Borrowed Ground

Twelve hours in an airport is its own kind of assignment. I had a table with a clear sightline down the concourse, a protein bar, and nothing else on the agenda until boarding, so I did what I have always done in places like that, which is observe, rest and write. A young couple strolled by with the unhurried posture of people who have never once worried about missing a flight. A man in faded skinny jeans hung his sunglasses by one temple in his shirt collar and let a leather bag swing hard against his leg with every step, a small percussive thwack keeping time. 

A cleaning woman came through with her cart for the fourth time in an hour, wiping down the same trash bins she had wiped an hour before, and I found myself more grateful for her than for almost anyone else in that terminal. It put me in mind of a man I used to see at a mall in Colorado Springs years ago, neurodivergent, always smiling, who danced with his broom the way some people dance with a partner. He loved that job in a way I have rarely seen anyone love any job. The paper wrote him up once. I had not thought of him in years, and there he was again, borrowed from memory by a stranger with a mop.

A cluster of aging hippies drifted past in loose linen and round glasses, and for a second the whole concourse smelled unmistakably like a Grateful Dead parking lot, which, fair enough, it is Colorado. Somewhere in there a man conducted an entire business call at full volume three feet from a row of strangers trying to nap, headphones nowhere in sight, and I had my one uncharitable thought of the day about people who mistake being loud for being important. Then I let it go and went back to watching, because watching and writing, it turns out, is most of what a twelve hour layover is for.

The flight to Dublin ran late, first by ninety minutes and then by ten more, and a good tailwind at altitude clawed back most of that time before we touched down. My friend met me at the airport and we ran errands the whole way to Clasheen, a stop at the grocer for cat food, a stop at the insurance office so I would be legally covered to drive, a stop at the butcher for lamb chops. By the time we pulled into her place the light was doing the thing Irish light does in the evening, and Pip, her dog, was waiting at the door like she had been told I was coming.

We walked the lane before dinner. Pip worked the ditches for smells while she pointed things out the way you do when a place is so familiar you forget other people have not seen it. Rose hips along the hedgerow, ready to be dried for tea or worked into jelly if I get to it. Hawthorn. Holly further down. Blackberries that might already be past their moment, dock, and enough plant life just on the property I was sitting to keep me in eco printing material for the whole five weeks. I have never worked with eucalyptus and she has several varieties planted on the property. 

Somewhere past the fields is a mass path, half grown over now, worn in by generations of rural families walking to church on Sundays. Other areas have stone bridges built during the famine, one of the projects wealthier landowners funded not just for the work but so the people building it could keep some dignity along with their wages. I will walk the mass path this week. I will visit the church. There are old gravestones near it I want to get rubbings from. 

Housesitting, once you get past the mechanics of it, turns out to be a strange and generous kind of trust. My friend handed me a dog who jumps at the chance to play in the water, a kitchen with a gas hob and a Rayburn that never goes fully cold, a fridge to keep stocked from a butcher and a grocer she has known for years, and before she flew off to Australia she made sure I would not be a stranger here. She introduced me to the insurance man she plays poker with on Thursdays, to a woman at the grocer who golfs with her, and to a man named Pat who once rented the cottage next door. Some other good friends Martin who used to be a geologist and now sculpts and his wife, also an artist, both heading toward some eco project at the bog. 

She also got me on the phone with an eighty-year-old potter named Jim, and I am driving over shortly to another small village to meet him in person. A delivery driver came by just a few minutes ago, and it turned out he used to own the land behind the house, though I was not entirely sure whether he still does. She also told me about a woman who makes her own earthen pigments, another who forages and turns what she finds into tinctures and food, and a river a few minutes from here where you dip in cold and then sit in a sauna until you cannot remember why you would ever want to be anywhere else. Same river I can kayak on it seems.

None of that was on an itinerary. It came from staying still in one place long enough for a place to start introducing itself, one poker night mention and one grocery run at a time. I keep thinking about the man on his phone in the airport, all that noise trying to prove he mattered to people who were not even listening, and then about the cleaning woman with her cart, content with four passes at the same three bins. I would rather be doing what I am doing here, walking a dog down a lane that leads to a mass path that leads to a church that leads, eventually, to a stack of dried rose hips and host of other botanicals that has something true to say about a place I only get to borrow for a little while.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio