Tick-Tock

I heard the clock ticking today. It’s not like I was just waiting for it to tick. On the contrary. I was running around the house, packing things for the charity shop, sorting stuff that’s ours vs. what belongs to our landlords, moving stuff from this pile to that...moving out essentially. I’m leaving Ireland in a couple of days. Leaving Ireland. Leaving. Ireland.

So I heard the clock tick and I had to pause because I was struck with a very strong memory of what my life was like when we moved here two years ago. I had come from a relatively high-stress job, with a relatively high-stress life (some, but not all, of my own making) and when I came here there was nothing. Floyd would go to work and I would sit. Sometimes I would read, or watch TV, or go to coffee with other expat ladies. But, other times, I would just sit. And I would listen to that clock tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Marking the passing of time at an unbearably. slow. pace.

Why is it that time only seems to go slow when you’re miserable? Or, shall I say, when you think you’re miserable. Because I look back on that time now and I think about what I could’ve been doing with that time. And not so much "doing" with that time as "enjoying" that time. That precious time.

That precious, miserable time lasted about three months and then I managed to fill my time with classes and horse-back riding lessons, doctors visits, and trips into Dublin for acupuncture and herbs. We were still trying to get pregnant back then so I was pretty focused on that. I would go to the gym and work-out most days. Other days I would just go for a run. I slowly became more comfortable in the kitchen and began cooking adventurous meals. We ate at the table and I stopped watching TV. I had successfully made my life busy again.

Then we decided to adopt, so my life became completely focused on that for several months. Then we started to travel. And travel. And travel some more. We had friends and family over and took them to fun places like Paris and Rome and Oughterard.

And then our house burned down, so we had to focus on that for about eight months.

Then more traveling and more visitors who we took to fun places like Paris and Rome and Doolin.

And then we met Thor, so we’ve been focusing on that for the last four months.

And now we’re going home. Time’s up. No do-overs.

I was reminded today of those first few months in Ireland, listening to the clock tick, back when I thought I was miserable. I feel like I haven’t heard that clock tick in a really, really long time, so I became nostalgic. I have always said that boredom is highly underrated.

Now I’m going home. Back to my job and back to our lives. We’ll soon travel to China and bring home our daughter. Life will naturally be different, but I’d like to think that I’ve learned a few things in the last two years. I’m sure I have actually. I discovered today that I learned to enjoy the sound of the clock ticking.

Inter-Continental

An internetty friend over at China Calling suggested we post a Google Earth image of where we live. Cool idea! I love Google Earth and we've had some fun playing around with it in the past. So I thought, hey, I'll post satellite images of our Irish home, our Portland home, our property on the eastern flank of the Cascades, and the City in China where Thor lives.




The interesting thing was this...you know how when you type your location into Google Earth and the image "flies" from one place to the next? Well, as I flew over vast stretches of land and giant oceans to get to each place I started feeling knots in my stomach. Anxiety. Almost a cold sweat. I started to feel, well, a little spread out. I felt an overwhelming need to pack up shop, go grab Thor, return to our nest and never leave. Ever. I suddenly needed all of these things that I love to be very very close to me.

And then I looked at the scale of things. Look at our Ireland home at 7,500 ft (obviously not a lot of demand for high res satellite imagery to, say, count sheep). We are one of the little brown dots near the top of the screen. Let's just say it'd take a while to walk down to the store to pick up a loaf o' brown bread. Yet, look at our Portland home at 3,500 ft. Ack! Houses upon houses upon streets upon freeways upon Plaid Pantrys. Then compare this to where Thor lives in China, viewed from 35,000 ft. Even at this elevation it's poor resolution because, well, because it's China. Gazing at that image I can almost hear the noises, the shouting, I can almost smell the warm, dank, choking air. At our cabin you can hear the wind touching the leaves. It's amazing to me how different these places are.

