Not your average January...
A month of mayhem in West Kerry
It’s been a strange month in Lake Wobegon…*
First it was the flu that kept us coughing and groaning for nearly three weeks. Then the “weather bomb” this past week with winds of 186 kph that crashed into the West of Ireland, that power of wind not seen since the Big Wind of 1839 (see my previous post Breath of the Cailleach).
It tore off our hard plastic polytunnel roof, snapped one of our trees from its roots, and cut our power and (due to well water and an electric pump) our water supply for 12 hours. My husband was delighted to start on the frozen meringue roulade and ice cream for breakfast and lunch.
But we got off lightly compared to the rest of the country, which saw ripped up sports arenas and roofs, demolished trees and polytunnels, and even massive wind turbines crashing to the ground. Half the country is still without power and water a week later.
And there was (and still is) enough rain and hail to make the lanes indistinguishable from the streams.
Oh, and lightning struck our house in the night, waking us with a tremendous “bang” that set the car alarm going and sent the neighbours out into the rain with flashlights.
Phew! The good news is that the Spring bulbs are cautiously sticking up their heads in their pots and there are even daffodils in full flower over in Ballyferriter, north of Dingle (though they may be regretting their enthusiasm). The camellia bush down the road that was flowering so confidently at Christmas is looking a bit bedraggled and sorry for itself now.
It’s Sunday, and I can hear husband Ben practising a Sting song on the cello, and I have been enjoying my new carbon fibre violin bow (though it still doesn’t make me sound like Nicola Benedetti). Kerry Doodle Cockapoo is, as usual, snoring – no doubt dreaming of our exciting trot down the lane in the driving rain and bitter northwest wind this morning.
There isn’t much happening in town at the moment. After the mayhem of Christmas and New Year, when the main road into Dingle was as busy as midsummer with people pouring in, everything has calmed down to that tranquil waiting period (mad weather not withstanding) before the cows come out from their winter barns and cavort in the Spring grass and new lambs appear, wondering where on earth they’ve landed and will it ever get warm?
The heavily pregnant ewes and last year’s lambs are huddling behind spiky hedges out of the wind and stuffing themselves with silage, which smells – and no doubt tastes – a bit like sauerkraut.
I am busy painting a new series in acrylics and mixed media (paint, pastel, pencil, crayon, textured mediums – anything I can throw at a canvas with joyous abandon), with which I have been experimenting over the Winter. Ben is carving two standing stones with stained-glass panels in them for the American Sacred Heart University, which has been refurbishing the old Christian Brothers school in Dingle into an amazing campus.
And as the song thrush, or céirseach, keeps telling us in his clear voice that rings out over the fields, February 1 is St Brigid’s Day, the first day of Spring (Imbolc in the Celtic calendar). Already, we can feel the earth humming.
* News from Lake Wobegon was a very funny segment of ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ on American PBS Radio by Garrison Keillor, about ordinary people doing peculiar things. He also wrote Lake Wobegon Days, which I highly recommend for a quiet read somewhere you can guffaw in private. You’ll never look at your neighbours in the same way again.