I'm still getting up pretty early and we are working on putting the house together a bit. It is strange and good and awful to be home all at the same time. I'm up, sitting in the lovely screened porch that I remembered and loved, but I'm greatly missing the 200 year old pear tree in our back garden and I can hear the traffic screaming on I-35 which is nearly 1/2 mile away from our house.
Sheila is frantically trying to reconstruct Ivy Cottage (our house in Dublin) and keeps threatening to put our house on the market and find the same open-room phenomena that we enjoyed there. I will post pictures but here is a description of the place. It was quite small - two floors with three bedrooms upstairs. The back of the house had a kitchen with an island, that opened up to the dining room on the left and out to a sitting room on the back and then a back "garden" or gorgeous back yard with a rock fence and the old pear tree. We gradually found ourselves spending ALL of our time in these rooms, not missing the television at all. In fact, I'd say other than a few shows for the kids here and there, we didn't turn the thing on in the last two months we were there.
I tried driving yesterday and it wasn't as easy or instinctual as you would expect to stay on the right hand side of the road. That is to say, we had a couple of close calls.
We've been welcomed by friends and have already gotten to share a couple of meals and good time with some of our closest. Johnny checked off a few of his besties right away and, I don't think I've seen Maggie in 30 hours.
We came home to find out that she is the only girl in her class without an iPhone which shocked us. But we do recognize that she needs a phone. Not such a big deal as she had one in Ireland. Not sure if we're ready for her to have access to the world and internet 24/7 just yet. And are reviewing these cell phone rules posted by some wonderful mom out there. (For those of you reading this blog and if you are in contact with Maggie, please don't tell her we are considering this yet, it will be a surprise. And no, she doesn't read this blog herself. How uncool would that be?).
On our last night when Susan and Ed popped by Susan asked us how we thought the whole experience had changed us.
And now, on the other side of the pond, we've gotten the same question from a few other friends.
I will let Sheila answer for herself (how gallant of me! Actually, I will "encourage" her to write a post about it) because I suspect her changes will be more profound. The Ireland visit, for me, was like having access to low hanging fruit to pull out all of different facets of my personality. The town was just big enough to have excellent theatre, rich history and amazing restaurants, but just small enough to nearly completely explore in five months. The location near the mountains let me taste a dab of what it would be like to be able to get out and hike and wander and camp and explore within a half hour of where we live. The sea. Well, you know how much I enjoyed the sea. We've got a lake within 1/2 mile of our house here in Minneapolis (and a cabin about 1 and 1/2 hours away in Wisconsin on a lake) and while the water definitely gets comparably cold, I will never be able to recreate the buoyancy of the salt water or the fear of the little crabs nipping at my toes or the challenge of heading into the ice water year-round with fellow compatriots (here is a video of people taking a dip at Christmas).
I loved exploring the history of Ireland and making connections between the ancient settlers from over 6000 years ago who left their marks with huge tombs on hills, English rule, oppression during the famine, the rebellions, the Easter Rising, the Troubles, the Celtic Tiger and who our friends and the country is today.
Those stories are all entwined with the strong Irish pride in their culture and it was incredible to be able to see first hand those things - the Gaelic sports, the Irish language in all of the schools and in Irish schools in particular, beginning to recognize some of the language in print (if not even coming close to being able to pronounce the words or understand them in speech -- Susan was teasing us at our attempts at pronouncing even a few words. But I think I finally was able to pronounce Dublin in Irish: Baile Atha Cliath meaning the "town of the hurdled ford").
Five months is not enough to accomplish anything more than a shallow, broad swath of the literature, art and poetry in Ireland. Each time I would finish one book I would find another that was just as historically or culturally important as the last and, of course, I never finished more than a couple of stories from The Dubliners by Joyce.* Every time I picked up the newspaper or some other local publication I would find tiny bits of references to Irish poets and painters (not just the Yeats boys -- those were low hanging fruit, easily spotted and consumed) that I had not yet heard of and would demand another visit to the museum.
The slower pace of life that gave us all time together let me learn more about Sheila, Maggie and Johnny and all of our idiosyncrasies.
So... Have I changed? Undoubtedly.
I hope I can hold on to that insatiable curiosity that I fostered in Ireland. I want to keep the slowness in our lives and the openness to having people "pop by" for a tea and a chat. We don't do that enough here. I don't want to go to Target three times per week and spend stupid money on stuff we don't need (we were overwhelmed at all of the crapola we own in this house in Minneapolis. Why do we have all of this stuff? Where did it come from? And are in the long process of a serious purge.) I hope we travel more in the years to come.
For those of you interested in a little "book club" I'm starting Trinity by Leon Uris. It is one of my Aunt Bev's favorite books (she's the one whose dad is from Ballyshannon). Maybe we could all talk about the book on this blog? I could connect Americans and the Irish friends we have. Disclaimer: I am a slow reader.
*I still intend to struggle through Ulysses some time. Maybe I will find an online course to guide me through. I just signed up for Constitutional Law in January!
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