Lady Blessington

I have a dear friend who lives in Scotland (she's the one responsible for taking us to Hadrian's wall), who is the only person I know who never forgets a birthday or anniversary. Cards come with astounding punctuality, and sometimes bonuses arrive as well.

Stuck to the wall next to my computer (thank heavens for blu-tack!) is a picture postcard of a painting of Margaret, Countess of Blessington, by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Knowing the name of our temporary home town, she had seen it and thought of us.

This newsy card (for she fills the back with all sorts of tidbits written with a real ink pen) was followed by the requisite Christmas card (also handwritten), an anniversary card (she remembers! Well, she was my bridesmaid) and a birthday card, also full of purple-inked news.

There are a few things we will finish up once home: there is the borrowed video of Braveheart, filmed just up the road and at Trim castle; there is a bit of writing and rewriting, blog posts and article research; and there are a couple of books about the lives of people who lived here, the one being a contemporary, well-researched book on the families of Blessington (The Blessington Estate 1667-1908, by Kathy Trant), and one a period piece, called appropriately enough, The Most Gorgeous Lady Blessington. I note with a smile that the frontispiece is exactly the same as the portrait next to me.

No tractors

Did I ever mention how much I love the fact that not only does Little One go to a school where they have sweet signs to remind you to not drive your tractor on the grass, but that people actually ignore the sign?

It's also very cool that you can feed your dog the same thing as your kids.

And it's very odd that they have to remind people that walking on water is dangerous.

I know, just gratuitous signage, but that's half the fun!

In stiches and other trivialities

I have already related my delight when I saw a note for a knitting group at the library. So imagine my continued delight when I discovered that these women (nope, no gents) were a bunch of fun women from all walks of life, beginners to accomplished fingers. And so, a gratuitous picture of something one of the more experienced knitters whipped up last week.

I've got a pair of socks on the needles for my traveling that resumes in two weeks, and a new pullover on circular needles for the young lad, using a red Donegal tweed I picked up in Glendalough.

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Here's our friend Paul coming over for supper. Clearly, he'll be leaving after darkness falls and is looking for a way to work off the delicious lamb tagine that's simmering on the stove.

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And then there are the cats and the rubbish.

There were a good dozen stray cats in the village when we arrived. Our neighbor is a kindly lady, who makes sure they are fed, and who works with the volunteer organizer who takes them in for spaying by a kindly vet a few towns over. The cats are all shades of calico, clearly from the same family stock.

But ever since Tulfarris went into receivership, we've had the mounting rubbish heap. With more folks taking advantage of the low rents out here, the garbage seems to pile up faster than ever, and the cats rip open the bags in search of tasty morsels. And as more cats from adjoining villages have caught wind of it (yes, it does smell on sunny days), the population increases. We've added some tabbies. But no new wheelie bins.

Shopping centre

When we first moved to Washington, our quiet little town was enjoying the boon created by the then relatively young tech companies who chose it as their home. As the population swelled during the day, the city fathers (and mother) decided that the quaint historical downtown was woefully inadequate for a town of its stature. "You can't even buy a pair of socks!" exclaimed the mayor. And so, they decided to create a concept shopping center on the other side of the railroad tracks. It would be an outdoor shopping center (clearly a California developer), and would continue the city's street grid across the tracks and into a retail center. The concept was that it wouldn't be a mall, but akin to the experience of shopping in an old-fashioned downtown.

Of course, the built reality is a mall in sheep's clothing; one look at the names of the tenants tells you that it's a mall. You can buy fancy clothes in a chain department store, browse books in a chain store and eat in a chain restaurant. But you can't buy an envelope or stamps, food for supper, or an aspirin for your head that is now throbbing from the assault on your senses that is mall shopping. And you have to constantly climb back into your car.

