Irish Mist: Reflections on Irish Weather

As I sit at the seaside home we have come to on the West Coast of Ireland, I contemplate the fog. It has been thick and gray for the past three days. Before that it was mist. In the weeks we have been here we have spordically seen the sun, and always, it seems a day when we are traveling.

It's not that we weren't forewarned. Friends gently urged us to take all our rain gear. An ardent Ireland traveler told me over drinks in early July to bring a wool dress. Wool, I thought. It is summer. I came with a kind of naive disbelief. Like anyone setting off on a perilous course, I was sure it wouldn't happen to me.

But there were warning signs when we arrived. An illuminated sign, showing a couple, relaxing on a Caribbean beach, said "It's easier from Shannon to take your summer sun holidays in 2002." Only briefly did I ask myself: why would they need summer sun? Then on the Aran Islands as we took a ride, shivering, in a pony cart with a cold mist in our faces, our driver turned to us in the laconic Aran way and said, "Well, at least you got a break in the weather." I was unclear why this was a break until we spotted a souvenir t-shirt. It showed a sheep, dressed for all four seasons. In three he was dressed for rain and in the fourth he wore a snowsuit.

The past few weeks during which it has been too cold to head to the beach, which is why we came here, have given me time to think about the Irish character and its relationship to weather. Descended from the ancient Celts, a loosely organized band, the Irish have maintained a fierce independence, a rugged sense of resignation, a twinkle in the eye, and a strong sense of the here and now.
In America we live by our ten-day weather forecasts. Indeed the language of our weather reports has a kind of poetry to it: Early clouds soon open to bright sun. Cold front moving in will bring crisp, breezy day. We want to know all things before they happen and our weathermen seem to make promises they can actually keep. Many times I have planned my life based on the Yahoo weathermap. Indeed our weathermen are minor celebrities and we all know Storm Field (great name, of course) and Al Rolker. We are sometimes amateur meterologists ourselves. If I call my father in Milwaukee and tell him it's raining, he says, "Oh, you'll get our sunshine tomorrow." And he's always right.

But who's an Irishman or woman to call. Their country is no bigger than Cuba. If the mother from Cork calls her son in Galway and says, "What's it doing up by you," chances are its doing the same as down by her. A waiter in Connemara put it this way as we slipped into a restaurant to escape the driving rain, in Ireland you get all four seasons in one day. An Irish friend offered this up as the Irish forecast. If it's sunny in the morning, it will rain by the evening and vice versa.

My husband calls this the ten-minute forecast. As we sit home on a cold, foggy afternoon, playing a l983 British edition of Trivial Pursuit the question presents itself. What is the name of a person who studies the weather? And we all realize that, unlike how many eyes does a bat have, this is not a trick question. The notion of an Irish weatherman is a bit of a paradox to them. At the very least he seems irrelevant.

My Canadian husband is befuddled by this. Weather is the first thing we discuss with our relatives. It is the major topic, especially when people can't say what's really on their minds. For example we received a letter from a childhood friend who wrote the first page on the weather (How little snow we've had this season) and the second page moved seamlessly into the break-up of his marriage. My husband is perplexed by the Irish seeming indifference to their climate. To him it's like a country whose economy is on the brink of collapse and everyone hides his money under the mattress and goes merrily along.

But even in this fog and chilly air, I think I see. Ireland remains true to its pagan roots and mysticism and superstition abound. As we watch a blazing red sunset, a neighbor joins us and said, "Red sun at night; sailors delight." But in the morning when nothing has changed, we alter it to "Red sun at night in Ireland isn't right."

One night a flock of birds appears. Thousands and thousands soar overheard. As we run out to see, a neighbor's child turn to us and says, "It will be hot tomorrow. We learned this in school. When the birds come in flocks, it will be hot tomorrow." But the next day when it is just as cold as it has been we are left to ponder the efficacy of the Irish public school system.

I ask the mother of a friend who lives in Tralee what an Irish weatherman does for a living and she replies, "Oh, they just cover all the bases. A little wind, a little rain, a little sun, a little fog." Yet no one seems too upset by this. Indeed no one thinks very much about it as they blithely put on their slickers and move their livestock or plough their fields, as they take children for walks or even swim in the sea which we saw people doing several times in rainstorms. There are no predictions here. No "what will come tomorrow." Anything goes.

