Tim has packed up his canoe and headed to New York to seek his fortune. As a naturalist, he prefers animals to pets, but he is managing to bond with Lola, his feline host in Brooklyn:

And their pets.

Moleskinerie is a journal devoted to these fetish notebooks and the jottings they invite. This is the kind of nonsense I can really get behind. I filled four of the large, lined Moleskines with travel notes last year, used a small one for to-do lists, and finally ditched all the handheld electronica for a Moleskine address book and a Uniball. Gadget pushers, bless their hearts, have no idea just how tethering their toys are.

The Irish government gives tax incentives for tree-planting, and the national forestry organisation, Coillte, has planted millions of spruce, or, as we soon learned to call them, “more fucking Christmas trees”. They are a monoculture cash crop, nothing else. Our birds do not nest in them and nothing grows beneath them once they drop their acidic needles. They are too thickly planted to walk through. On the bogs and in stark Connemara these non-native plantation strips look like a moustache on a Mona Lisa. In lush Killaloe they fit in about as well as the palm trees that struggle in every front garden.

Here and there, as in Killary Harbour, a few pine groves survive. They fit in, somehow, and they also produce good wood in less than forty years. I wonder why more are not planted instead of these Viking invaders? Must ask my friend John, who looks after Co. Clare for Coillte.

Tim and I rented a tiny silver car and hurtled around Ireland. Sixteen counties in four days, like a Yank tour bus. Tarbert, Ballyvaughan, Fanore, the Cliffs of Moher at sunset. Galway city. Up to Dublin—a flying visit to see Joy’s new morsel of a son—and on to Sligo to hear some diddley-aye music and pay our respects to Yeats. Down we came through Westport, ditched the car to scramble up Croagh Patrick, onwards to Achill, and through the bogs to Connemara. We boomeranged around Killary Harbour and past Kylemore Abbey, down to Clifden. Then home.

He is Canadian; I am Irish, and I am relieved to have my native sense of scale restored after the vastness of his country. Ireland is travel-sized convenience, where diverse beauties sit as close as Disneyland rides. The reports of rolling green hills miss the half of it: the lunar Burren limestone; the stark Connemara mountains, rearing up from the Atlantic, that only sheep can convert to food; velvety Tipperary; bright and windwashed surfing villages; the heathery, shifting Bog of Allen.

Our greatest-hits tour didn’t allow for the walks that earn landscapes. Nor did the weather. Still, in a year of buses I’ve seen nothing to better Ireland. In winter it has the most dramatic of lighting designers, and the scene changes by the moment. Ireland will not be fixed: you cannot say you’ve seen it unless you live there, and even so the claim is shaky. Ireland is theatre, not painting, and you have only seen a production.

Is it because this is ‘my’ landscape that I am so moved by the beauty and the history here? I don’t know. Even if I knew it only from a guidebook, I would still be affected by the story of the starving, desperate people who crossed the Doo Lough Valley one bitter Famine winter to beg help from their landlord. He refused, and 400 died on the journey home. Every few miles, we pass tumbledown castles, Stone Age forts, or early medieval monasteries. We pass Leamanagh Castle, where in Cromwell’s time Ma´ire Rua used to off the husbands who displeased her. God forgive me, I cheer her every time, the crazy old wagon.

The placenames whisper to me: Kinvara, Achill, Leenane, Drumcliff. They whisper “Come and live here in a cottage by the sea.” But the estate agent windows do not tread softly on my dreams. A cramped three-bedroom terraced house in Westport—butt-ugly Sixties pebbledash—is over $350,000. A rundown cottage, in the back of beyond, and smaller than my New York apartment, is half a million dollars. I’d blame Madonna, but she hasn’t even moved here yet. I try to picture the horror of the native Irish who were driven from the fertile east and south to these barren mountains, where I can’t afford to live today.