I suppose, though, that when you bring it back down to a human-scale, it's all about home. Floyd and I have "homes" in several places (does that sound pretentious or what?) and we've been traveling so much over the last couple of years that we joke about the concept of home. Where is home? We've taken to saying, "Home is where the Jezebel is" (Jezebel being our cat). Now that we've added Thor to the mix, I'm thinking that home is wherever she is. So here are some pictures of our "homes" on a more human scale. Thor's home? Well we don't really know what it looks like, but this image is certainly closer to the truth than any of those other doorways.




So it looks like I won't really feel at home until we've got Thor and Jezebel taking naps under the same roof (sigh....).

Top Five Fave....Home

We’re not really sure where home is these days, but Floyd once said, “Home is where the Jezebel is”, and since the little princess herself is napping on her blanket about 5 feet away from me, I guess I’m home. Being home is a little unusual for us as of late. We’ve been traveling almost constantly for the last several months. We’ve seen some beautiful places, some not so beautiful places, and some very very ugly places. We’ve seen a lot actually...and I’m plum tired. I feel like I been rode hard and put away wet. I wouldn’t mind never getting on another plane ever again (except for the one that’s going to take us back to Portland for ever and ever).

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. I love to travel and these past months have been such a huge gift. As a little kid growing up making dirt pies, I wouldn’t have...actually, make that couldn’t have, imagined seeing all of these places. I feel blessed in such a big way. But I think it is possible to have too much of a good thing. We were traveling so much there that I would wake up and not know where I was. I would get on a plane and forget where we were going. And we’re not talking pharmaceuticals here. This is just life moving a little too fast. So I’m loving home right now. Loving and adoring it actually. Here’s a few reasons why.

1. Sittin’ on the couch: This couch is a central part of our lives. It’s purple. It’s velvet. It’s ripped. Some might call it shabby chic...we call it a piece of shit. But it’s the couch and we use it man. We use it and abuse it. I’m sitting on it right now in a position that I’m in so often it should be on my headstone. Propped up, legs extending down the couch, feet on the cushions, with a laptop on my lap... “May God Have Mercy on Her Soul”. In the evenings, after we’ve had our dinner and Jezebel has come in from her sunset stroll, we all congregate on the couch, the whole pride. And this is what it can look like. Infinite happiness.

2. Making the house happen: Ahhh...the house. We haven’t actually started the restoration yet. I know I know. Let me just give you a little snippet...our mortgage company actually sent our first check to our house in Portland. Yes, the one that’s blackened like Louisiana catfish. Yes. After we told them MANY Many many times not to do that, we got an e-mail from our neighbor telling us that the Fed Ex guy had been trying to deliver it for days. So sad. We’re still waiting for that check. And while we wait....nothing gets done. But I tell you what! She’s going to be absolutely gorgeous when we’re (they’re) done with her. I think I’ll be starting another blog about that one so you’ll be in the loop. It should be a fun process once it actually gets started (yes, I am delusional). So, even though the house looks pretty much the same as it did a few months ago (except for a new roof...yea!) we’ve been bustin’ our humps. Counting beans basically. Moving beans from one pile to another and trying to find more beans. Beans anyone?

3. Cooking: The first night we were home and on our own, I roasted a chicken, an organic chicken, which, over here, cost me 18.50 euros or $25. It was a small chicken. Needless to say, don’t eff up the chicken. Fortunately, I chose a recipe from The New Basics Cookbook, which I love and has never failed me. The recipe is called “Chicken with garlic, lemon, and rosemary” and it was, seriously, the best chicken I’ve ever had in my life. It wasn’t me. I would never take credit for it. It was the recipe. A hands-down winner. We’ve eaten some pretty wonderful food while traveling as well but we don’t splurge on expensive meals but we tend to eat pretty rich, fatty (but cheap) stuff when we travel (hello...). So we just have more control over what we eat when we’re at home. I (mostly) don’t work and I consider cooking part of my job over here. It’s a job I appreciate and enjoy (who is this woman?). I’ve gone from fearing the kitchen to being pretty darn comfortable in the kitchen...and that’s just cool.