Consider, if you will, yesterday's shopping list: I needed a book of stamps, two maps (#77 & 78, Kerry and the Dingle Peninsula), maple syrup, lentils, turmeric, soy milk and rice noodles, candied fruit and yeast (think hot cross buns for Easter morning), chocolate eggs, and wintergreen to keep the village strays from using my flower beds as a litter box.

At home, I could have looked in the national chain bookstores for the maps (you know which two), and there is a supermarket for the foods and a drugstore (local, but still chains) that should have the wintergreen. Chocolate eggs would have been available at either, no doubt, but they are far away from the "town center" and set back from the road by the ubiquitous immense parking lot (which is never full, indeed, usually less than a quarter full), which means I need to drive there-over speed bumps on an empty four-lane road. For stamps, I would have had to get back in the car yet again, cross the railroad tracks, and head to the real downtown post office.

But I'm in Blessington, which reminds me somehow forcibly of one of Lake Wobegon's fictitious stores, Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, whose slogan is, "if you can't get it at Ralph's, you can probably get along without it." Likewise, if you can't get it in Blessington, you can probably do without: if they don't have it, chances are they'll have to order it, usually from the UK. It makes you think twice before buying something.

I start by parking the car along the chaotic street. At first glance, it's a traffic engineer's nightmare: the major arterial (two lanes!) from Dublin doubles as Blessington's main street, which means traffic can be heavy in the morning (folks heading up to the city), in the evening (coming back down), and when the afternoon buses arrive (2:15, 3:15, 5:10), dropping kids who go to school up in Dublin. Traffic is slowed additionally by the fact that cars park head-in along both sides of the wide street, and need to back out. You'd think no one would ever get out of the parking spots, but they do, and quite easily. You see, since that's how every one parks, they understand that niceness is the only way the system will work. And besides, with only a few spots free at peak times, people may want your spot, and are happy to hold up traffic for you. Speed bumps are unnecessary, traffic calming is built in.

Little One and I head down the Main street, past the pub, the betting office, the pizza place (Mommy, see the dough rising?) the church, the florist, the bank, the butcher, and the video store and duck into the office shop cum post office. There are a few folks in the line, but that gives us a chance to read the bulletin board. Puppies and a car for sale, a new treatment room at the health food store, and vegetable garden allotments available at Hunting Brook. We buy our book of stamps, and have a look at the map rack, but it doesn't have what we want.

So, we head back up the street. The church is quiet, but the doors of the betting office and pub are open to the lovely warm day, and we can hear the conversation and horse races inside. The bread is out of the pizza ovens, cooling in the window. It smells lovely. The fellow from the print shop where we got the apple juice labels done greets us on his way into the pharmacy.

We cross the street and duck into the bookshop. The lady has the same sniffles as me, and we commiserate. She digs around in the map rack with me, and we find #61 (which I've been looking for all over Dublin), and gets on the computer to order the others. She takes my mobile number, and promises to send an SMS when they come in in a few days. She sticks the yellow note on the wall next to the till.

Two doors down (skipping the beauty shop), we duck into the health food store. Deirdre saw us on the other side of the street and has already brought the case of milk I ordered out, and ducks into the back room for the noodles while I take the last tomatoes and scour the shelves for the other items. Turmeric proves elusive, but I'll try across the street. We--that's everyone in the shop-- have a chat about the best way to keep cats out of the garden, and how lovely wintergreen smells, and no, they don't have any, but McGreal's across the way might.

We pop our groceries in the car and pop down to the pharmacy--sure enough, they have the wintergreen in a spray can. We have ice cream in the car (our veg box had rhubarb in it, which screams to be made into cobbler, which needs ice cream). We duck into Kenny's SuperValu, where the butcher sharpening his long knife greets us coming in. We get the makings of an Irish breakfast from him, peek to see if there are any white eggs for dyeing (nope!), and find the turmeric in the spice rack. With that, we have everything on our list, and an ice cream cone goes into the cart as a reward to a patient little boy.