Ireland is so expensive that it takes ten of my dwindling Weimar dollars to buy an “open-faced BLT” in Lahinch. Open-faced, in case you’re wondering, means a half a stale ciabatta on the bottom and naked, greasy rashers on the top. Bare-faced cheek, more like. We soon learned to exist on crumbly picnics of McCambridge’s soda bread, Cashel Blue, and Milleens, supplemented with the chowder that is the only decent restaurant deal in these parts. (Tim has also developed an obsession with chips from Luigi’s Takeaway in Limerick, which are cooked in lard and disturbingly good.)

He was last here twelve years ago, when he hitchhiked around Ireland and fell in love with dilapidated, rollicking Galway. But you can never go back. On our pilgrimage there from Limerick, he sputtered “Housing estates! What’s with all the fucking housing estates?” from several miles out. Ireland hasn’t grown out of its obsession with owning property, and like every other urban area Galway is choked with dreary, expensive housing estates. The city centre is ruthlessly slick now, and there may even be more baristas than barmen, a dangerous tilt in the ecosystem. Students protested in the streets—“Against War, Racism and Globalisation”, bless their ambition—and a chopper whined in the sky for hours. The EU ministers were in town. I couldn’t stand it and begged to go back to Limerick, which does not tart itself up for visitors any more than the mountains or the surfy sea.

Connemara sheep have black faces and legs, and matted white dreads partly sprayed blue, pink, or red. They look at you from between their horns with more interest than fear, and they will jump a stream, legs splayed, with a nimbleness that their round bodies shouldn’t have. I love them, these ovine can-can dancers.

A New York friend of mine was transferred to Clonakilty, Co. Cork a few years back. He took another American co-worker for a bike ride out the country one Sunday, a serious young woman who found it hard to adjust to the laid-back Irish. They passed several flocks of sheep, gaudily spray-painted.
    “Sheep gangs,” he observed, “They’re pretty tough around these parts, the sheep.”
Several miles down the road, she corrected him gently. “No,” she said, “I think the farmers do that so they can tell who owns what sheep.”

Thanks for all the good wishes you’ve sent for my return to the working classes.

To answer your questions: I’ll be moving back to Brooklyn (BREUKELEN, baby!) as soon as Tom Ridge’s immigration cops see fit. I am their slave. I cannot book a flight until they beckon. With luck, that will be within a month, though they’ve introduced several fiery new hoops since I last jumped through. I will start a Free Dervala Meetup if it goes on longer. Be assured, American workers, your turf is being defended, and should I threaten your liberty, my biometric data will be on file.

To Jen, India, Betsy, Liz and the other bloggers I know only here: I hope we get to meet (up) before too long.

And as to how I feel about moving back to New York: well, great. I love Brooklyn like chocolate. But in spite of nine years of claiming I’d never move back to Ireland, I’m going to miss this place something rotten. I’ve learned that every so often, when you’re running or shunning, it’s good to stop, turn around, and check if the monster is still there.

xxx
-D.

I took a job at Meetup in New York, a service designed to help people meet in real life. Real life! Look up from your screen and imagine that. Knitters, bloggers, blow-ins, Wes Clark supporters, chihuahua owners, and Buffy buffs: they’ve all found kindred flesh through Meetup. Famously, Howard Dean’s handlers used it as a new and deadly fundraising tool for his Democratic nomination campaign, and it helped him come from nowhere to lead the race. Just about all the Dean coverage I’ve read has mentioned Meetup, and the name seems to have passed into the language. This toddler of a company has already attracted the interest of some very bright people, and I’m excited to be a part of it.

Encouraging people to meet in real life seems a decent, useful goal in this disconnected world. We’re beginning to realise that we’ve lost something by choosing to live on our backsides, alone with TV, broadband, or an SUV. The hunger for human contact is growing. Meetup is of its time, not too early or too late, and I can’t wait to learn more about how people are using it and what they need next.