Have you seen our kitchen over here? We call it the “one butt kitchen” for pretty obvious reasons. It makes us really look forward to the kitchen we’ll have when we go home.

Oh, and here are the rhubarb pies we made over the weekend, with the rhubarb from the garden. Two pies, two people....coincidence? I don’t think so.

4. Me Time: I have loads of me-time when we’re sans guests at home. It’s everything that happens between the housework, cooking, restoration planning and errands. I read, I write, I exercise, I try to practice the piano, and not enough of any of those things. Stuff like that. I don’t feel guilty about it at all really. Ok, maybe a little. But I know what my life has been like up till now and I’ve got a pretty good idea of what it’s going to be like when we get back. And it sure as hell doesn’t resemble this. So I’ll wallow in it for now...thankyouverymuch.

5. Playing on the farm: Babies, babies everywhere! Who doesn't love the baby farm animals? We got the baby lambs in early March and then we just got two new foals a few weeks ago. They’re so much fun to watch. They "boing". One second they'll be lazing around and then all of a sudden...boing...up in the air. It's the damndest thing. The weather has been uncharacteristically “springy” and the days have been quite fresh and dry. We take walks down to the river..well, not quite to the river because the mean bullocks stand between us and river...but we get almost to the river before we have to run away from them. The farm is just really beautiful this time of year and this little slice of heaven is pretty tough to top.

Oh, big news! We finally got the hedgehog on film. He’s a funny one alright! He ambled into our backyard one evening and snooted around for a bit, keeping his nose buried in the grass. The epitomy of “rootin’ around”. They make kind of a quiet grunting noise...the kind of a noise you would make if you were rooting around I suppose. Because his nose was firmly lodged in the detritus, he didn’t smell my foul humanness so I was able to get quite close....loving the hedgehog. When he finally did smell me (ewww...can’t eat that!) he lifted up on his startlingly longish legs, and waddled off...rapidly.

So that’s what we’re doing while we’re at home and we’ve got the place to ourselves. We’re off to Belgium this weekend for a bike race and then we’ve got the folks here after that. We’ll be taking Floyd’s folks to Spain (Barcelona and Girona) and we’re taking my folks to Rome...not to mention the random Irish ramblings as well. Now that we’ve had this time for rejuvenation, we’re really looking forward to it all.

My Bachelorette Weekend

Floyd was off to a "stag weekend" down in Cork so I was on my own for the weekend. Friday afternoon through Sunday evening. This wouldn't be such a big deal for lots of couples but Floyd and I are joined at the hip. We enjoy spending time together and our continuing infatuation with each other tends to annoy people (I think it might have something to do with the monosyllabic, pre-hominid babytalk involved...mbeb).

So being away from Floyd and having the weekend to myself was a big deal. The world was my oyster. I could do anything I wanted...literally. I could've done some traveling, done some great cultural things in Dublin, gone bird-watching down near Waterford. Anything. So what did I do? Nothing. Big, fat nothing. If it weren't for the family that I drove to the airport on Saturday afternoon, I wouldn't have bathed or bothered to put on clean clothes. As soon as I dropped Floyd at the train station I went to the video store, then the library, then the grocery store. As soon as I walked in our door I baked myself a single batch of chocolate chip cookies (I don't even think I took my coat off). I just couldn't think of anything that I wanted to do this weekend that didn't involve having chocolate chip cookie crumbs on my chin.

So I watched movies (The Stepford Wives and Breakfast on Pluto - both chick flicks but otherwise in very different categories), watched one episode of My Name is Earl (borrowed Season One on DVD...brilliance), finished a book ("A Lesson Before Dying" - wonderful book, read it), started another book ("The Kid" by Dan Savage of Savage Love fame - a gay couple's experience with open adoption - I'm laughing hysterically and learning some things too), talked on the phone until 2am (I'm 8 hours ahead of all of my friends and family), had cookies and stout for dinner (not breakfast...but tempting), worked on kitchen/house design (this effort is consuming me), traded sweet little text messages with Floyd (awww...) and talked to my cat.