It is what I have come to admire about the Irish character.

In pubs they sing of shipwrecks and brokenhearts and the heroes of Ireland, but no one sings of the weather. The only person ever to discuss the weather with us in any detail was a despondant Hungarian innkeeper and a neighbor who kept asking cheerily, "So what do you think of our Irish weather." We did once listen to about a dozen takes of Ella Fitzgerald singing "Stormy Weather" and thought the tape was stuck until we realized it was the restaurant's idea of a joke. And it's not lost on us that their number one liqueur is called Irish Mist.

But to me it all goes back to those Celts who cast their lot with an unyielding land, but also believe in fairies in the Liss. To them this land where little grows is magical and they have clung to it fiercely through years of oppression. They aren't going to be bothered by a few drops. They will strike as defiant pose and carry on. They will head to their pubs for a pint and a song.

I know when I will next see the sun. When my plane lifts off in a few days. Meanwhile this fog which sits outside my window is nothing to them. It will come. It will go. And it has a beauty of its own.

* * *

On Swapping Homes

A number of years ago, more than a dozen now, a friend inquired at a basketball game of Kate's, if we'd ever considered swapping our home. I said no I hadn't and wasn't sure I'd want to. "Well," she said, "this very nice family from France wants to visit and we're already going to Spain."

She gave me the website and I told her to take a look. And I did. I saw this crumbling French farmhouse, surrounded by wheat fields and a garden that seemed to be from Eden. A vision from Manet.

So we made an exchange with the Massons, our first exchange family. We met the Massons in Paris over an espresso and croissant. They handed us the keys to their son's apartment in Paris, to their farmhouse in the Loire, and to the Renault. We gave them a Metrocard, a subway map of NY, and the keys to our house. That was it. We said good-bye.

This was the beginning of what has become more than a dozen exchanges for us. France, Belgium, Catalonia, San Sebastian, Florence, Todi, County Clare. We have lived in all of these places. One of our most recent swaps was to a second home of a Madrid family. It was by the sea in a place called Mojacar. Mojacar is a white washed city where Arabs, Jews and Christians once all got along. It is a steep and hilly place and was difficult to navigate with my broken leg, which I had at the time. But I loved being by the sea and a part of me felt as if this was where I belonged.

I will share more stories on Mojacar and our house swaps from time to time. But we like to live in a place when we go there and we have lived in all of these. I am happy to talk about house swaps with anyone who wishes to engage me. I believe more and more that it is the way to go. Especially with a family.

Desire Paths

The other day I was walking to my office at the college where I teach. It was one of those glorious November days we've been having and I decided to leave the sidewalk and cut through a small wooded area. It is a little faster this way to my office but the truth is I wanted to walk through the woods.

There is a path there, a path worn down by others who have walked this way, and on nice days I like to take it. As leaves and bark crunched beneath my feet, I recalled how as a girl I had more or less lived on such paths in Highland Park where I grew up. Along the bluffs of Lake Michigan and into the woods these paths had been blazed by Native Americans long ago and indeed our middle school was called Indian Trail School because of these paths.

There were also trees, which we called Indian trees, which had been bent to mark the paths, and they grew this way, humpbacked, not straight up and tall as a tree is supposed to grow. But these trees pointed to the trail and I followed the trails whenever I could. When I was quite young, I darted along these trails, imagining that I was an Indian scout, a brave, a pioneer girl. I had many "Little House in the Prairie" type scenarios that rumbled around in my head. At times I was a horse and in fact when I stepped on the path last week, what I first thought of was how as a girl I galloped along these trails, pretending to be a horse.

My mother never worried where I was (I'm not sure why, though I usually had my dogs with me). I never got lost or ran into anybody I didn't want to run into in all my years of wandering through the bluffs and ravines of my hometown. On the path to my office, I thought about those first ventures I made into the wild. I was never frightened and I was content to be alone.

Whether as a wild horse or pioneer girl, these were my first small journeys into the world. I made them along these paths, which in fact have an official name. They are called desire paths because they are made by the footsteps of those who want to go this way.

