We drive slowly so we can take it all in: the rivers, the reddening sky, the fields of green. the sky stays brighter past ten o’clock here, and soon everything is bathed in a red light that casts a dreamlike haze onto the land. I would be asleep if it wasn’t for my unblinking eyes - not wanting to miss a second. we float from Rosslare to Kilkenny, led by our body’s intuitions, drawn in by the soil, as the land welcomes us.
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We spend the morning gardening: untangling the weeds and cutting back the bushes, we let the pink fern shine through. grandma planted it against the wall, so we bring the back of the garden to the front, the past to the present, continuing the art she started. ‘Gardening situates you in a different kind of time,’ as Olivia Laing writes; ‘Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades’, and as we make room for the pink fern, we make room for grandma’s eye of beauty, that will continue to live on. and for a moment, with closed eyes and grassy hands, a daughter was somewhere else entirely: floated away by her mother’s hand.
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We return to Ballyouskill, to where grandma grew up, to when I existed as only a thought in the sky. my last visit was 16 years ago, and my brain can’t remember; but scents of green pull me in, and I walk on top of the grass as if I’ve been here before. drawn in by the soil, I trust the memories that have been passed down to me, letting my grandma’s movements guide me. as Elizabeth-Jane Bennet writes of her father, ‘the life he had before I was born […] felt, at first, as intangible as these falling mountains, and yet there it is, buried in the soil, mine to touch and pull from the ground any time I please. And the more I talk with him of family and of fields, the more the gap closes between time and space and people’.
Memory is slippery, and I want to swim against its currents: as we retrace her footsteps, the gap closes, and the past circles back to hold us. as I write this, I turn inward and assemble sentences out of the pieces of grandma left behind, the parts of her sewn into the days’ fabric. everything becomes scattered words for me to pick up. it is love that lets me feel her presence on the land, that lets me hold this as part of me.
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And as we drive home, I watch the sun fall and the moon rise, realising that the sky never ends; it just changes shape. it finds another way to exist.
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Reading this was so peaceful, thank you!
So lovely Tara, you have truly captured our time here, beautiful memories to cherish, thank you. 💚