Ranger Tim arrived on January 1st, a Canadian herald dragging my sister and me out of bed at six to greet the new year. He brought two backpacks, one a giant I could hardly lift, with two orange lifejackets strapped around it. It was stuffed with an inflatable double canoe. The other held a tent, stove, and sleeping bags, and my Christmas present: The Backwoods of Canada: Letters from a Frontierwoman.
    “This is Ireland,” my family told him, “Not Canada. You can’t go camping in January.” Lord, don’t goad him on, I thought.

Ireland it is. Since he arrived it has stormed almost every day. Great hailstones drum on the kitchen skylights, and Dad tells us about the Ghanaian exchange students, on a school canoe trip in Co. Mayo last year, who dived like mallards when these mysterious stones were thrown at them.

But the clouds move across an Irish sky like nowhere else, and we snatch a dry afternoon here and there. We cycled out to Adare, with its thatched cottages, and on to Curraghchase park through the back roads. The Irish countryside is pocked with buttercup-yellow McMansions turning their wide arses to their elders and betters—the whitewashed cottages and stone farmhouses on the hills behind. But the fields are green and still stitched together with old stone walls, and even turreted yellow boxes cannot fully spoil them.

My parents brought us to Keeper Hill, just across the Tipperary border. I am Tim’s dialect coach: “Tip-peh-RARE-y. Not TIPP-erary.” I tried to set pronunciation rules for Irish placenames and quickly gave up. The accent is on the first syllable, except when it isn’t. We sloshed up Keeper, past the Mass Rock where priests gave secret masses when the Penal Laws forbade Catholic worship. On the way down, Dad produced miniature bottles of grappa and Kit-Kats to keep us going. I’m a good walker, but I can never keep pace with my old dears.

Tim gave me my own city. I had hardly strolled around it in fifteen years, and it is changed utterly. Limerick was lucky: in the Seventies and Eighties it didn’t have the money to knock down and “redevelop” its medieval and Georgian centres, and so they lay derelict until we were ready to appreciate our inheritance. Parts of it are truly lovely now.

At ten thirty in the morning we went for a pint in Nancy Blake’s. The fire was lit, and the front bar was full of ould fellas settling in for the day. Nancy’s is a perfect Irish pub, where hipsters drink alongside flat-capped farmers, the seats and room sizes are nicely mixed, and no theme-park guff hangs on the walls. Afterwards, at the new Asian supermarket on Mungret Street, we bought dried durian, to the shock of the Thai-Chinese owner. “You know this?” she said, holding it back. Then, pleased: “Durian is king of fruit.” We ate the smelly crisps by the Maigue river, watching it swirl into the Shannon, and planned a mythical canoe trip. Then we went to St. Mary’s Cathedral, built in Viking times, with a barrel ceiling of the same Limerick oak used in Westminster. I hadn’t been in there since a school trip I was twelve, when the stained-glass windows and the elegant Cistercian stonework held less interest than the boys a head shorter than me.

Nearby the medieval King John’s Castle curves around the river bank, slit windows eyeing the Shannon for stray arrows. Two little gougers trundled over on too-small bikes, shouting “Sorr! Sorr! Give us a tip for a photo, go on, sorr.” So Tim fixed them in light and time. We crossed the Shannon, quizzed a playboater for tidal information, strolled along Clancy Strand, and crossed back over to Arthur’s Quay. The Latvian girl in the new Russian Deli sold Tim the rye bread he loves and chatted to him about Riga.

We finished the walking tour with chip butties at the Lobster Pot, for sentimental reasons. Friar Tucks once stood there, and I spent Saturday nights outside eating curry chips and watching the fights on the steps of the Redemptorist Fathers across the road. (Ah, the Redemptorists, who drove the Jews out of Limerick a hundred years ago: may they somehow atone for their evil.)