I think it's also notable that, aside from the ~4.5 hours that the television was on, our house was completely silent. I chose not to listen to any music, which is a choice I often make living out here. I think it's because it's absolutely, perfectly, pin-drop silent at the end of our little road. During the day you might hear a tractor off in the distance or a horse whinnying. If you step outside you can hear the birds singing (Spring!!) or the distant train to Cork. But that's it. It's really really quiet and I know that this may be the only time, for a really really long time, that I will be able to enjoy this kind of peace and quiet. So I relish it. I celebrate it. I wallow in it.

The silence was broken when I went to the grocery store (on a Sunday afternoon, what in G0d's name was I thinking?) and picked the lads up at the train station in Dublin. Suddenly, there I was with a car load of men slightly wounded by their debaucherous weekend. It was as quiet as a car full of Irish lads could be...which, actually, isn't quiet at all. For what it's worth, I think they had a good enough time to justify their ashen complexions and their curdling smell.

And, actually, so did I.

Mind the Gap I

There’s a squirrel that lives in the trees outside of our house. These trees are all deciduous but there are some evergreen ones that keep their leaves all winter. I can sit in my usual spot on the couch and look out the window and, in the winter, the view is both leafy and limby. When we moved in, the owners of the place cleared an opening in this patch of trees because they thought we might want to garden back there. As usual, the effort wasn’t well planned. It turns out it’s a dark swamp back there. Clearing the trees also had the added benefit of affording us a great view of their enormous collection of tires (we live on a farm and, as we all know, farmers save tires). To their credit, I think they did try to maintain the trees around the edge of the clearing but the backhoe needed a way to get in and out. So now’s there’s a gap. Where the trees were once continuous, there is now a space between them. This is nice in some ways because it probably lets in more light than we would otherwise get back here in our little hollow. Without the gap I wouldn’t be able to see the sky from the couch (which is important on those non-ambulatory days). We look west through the gap and last night we watched the most amazing, purple and orange, post-apocalyptic sunset ever...over the pile of tires.

So, this squirrel. He lives in the trees around the clearing and, in making his way from one end of the trees to the other, he has to pass the gap and, in the winter, I can see his passing of the gap really well. My eyes are drawn outside when I catch a glimpse of him popping out of the dense foliage onto the bare branches. He's a little grey squirrel with a long, bushy tail. He quickly skitters out to the end of a limb and flings himself across the gap. All without hesitation. He falls a little in elevation but the tips of the other branches are within his reach so he grabs one of them, hangs upside down for a moment (he always winds up upside down), waits for the bouncing to slow, then pulls himself up onto the branch and skitters off into the leaves on the other side of the gap.

I see this at least once per day and it makes me very happy. Even though he never misses, my heart skips a beat when he flings himself off that branch. Just enough fear that my heart feels lighter when he’s snatched the branch on the other side and made his way to safety. And I smile when he’s bouncing up and down on the tip of the limb because he looks like a monkey. We have squirrels where I come from, but I never get to look out of my window and see this. Never. So I’ll miss this when we leave.

Jezebel and the Tits

There are these little birds over here called tits. They’re a lot like the chickadees that we have back home. Small, flitty, chirpy...you often look up and see them clinging to a small branch, picking at bugs or somesuch. Cute as the dickens. They have names like coal tit, blue tit, marsh tit, and the all-time sniggler, great tit. Even birders (or “twitchers” as we’re called over here) can’t help but peel off a few tired lines every-now-and-then, e.g. “Why that’s a lovely pair of tits up there...” Actually, if I were to say something like that with a group of European birders, and follow with the snort, guffaw, knee-slap combo, they’d probably ban me from their birding group. So maybe it’s just me.

