Summer in Morris

I miss late-afternoon dinner parties with copious wine and vegan dishes spread out covertly in a backyard or on a front porch, food all of which is delicious, all of which made by us, consumed in the shade -- then sweaters on and night-time wandering around town with nothing to do and with friends who have to work so very early but are out all the same.

If you have the opportunity to do it, do.

Mr. Rogers

I met my neighbor yesterday.

He isn't really my neighbor, since he doesn't actually live in the house across the street -- it is rather simply his workshop. Also, it isn't really a house. I live in a place that used to be a pub, and he builds doors and bookshelves and stools in an abandoned-looking stone structure that was once the schoolhouse.

His name is Jerry. He is either a youthful sixty or a poorly-preserved fifty; like his building, he is weathered and gray, with skeletal legs, fluttery hand movements, high cheekbones over unshaven cheeks, full of elegant disdain. When I pulled up to the house yesterday on my bike, he was outside, unloading wood from his red van.

"Hello, Jessie," he said. I was surprised -- we'd only met once, and I really hadn't talked. I'd simply been introduced to him, answered "Oh it's lovely!" to his obligatory "How do you like Ireland?" question, and gone inside. I was impressed that he remembered me at all, much less said this:

"Have you ever been inside this building?" he motioned elegantly, a toolbox in his hand.

"..No?" I said. When I'd thought that the building was abandoned, I'd definitely entertained the idea of breaking and entering, but as soon as I approached it, I saw that there were wires going into a window and fresh boards by the door, so even if it were falling down, someone definitely owned it.

"Would you like to come in? Have a cup of coffee?" Jerry asked intently.

The me before WWOOFing would have probably made some excuse -- here was an older man, who I didn't know really, inviting me into his house; even if it wasn't going to be him hitting on me, it would at least be awkward. I now, however, was just bored enough and trusting enough -- what with the whole Chelsea turning out to not be an ax murderer thing -- to enter, and so I did.

"Sure," I said, and stepped after his jacketed back, missing a step and falling on my hands as I followed him up the crumbling mossy steps. He didn't notice, being I suppose preoccupied with the problem of entertaining in a workshop without heat or water. (That was another reason I'd followed him -- I wanted to know how on earth he was going to make the coffee. I also love coffee.)

We entered into a cluttered garage-like part of the building, and as my eyes adjusted to the light I waited for him to go downstairs or wherever it was we were going to drink beverages. He didn't. Instead, he lit a sketchy-smelling gas stove and motioned to a sawdust-covered, object-strewn table. "Sit!"

So apparently this was it then. Jerry was intently pouring a jug into a teakettle, his back to me. Elegantly, he muttered, "Here we are. I steal holy water from the church."

I smiled widely and laughed uncertainly, then coughed in the sawdust. I looked down and brushed it off my leggings, where it had already settled in dandruffy flakes. Jerry clapped his hands. "Would you like to come and see my porch?"

I hadn't noticed any kind of a porch on the outside of the building, so yes, I did. I followed him to an open doorway on the other side of the room, and we walked out onto five cedar planks scaffolded to the outside of the building. He stopped me with his hand. "I'd be careful, there, I haven't got much of a railing..." I stared down at the twenty-foot drop, and wondered if he was about to make a move on me..

"See the view?" and I did -- the valley spread out below us, first our creek and then some trees and then further on the man-made lake opened, and on the other side more mountains. The sky was blue with turbulent clouds. It would, if finished, make a lovely porch -- perhaps he wasn't after all completely crazy.

Back in the sawdust-clogged workshop, he motioned to the cluttered walls. "I get all this stuff from skips." Skips? What were skips? I dimly assumed it was some sort of ship -- there were certainly a lot of wooden bits. I was however hard-pressed to explain the angelic thirties-ish painting of a girl, the stuffed stag head, and the nine-foot-tall decrepit Jesus oil painting.

"Where do you find the ships?" I said politely.

"No, skips," he said, and frowned.

"What are..."

"Sales," he said impatiently, "where people throw huge lots of stuff away. That's where all these bits of wood are from. Him," he thumped the stag head, "he came from a friend who bought a pair, only wanted one. He painted the other."

