(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.

Claire comes to Ireland

Claire's been back home for five days after her visit here, already hard at work at Borone's Cafe. For Claire our seven days together was her first trip to Ireland, her first time to meet relatives neither of us knew before now, her first visit to Ballinderry, her first Irish chips, her first Guinness (ordered at the pub by her--drinking age is 18 in Ireland). For me it was my vacation from sitting in frigid rooms (even in June) reading bad nineteenth-century handwriting. It was my first trip out of the Midlands since I've been here, my first really good meal, my first time to visit Cork without Nora (so remembering the great time we had there together a few years ago). Mostly it was a chance to spend time with one of my children, all of whom I have been missing so much, to catch up with what Claire has been doing since I left, to hear about her thoughts about the future, and to show her where I have been for the past three intense months.

Cork, which is about three hours from the place I have been living, is a vibrant city on the southern coast. Nora went to school at the University for a semester during her junior year. This time Claire and I stayed in a B&B just across the street from Nora's old campus. We spent the days in the countryside and the nights in the city, the perfect arrangement. The best meal I've had since I've been here was in the resort town of Kinsale. While the town itself is a bit too similar to the crowded tourist towns on the Maine or Massachusetts coasts, the steady influx of tourists does help to support the local restaurants, including one of the best-known ones, Fishy Fishy. Irish foodies tend to worship at its fins; having eaten a superb lunch of mackerel on the sun-drenched patio I now understand why.

Both nights Claire and I were in Cork we went to the theatre. The first night we sat around the perimeter of an open space on the 17th floor of a government building at the edge of the city where we saw a highly updated version of the Medea story. This one began with some backstory coming through a cleverly hidden tape recorder on the elevator ride up. This medEia, fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, had three actors manipulating Barbie and Ken dolls in ancient Greek get-ups through the traditional story, complete with numerous inexplicable references to pop lyrics, mostly from Beatles songs. The very best part of the production was the use of a 40- or 50-gallon fish tank, complete with goldfish, to represent the Argonaut, Barbie Medea and Ken Jason riding in glory on top. The actors pushed the tank across the performance space while the fish sloshed around inside.

The second night we saw the kind of play that most kids would be horribly embarrassed to see with a parent. In fact, while we waited for the opening of Slick in a 50-seat black box theatre behind the Cork Opera House, the person behind us remarked that this was the kind of play an actor wouldn't want his parents to see. Uh-oh. The play was billed as adult, even though the main character was a nine-year-old boy who loved to skateboard and whose only wish was that his horribly abusive parents would buy him a helmet. The characters were all presented as puppets, although according to Claire, not at all like those used in Avenue Q. Comparing notes afterwards, Claire and I agreed that the script was simply gross in a way that managed to nearly completely undermine the allegorical comic-book tale of greed, the sort of meta-greed that big oil companies suffer from. Still, the staging was nothing short of brilliant, and Claire is far too sophisticated to be concerned about sitting next to me while something potentially offensive is going on onstage.

To me the sightseeing highlight of our trip to Cork was our tour of Bantry House, a much-added-to eighteenth century mansion an hour or so west of Cork. The house overlooks Bantry Bay, and comes with the usual extensive gardens, this one including 100 steps reaching up to the hills behind the house. Claire held out her camera and took a photo of us at the top of the steps. We also visited an enormous ruined castle, where Claire found a door designed for her height (and we had had another great lunch at a German cafe), and we drove along the gentle west Cork coast.

On the way home we decided to stop in Tulamore to go to the movies, something I hadn't done since I'd been here in this country in which very few towns have cinemas. Our choices were severely limited, but we finally decided on I Love You, Man, a fluffy romantic comedy that Claire had actually seen (she went to the premiere in Westwood and ended up having her photo taken with the star, Paul Rudd). We were a bit late for the start of the movie. As we groped our way to seats in the very dark theatre it dawned on us that we were the only two people in the room. And, as we walked through the lobby afterwards, we realized that even though it was Friday night at the multi-plex the place was like a ghost town, another casualty of the recession here (or maybe they needed to choose better movies).

We went to Dublin twice, once for Bloomsday (June 16th, the first full day of Claire's visit) and once to have dinner with my first cousin Deirdre, her husband Eric and some of their family. But first we went to the World Street Performance Championship in Merrion Square, the heart of Georgian Dublin. Two of the three acts we saw were Americans, as it turned out. One, who billed himself as a piano juggler, told us after his act that had just moved to South Carolina from Santa Cruz where he had been based for 50 years. He said he didn't perform so much these days but that the Dublin championship was so lucrative he couldn't pass it up. It's astonishing that a country so mired in economic woes still opens its pockets when the hat is passed.