Regardless, I love the tits. I love them for their own sake but I also love them because they spend quite a bit of time flitting about in the big, scraggly crabapple tree in our yard. We have this great window in our upstairs bathroom that takes up essentially the whole wall and you can stand in the shower and watch the tits (and all the other birds for that matter) do their flitting thing. It’s my kinda bathroom. (It’s important to note here that the window looks out on the crabapple tree, our small side garden, and the great stone wall of the old stables. And that’s it. See the Ballyknockmilliedoon post if you want a better idea of where we live. I’ve only had one occasion of showering and needing to drop out of view from unexpected eyes, so the shade is never drawn.)

OK, back to the tits. The first thing I did when we moved in last year, around this time of year, was to go out and buy a couple of feeders. After a bit of research, I bought a sunflower seed feeder and a peanut feeder, occasionally putting up a suet feeder as well. And that seemed to suit these birds just fine. Before too long we had loads of birds using the feeders. The tits were, by far, the most abundant, but we also had chaffinch and greenfinch. The magpies and jackdaws would catch wind of it when things were really hopping, and they’d come ‘round to cause trouble. There were other birds, like the robins (my sweet sweet robins), the dunnock, or the thrushes that never went to the feeders, but they would watch from the tree and, oftentimes, drop to the ground below the feeders and eat the scattered bits.

And this is where my cat, Jezebel, enters the picture.

Despite being raised on the streets of North Portland (pre-gentrification), Jezebel was never a scrapper. She was vaguely interested in the comings and goings of birds and mice, but it always seemed to be more from a natural history, taking notes, kind of a perspective...like me. She would just sit and watch. Even when the baby mouse was scurrying back-and-forth in front of her, she just sat...and watched. Despite her propensity for casual observation, we bought her a bell for her collar...just in case. We wanted the birds to have advanced warning of any potential disruption to their flitting, but, because she never felt the need to disrupt their flitting, the bell’s use became primarily a cat-finding device.

So, imagine my surprise, when I walked out to the base of the crabapple tree one day a few months ago and found Jezebel with two little bird legs sticking out of her mouth. Because of my astute skills as a biologist I surmised that she was in the process of eating the bird. Like the whole thing. She looked up at me and continued her bone-crunching chewing and I, in shock, could do nothing but stand there and watch the little black claws disappear into her mouth. Sadly, I couldn’t tell which species she had devoured, but I’m sure it was either a robin (my sweet sweet robin) or a tit because these were the birds that spent the most time on the ground below the feeders. So sad. Needless to say, they wouldn’t have been hanging out on the ground if it hadn’t have been for those feeders. I guess all this fresh air and farm living has inspired the vicious carnivore in our little girl. And I guess the bell doesn’t work for shit.

So, life’s been different since that day. I no longer fill the feeders. In fact, they got blown down in a wind storm and I don’t think I’ll put them back up. Now that the air has a chill and the leaves are turning, the tits are flocking and spending more time in the crabapple tree. Sometimes Jezebel hops up on the window ledge while I’m taking a shower and we watch them together.

Totally Irish, Vol. 2 The Medieval Castle

Ireland is loaded with castles and, what we refer to as, “castley-bits”, the great stacks of stones that are scattered about across the countryside. They’re so common they’re in people’s backyards and in cow pastures. Sheep graze over the top of them. They’re everywhere. You may hear about the romantic side of castles but what our guide told us today is that the romantic image was conjured up just a few hundred years ago when the great great grandson of the original Lord de Lacy would use the castles for nothing more than secret romps with his "lacy" entourage. But when the castles were actually lived in, when they were actually used, they were, as our guide put it, “killing machines”. Whoa.

I’ve discovered that there’s loads of really interesting information out there about what life was really like for those damsels in distress and knights in shining armor, so I won’t go into it here. I just wanted to take the opportunity to talk about poop.