"Painted?" I said, imagining a Romanticism-like nature painting, only with a stuffed and mounted stag's head instead of a frolicking baby deer.

"Yeah, covered it in blue and made it some papier-mache antlers and sold it for four grand," he said.

"Oh," I said. "Of course."

It turned out that the Jesus painting had been tossed out of the neighboring church. "Think it's valuable, you know, Italian-school 1830s religious art..." Jesus peeked out mournfully from under a layer of filth. "I'm antireligious myself."

A cart of tools had come from a skip, too. "See that drill? It works! Got a hammer, a whole bundle of power tools..." he snorted disdainfully. "Old lady whose husband had died just threw the whole bunch out."

Finally I too could sound interesting. "Isn't it amazing what people throw away?", I said intently, and I told him about my friend Matt who only ate garbage and had for oh at least a year now. He snorted, didn't say anything. I was used to that now; I read in my Intercultural Competence textbook that Americans like me talk about themselves far more often than the rest of the world. Far from deciding to be less fond of self-disclosure, I have instead resigned myself to a semester of sharing anecdotes and receiving none in return, so I simply smiled and brushed sawdust off my pants again.

The coffee was ready -- canned espresso in a semi-clean French press poured into two mugs. "Found you a clean one," he said brandishing one free of dirt triumphantly. "D'you take sugar?"

I said I did. He rummaged through a closet and found me one single sugar packet. "It's damp, but it'll work."

It was indeed damp, and dirty; God knows what it had been through. "I do this too, collect sugar packets from restaurants," I told him, and he nodded, saying, "I stopped a while ago though." At that, old me would have politely declined the packet, but current me shrugged, ripped the top open, and dumped it into my coffee. It came out in one large lump -- bloop. I laughed, and sipped it -- despite everything it was good.

We talked awkwardly for half an hour, me offering muted and semi-unintelligible tidbits about myself in exchange for his colorful stories of how this neighborhood used to be, the pub open from midnight to six am, the schoolhouse a town hall then a ton of bricks with a fallen-through floor. After I finished the coffee, and he said, "Well, two o' clock's a good time to start work," and I said, "What time is it now?" and he said, "Two," I left him. Last I saw, he was two weeks past deadline, fretting over an as-yet-unassembled bookshelf that was 1/16th of an inch too high.

Later, I learned from Chelsea that he'd built all the beautiful doors in our house, and that sometimes he slept in the schoolhouse in a little bunk when he was on deadline. Both tidbits meshed nicely with what I'd learned about him, and both made me once again aware that I wasn't in the suburbs anymore.

Damn.

Three weeks ago, I was having some serious anxiety about going to the home of someone I'd never met, sleeping under their roof, and working for them for four long weeks. This was aside from my usual nervousness about meeting new people, too. I'd had multiple very kind email exchanges with the woman who'd posted the advertisement on the web page -- she'd been incredibly willing to have me, and even more willing to pick me up.

This Internet kindness threw me. All the other hosts I'd encountered were people with short, clipped, late, grammatically incorrect responses to my querulous queries; I'd been left with no doubt that these people had better things to do, vegetable patches to weed, organic feed to produce. This woman was not only kind and funny, she responded swiftly and knew how to use punctuation. Unnerved by this, I'd searched the WWOOFing web site and found that WWOOF hosts submitted to no tests, no inspections. There was no requirement for stopping anyone registering as one apart from their ability to pay the Web site fifteen dollars. In short, there was nothing to keep The Old Pub from being the wooded home of axe murderers.

Vaughan, the principal of the school I was helping teach English as a Second Language at, really wasn't helping. He kept stopping me in the hallway and looking worried; regularly he placed a hand on my shoulder in a fatherly way. "If you get there, and it's odd, and you want to come back to us," he would say, his kindly crinkly six-foot form staring at me from underneath his toupee-like hair, "just call. If anything's wrong..." he paused, "anything, anything at all..." and his eyes would grow distant.

On the web site's forum, I posted: "Hey, the lady I've been talking to seems really, really nice. She has a bunch of animals -- baby chicks, ducks, maybe even a hedgehog -- and a passel of children. They seem funny and kind.... they're almost too good to be true. How do I know I'm not going to the home of people who will murder me?"