In between all the touristing we visited Ballinderry (where Claire met the horses up close), Ballindoolin, Grange Castle, and the wonderful Nodlaig, who welcomed us with tea into her cozy bungalow. For me Claire's visit was one of the very best parts of my time here. It was great to have a travel companion, especially one who did all of the map reading. So much of my anxiety about driving here has been tied to not knowing where I am going; Claire read our atlas so brilliantly that we almost never got lost, and I could relax and just steer the car. Claire's very bad allergies nearly wrecked the trip for her, but she refused to allow them to slow us down. When she left I started the last phase of my stay here, the recent memory of our little vacation always fresh in my mind.

Dinner party

I finally got up the nerve, after nearly three months here, to have a small dinner party. The limitations of my kitchen are challenging, despite the amount of counter space. The electric stove isn't regulated and the heat is very difficult to control. The fridge is an under-the-counter model that would be at home in a dorm room. Generally it doesn't keep food cold enough except when turned up a bit, when it freezes all the produce. I have exactly three dinner plates. Until last night, when I discovered just before my guests arrived that one was broken, I had two wine glasses. The silverware was probably bought by the landlord for picnics, then 'donated' here when it got too funky. Still, I really wanted to thank Alan and Eleanor for their incredible generosity over the three months I've been here, and I thought I could do that better with a home-cooked meal than by taking them out to the only passable restaurant in town, to which in any event they had already taken me. So what if I had to figure out clever ways to cook in a wok, a tiny saute pan, a couple of lidded pots and a metal roasting pan.

Finding food to serve was a whole other challenge. My plan to have cold asparagus as a first course was thwarted when I got to my beloved organic farm shop to discover that the season ended last week. But Deirdre O'Sullivan, the farmer, had some gorgeous ripe figs from Spain on the counter, so I bought six. I got a huge head of her red lettuce, and a bag of already cleaned arugula, also from her garden.

I switched from lamb to chicken for the main course, concerned that I wouldn't be able to control the stove well enough to make a lamb dish; the butcher around the corner from my apartment cut up a gorgeous Irish chicken for me. I appealed to Niamh at the Eden Deli, where I had already ordered dessert (a lemon meringue pie) for help with the figs. She sold me a packet of serrano ham and a log of goat cheese and suggested I drizzle honey over the figs before serving them.

I had planned to serve rice with the chicken, but when I dropped by Nodlaig's house in the afternoon there was a lug of new potatoes, just dug out of the ground by Nodlaig's nephew Brendon and still covered with good black Irish soil, waiting for me. I picked out the smallest ones and decided I would boil them up before rolling them in a bit of olive oil, sea salt and pepper.

When Alan and Eleanor arrived the candles were lit and some toasted almonds and olives were waiting. The fig, ham and rocket starter was on the table (I had two nice plates on which to serve them), the Chicken Marbella was in the oven, the potatoes and green beans were ready for their quick boiling, and a salad made from the organic lettuce was on the counter. I even had parsley and thyme grown in my back yard for garnishes.

I'm not sure if the meal was what my guests had in mind--fresh figs were new to them, and the chicken with its olives and figs is unusual despite its long-standing classic reputation in the States--but the conversation was lively, the food got eaten, and I felt that I had been able to express how much their hospitality had meant to me. I'll count the evening a success.

Coming home late for the second evening in a row tonight, under the panoramic Irish sky. Because the island is so far north, night comes very late here. Yesterday we came out of the Gate Theatre in Dublin about 10pm. At that time of the evening the sky is still in a kind of late twilight mode; it makes you feel that the night will never be fully realized, but by 11 the roads are pitch black, with a density of unremitting darkness that seems like it could simply swallow you alive.

The play was All My Sons. I had recently re-read Death of a Salesman, which reminded me of the sheer brilliance of Miller's writing. Seeing this play cemented that opinion, although it was odd to be watching Irish actors doing American accents with more or less agility as they struggled to interpret the very American theme of the play. The father, a brilliant actor, had the purest accent, a fact explained, as I discovered afterward, by the fact that he was Canadian.

