Memories - found an old journal entry at my parents over the holidays....

I close my eyes and I can still feel the wind, almost taste it coming off Galway Bay. I'm standing just outside the ring fort I later learned to be called Cathair Dhun Iorais, or the Fort of Irghus. At Black Head you follow the continuous stone wall up the hill hiking over limestone, and hiking and hiking and resting and hiking until the Fort of Irghus comes into view. A fox catches my eye, running ahead and disappearing behind the rocks only to reappear when I come over another rise. When I reach the ring fort I am singing because I believe myself to be alone. I see an unlikely color for the Burren, the red of a sweatshirt, in my peripheral vision. A farmer and his son come into my line of vision and here I stand hoping my voice was lost on the wind. I have many talents, singing...probably not one of them. They don't mention my song, only that they thought they were the only ones for miles around. I am warned that rain is coming on. In Ireland? Who would have guessed. I thank them and absorb my surroundings for a few moments longer. I make the hike down to the coast road to where my bike is stashed behind the stone walls that line it. I bike back down into Ballyvaughan just barely beating the rain clouds. I'm thirsty and ravenous. In Hylands Sonya serves me lunch and a cup of tea. It isn't long before I've finished my meal. I head upstairs to where Barry, the boyfriend who serves drinks on weekends, is sleeping, still sleeping! He wearily lets me in as I tell him about my morning, the morning he's slept away I tease. Ah no, I've had my share of sleeping in. This is the man I'd hoped I'd be coming back to in the summer. See you in the summer. The lad that never wrote once I left. And it's for the best because when I return to Ireland, will be for Ireland itself!

Hylands: the scheduled storyteller was never there when he was expected but I found plenty of willing substitutes. There was the man who introduced himself as "Michael, like the angel." There was Owen with a group of Dublin architecture students, on a weeklong study of the Burren. What I remember of Owen, he was an extremely nice young man who unfortunately spilled a pint on my lap. But no worries, Owen. You are forgiven.

The staff of Hylands became quite familiar to me as friends and as subjects of my work at the Burren College of Art. I'd surprise Jo and Gary with my camera in the kitchen. I never was quick enough to get Jo before she turned away. I do have a lovely photograph of her hiding behind a tea towel. Gary was a bit more agreeable, just a bit. It was Louise, the prep cook, who was my most willing subject and the girl that I took with me to Galway to take photographs I intended to use as reference for a painting. I drew Bernie while she washed up and she rewarded me with a cup of tea with more sugar than I'd usually take. Didn't tell her though 'cause it was such a nice gesture.

I swore I'd walk on Irish soil once again and I wrote this sentiment in my journal. I wrote it in Greene's surrounded by a live traditional music session. I wrote it on my walks in the hills and along the famine roads. I wrote it in accounts of the day scribbled before I rested my head in the drafty farmhouse that sheltered me those four months that Ballyvaughan was home. I even wrote it when I had the flu and was too tired to do much of anything but heat up water for Lemsip. 

Postscript: and I did walk on that limestone soil of the Burren and the cobblestones of aul Dublin city again. Will do again too!