Happily licking his cone, we head to the car. The church tower clock tells me it's already 5:15: all that chatting and walking does take time, or rather makes the time pass pleasantly, and it's clear that we can't possibly get the chicken cooked tonight. The funny thing is, I don't feel tired and stressed, as I usually do after a couple of hours shopping in the States.

So we beeline to Pizza 2000 (hey, that's the year it opened, and the cheesy name stuck), where we order up three pies (margherita, apollo, quatro staggioni) and chat with the lady making them. As I stand there reading the board, she reminds me of what Number One son ordered last time he was in--she remembers better than I do!

I think a town like Blessington is what that California developer may have had in mind, except he or she forgot that making something look like a town center on paper does not make it one. Little One looked at the title over my shoulder as I wrote this morning and said, "which shopping center?" I asked him if he thought Blessington was a shopping center, and after a short think, he responded, "no, because people live in Blessington."

Freezing

At some point during our time in Germany, I looked at the weather report and sighed. There was no way I was going to be able to remove my longies for at least a week. The bad news is that the weather pundits were right, and temperatures stayed well below freezing for our last week there; the good news was that we did get some snow.

It took some machinations, though: Two years ago, a friend mentioned to Danny that you needed to wear your jammies inside out to make it snow. Danny immediately tried it, and damned if it didn’t snow. When we got to Germany that year, he wore them every night, and it snowed every day. Magic, and it worked.

Fast forward to this year. Icy cold, Danny (and Marcus, who still has just a bit of little kid in him, or maybe he just likes snow) wore their jammies inside out. Did it snow? You bet! The boys wore their jammies inside out for a week, and two feet piled up. At our doorstep in Redmond. But in Germany? Nothing. Nada. Nichts.

I called a friend back home and told her what was going on, and wasn’t it funny? No, she said, make them stop! So we made a deal: her whole family turned their jammies inside out. It did the trick, and we had fluffy flakes for the rest of our Swabian sojourn.

The cold weather did make for some interesting talk at the dinner table. Papa reminisced (Germans like to do this anyway, and weather is a popular subject) about the year that Lake Constance froze over. He and a toddler Alfred (I’ll give you a moment to relish that image) walked out onto the lake. You can find pictures on the Web, and they’re not alone, in fact, many people drove out onto the ice. The year, for the record, was 1963. That was the year that the isles got 2 feet of snow, and the Thames froze over.

So, here we were, looking forward to returning to Ireland, to a TV-free house where kids could make noise and messes, and the mercury stayed in a reasonable zone. I had fantasies about wearing only two layers, and the pilot announced that Dublin was enjoying a balmy 3 degrees (Celsius). So imagine our surprise, then, when we came over the crest of the hill to see the Blessington Lakes, right where we left them, but frozen. And not just a little bit—all the way across. We all gasped, and then the boys started jumping up and down, “this is soooo cool!”

Of course, this being Ireland, when I turned onto our road, I was tractored (that’s expat for ‘a tractor doing 10 km/h pulled in front of me, and there’s no way I can pass on this @#$! horse track.’). Marcus intelligently suggested that our time might be better spent chucking rocks onto the lake rather than staring at a John Deere fender, and so we did.

A warm—relatively speaking—wind blew in last night, and by this afternoon, the lake had mostly thawed. They say that in 1963, the ice and snow didn’t melt until March. We feel lucky to have seen this extraordinary event, even if it did mean we didn’t get to wash the longies.

“Well, at least you’ll have plenty to blog about”

“Well, at least you’ll have plenty to blog about,” notes my dear husband. I know he’s just trying to cheer me up.
“I can’t very well blog about the stomach flu, though, can I? And most people aren’t interested in a flat tire. I really would rather write about the great weekend excursions we had.”
“Yes, but the flat tire at least points up how some things actually do work here. I mean, the rescue guy showed up in record time—less than an hour from Dublin.” He’s got a point there. And it proves my theory: if someone apologizes and says it’ll take a long time, they’ll get to it right away; if they say they’ll take care of it straight away, you’re in for a wait
“True, even the broadband is finally working! Are you going to go in or work from home, since Marcus doesn’t need a ride to school today? ”
“I can’t, I have a meeting that I have to go to this afternoon. And I don’t think I can reschedule.” Great, I have to figure out whether to leave Marcus by himself or schlep him with to the tyre centre.
“No. Oh, wait a sec, Ferdi’s stuck in Thailand.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Nope, he’ll be home in two days, via Kuala Lumpur and South Africa. He has to reschedule!”