Tonight I took the short walk home through the Edenderry streets after a dinner with new friends. Niamh and Nall, the spelling of whose names I could very well be butchering, own my favorite spot in Edenderry, the Eden Deli. They moved here five years ago from Dublin, although Nall has worked as far away as Cedar Rapids when he was in the IT industry. He is a self-taught cook and, like Niamh, passionately devoted to food. I discovered the deli on my first visit to the town; in fact, its presence helped me to make the decision to live here. The deli was hands down the best food I had had in Ireland at that point, even though its relatively modest lunchtime offerings of sandwiches, salads and a couple of hot entrees would not on the surface seem like the kind of food that would sell you on a place to live. The atmosphere was simple but scrupulously clean and charming. It's a place you can bring a book to in the late afternoon and read quietly with a cup of tea and a scone, something I have done two or three times when I needed to get away from the computer or felt I had earned a treat.

I have had breakfast with Claire at the deli, and lunch with my brother when he visited and with a young scholar I have been working with here. I had a meeting in the balcony dining room with a group of artists from the area who wanted to know about artists' books, a medium unfamiliar to them. I buy freshly made loaves of granary bread, often to give away but also to eat; the toast from this bread, which is made using a three-day fermenting process, is gorgeous. Tonight I discovered the reason for the excellence of the offerings: Niamh and Nall are completely devoted to locally sourced, seasonal, and when possible organic produce and meat. They make their own stocks, breads, rolls, and pastries. Recently Nall decided he was unhappy with the bacon he was buying so he simply began to dry-cure his own; tomorrow he will do the first test serving of the rashers in the cafe. They have located sources for many products I have been frustrated in finding, including canned chickpeas. They have a supplier for prosciutto and serrano hams. They know all of the artisanal cheese producers, and have checked out the ten or so micro-breweries that are at the forefront of local Irish beer. Niamh is trying to track down some bees so they can have a hive in their back garden, a large, sunny space behind their live-work premises.

Their sophisticated house behind the cafe began as two stone walls that had long since lost their roof. They have turned this space into a marvelous big room with a heavy dining table at one end, a sitting room in the middle, and a dream kitchen on the other. The word COOK is laid out in large white letters on the vent fan above the stove. They have books everywhere. Nall has a carefully selected group of cookbooks and a collection of food literature. His bible is the collected Elizabeth David, arguably the most important food writer in Britain in the 20th century. Niamh is passionate about books; I left with two books under my arm along with a promise that she would list out for me the titles of a large stack of books she had set aside from her library that I must read. We are trading two Colm Tóibín books: I am giving her his latest, Brooklyn, and I in turn am getting The Master, his most popular novel.

In the cafe, Niamh and Nall are quiet about the depth of the care they take with the food. They don't mention the organic nature of most of the ingredients, nor the fact that the lettuce in their salads was grown in their garden, just a few yards from the cafe's kitchen. The seasonal nature of the food is implicit in their menu; they don't make a huge point about what they are doing. This is probably smart marketing; they are a neighborhood cafe serving good food to their customers rather than a restaurant out to make a point. Meeting them has given me a slightly different lens through which to view the people and the culture here, and a hefty reminder that even though this is a very small island there is still a surprise around every corner.

Another slice of real Irish life

At 3pm on Sunday I walked through the doorway of the Kildare Club. The club is located in one of the august brick Georgians that line St. Stephen's Green, the huge public park in the center of Dublin. Outside, the panoply of an Irish summer weekend was in full force. Horse-drawn carriages lined the curb just in front of the massive European tour buses that are in scale only when they travel on the broadest city streets. A juggler worked the crowd in the plaza across from the park entrance. Shoppers with bags from Zara and H&M filed into Insomnia for a shot of caffeine and a sandwich.

Inside the club I was greeted by my host, Anthony Malcolmson, the archivist who did the original indexes for both the Ballinderry and Ballindoolin archives. Anthony was in Dublin for a brief stay between a trip to Limerick and his home in Belfast, and had phoned me to ask if I would like to meet with him. I left my own shopping bag with the doorman (not for security reasons, but because it wouldn't look seemly to carry it into the club; evidently shopping smacks a bit too much of real life in these halls) and followed Anthony up to the drawing room, a high-ceilinged and plastered space that looked like a slightly dingier version of how Hollywood would picture a gentlemen's club c. 1940.

