Does this happen to you? That you wake, knowing you dreamed of something deeply important, but you’ve forgotten what? How did you sleep, I asked John just before 7 and he replied, Not well; strange dreams. Given that he is experiencing a new health thing, I wasn’t surprised, but sort of sad, because sleep is the one time we can leave the daily worries and be transported. I knew I’d dreamed of something unsettling too but couldn’t remember just what.
Putting laundry into the washing machine, I found myself singing softly and I realized it was this song:
And then I remembered my dream. John and I were somewhere, don’t know where, and two guys were also there, obviously bored. Never mind, one of them said, we’ll just drive on to Galway. I was pierced, in the dream, and now, that someone could simply drive to Galway, a city I love and have spent a little time exploring. It was the nearest city to me when I lived on an island off the west coast of Ireland and sometimes I got to tag along with someone going there with fish or on other business. Later, in Ireland with my son Forrest in 2001 so I could research Irish history and revisit some special landscapes while I was writing A Man in a Distant Field, Forrest and I spent three nights in Galway. He was just finishing an undergraduate degree in history at the University of Toronto and he’d taken a course in Irish history and was full of information I’d never known. But I knew places and plants and another kind of history so I think we were a good pair that spring. We were blessed with weather. I think it rained the day we arrived in Dublin and it might have rained another day but mostly it was warm and sunny, ideal for following the Ordnance Survey Map I’d ordered from Kennys, a book store and art gallery in Galway, before flying to Ireland. I wrote about that trip in an essay, “Well”, in Phantom Limb, how we used the map to find (or not) sacred sites:
We didn’t see St. Patrick’s Well off the Maam Valley road, nor his bed a little further on. We drove as far as the path to that Well but then it led through a farm yard and the sign told us Do Not Enter. Later in our trip, we ignored the signs and ventured into Hoare Abbey, a field of beehive huts on the Dingle Peninsula, a grove on ogham stones on a private drive, but we hadn’t yet found the courage to climb the gate, and walk up the path, smoothed by centuries of travellers and believers.
Forrest found a small map in Galway that took an interested person, or two of them, on a walking tour of medieval sites, many of them hidden in plain view. You looked up and saw a gargoyle, an oriel window, the hall of the Red Earl. We walked, parsing the streets in their layers of occupancy. Streets I’d walked and never thought to look up.
We went to places I’d been but had never known to look at with an historian’s eye. At Sellerna, this megalithic tomb:
The Kilmalkedar church on the Dingle Peninsula:
In my dream, this was all somehow in the atmosphere, that a person could simply go to Galway, or by extension, Ireland. But that person wasn’t me. I know I am mourning in a mild way the loss of our trip to Ukraine and London in September, wondering (perhaps) if we will be be able to plan such things again. Things happen. One day you are healthy and vigorous and another day you aren’t. And a song helps, or doesn’t. It’s a long long way from Clare to here, from Galway to here, from the village in Bukovina my grandfather left in 1907, maybe for good reason, maybe not. It’s part of a project I’m working on, a series of essays that might become a book. I didn’t think Ireland was part of it but, well, are dreams instructive? Was I being told to pay attention to where the heart longed towards?
We had to stop while John Smith drove his cattle to their evening pasture, him still in the black wellingtons with a familiar dog at the heels of the last wild-eyed heifer. He waved to us as though to anyone and for a moment I thought to call to him, asking him…but what? Where have the years gone, John Smith, that you are still with the cattle and I am driving with a son the age I was when I lived on the island we’ll see when we park the car and take our picnic to the sand.
Was I being told to at least look at old photographs and remember that ramble through narrow roads so overhung with fuchsias and hawthornes that we kept having to pluck blossoms from our clothing when we got into the car, or out of it.
I sometimes hear a fiddle play or maybe it’s a notion
I dream I see white horses dance upon that other ocean
It’s a long, long way, it gets further by the day
It’s a long way from Clare to here
...Theresa Kishkan 
I love Nanci Griffith! Haven’t heard her for ages – thank you for that. And thank you for this beautiful meditation on dreams, on disappointment, on exploration and family. I had one of those dreams the other night too – maybe there was something in the atmosphere. I’m sorry John is having to deal with health and your trip was cancelled. But something else will come, Theresa, something magnificent, because that’s who you are.
Isn’t she wonderful? I have three or four of her cds and love what she does with the whole long tradition of song as conversation — with song-writers, with audience, with the self. Kate Wolf’s Across the Great Divide, Ian Tyson (sigh!), Stephen Foster, Townes Van Zandt…I hope the time will come for travel again but in the meantime, it’s more important to deal with immediate health stuff. Thanks so much for reading, Beth. Lovely to think of you there across the country.
Incidentally, my friends who live in Provence have an extremely old stone “beehive hut” called a “borie” actually on their property. There are many in the region.
Simply beautiful, Theresa. Your description of that journey with Forrest has stayed with me. Travels we take with our children singly are special.
Thanks, Anne. Yes, the trips…Paris included!