Swiftly, a WWOOFing board member responded. WWOOF was working on it, but no, as of yet, there was no way to make sure that the Collinses were not serial killers murdering young hippies systematically. Still, he could plainly deduce from my description of the place that it was the Old Pub I would be staying at, and they seemed like pretty nice hosts. If it didn't work out, the board member told me, he could certainly find me another placement, in fact he was even a farmer himself. He ended by telling me to 'Trust people! They're inviting you into their home, too! You might be an axe murderer yourself!'

Chastened, I deleted my post, resolved to just suck it up and either get slain or not, and assumed that was the end of it.

Until yesterday, when driving with Chelsea, the kind, funny, grammatically correct host who is pretty much the same as her Internet persona, in her minivan the other day, I happened to mention it. "You know, I was so worried about this... I even posted on the web site..."

She started to laugh. "I... I know."

Oh god. "What?"

"My friend saw it on the forum. I don't usually monitor them, but she saw the thing about the hedgehogs and called me right away." She was enjoying my clear discomfort, chuckling slightly as she drove with her injured wrists placed delicately about the steering wheel. We were on the deserted, winding road that leads to their wooded home, with a car full of groceries.

"I'm so sorry! I deleted it -- I had no idea that people would know it was you so easily..." I was giggling nervously, counting the miles until we were home.

"Yeah, Mel and I were debating what to do. My friend said she'd write me a character reference, but for a while I was pretty set on picking you up from the bus station, acting all normal, then, calmly, right about here..." (I stared out at the gray, foreboding woods) "pulling the minivan over, opening the back hatch, hauling out a black garbage bag, a bunch of chains, and a pair of rubber gloves."

Although I'm sure the possibility was tempting, I'm really glad she didn't. Either I would have started just speed-dialing Vaughan straightaway, or I would have probably killed her in self-defense.

Slow Descent

So it's official: I will bike five miles for a beer. Probably more, but that's how far away the town is from my house. Five miles of HILLS....scenic, scenic hills.

I've started talking to animals, sort of. They don't talk back -- don't worry, I haven't gone completely bonkers -- but failing other human contact (I've been alone in the farmhouse for a day minus the screaming children and demanding teenagers and kind hosts, and it's sort of nice) I tend to assume that the cat has a greater personality than he does.

Today I got the bike out of the shed and had to shoo the herd of chickens away from the table by the window. "What, are you guys trying to Peeping-Tom me? Get out of here." Then I walked it past the pigs, who oinked in a friendly kind of way. "Sorry, Miss Piggy and Madame Cochon, no rotten egg shells for you today." I pedaled down the road, my back muscles wussy from misuse, and couldn't pass the friendly horse without saying hello. She was wrapped in her blanket, staring warily through her chain-link fence at me; we exchanged no actual words apart from my fumbled, "You're preettttyyy", but I did blow into her nose a lot, which is horse for "hi, should we bite each other or be friends".

Despite all this talking, when the friendly men in the all-male pub said hello to me, I said "hi" really quickly, grabbed my coat, pushed past the crowd by the fire, and awkwardly opened the exit door the wrong way. I think I'll leave this experience mute.

Ideal Meal

Since my last entry was so damn serious, this one is just a list of everything I would eat each day if I had the money and wherewithal to compile it into my kitchen.

1. Life cereal, not the cinnamon kind.

2. Smoked salmon. They're all about it in Ireland, and god do I love Ireland now.

3. A pint of blueberries.

4. Boozeberries.

5. Nutella on anything,

6. Tomato bisque soup from Common Cup, the kind that has lots and lots of hashbrowns in it.

7. Mussels -- most particularly this kind I had when I was spectacularly toasted in Greece one night. I don't remember them that well, but I know that they were fabulous, up for grabs at this one woman's house, and also that I ate the whole plate.

8. Seven-layer white cake from Taste of Scandinavia, the kind that has jam and chocolate and bananas and ganache and cream in it.

9. Sea scallops with ginger and white wine. Every single time I have had scallops in a restaurant, they have been fabulous. Every time I try to make them at home, they suck and taste purely of fish. If I meet someone who can saute them properly, I will marry them.

10. Bread. I would eat bread for each meal, if only my body would let me. I suppose that Joey and I are quite similar in that way, although because he is six feet tall and a hundred and forty pounds, he can eat far more bread than I can, without similar consequences regarding his butt's growth.