After our tea was delivered on a silver tray by the concierge we talked a bit of business about the archive (talking business is also forbidden within the club's walls, along with, inexplicably, the carrying of umbrellas). But as it turned out, Anthony loved nothing more than a good gossip, and I was happy to oblige. We chatted about the more reprobate members of the Tyrrell family (my maternal relatives, and the subject of my research), and Anthony gave me some canny insights into some of the contemporary characters I have come across (being careful to except any close relative; he knows when to be discreet). After an hour of so, Anthony and I headed to the most hallowed of the club rooms, the library. With a large Members Only sign on the door (which happily for me Anthony ignored) the room is straight out of Agatha Christie, complete with a member buried in his Irish Times--I hope not literally, but with the oversize paper held up in front of his body who could tell?-- in a wing chair in the far corner of the room.

Here we met Anthony's partner Bruce. After picking up my shopping bag from the concierge, we all headed over to St. Patrick's Cathedral, considered the main edifice of the Church of Ireland; Anthony had invited me to book launch for a new history of the cathedral, evidently many years in the writing, that his own publisher, Four Courts Press, was hosting. As we walked through one of the more nondescript areas of central Dublin, Bruce told me about his various feats of academic prowess as an economic historian, listing the places he had lectured (Yale, Harvard, many locations in Europe and Asia). When we arrived at the cathedral, the narrow street that ran alongside the church was lined with more of the gargantuan white tour buses, all with two wheels propped precariously on the sidewalk to allow traffic to squeeze past. Eastern European tourists were pouring into the church after waiting outside during the Evensong service, which had just ended. Our destination was not the cathedral itself, but a small door in the wall across from it. We walked through it onto what must have normally been a hushed space protected from the noise and dirt of Dublin traffic, not to mention the curious, by a high garden wall overhung with vines and roses. The private lawn was now filled with scattered clusters of people chatting, wine glasses in hand, their pale faces occasionally looking skyward in an anxious search for what looked like impending rain. Small boys with the cherubic faces that signify boy's choir membership passed sandwiches on little trays. A miracle! Anthony had transported us to a 1970s British garden party here in the dense center of Dublin.

Here was another side of this country, one that had largely escaped me despite my attendance in church one Sunday. As I have been struggling with a way to understand what my ancestors' lives had looked like, living in a small landowner's house in the Irish Midlands, I realized that this is the part I hadn't pictured, the gentility of it, the need to grasp onto the Anglicized part of their lives so easily subsumed in a country that is so washed with Catholicism that the main national news station pauses three times a day to ring the Angelus. This hidden garden, which we entered like Alice going through a keyhole, seemed an apt metaphor for the space the Protestants inhabit here, grand but furtive, its occupants proud, separate, with the full awareness of the complex history of their families.

I stayed for about an hour in this time warp, listening to conversations, meeting Anthony's friends, and eating strawberries and cream, the de rigeur sweet this time of year. As people drifted away I asked Anthony when the actual launch would take place. Ah, he said, evidently the Dean of St Patrick's had some difficulty with one of the authors of the book, so a decision was made to forego any speeches. The fact that there were also no copies of the book itself in evidence was never explained, although one mother and son duo proudly held up their copy when I asked if they could take a photo.

As the three of us walked back, Anthony and Bruce to their club and me to the car park, Bruce explained why he would never again travel to America. He refused to be finger-printed or otherwise physically marked in some way for his passport. He was repulsed by a country that would elect a George Bush, and while he recognized that in electing Barack Obama the country was making the ultimate visible apology for its horrific gaffe, he remained skeptical. Finally, as a Northern Ireland native he continued to be furious at the fact that the main funding for IRA activities over the past 25 years came from Americans who refused, in his mind, to recognize that the IRA was a terrorist organization. Divisions run deep under the generally friendly facade on this very small island.

(real) Life in Ireland

A couple of nights ago I pulled into my parking spot in Clonmullen Hall, where I live, about 10:30pm. I was returning from Dublin, a trip that no matter how I do it remains fairly arduous. This time I drove to Kinnegad, a town about 20 minutes from Edenderry, parked the car and took the bus into central Dublin. After a 6pm reading at the Abbey Theatre and a rather unfortunate hotel meal with my cousin Deirdre I took the bus back to Kinnegad and drove home over the nearly pitch black and narrow roads. Driving at night is a challenge I don't relish at the best of times, and tonight I just needed to get home and go to bed.

I hadn't opened the car door when Darren, a smart 12-year-old with a faceful of freckles and an eyebrow piercing, ran up to me. "My uncle's mad for a cigarette. Could he borrow one?" I told Darren that I didn't smoke (a fact I'm sure he was aware of) but he repeated the question, adding that his uncle would get money from the ATM but his card wouldn't be activated until tomorrow. This story isn't as implausible as it sounds, given the hysterical nature of password issuance here when it comes to bank accounts, but I pretended that I didn't understand that he was asking me for money for the cigarettes and just said again that I didn't smoke.

Darren's uncle is undoubtedly one of the statistics here. In Edenderry unemployment has increased 130% since last year. That is not a typo. 130%. This town is now one of Ireland's unemployment 'blackspots', with the third largest unemployment figures of anywhere but the major cities. The effects have been swift and highly visible. Storefront after storefront is vacant here. Men are visible in the streets all day long, hanging out in front of the two types of businesses that seem to be stable, pubs and bookies. The level of litter has risen even since I came here, one sign of a community that has given up its sense of pride. Today the manicurist, chattering in a strong Irish lilt to me during my pedicure (the first attention my nails have gotten since I came), told me that she has gone from full time work in the salon to working two days a week, and that there is barely enough work to sustain those two days. She lives at home, as many young people do, in the same house where she grew up. To most of the people that I meet, California is a place they see on the telly.

Darren being sent by his uncle to hit me up for fag money was most likely precipitated by my paying four of the neighborhood kids to wash my car. This was a mistake, since it sent the signal that somehow hadn't occurred to anyone before: that I was an American with money. The four girls did a fantastic job with the car wash, especially considering how filthy it was after two months of driving on country roads and the fact that there is no outside hose. They did it with a bucket and some thin rags. James, one of their endless stream of cousins, showed up late and was given the job of washing the wheels. I paid each of the girls €5. James got €4; as he put it, one for each wheel. Little Kaitlin, age three, who worked away with the rest, got a euro.

Even before Charlene, her sisters and her cousin Shannon finished the car, Charlene's mother (whose name, like mine, is Kathleen) and her friend showed up with an ancient car seat in tow, asking for a ride to the shops 'for baby food'. Evidently the fact that the girls were washing the car gave their mother errand rights. In the time it took me to grab my purse they had managed to cram five people and the baby seat into the back of my Ford Fiesta. When I balked, they sorted themselves out, Charlene took the baby and the car seat off, and the rest of us drove away to the Spar. The shop is on Main Street, perhaps a ten-minute walk. It was an entirely unnecessary trip from the standpoint of driving, but that wasn't the point. I realized that a car ride was a rare occurrence for this family. I'm not sure what they bought at the Spar--I waited in the car with the two little ones--but I don't think it was baby food, judging from the size of the two bundles and the sour smell of alcohol coming from the back seat. On the way back we stopped at the chipper to get some takeaway for Jessica, the daughter of Kathleen's friend.

On the night I turned down Darren's request for fag money, Kathleen and her friend, who were as usual sitting on Kathleen's front stoop and drinking, called me over for a conversation. I climbed the stairs to their apartment reluctantly; I was not in the mood for a chat, especially with someone who was drunk. When I got there Kathleen said something to me about electricity. (She has no teeth, and between that and the slurred speech I sometimes have a difficult time understanding her.) I had to ask her to tell me again what she meant. As I was listening to her I slowly realized that the house behind her--the front door was open--was completely dark, and it began to dawn on me that she had an electric meter inside that needed replenishing but she had run out of money to top it up.

Later, with the hindsight of remorse, I realized that what I should have done was to ask where the meter was and whether it took coins or just the card she was trying to tell me about. What I knew was that I couldn't hand her cash, since there would have been no possibility that it would have been used to activate the meter, even if she had been able to top up the card at 11pm. I told her that I couldn't help her right then but said I would check in the morning to see what she needed. Then I left for my place, where I sat up for a long time worrying about what I had not done.

This incident was, luckily for me, forgotten, or forgiven. I suspect that they took a shot, missed, and moved on. Kathleen sends Victoria for my phone from time to time, and the girls sometimes ask if I have work for them. I have been photographing the kids here, and I am making prints for them. I plan to put prints of the three girls, Charlene, Victoria, and Kaitlin, in small frames. One photo posted here is of Charlene and Kaitlin; the other is Victoria. I will miss these girls, all the more for knowing that the childhood they are having now, in a dark apartment with a toothless, alcoholic mother in a town that exudes anything but hope, may be the best time they will ever have.