When we got home Claire told us a story from her friend Michael, who interviews asylum seekers for the Irish Refugee Council in Dublin. A man who had been waiting for weeks came in to withdraw his application on the morning of his interview. “But why?” Michael asked. The man had been told that if his application to stay were approved, he would be transferred to accommodation in Limerick.
    “I’d rather go back to Angola,” he said.

Myself, I’d pick Limerick over Dublin these days. Or Angola.

The phone rang three times before ten in the morning. Then Michael and Gráinne dropped round. It was Michael’s sixtieth birthday party that evening and Dad had planted a silver birch in his garden before he woke up. Next Sean Ahern rang the doorbell. Nora popped her head in to tell us that Tom Hallinan up the road had just died. Kay-next-door arrived, still sick with ‘flu, followed by Pat and her daughter Michelle. She brought photos of New Year’s Eve, when our faces were shiny and our lips stained with mulled wine. Donal Lynch phoned to ask which kind of John Rocha Waterford Crystal glasses he should buy for Michael’s birthday. Sean and Mary Meegan were just passing and decided to stop for coffee at Hanleys.

We boiled and boiled the kettle, served up pots of tea and the odd coffee. (Coffee is still a treat for town.) My family makes tea too weak for anyone else’s taste, but generally they don’t complain, except to ask for the last cup poured. Pat takes sugar in his tea, the only one the road, and we always forget to set it out for him. There are plates of Christmas cake and chocolate-biscuit cake, and my mother makes a fry. The English habit of putting out tea without a bolstering biscuit or cake is considered fierce mean here.

This is how my parents’ live on Saturday morning, and for most of their long teachers’ holidays. Their Ireland is a breezy drop-in culture, where visits are short, frequent, and unannounced. All is dropped for the cup of tea. In the summer they have barbecues with the neighbours that last long after the sun goes down at 10.30, and in the mornings they cycle out to Adare for coffee with Kay and whoever else wants to go.

The talk is of birds and gentle slaggings. Bird tables are the Sky Sports channel of my father’s friends. They spend hours customizing feeders and lugging out bags of peanuts and balls of fat, then watching the welfare tits, goldfinches, robins, and blackbirds bob at the offerings. Sean Ahern has persuaded a rare and handsome brambling finch to dine at his table in Patrickswell, and he crows about this to Dad at every chance. “I’m going to have to ask you for a subvention of 47 cents a day to support your birds, Sean,” he says. “They’re all coming over to my table these days, and I can’t afford to be keeping them in birdseed. Jesus, my brambling finch has a fierce appetite.” Dad blames me and my mother for neglecting the birdseed when he was off skiing with the school last week. I blame Kay’s cat, who stalks our garden.

They tell stories in rounds, prompting them out again for new arrivals.
“Tell Dervala the one about Pat’s uncle taking the ferry, John,” says Sinéad, and John settles himself for a good scéal. He works for the national forestry association, Coillte, and has an anthropologist’s eye for the mountainy men on the back roads of Clare. Half the stories at our kitchen table start with noting the county the main character is from, a key to the motivations to follow. I am rusty on the psychological significance of being from Termonfeckin, Co. Louth versus Knocknagashel, Co. Kerry, but even I know of the bachelor hill farmers of Clare.

“This lad now, he’d lived on the side of a hill up the far end of Clare all his life,” says John. “Way out beyond Inagh, on the road to Miltown Malbay. He was eighty seven years old, and he’d never left Clare County. I’d say he’d gone to Ennis, twenty miles down the road, maybe twice in his life. His sister was ninety-three when she went to Ennis for the first time, and she died the next day.”
“That kind of travel would kill you,” we agree.
“So one day the nephews decide that for a change they’ll take their few cows to the mart in Tarbert, across in Kerry, rather than the local one. They’ll hop across the Shannon estuary on the Killimer-Tarbert car ferry for a bit of a day out. And the ould fella decides he wants to go. Never in his life left the county before, mind. So they go to collect him, and he’s been up since six in the morning, all excited about his big travel. And they motor down an hour and half to the ferry, and they drive on, and twenty minutes later they’re across the river in Tarbert. The mart is a big success, they get better prices than they were expecting, and the ould lad is having the time of his life, taking it all in. They get to the pub and he says, ‘Lads, lads, ye’re after taking me out, so I’m buying this round.’ Grand so, they say, three pints it is so. And off he goes up to the bar, and the pints are drawn, and the pints are settling. And the barman says, ‘Where are you from, sir?’ ‘I’m from Ireland,’ says your man, in all seriousness, ‘Just over for the day.’”