Blown Glass, Red Hook

I took my students in my Writer and Wanderer class on a field trip to Red Hook. They took the train into the city, then a subway, and then the free Ikea ferry. I met them with apple cider and string cheese. We hung out for a few hours and, among other things, found a glass blowers studio. Naomi Bishop took the photo on the below. I couldn't resist trying a watercolor which is above. It was a beautiful day - sunny, windy, and mild.

"...I have never in my life been on my way anywhere, but simply on my way...

The quote is from Samuel Beckett and the picture is of Beckett, satchel over his shoulder, walking away, and my husband, Larry, beardless and well before I knew him, notebook under his arm, also on his way. Beckett on the street, Larry beside railroad tracks, smiling at someone.

The viewer has no idea where they are going or why, but perhaps they don't either. These images have long hung side-by-side on the large bulletin board I keep in my office at home. I'm not sure where I got the Beckett image, but I know I stole Larry's from his bulletin board in his office downstairs.

I stick more or less everything on this bulletin board, layers and layers of notes to myself, but these have stayed up for a very long time. I have a long association with both men. My cousin, Barney Rosset, of the Grove Press was Beckett's editor.

The story goes that in the early 1950s Barney read "Waiting for Godot" and thought it was going to be the most important play of the 20th century. He wrote Beckett to tell him so and asked Beckett (whom Barney always called Sam) if he'd meet with him and discuss Barney becoming Sam's US publisher. Beckett wrote back a cryptic telegram that told Barney to meet him on a certain night at the Ritz Bar in Paris and Beckett would only have an hour.

So Barney hopped a cruise ship and in a week or so was in Paris (I am taking some liberties here) for their meeting. The hour Beckett allotted Barney turned into a very long drinking night and a life long friendship. Indeed I have a cousin I am very fond of, a lovely man named Beckett Rosset.

I met Larry in Richmond, Virginia, a place I haven't traveled to before or since. Our paths crossed in a classroom. I was coming from California where I was living at the time. He drove down from the North. In this picture Larry is clearly on his way. To Tahiti perhaps, or Nicaragua, or San Miguel de Allende before he showed up in the Glaston Residence House where visiting athlete teams were housed on a college campus in Virginia.

Our paths could have crossed in any one of a number of places (We just missed one another in San Miguel. We were a few months apart in Nicaragua). But, as my mother said, when a Canadian drives to Virginia in an unairconditioned car in a heat wave, then it's meant to be. And so it was. Anyway here are two writers and wanderers, setting off on their journeys, on their way...

On Stories and the Road

I'm going to repeat once more what my teacher John Gardener said because it continues to resonate for me in almost everything I do. There are only two plots in all of literature. You go on a journey or the stranger comes to town. Or as Stanley Elkin put it more succinctly when referred to science fiction: They come here or we go there.

I have also written how women, for so long denied the journey, awaited the stranger. Vermeer clearly understands women awaiting the stranger in so many of his portraits of women, especially those who stand in front of maps of a world they will never see. But I come from a more fortunate generation of women and I have gone a lot of places.

For me a journey is quite simply a story unto itself. In a sense it comes ready made, at least the literal story does. On the road things happen. You meet people. You take a detour. A bus drops you off at the wrong stop. Someone offers to help you find your way. And you find yourself in the middle of a narrative you had never anticipated.

Take the instance of an old story of mine that I remain very fond of. "The Typewriter." It appears in my collection THE BUS OF DREAMS. A number of years ago I traveled through Europe with my then boyfriend who insisted on carrying a typewriter to an old friend of his family. We were supposed to spend six weeks backpacking, but now the typewriter took over our entire trip. We had to be careful with it. We couldn't leave it alone. He had to carry it. Anyway it became a story. I wrote the first several drafts out in a very literal fashion, but it didn't work. Then I returned to it, after a long time, and realized that the typewriter had to become a character. It had to know something that the couple carrying it does not. And once I took the story out of its literal realm and allowed imagination to come in, the story came together for me.