11. Most importantly: watermelon, mango, and grapes. Christina Rossetti had it right when she wrote that poem. I would not have been able to resist the goblins tempting me with their luscious fruit, not in the slightest.

Free Range

The town was a cluster of squat two-story buildings painted vibrant colors against the dank air; squat, vibrantly-colored patrons hustled in and out. A little hunched woman draped in a red coat lurched across a crosswalk, waving her hand at the line of cars stopped impatiently behind the painted line. I stared at her as I jogged past, aimed at the old church.

Along the stone wall, a tidy row of Celtic crosses: the church's Reverend Fathers from years past lined up along the street, awaiting eternity. There was no room for anyone else, and I wondered where the current priest would be buried; there was simply no place for more time to pass, or more holy men. Was this because of an oversight -- the road built too close by -- or was it a quiet architectural prayer for a swift Second Coming?

There wasn't time. I had to conquer the hill before night fell and traffic could not see me in my long dark coat, and so I did, placing heel before toe, the muscles like taut rubber bands in the back of my thighs. The road curved, revealing another slope; I groaned; I conquered it. I was at the top.

Mountains in the distance, blue, like the worn-down teeth of a dog. Clouds that shifted, changed, morphed as I watched. A patchwork of fields in green and gray, separated by hedges -- sheep -- a cluster of multicolored cows -- at the bottom, there, the lake, the bog, with its shining unpredictable currents and still man-made patches of muck that could swallow a stick, or a person -- all of it separated from me by a thicket of sticks that served as a fence. I could see the curve of the world, a little yellow blossom in a hedge, but I had no time to marvel -- I had to go down.

After a hurtling descent and a few near-somersaults, I found myself on the road that led to the home, or at least I thought it was -- but the light was different now, near evening instead of pure noon, and so I traveled, constantly questioning. That was not the path. That certainly was not? Did I turn, before? Did I see this hedge? Was this rather long and unremarkable road part of the journey? Was that stone wall --

As I was on the point of near-panic, I saw their field, and everything changed, was made solid. I drew a deep breath and whistled -- they looked up, shook back their blankets, trotted over, and welcomed me. Go on, the deep-brown one said, you're nearly home. She licked my hand, then tried to bite it. I offered her grass and stroked her neck.

It was nearer sunset when I walked in the door, footsore. Two white heads looked up.

"MacROOM!" the older one said. "I would've taken ye there meself!"

"Do ye like it there, in Macroom?" the younger one said, brandishing a teapot at me. "Tea?"

"There's tart there, in the pan," said the elder, lighting the wood stove. I couldn't see what she did, but flames flared up right away.

"And custard. They were tryin' to eat it all up," the younger said, flipping the switch to make the pot whistle, "but I wouldn't..."

"Granny, read my book!" whistled the young girl at the big wooden table, brandishing a sheaf of torn white paper. The elder waddled over.

"The princess and the frog look at each other, and begin to kiss," read her Granny. "Sophie, this is lovely." Then, with a practiced air: "Didn't this happen to you, Auntie May?"

"Kissed a few frogs meself," said her sister. "But they stayed frogs."

I put down my coat, poured custard on my pie, and began to eat.

....

What I'm trying to say is that I now live in a Neil Gaiman book.

A Wrinkle in Time

Funny story: I was once afraid that the people who have taken me in for this month would turn out to be axe murderers.

Now, I have arrived in this house, in the outskirts of a tiny town that is itself the outskirt of a larger city. I have scratched their pigs on their heads. I have chuckled at their multiple chickens. I have played Duck-Duck-Goose with their two small daughters at least seven times today. They have fed me lemon cake.

If they're going to axe murder me, they're sure off to a terrible start.

These people are at once relaxed and archaic. Chelsea and Mel may live in an old pub -- seriously -- across from a still - running church and a defunct one-room schoolhouse, but it is a nice old pub. It has three-foot-thick walls and a big white kitchen with clean tiny European features. It is heated by coal fires, stoked by the boy, who is a solemn charming ten-year-old with a knack for being mildly injured by his science experiments; his sister, fourteen, is a dreamy picky eater who likes to tell tales.

