(almost) goodbye

My last days here are nothing like my first. Then I was a tourist; now if I don't exactly live here, I am leaving behind friends, cousins I never knew before, spaces I have grown to love, people I didn't get to know well but would like to.

Yesterday, the penultimate day, I again met the walking group that has recently formed here. We left the Parish Centre at 9am for a short walk to an area at the edge of Edenderry that I hadn't seen before, a charming neighborhood full of pristine gardens and the occasional horse pasture. As we crossed over the canal on the way back into town I noticed that the space just below the bridge where people normally park their cars when walking along the canal path was now filled with small caravans, the rather romantic word here for camper vans, a sign that the Travellers are in residence, as I"m told they usually are this time of year.

Seeing the caravans reminded me about the most extraordinary scene that Claire and I came across as we drove to Cork. We were heading south on one of the main highways, not quite the motorway but a wide two-lane road. As we rounded a curve I was distracted by a lorry parked along the side of the road, the driver tinkering with his engine, while behind it was a car with its hood up, steam pouring out of it. But slowly my mind registered another far more stunning occurrence in front of us. Two huge bright red Barry's Tea semitrailers, one behind the other, were approaching us from the opposite side of the highway. In front of the first truck two horses were coming at full tilt straight down the roadway. Their black-and-white manes were flying in the air as they galloped in perfect unison while the two trucks followed closely behind. For a brief moment the combination of horses and red trucks made me think this was a circus stunt, but somewhere in my mind I also suspected I must be hallucinating. As I concentrated on avoiding the various potential hazardous obstacles--lorry, overheated car, semitrailers, horses--horses?--Claire and I were aghast at what we were seeing. Later, Alan told us that the horses belonged to Travellers. When they set their animals to graze on borrowed land they don't tie them up in case of the need for a quick getaway. If the horses stray to the roads they often panic and begin to run. Once that happens they just run until they exhaust themselves. But when they passed us going at their great speed they looked like they could run forever down that highway.

After the walk we headed for the ring road behind Dunnes Stores, one of the town's two supermarkets. We put on our gloves, picked up our litter pickers, and moved along the chain link fence picking up the discarded cans, bottles, cigarette packs, plastic bags and whatever other detritus had been tossed there from moving cars or blown in from the Dunnes car park. This initiative, to help clean up the town, began at the inaugural meeting of Edenderry Women in Business; when someone asked me what I most disliked about Ireland I answered that there was a disturbing amount of litter everywhere, and that Edenderry was unfortunately one of the worst places I had seen. The next week our new walking group picked one of the entrances to Edenderry and spent about two hours cleaning it up. Since this is a small town the women were easily able to marshall help in the form of a trailer to haul off the trash, the donation of litter bags, and even a man with a portable pressure washer who sprayed the town sign and the park bench at the bus stop. Later that week we all got our picture in the paper, and the tidy town initiative was off and running.

I left the cleaning crew after an hour or so begin some packing and to change; I was having lunch with a friend I had met at Alan and Eleanor's. Grattan is a retired banker whose professional career was spent in London except for a glorious six months in Chicago, which he managed to stretch to seven by refusing to leave, when he was 30. Grattan lives in the family pile, an elegant and much added-to Georgian big house set, as the big houses here always are, in the midst of pastureland and reached via a long, curvy drive under a canopy of mature beeches. I entered Drummond through a square formal hall with a simple eighteenth-century wooden bench as the only furniture. These entry halls are always built into the houses here, as a transition into the house proper and also no doubt as a buffer against the cold and rain and a place for visitors to wait while the servant checks to see whether the master or mistress of the house would like to see them. At home I have three small wooden rosewood chairs, late nineteenth century, that would have been in the hall at Ballinderry when my grandmother was there. These chairs are not really meant for sitting; someone infirm might perch on the edge, but they were there for decoration, not the comfort of the guests. At Ballindoolin the front hall is huge, much larger than most other houses of its size, and the outside door, always called the hall door here, is equally outsized. The door and hall were built to accommodate a horse and rider; evidently Mr Bor, the original owner, loved to make a memorable entrance by riding right through the door and dismounting in the hall. Over the years the heavy door worked its way loose due to the strain of the weight on the hinges. In 1993 Bobby Tyrrell, my cousin, a frail and elderly man living alone in the 32-room house, opened the door one last time. It fell on him and killed him. He was found with a revolver in his pocket, the same one he had carried every day for his entire adult life.

