I'm writing this post whilst sitting in an old-fashioned wicker chair in the glass room extension of Moyleabbey farmhouse. It is cold, but that is nothing new. It is always cold. The wall behind me is thick and plastered and possesses the false appearance of sturdiness. I presume solidity is deceitful pretense because I can hear every single decible of the conversation taking place over dinner in the dining room on the other side. Yuki, Kai, and Liam are discussing today's epic hurling match, and Mimi is occasionally putting in her two cents of "baabaah! Bye!" and an abundance of contagious giggles. Kai is unimpressed with his food, but as a general rule, Kai is seldom impressed by anything. Impressed people will stop asking "why" after a reasonable amount of time and simply allow a thing to be in appreciative silence. Kai is too busy dissecting the flaws of his meal to his poor, tired mother to appreciate anything about it. Liam is a bit downtrodden, as he paid over a hundred euros to watch his home team of Tipperary get thrashed by a dominating Kilkenny. It was the biggest game of the season, and I assume that the whole island shut down for the afternoon to turn on their televisions. Sports are a big deal here. Rugby, hurling, Irish football, Guiness, and leggings are the passions of these pale people. Most children start playing one of the three sports quite early, and continue playing well into their school years. Kai is already on a rugby team. He practicing pinning other rambunctious eight year olds after he finishes his weaving, knitting, and spinning classes. He is a very well-rounded young man.
The work has been the same. The weeds are as relentless as Kai's "why?" While this week saw no respite from the former, the latter situation has improved significantly since school started. I have my mornings free to contemplate how greatly I loathe chickweed without having to answer for it.
I loathe chickweed. Because it is loathsome. Finito.
However, as soon as fifteen o'clock rolls around, I am beset by all the questions the teachers must have admirably supressed at school. Kai gallops out of the house in his Irish regalia of green wellingtons and orange sweater, and Mimi flails happily behind, face and fingers an artful display of what she played with for lunch. The ensuing questions often are punctuated by:
"Oooowwww! MIMI! Let go of my hair! MIIIIMIIII! That's not very nice. How would you like it if I pulled your hair? Daddy, Mimi won't let go of my hair!"
To which dire cries "Daddy" comes running to the rescue of his incapacitated son. Mimi continues to sit, serenely holding a tuft of Kai's auburn hair in her fat, dirty little hands, and smiling broadly as her father wrests her prize away from her. As Kai angrily rubs his sore scalp and Liam gently berates his baby girl, Mimi continues to smile at me. It is the knowing, self-satisfied smile of someone who knows they have just done you a great favor.
As much as I've grown to dislike chickweed, I believe I may dislike lunchtime even more. At the Agritourismo, lunch was a busy, bustling, talkative affair. I'm sure that the wine helped get things going, but as a general rule, there was always someone with SOMETHING to say, and there was always someone agreeable enough to disagree with him out loud and not only in his head. That is not the case here. Pauline, Thomas, and I set the table with bread and spreads, and then we sit. We wait for the rest of the family to show up. Then we sit quietly and eat, staring at our plates. As I cannot eat bread and spreads, I only sit quietly and stare at my plate. I even begin to long for a "why?" to break the unbearable silence. Mimi is our only relief. She entertains us all by smashing her food into unidentifiable pieces, smearing it on the table, and then crawling out of her chair and trying to eat the food off our plates. As a rule, she never eats anything that has made contact with her own plate. I don't know why they bother giving her one.
I've grown to enjoy the French couple's company a good deal. I've beaten them soundly at hearts three times, dishing out the incredibly satisfactory 26 points every evening we played. Thomas starts the game by saying, "I will win this time." Pauline ends the game by saying, "I hate you."
I think we will be playing poker tonight. Even the French can only handle a certain amount of resounding defeats.
I interviewed Yuki this weekend. My first in Ireland, and it was with the only Japanese woman in the county. I love how things like that work out. It was a wonderful interview though, and helped me to remember why I'm here. Besides to lend a couple of volunteer hands with the cabbage harvest, that is. It also helped sate my theatrical cravings that have been getting more and more intense over the past couple of months. I miss performing. I miss memorizing lines and rehearsing scenes. I miss the agony of not quite understanding a character, and I miss dissecting scripts into the tiniest action units possible to find all the clues the playwright left for me. Alex suggested that I put on a play with Kai and Mimi. However, I do not have enough faith in my ability as a director to take on Kai as an actor. I could get great things out of Mimi -- she is a budding comedian and merely needs a gentle nudge in the right direction. I do not have the mental fortitude for Kai.
I think I may have been too hard on this family in my previous post. They're very good, hardworking, genuine people, and they do treat us well. I think I may have felt the "employee" vibe because people in Ireland need a lot more space than people in Italy. Things are quieter here. People seem more distant. I had always thought that the Irish would be a loud and invasive type of people, but the Irish countryside is almost unsettlingly quiet. The quiet is making me more homesick than ever before, and I spend a good deal of time thinking about how nice it would be to pack up and fly home in time for Thursday night dinner. I miss controversial conversation over turducken, and I miss the loud, vibrant, sunny cultures of Italy and Spain. But I am in Ireland, and I shall make the best of it. I am learning a good deal about the black humor, grey weather, and the hardworking attitude of Ireland and its nearly four and a half million citizens.
To Saint Fiacre, patron saint of gardeners and Paris cab drivers:
Why is it so much more difficult to uproot weeds than vegetables?
Why is it that if you leave a fraction of a chickweed root in the soil, the whole plant will return with double the foliage the next day, but if you uproot a carrot, no amount of gently stuffing it back into the dirt will revitalize its ruined root? I know this because I have tried, on several occasions, to replant displaced produce. I have tried with corn, asparagus, onions, and beets. I simply cannot get them to re-grow, after accidentally unearthing them. I now recognize the utter futility of my endeavors and leave the wilting, underripe produce between the rows to rot, contenting myself with blaming Mimi. She doesn't seem to mind.
Why is it that harvesting is so much more fun than weeding? The action is the same, is it not? Pulling up or cutting out something that no longer belongs and moving it elsewhere. Yet I am always more willing to harvest the carrots than weed the carrots.
Why is it that when you want to uproot a weed, you uproot a vegetable, but when you want to harvest the same vegetable, it is nigh impossible to remove from its earthy bed?
What is the correlation between gardens and cabs?
I enjoyed a marvelous Irish breakfast this morning. Liam bought us some bacon, sausage, black pudding, and eggs so that we'd have the opportunity to taste an authentic Irish breakfast at least once before departing this macrobiotic farm. My French roommates bought some beans, and we happily devoured a warm, hearty breakfast in our frigid mobile home.
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| Irish Breakfast Foods |
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| Thomas assembling breakfast |
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| Pauline assembling breakfast |
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| Breakfast! |
I have two weeks left at this farm. I anticipate a lot of rain and a lot of weeding. Yuki has also offered to give me a free acupuncture session. I plan to take her up on that sometime this week.
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