I hesitate to draw conclusions, but I might be living in the farmhouse from A Wrinkle in Time. If I disappear, know that somewhere I'm battling a giant Irish brain.

Always Leaving

This semester in my German class, we learned all -- and I mean all, we read two books and saw two movies and a musical -- about Elisabeth, the queen of Austria-Hungary at the end of the nineteenth-century. I can see why my German prof was mildly fascinated by her, and why the country was for the entire forty years she ruled; she was incredibly beautiful and naturally brilliant. She had dark brown hair ("tinted by walnuts", one of our textbooks told us in a gossipy sort of way) that fell to her feet. She dressed beautifully, corresponded with the leading thinkers of the time, wrote poetry and excelled at sports. She ensnared the heart of a ruler when she was I think sixteen and quickly became the queen of the largest empire in Europe.

She was, in short, awesome, and so saying that I see any parallels to myself in her is bald vanity, but bear with me. I'm not saying that my famous beauty should put my image on everything from decorative china plates to postcards for a century, nor am I saying that I correspond with genius poets.

However, the Empress liked leaving, and it's something I'm learning that I do well. I'm really hoping we do it for different reasons, though. Empress Elisabeth had it all, but was never quite happy; historians think that although she was staunchly Catholic, she was trying to slowly commit suicide by traveling on dangerous trips, using dangerous methods of transportation. From her dark poetry, sad family life, and habit of wearing black every day, we can gather that she might have been seriously depressed. She was definitely anorexic, at least -- she ran from things both in the metaphorical sense and in the physical sense, jogging miles in a corset every day at a time when other women gave up and sat on fainting couches. (She was also an avid horseback rider, although I was angered to learn that while she took her horses over the scariest jumps possible, ones that sportsMEN of the time wouldn't take, she never ONCE broke both wrists.) She was never at home for more than a few weeks without taking off again.

I left Bray today. I quit the ELTAP program after four weeks, first of all because I realized it was costing me far too much money, and secondly because I'm tired of being indoors all the time. So I found a WWOOFing post in southern Ireland --- the WWOOF program places willing workers on willing organic farms. They are fed and housed in exchange for food and board (and, well, sometimes money). I will be staying with a woman who had rhuematoid arthritis surgery and can't feed her goats. (The best part is that she has CASTS ON BOTH WRISTS!)

I'm sitting in a nice hotel room in Cork right now, a town where I know exactly nobody, and I like it. I'm happy this way, running -- not away from something, but to the unknown. Is that the difference between me and Empress Elisabeth? Or did she also have moments like this, moments where she sat in her hotel room and thought, "This is pretty tops, maybe I'll order room service for dinner and watch TV all night, or maybe I'll go out to the bars and people-watch? Oh, and fuck Valentine's Day"? Is this feeling of unlimited potential in solitude all it takes to make a person constantly leave?

Three Facts

1. There is a dog in this coffee shop. I am petting him. His owner informs me that his name is Hector. Animals here wear bandanas, follow their owners, and fetch newspapers. It's like the Disney Channel, but with Irish accents, and in real life.

2. Bananagrams came with me to Ireland, and it's, as of now, my most valuable piece of luggage.

Bananagrams, if you don't already know, is a game: merely a bunch of Scrabble tiles in a cloth case inexplicably shaped like a banana. The object of it is to form your portion of those tiles into a bunch of words intersecting other words, like a crossword puzzle. But for being a crazy simple game, it's given both Irish and American people a lot of (banana-shaped) pleasure lately.

I started forcing the children I teach English as a Second Language to to play it in class, but it's also gotten a lot of playtime at home -- one of my housemates has lately taken a shine to sitting down, pouring a cup of coffee, spreading the banana open, and then spending an hour frowning at the tiles, arranging them into a delicately-formed grid with a common, subliminal theme. Occasionally I or another housemate, Heather, help him. The first one we formed had, not unsurprisingly, the theme of "sex" ('QUEEF! BJ! HEAD!' and my invention, when we couldn't find any use for our x and multiple i's -- 'XIII'!).