I just took one of our visitors to Trim Castle this past weekend. I’ve been there before..a few times. It’s pretty close to our house, it’s a cool-looking castle, it’s where they filmed parts of Braveheart, and they do some pretty interesting tours, so it’s wound up on our heavy rotation list.

There’s this one tour guide that I like in particular. He’s a refined, middle-aged man, very well-spoken, and has one, possibly, glass eye. As he’s waiting for the dawdlers to gather, we chat about how the area’s changing and he’s always got some choice words for the development taking place in the village. The juxtaposition of the bad, modern architecture with these kinds of castley-bits is, well, disturbing to some. But, the people gather, and then we get to the good part.

He’s already described the structure of the castle, how it was built for defense, this is where the Lord and his family slept, this is where they filmed that one scene in Braveheart, yadda yadda yadda.... Then he points to the hole in the floor. That is where the Lord of the manor shat, you see. And, as opposed to the internal plumbing that everybody else’s shat would flow into, the Lord’s shat went directly to the exterior wall (I take this opportunity to scan the faces of the tour group). Why’s that you ask? Well, displaying the royal shat in such a manner was a means of presenting to the surrounding serfs and occasional guests (?) that these folks ate well and were, therefore, better than them. Displaying ones shat as a means of exercising dominance. I hadn’t thought about that before (think about the application of this technique at the office....). And, if this didn’t do the trick, when they had really important guests, the “poopsmith” (the guy that stirred the poop in the internal holding tank) would paint the rich shat on the wall surrounding the castle entrance. A big, fecal “Howdy Do!”. Quite.

And then I take the opportunity to scan the tour group again. They’re LOVING this! All the kids that were yawning and picking their noses before, are now completely intrigued...asking questions...fully engaged. Husbands? LOVING it! The ladies? ...pretending to be appalled.

I LOVE this tour. I wave goodbye to our tour guide and tell him I’ll see him the next time we have guests in town....maybe next time we’ll have a pint.

Totally Irish, Vol. 1

Totally Irish, Preface

Since we’ve been living here in Ireland I’ve been wanting to write about, well...living in Ireland. Because it’s different here. Like really different. (when I say “different” I mean different from Oregon, USA because that’s where we're from) Before we moved over here we thought “how different can it be?” We’ve both traveled a bit, lived in a country where the language was foreign, and consider ourselves pretty open-minded, worldly people...so we’ve experienced “different” and we just weren’t expecting much of it from this adventure. We were wrong. It’s difficult for me to explain the differences in one, succinct, little blog post...so I’m not going to try. (Besides, I need stuff to write about.) Instead I think I’ll just write a little story every once in a while about something that I think is “Totally Irish”. Please know that I am not a Sociologist, Psychologist, Irish Historian or even very smart, so if I start throwing opinions (or even facts) around...well, take ‘em with a grain of salt. And I would welcome anybody that knows anything about what I’m writing about to comment...nicely, of course. So, here goes...

Totally Irish, Vol. I, Hurling

Hurling is totally Irish. There’s a few other folks that play games that look kind of like it but, whatever dude, it’s Irish. If you have a chance, treat yourself to the movie “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”. It’s a wonderful movie and there's an old-school game of hurling in the opening scene.

They say hurling is arguably the fastest team field sport...but I have no idea what this means. What I can tell you about this game is that there are loads of lads (15 per team) out on the pitch (that’s what the field is called) all carrying big sticks (hurleys) and whacking at a little ball about the size of a baseball (the sliotar, pronounced sli-her). They can kick the ball (usually a last-ditch effort), smack it with their hand (but not throw it), whack it with the hurly, or, my favorite, running down the field balancing/bouncing it on the end of the hurly....very cool. As you can imagine, it’s pretty dangerous, what with whacking the sticks and all, but helmets are optional and some lads choose not to wear them. I hear broken teeth are common. Oh, and the refs? They stand on either side of the end zone and wear lab coats. Lab coats?! It’s very scientific dontcha’ know.