Which means I can head into town to get a new tyre, knowing that Alfred will be here if Marcus needs him. I know the tyre centre well, and the fellows have already sold me new tyres for the front to get me thru the NCT (car safety test). At this rate, I’ll have a matching set by the thaw. And their proximity to downtown means I could take care of the Post Office and shopping.

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So much for the news. But what I really wanted to write about was the great weekend we had. The turkey had trimmings, and Alfred and Marcus cut out early to be home for an early supper. Butternut squash stood in for pumpkin, and today I saw sweet potatoes in the market, but otherwise it tasted just like it should. And after supper we stepped out our back door for some Space Shuttle gazing, with Danny spotting the bright body arcing overhead. We waved, and wished them a happy Thanksgiving.


With Thanksgiving came a change in the weather: clear and bitterly cold, loads of fog. When we headed out to do some exploring, chunks of ice would fall on the car from overhead: not hail, but ice falling off the canopy of trees.


We opted on Saturday afternoon to take a drive around the Blessington Lakes, and discovered a lovely castle (think small) just around the corner, a couple of overgrown fairy rings and a gorse-covered passage tomb. Reminders that people have been here much longer than we might think.



As we passed through Blessington on the way home, the town was all dressed up for Christmas, and the fog and cold added to the mood.

Sunday, we headed out after a breakfast of pumpkin (well, butternut squash) scones. South to Baltinglass, where the ruins of an abbey stand proudly by the river. Little treasures of a pillar that defies physics to remain standing, and Romanesque carved capitals, with frosty ferns poking out from between the stones.



Emboldened by the ease of finding the place, we then managed to drive in circles, and finally resorted the GPS to find a place called Castledermot—yup, Diarmait Mac Murchadh (or Dermot McMurraugh, if you prefer the modern spelling), King of Leinster, built a castle there, but there’s none of that left. Instead, there are ruins of an abbey dating to about 900, a pair of high crosses and another church/abbey, with no information posted other than we could get the key next door if we needed.



Thoroughly chilled, we tucked into shepard’s pie at a pub, and headed north to Kilcullen and one of my favorite events of the year. (At the back of the pub's car park, we found the signpost that was clearly missing when we needed it.)


The winter, or advent, spiral is a contemplative walk in an evergreen spiral, to light a candle in the growing darkness of winter. Together our light fills the room with a warm glow. Our school back home will celebrate the spiral later this week, and I shall miss watching the children that are still four years old in my heart walk tall as young adults, knowing that this is the last time they will walk this path as students of this school. For the first time, I have a pang of missing someone, and realizing it is “my” other children. Good thing they are all on Facebook!


And my visa application arrived this morning, which means I can stay another six months. Good thing Alfred was here to sign for it!

Free books and music

After we moved into Tulfarris Village, we had to wait a whole week before we got a piece of mail--any mail at all--for the purposes of proving our address so we could get library cards. Noble intentions aside, we had a practical reason: we needed stories to read to Danny before bedtime, and we had brought precious few books to save on weight. But once we had that proof of address, we gleefully trekked down as a family. As she handed us the cards, the librarian also handed us a flyer for a series of "alternative" traditional performances, noting that there would be a free recital in this very library next Tuesday evening. I looked at the tiny place (perhaps twice the size of our living room) wondering if I was missing something, and said, "will you have room enough?" "Oh yes, the last time we had a free performance, no one came." Small town life. Did I mention the population of Blessington is about 4,000?

