too far away to hear what he said but some of it was funny, because he laughed often.

8 May Sunday

The rain did not really do much towards cleaning off the white splashes of bird droppings. It wet some of the guano and diluted it a little so that the whole mess dripped and dribbled down the wall and across the windows. There were seventy or eighty splashes of excrement on a wall that is only nine metres long. Maybe there were one hundred splashes. This afternoon Simon got out a mop and scrubbed the wall. His theory is that if he cleans the wall at the peak of these seasonal droppings, he will not need to do it again. I am not certain that we have reached the peak yet, but for the moment things look less like a disaster area.

9 May Monday

I heard John telling the woman to Turn Left at The Master McGrath.  McGrath, as always, was pronounced McGraw, as if there were a W at the end of the word and not a TH. This is how the name is always pronounced. The woman was confused. She knew she needed to drive on the Clonmel road all the way to the junction with the Cappoquin road just outside Dungarvan but she had no idea who Master McGrath was nor how she would recognize him. The Master McGrath Monument is easy to miss. It is a relief carving of the most famous greyhound in the country. The relief is centered on a stone obelisk. The monument is not huge and it is set back from the road but it is completely visible if you are looking for it. This dog won many races. He won the Waterloo Cup three times. When he died in 1871, the monument was erected to honor him, first at his birthplace and later it was moved to its present location so that more people could see it. There are many people who do not know anything about his celebrated history but they know exactly what to do if they are told to take a left at The Master McGrath.

10 May Tuesday

My right foot is still a problem, but now I know why. It is fractured. The X-rays do not lie. I am required to wear a big Velcro boot. And I need crutches, or at least one crutch to go anywhere at all. The cumbersome nature of the boot knocks me off balance. I bump into things a lot because I am not used to my foot being so large.

11 May Wednesday

The wild garlic is in bloom. The white blossoms look like little star explosions. The blossoms taste just as good as the leaves but they are more exciting to look at. When the flowers have finished blooming, the leaves will start to die back and that will be the end of wild garlic for another year. It is already getting harder to find it because it is disappearing underneath the cow parsley.  By the time the cow parsley dies back the wild garlic will be gone.

12 May Thursday

The whole country has gone mad. It is the time of First Holy Communions. As I am not a Catholic, this frenzy take me by surprise every year. I forget that it is an enormous part of local life. None of this activity took place during the lock-down years. Everything was cancelled which caused many people to bemoan the absence of the ritual. The radio was full of the crisis. There were endless discussions about the unfairness and the hardship of it all on the talk shows. Now it is all happening again. As a result, it is impossible to get an appointment for a haircut. The hairdresser said she is flat-out and she is working several evenings to try and keep up with the demand. People are cleaning their houses, mowing their lawns and all of their windows must be washed, inside and out. Visits are scheduled with the Dental Hygienist. New clothes are purchased for the participating children as well as for their parents.  It is difficult not to overhear conversations about the application of fake tans. It is imperative to look good in all of the photographs. Cars must be washed. Parties are organized and Bouncy Castles are a must-have for these parties. Gifts must be bought or envelopes full of money must be given. I hear people announcing with great excitement that they have to go to several of these parties in one weekend. The pressure is enormous, not just for the children but for the entire community.

14 May Saturday

I do not really know this woman. I do not know her name. I meet her at the market most Saturdays and we chat about small things like the weather and about how busy the market is or is not. Sometimes we comment about a fine looking cake or the new cheese stall. Today she started to talk and it was like a faucet had been turned on. I was not moving fast because of my crutches. I was unable to move away with ease or speed. She told me about her hysterectomy many years ago and how it had left her damaged for life. She declared that a woman’s life is too hard from beginning to end. It was a completely depressing conversation. She said that she now has nothing in her life except family and her ailments and her grief—(Dead husband. Dead son. Dead siblings. Dead grand-daughter) and now, I learn she has this seething anger about being a woman. She was happy to see me and to stand and talk in the cold sunshine. She said she finds the Saturday market a high point of her week. I found it grueling but I tried hard to be cheerful inside the conversation for her sake.

15 May Sunday

Silage cutting is in full flow. The sound of tractors and other machinery in the distance and in every direction is constant. The sound of the repetitive work continues late into the night. The farmers are all taking advantage of the good weather to get their first cut in.