Going through into Drummond's second central hall, the interior one where the real life of the house begins, was like stepping back into the eighteenth century. The house is gorgeous, filled with formal mahogany furniture and carpets. The curved staircase is deftly carved with simply filigree details, and there are paintings, mostly formal portraits, hanging from every picture rail. Grattan led me into the small sitting room where he obviously spends most of his time. There are two small slipcovered chairs set on either side of the cozy hearth. Matching bookcases flank the walls behind the chairs; a small and fairly ancient television sits in one corner. The formal drawing room can be glimpsed through the door opposite where I sat, a large room with a piano at one end and some soft and worn furniture grouped around the much larger hearth. When lunch was announced by Mary, the day woman who comes in to cook and clean for Grattan, we walked through the drawing room into the dining room, where the long table was set at one end for two, with starters (mushroom and onion compote) on our plates along with a basket of brown bread. When we finished the starter Grattan cleared while Mary brought in the main course, which she set on the sideboard. We helped ourselves from china tureens using large, heavy silver serving spoons to lamb chops, new potatoes, carrots, and peas, the meat, potatoes and two veg that are an inevitable offering at any meal here but breakfast. Grattan poured the wine, which we drank in the presence of the wigged ancestors looking sternly down at us from three walls of the room. The fourth wall had a huge fanlight window from which I could watch the cattle in the pasture just beyond the gravel drive. At lunch Grattan told me that his grandfather, a rather hard-up doctor who was the fifth of nine children, had inherited the house from a dear friend who had himself inherited the place but would die childless. Evidently when the original owner first got Drummond it was rather worn down. He invited his mother-in-law to help with the renovation, which she did by taking literally every stick of furniture, every painting, every piece of paper, even some of the books, out of the house, piling them up, and lighting a bonfire.

After dessert (fruit salad with cream), cheese (two kinds) and coffee in demitasse cups we went back to the sitting room and spent a very pleasant couple of hours talking about local history, for which Grattan has both a passion and a vast store of personal knowledge.

Our conversation went on much longer than it should have, so that by the time I arrived at Frank and Phyllis's house tea was well under way. In contrast to Grattan's sanctuary of quiet and order, Frank and Phyll's small cottage, Clayton House, is a crazy admixture of artifacts that reflects the lives of two long-married people very curious about the world around them. Outside, rusting farm implements are propped outside venerable but run-down stone outbuildings next to children's toys. Dogs and cats roam freely, the dogs nuzzling you as soon as you open the car door. Inside, paper, boxes, bric-a-brac, books, souvenirs of their many trips, pottery, piles of videos and the accumulation of the hundred or so years that the family has owned the house fill nearly every inch of the rooms; when one person wants to go from one point to another in the sitting room everyone needs to shift position to let them through. Frank no longer farms, but his son Philip has taken over, so behind the house there are both the old stone barns that would have been in active use before the turn of the twentieth century and the huge new barn that serves the current operation. Frank and Phyll's daughter was visiting from Cork with her children, and Philip's daughters were there as well. Phyll had also invited Sheila, a neighbor and a Tyrrell just like everyone else in the room. The tea turns out to have been in my honor; I was horribly embarrassed to have been so late although I hadn't any idea that they were planning this in the first place. I drank tea and ate brack (fruit bread) and butter, leaving the cakes to the kids and hoping that nobody noticed I wasn't eating them (they did, alas).

At 6:30 I raced off to get home in time to change again before heading over to Ballindoolin to meet Esther for dinner. I could scarcely imagine having to eat another meal, but I had invited Esther out to thank her for the warm hospitality she had shown me. We were going to Furey's, a local pub with exceptional food and the atmosphere that used to be prevalent in Ireland but has largely disappeared. Claire and I had had lunch there her first day in Ireland. At that meal we had burgers at one of the inside tables on a cool, damp day. This time Esther and I sat on the patio and ordered salmon and salad. The patio overlooks the canal, this one with a picturesque canal boat moored there instead of Travellers' caravans. The evening was balmy, and we sat there chatting until I began to feel the real pressure of needing to head back home to pack. I was leaving the next day and could no longer put off the inevitable clearing out that I had so far managed to resist during my long goodbye to Ireland.