So, Floyd and I went to our first hurling match this afternoon and it was a blow-out. The teams were playing up to the Christy Ring Cup and we were supporting our home team, the Lily Whites of County Kildare (Go Lilies!!), and they were completely shut down by the County Antrim Saffrons (I know, I know, but believe me, you would not walk up to these fellas and start picking on their team name). Final score was 2-21 to 0-06 (you figure it out).

You know how the Irish have this reputation of being fond of the drink. Well, there was no alcohol there...at least not that we could see (other than the beers that we brought but didn’t drink because it was obviously not cool). It was very family-oriented. Loads of kiddies. Now I just can’t imagine going to a baseball game and not having a hot dog and a Bud. Sports and alcohol, man. They just go together. I seriously doubt that every hurling match is as sober as this one was...but it was interesting...and nice.

There was great team spirit without getting nasty. Nobody was bitchin’ at each other and nobody was bitchin’ at the refs. In fact, there was one obviously bad call and the fella in front of us turned around and said, very calmly, “Now that was an unusual call...” Unusual?! That’s a far cry from the American parent shrieking and foaming at the mouth at their kids’ soccer match. “Unusual” is probably not the word they’d be searching for.

Hurling has been around a very long time…there are some references to it all the way back to around 400 AD. It’s a common man’s game and it always has been. Even today, while being an Irish obsession, it’s still strictly amateur…meaning none of these lads gets paid. It is played purely for the fun and passion of the sport. When the game is over the lads go raise a pint together then go back to their regular jobs the next day. There is no glamour, no posse, no ‘tude. And because they’re playing for pride, and not money, they play honorably, which means they’re not out there whacking each other with those sticks. But pride also means they’re playing with all they got, so look out for that stick (remember the broken teeth?).

As this fella Tom Galvin wrote, “Hurling is a great game, not just because it is a great game by itself, but because it seems to illustrate the best of Irish culture -- its folksy character, its work-hard and play-hard virtues, and its community-based values.” Here here….

So after the match we came home and watched Tiger win the British Open and Floyd (Landis) take the yellow jersey in the Tour de France. USA #1!! Oh, wait....that was so. NOT. totally Irish.

Ballyknockmilliedoon

This is where we live. It’s not really called Ballyknockmilliedoon but that’s pretty close. My husband and I are the luckiest people in the world (don’t worry if you think you’re luckier – we won’t argue with you). We’re living in Ireland for a couple of years and we live in a 200-year-old stone cottage at the end of the road. Well, it’s not really the “end” of the road, but it turns to gravel after our place.

It’s a big ‘ole estate with cows, horses, wheat fields, pheasants, badgers and hedgehogs (yep, hedgehogs). There’s even a river, from which I caught my first ever brown trout. Our closest (human) neighbors are the owners of the place and they’re about a 10-minute walk away. The estate is bounded by an old stone wall and there’s a big, iron gate that prevents just about everyone but the mailman from getting in. Quiet is an understatement. All this and we're only 20 minutes outside of Dublin.

The estate has some interesting history involving nasty landed gentry and some underground tunnels dug to facilitate an easy escape from the, understandably, angry Irish folk. Our cottage is right next to the old, cobblestoned stables and, if you’re really quiet, you can still hear the click-clack of horses and carriage on the stones. It’s pretty cool and creepy. A cab driver once told us that Michael Collins used to hide out here during “the troubles”…but I’ll bet he says that to all the ‘yanks.

Last night I was sitting outside, soaking up the quiet, and I realized it wasn’t that quiet after all. First I heard the heavy hoof steps and exhales of the new stallion anxiously exploring his new stomping ground. Then there was something rummaging around our compost pile…a badger maybe? I couldn’t see. Then there was a tiny, chaotic rustling under the hedgerow and a rotund little hedgehog ambled out into the moonlight. Hedgehogs make for perfectly delightful neighbors. My goal is to get a picture of one…if I do I’ll surely post it.

So this is where we live. I realize it may not be for everybody but it’s perfect for us.