Where to start.. where to start.

Mabel and I hitchhiked into town on Sunday to go to the Sunday Session at the Stores. Slow pulled beer and live Traditional music.

On my last night on the farm, we invited all the people we knew in town over for supper. Twelve showed up, and we feasted on pork chops and potato salad. Down home slow food. We washed it down with Chilean wine, in spirit of our Chilean company. After supper we all walked down to the beach. One of the Irish girls was improperly dressed (which we found humourous as she was the only locally grown person in attendance) so the main group headed back to the bunkhouse. Mabel and I stayed down on the beach and lay down to skywatch. I explained to her the northern hemisphere constellations. It is wonderful to be so far from home and look up to see the same stars as from Arlington Crescent.

I am now in Kinsale, Co. Cork. It is a fishing village turned yachting resort with an ancient medieval past. I stood up on the walls of a crumbling fort and the intense wind buffeted around me, long grasses rolling in time with the rolling of the sea down below, that sea a heart-lurching distance below.

Later I took off my shoes and walked into the sea. The sand was scattered with empty limpit and shattered razor clam shells. So calm. So calm. And I lay on the sands and wrote and wrote, out with everything in my head.