I've met many odd people and found many stories on the road. Last year I stayed in Sicily with a woman whose house was decorated with old dresses she once wore to prom and things like that. I know she will find her way into something. A few years ago we did a house exchange in the Loire Valley. It was the coldest summer in recorded history and, despite the blazing fire in the fire place in mid-August I was freezing. So one day I tried on a sweater that belonged to the woman we were exchanging with. It was a perfect fit. I tried on her sweat pants. They fit too. I began walking around the house in her clothes. I started thinking to myself "What if all her clothes fit? What if I just moved into her life." A story called "Exchanges" (published in DAEDALAS) came out of that "What if."

I am always asking myself what if I push myself further. What if I make a character do what I would never do. What if you go to Belgium and the old lady who lives next door, the mother of the man with whom you have exchanged, dies while you are on holiday? See my story, "The Dead Woman." (In TRIQUARTERLY). The possibilities for narratives are endless. So many stories and novels I love involve a journey - ROOM WITH A VIEW, ENCHANTED APRIL, SHELTERING SKY, POISONWOOD BIBLE, and of course the classics - THE ODYSSEY, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. MOBY DICK to name a very few.

You go on a journey and, by definition, something happens. Some stories, such as Paul Bowles disturbing "A Distant Episode" show what happens when we push ourselves beyond the natural limits of travel as does Joseph Conrad when he penetrates the HEART OF DARKNESS. But whether you are writing as E.M. Forster or Bowles, the task is still to push your material beyond what you know and to bring imagination to bear.

In terms of telling stories that is. To ask yourself "What if that person I traveled with actually was a shady character?" "What if the old woman died while we were staying in their house?" What if you went somewhere and decided never to return." Falling in love, growing up, losing your innocence, facing mortality. All the greatest themes of literature can come from the stories and people we meet, no matter how fleetingly, on the road.

I met a man once in an airport who wore a button on his shirt. The button fell to the ground and I picked it up to hand it to him. He explained to me it was a picture of his wife. Seven years ago she walked out the front door of their home. That morning she had made everyone breakfast. She had attended a child's performance at school. She went to work, came home for lunch. And then she left. No signs of a struggle. No money missing. She'd left behind her purse, phone, everything. But she'd locked the door and walked away from her life.

To this day her story haunts me. It is one I cannot fathom and also cannot forget. This is a woman who appears to have walked out of her own life. At times when I cannot sleep I wonder what was the journey she embarked upon.

What I love about Vermeer...

For a long time I've been trying to figure out exactly what it is I love about Vermeer. The luminosity, the attention to details, the contemplative women. But I knew it was more than that. While I can certainly appreciate technique, I felt that the answer lay in the content. Recently the Dutch, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of their arrival in what was known as New Amsterdam, sent one painting - a fact that my daughter, Kate, found charming. The famous "Milkmaid."

I went to the Met and saw it, and it is beautiful, but what I paid the most attention to was a painting I know quite well. The Met owns it and it is perhaps my favorite painting in the world, also a Vermeer. "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher" which I have posted here.

What I love about this painting is its sense of anticipation. A longing to be elsewhere. The open window, the woman, poised, but not moving. And then what I noticed upon closer inspection a map of the world. In several of Vermeer's most famous paintings - including this one, "Officer and Laughing Girl," and the widely interpreted "Woman in Blue Reading Letter by an Open Window," - there is a woman, sitting or standing, with a map of the world behind her.

In one painting she is speaking with a man who appears to have returned from a journey. In "Woman in Blue" she reads a letter, appears to be pregnant, and stands before a table of books and again the map of the world. While I love Vermeer for his meticulous technique, his ability to capture the moment and emotion, what I love the most is that he understood women. He understood their longing to be elsewhere and their inability to go. It is right there. In every painting almost.

Of course this exists elsewhere in art. When I read The Palace Walk by Mahfouz, I was so struck by the woman who marries, is taken to the home of her husband, and, thirty years later, has never gone outside since. The claustrophobia of her life. This is the definition of imprisonment, isn't it, and that is what is so terrible about prison. Clearly it is a circle of Hell. You can't leave.

I have said this many times before, but a beloved teacher of mine, John Gardener once said that there are only two plots in all of literature. You go on a journey or the stranger comes to town. For centuries women were denied the journey, but their longing was palpable. They wanted to leave but they were trapped by the circumstances of their lives. Vermeer understood this. He painted it over and over again. I cannot thing of a more poignant depiction of this than his maps of the world and the women who stand, immobile, captured, before them.