 

24 April Sunday

It was a Friday at the end of March when Charles and Camilla made a royal visit. This was yet another event to remind the world that the Queen of England has been on the throne for many decades. A Farmer’s Market was planned for the royals on Friday pretending to be our usual Farmers Market which meant that on the Saturday half of our regular stalls were absent. They had come on the Friday for the Pretend Cahir Farmer’s Market and could not be bothered to come again the next day for the Regular Cahir Farmer’s Market. The majority of the people selling wares on the Friday are not people who ever normally do the market. They were invited for the photo opportunity.  The Pretend Market was twice the size of our Regular Market. The car park below Cahir Castle was closed off for two days ahead of the royal visit. Local people could not use the car park because of security for the visiting royalty.

Opinion was mixed about the entire visit. Some people were aggrieved, pointing out that this royal family is nothing to do with the Republic of Ireland. Others pointed out diplomatically that it was good for the area. Good for Tourism. Sure it would bring some money into the area. There was a photograph in the newspaper of Charles buying a loaf of bread. C + C also visited the Rock of Cashel and had coffee at the newly re-furbished Cashel Palace Hotel. They went to Waterford and met a bunch of Ukrainians who have been temporarily re-settled there.

The two or three days when the royals were in the area were cold and dry and still. There were no winds. It was perfect weather for spreading slurry. I just learned that thirty farmers in the area surrounding Cashel spread slurry on their fields for the occasion. The stench was ghastly and burnt the back of throats and the entire nasal passages of anyone who stepped out in the town Cashel including, of course, those in the royal entourage.

25 April Monday

I spoke to Tommie this morning. He is hoping that I will be able to drive him into town one day soon. He has a few things he wants to buy at Dunne’s stores. They are things he cannot buy in the village. He could ask the husband of his niece but he said he would rather go with me. I told him that my foot is still not fully healed and that if he is willing to wait I will be happy to take him to town when my foot is up to the job. He said he has no problem with the wait. He said he would rather go with me because he feels that we Travel Well Together.

26 April Tuesday

The black cat from the farm comes down the track most days. He spends a lot of time underneath the bird feeders. I thought that perhaps he was waiting to catch a bird, but today I saw him eating the peanuts that had spilled out from the feeders.

27 April Wednesday

You can usually recognize a Pioneer because they wear a small pin on their lapel. That is, you can recognize a Pioneer if he is a man who is wearing a suit jacket. It is not quite as easy as it used to be to see who is and who is not a Pioneer. I rarely see a woman with a pin although I know there are plenty of female Pioneers. The lapel badge signifies that the person is a Teetotaller not an Explorer.

28 April Thursday

The sky stays bright well after 9 pm. It is still blue but a darker blue at 9.30.

29 April Friday

She is the lady who volunteers herself for every committee. If someone asks her to do something or to help out in any way, she always said yes. Her week is packed full of meetings and responsibilities. Once she is on a committee, she is not so agreeable. She has never been an easy woman to work with. Jim is not the first person to tell me that this woman is a Hard Woman to Control in a Committee. Today he came right out and said that this woman is impossible. He said that she is the kind of a person who would Put Hair on An Egg.

30 April Saturday

I am trying to stay home and to stay still. The foot is still not healing as fast as I would like it to. I think I was foolish not to go for x-rays and now I feel it is too late. I had begun to drive again but only while wearing my wooden clogs. The clog on the bad foot worked like splint.  It kept me from bending the foot, but now I think that even that was too much. I should not have been driving at all. I am now trying to stay at home and to rest my foot as much as possible. This is what I should have been doing all along. The out of door ground is rough and uncomfortable to walk upon so I am spending a lot of time in the house while the birds are singing and the world outside is getting itself going with spring activity. All I can do is to keep the windows open and to go out to sit on the bench beside the kitchen door as a way to enjoy the spring weather.

2 May Bank Holiday Monday

The door to the Book Barn was wide open this morning. It must have been left open all night long. Three swifts were swooping and diving around inside. They were bumping and crashing into the windows and skylights in their attempts to leave the barn. We spent about forty minutes with a broom and with a colander. Eventually Simon captured two of them in the colander and he released them outside. We drove the third one out the open door.

4 May Wednesday

I miss going for walks. My world has become very small. It would be easier if it was wintery and cold and maybe rainy outside. Then I would not feel like everything is happening out there without me. It would be better if my foot would hurry up and heal.