The second one was both more useful and more adult, mature, and subtle. Our landlords have been rather ornery -- despite infrequent hot water and, occasionally, no water, they refused to reduce our ridiculously exorbitant rent even a little bit. I looked up from my reading to find Blair seated at the table, frowning at a puzzle that included 'DIEMURPHYSDIE', 'NOLAUNDRY', and 'WTFRENT'.

We considered leaving it up for when they walk unexpectedly into our house all the time, but then again they're old and so it might kill them.

3. The schoolteachers at St. Cronan's, where I teach, have a turn of phrase that is always slightly jarring when I hear it. As I mentioned before, I'm a terrible disciplinarian, so I usually witness mischief instead of solving it -- the other day, two boys were hitting each other with backpacks before the after-school program started, and I was shifting from foot to foot uneasily, watching them. All of a sudden, from out of nowhere, Mrs. Lyons appeared, and thundered,

"WHAT ARE YOU MEANT TO BE DOING??"

The boys instantly ran to their chairs and sat down, chastened, but I stood, debating the merits of graduate school, of the Peace Corps, of any number of future possible careers. What AM I meant to be doing?...

Well, now, at least, it's dinner time, and I'm off to go roast some fish.

It's a Hell of a Townnnn!

Sometimes, being at this school is hard. Not because of the endless nuances of the photocopier. Not because I only talk to adults half an hour a day; not because I'm on my feet in uncomfortable shoes. Being a teacher is hard mostly because I remember what it was like to be a kid.

This is especially apparent in the after-school program here. I'm a designated homework helper from 2:30 until 3:30; during that time, the powers that be demand ultimate concentration on one's homework from the instant one is done with one's snack. Granted, this is only for an hour, and I know it's practically impossible to get a child back into School Mode after he's been in Play Mode. Still, I can see the insolence in their eyes the instant they walk into the door. "You're not my mom. Or my teacher. What the hell?" If one said that to me, I'm not sure what I'd respond with.

One of the boys in the after-school program is restless both after school and in it. In class, O. draws ceaselessly on his folder as his Second Language teacher talks. He is ten, blond, with an intense expression. He is Polish, and can read and speak in Russian. He loves guns -- I often catch him pointing a piece of plastic that is shaped only vaguely like a rifle at other boys, going "Pppppppp!" at their faces. When I take that away, he continues undaunted, using his finger. It's a little scary, or would be if he didn't have such an enthusiastic, crazy brain.

Today, I watched him work at modifying the line drawings on his verb - forms worksheet. They were insipid scrawlings of children doing things like "move -- moved" and "walk -- walked". While Mrs. Lyons, the teacher, helped other boys, I watched O draw giant springs on the feet of a boy who was jumping, doodle large black spectacles on the face of the girl with the box. I told myself he probably had verb forms down anyways.

Still, Mrs. Lyons, when she noticed, was obligated to take his marker away, as she'd taken away his folder that had a halfway-finished drawing of a dragon on it. (Along with some characters in mock Chinese -- we'd been discussing Chinese New Year in class, and O.'s 'words' had been gleefully shot down by his classmate Timmy, who legitimately was from China).

I realized rather belatedly that getting him back on track had probably been my job, since I was a) watching him do it and b) after all there as a sort of apprentice teacher.

I think I always tend to let kids go too far. After school today, I sat with two boys while they snacked, preparing to make them shut up and look at their homework after one last graham cracker. But I looked away for a second, and then looked back to find one hitting the other on the head with his water bottle.

"Hey, there," I said. "If you keep going with that I'll have to eat it." (Why not, "stop it"?)

The one boy looked at me, set the water bottle down and then -- I have no idea why -- pushed it with his fingers like an air-hockey puck across the table.

I have no idea why I did this, either, but I scuttled my hands like claws towards it, seized it, looked greedily around, then took it beneath the table for "dinner". I heard them above me going, "She's gonna do it!"; I emerged to find them staring gleefully at me.

The puck boy went beneath the table, retrieved it, and started gnawing on it like a dinosaur wordlessly. I watched his teeth squish and rip at the plastic, but I still didn't say anything until another adult came by, shook her head, took it out of his hands, put it in his backpack, and said, "I think we'll have to separate these two".

For a second, I'd thought she'd meant me.

(I also love Roald Dahl, The Simpsons, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Avatar, all of which the people of Ireland love. I should really be a student rather than a teacher.)