Bloom

Ireland's main garden show has its eye on the Chelsea Flower Show as both a model and a goal. Having been to both, I would say that the Irish show has a way to go but that Chelsea could watch its back just a bit. Bloom takes place in Phoenix Park on the edge of Dublin, an enormous swath of land that is, at over 700 acres, the largest enclosed urban park in Europe. On a hot bank holiday Monday the park was already jammed when I got there about 10:30. This was virtually the first decent weather that we had had, and everyone was wandering about in tank tops and sandals. The scene reminded me of the parks in London on the first real summer day; the very pale-skinned office workers bask in the sunshine, and you can practically feel the heat of their sunburns rising off of them as you walk by. Irish skin is if anything even more delicate; they should have been handing out sunscreen along with the The Irish Times at the gate.

         My friend Isobel and I have an annual day out at the San Francisco Garden Show, and I was curious to see how our show held up to Bloom. No contest: Bloom sweeps San Francisco right off the garden plot. The first thing I noticed were the number of families. Kids are free at Bloom, and families obviously take full advantage of this. (Otherwise the tickets are very expensive, at €25, or nearly $40, for an adult. This was a splurge of a day for me.) Isobel and I go to the garden show during the week, so we may not see how many kids come on the weekend, but for Dubliners this was clearly a family day; I think the San Francisco demographic is quite different.

         This show had everything. Inside the main hall there were elaborately constructed wedding bowers, but there was also a gorgeous display of produce in carefully constructed mounds. The Irish Craft Council is given major space in the retail hall; ceramists were throwing pots on a small wheel next to the stalls selling garden tools and outdoor ware. Of course there were weavers. I spent a long time talking with the stone carvers, and will try to get to one of their studios before I leave.

         The show gardens, all outdoors, were small miracles of scale and freedom. There were truly teeny plots along one side, dressed up to resemble cottage gardens in an Irish village. There was a replica in small scale of Darwin's garden to mark his 200th birthday, with markers explaining how he grew various weeds to test their survival ability. The best of the larger gardens were characterized by their embrace of the natural, as if the gardeners had come along a month earlier and scattered seed in the wet earth, although of course every inch of these gardens is planned down to the last detail. There was very little of the relentless hardscape plans we always see in San Francisco, since it's in the hardscape that money is made. When there was hardscape here it went all the way: one garden had nothing but long bright red sticks stuck in gravel to represent plants. The winning garden seemed somewhat mundane to me, but that might be because it resembled so many I have seen in San Francisco (and indeed at my only visit to Chelsea, which by the way was with Isobel's sister Tess): careful planting, walkways, the table set up with wine glasses, a water feature or two, and the latest garden must-have, a plant wall. I fell in love with a garden that looked like it had been gently flown in whole from a back garden in the country here, although the one with the chickens was a close second.

         Phoenix Park contains a walled garden of several acres which forms part of the show. It is planted in vegetables except for a massive herbaceous border that is planted in precise mirror image on both sides of the main path. While Isobel would have been appalled at number of plant names I have forgotten, I was able to identify catmint to two women looking at the herbaceous bed. (This might be because the stuff grows practically wild in my front yard, the only plants to manage to look healthy throughout the long dry summer.)

         What San Francisco definitely does not have at its garden show is food. At Bloom there is a building entirely devoted to Irish artisanal food products, nearly every one of them offering generous tastes. I had goat and sheep's cheeses, hummous, pickles, bread, sausages of all sorts, and as many jams, preserves, chutneys and relishes as I could have possibly wanted to eat. There were chocolate bars, truffles, and desserts piled high, and although I tend toward the savory rather than the sweet I did notice that the purveyors of sweets were far less generous with their samples than was everyone else. Perhaps they have found it isn't worth it, as people will buy their biscuits, scones and crumbles anyway.

         After all the tasting, lunch wasn't much of a necessity, which was a pity, since there was a very decent looking glassed-in cafe in the center of the show grounds. (Just outside the cafe was a replica of the new White House vegetable garden, an Irish homage to America's new regime.) What I did eat was a plateful of organic, vegan, raw salads. Every one of the six salads I chose was handmade and incredibly fresh. I loved them all, although I now know that eating raw chickpeas, even well prepared, is not something I should do with my allergies.

         I was of course not able to buy any of the thousands of plants on offer. What I came away with was a small wheel of sheep's cheese, tied with raffia, that still held the imprint of the cheesecloth it had been aged in, a small round of honey and garlic goat's cheese, a container of hummous (about which the sales person said, It should keep for awhile, I made it last night), and a tiny glass jar of sweet pepper relish. I took the sheep's cheese as a hostess gift to the barbecue I was invited to that evening; it was slightly sharp, smooth, and delicious.