There is great warmth here against the filthy January weather that has kept us indoors for five days now. The faces in the kitchen change as often as the skies. My parents have deposited in a bank of friendship for twenty or thirty years and that investment cushions against knocks. When you are sick here, or your house burns down, things get done for you quietly. In all seasons, tools and recipes, bottles of wine and children, are passed around as needed, and if your arthritis has flared up my father, or someone else, will dig your garden. Everyone gives their time: conducting a choir, staffing the Credit Union, visiting friends’ sick parents, teaching new widows to drive. It is a gift economy where time and effort are valued more than Tiffany’s boxes.

Consider pleasures, not as they arrive, but as they depart.
—Aristotle.The End of the Holidays

We drop you at O’Hare with your young husband,
two slim figures under paradoxical signs:
United and Departures. The season’s perfect oxymoron.
Dawn is a rumor, the wind bites, but there are things
fathers still can do for daughters.
Off you go looking tired and New Wave
under the airport’s aquarium lights,
with your Coleman cooler and new, long coat,
something to wear to the office and to parties
where down jackets are not de rigeur.
Last week winter bared its teeth.
I think of summer and how the veins in a leaf
come together and divide
come together and divide.
That’s how it is with us now
as you fly west toward your thirties
I set my new cap at a nautical angle, shift
baggage I know I’ll carry with me always
to a nether hatch where it can do only small harm,
haul up fresh sail and point my craft
toward the punctual sunrise.

—Mark Perlberg

My sister Claire flew west yesterday. Glen was waiting in forty-below Ottawa with his two kids, whom she has missed and talked about throughout her trip home. She lived at home in Limerick until last spring, but now that there are two small, immobile Canadians in her life we know her future visits are temporary. We know this, but we don’t say it in the Aer Lingus check-in queue for the New York flight, nor do we say it as we sit for a last coffee while she fills out her green IAP-66 arrival record. Instead we chat about how lucky we are to be able to fly directly from our small town to London, Chicago, or DC, and to be allowed to stroll through US Immigration at Shannon’s lovely, quiet airport rather than at JFK. Then her flight is called. My parents smile as they hug her goodbye, and they promise to post the keys she has just remembered are still on the kitchen table.

Twenty minutes later we are driving back past Bunratty Castle, past the neon-green hills of Cratloe, when Claire rings from the departure lounge, a last goodbye. Mum passes the phone back to me and breaks into sobs. She cries and cries from missing Claire, who will soon be three thousand miles away and whose sweetness can’t be replaced. Claire is our family glue, who tells me about Caroline’s adventures, and keeps the family posted during my disappearances. She phones every day and remembers the special treats we each like. I reach forward and put my hand on Mum’s shoulder. She holds it, but it doesn’t bring Claire back. Still she cries, muffled, hiccupy sobs, but she says nothing all the way home.

A few hours later she gets up from her nap. She still looks sad. I put my arms around her and she says, “I hate emigration.” Then she says, “People complain to me that their children are off in Cork or Dublin. And mine are so far away.”

I look at her in grief and guilt. I have just taken a job in New York, and I’ll be on that same flight in two weeks.

Emigration’s unwelcome gift is a permanent state of loss. Wherever you are you miss someone and somewhere, and if you are lucky you are missed in your turn. Sorrow is the price we pay for love.