We checked out a few books, and some CDs, since our new cars and the house all have CD players. Once home, we popped in the Best of the Chieftains, and kicked back to the first track: North Americkay, the classic tale and tune of the young woman who follows her banished love from Belfast to Quebec. I put the date for the recital on my calendar, and got stared on supper.

The recital was last night. Words simply fall short of showing you the amazement on Danny's face as he recognized the singer during the opening strains of North Amerikay--the same singer as on the CD. Yes, we had before us one of the early Chieftains (that would be Kevin Conneff), not ten feet away from us, introducing each song in the traditional fashion, telling us from whom he had learned it. A single voice held us all for 30 minutes; he was joined later by two other traditional musical giants, and together they created magic.

For free, in the tiny library in Blessington.

Tulfarris Village

With both boys in school, we could set a date with a realtor, to see the Tulfarris house and a couple of others. There are no lock boxes here, so realtors have to set up appointments with each other, and apparently miss each other all the time. In our case, three of four properties were a miss; and the fourth was the kind of place that left us gasping for air, literally, as every room had at least one air freshener in it.

Our date in Tulfarris revealed just what we needed: open floor plan, bright and airy, still small. The landlady and her husband owned and rented out three of the houses, and we even looked at another one, but our choice has the best light, and a view of the Wicklow Mountains from almost every window. We decided to take the upstairs room tucked under the eaves for ourselves.

We told her we would take it, with the proviso that she get broadband in. (We were absolutely not wanting to deal with setting up broadband, after having spent hours wrestling with Verizon the week before we left.) The realtor was left standing dumbfounded that we could do this all by ourselves.

The relo people at this point were feeling like a bit of a fifth wheel. When we asked them for things we really needed, like a second car and help with immigration for me and the boys, they were no help whatsoever; but they gave us maps and shopping bags and wanted to help negotiate the lease. We let them do this, but they got my name wrong on it, so I can’t even get a library card. At least they bought us lunch!

Blessington

We had a date at the school and we had been combing the Internet for properties for a couple of months, and had a few ideas of the general area, so we climbed in the car (a Toyota Avensis for those who want to know) and headed south to the school, via Blessington. At the boundary of town, we immediately took a side street into the “suburbs” and spent a half hour wending our way through every back street in town (it’s a small town!), until we came back to the main street at the other end of town. From there, we headed on to the school for our appointment.

A note on navigation: at this point, we were relying on two maps and a GPS unit. And even then we were getting lost. This is perfectly normal for Ireland, but can be frustrating if you’re in a hurry. The moral of the story, we are learning, is to not be in a hurry.

No matter. The teacher, Svantje, is delightful, and she and Danny had a nice little time together while we filled out a miniscule amount of paperwork. After a nice chat, including a lead for a violin teacher for me, we piled back into the car, set the GPS to Blessington, and headed back north. As we arrived in Blessington, we looked at each other—we had been here before! Last spring, when we decided to go visit the Steiner School, it was late, the boys were cranky, and so we stopped here for supper. We even had gone to the Centra (a 7-11 type store) for cookies for dessert, and window shopped at the real estate window.

On Sunday, after another early-morning concert (a fitting bookend to the late-night TV habits of the downstairs neighbor), we piled in the car again, this time to try and find the elusive Tulfarris Village. We had heard it might have rentals, and was lovely, by the lakes, but we had been unable to find it: every map showed the golf course, but no map showed a road leading there. And yet we knew it had to be there. So we drove, and managed to find a tiny sign—we found the place, had a look around, and decided it was a lovely setting, but the houses looked a bit run down. Alfred, however, found someone pulling in, chatted her up, and pretty soon she had invited us in to see their place. Quaint and snug (another way to say tiny), but a usable layout. Still, the place was a bit worn. Her husband peeked in, and what with this and that, let it be known that that one unit on the end had been completely renovated, with an open floor plan, dormer windows and a bright conservatory. He made a call, and got us a name. We made an appointment to see the place on Thursday morning.