Is it because it’s spring and I was working in my garden most of last weekend, until it began to rain, working mostly on the raspberry beds, transplanting some small canes to better locations, tying the long ones to poles of young maple, arranged in awkward teepees (and reminding me of how careless my garden efforts are: no tidy wires and sturdy posts, no neat rows), anyway, is it because it’s spring and I looked over to see the clumps of yellow primroses blooming by the fence? My heart cracked a little. I was tying the raspberry canes and I was also walking along a little lane in County Mayo with my new friend Sheila. She was taking me to see a cottage she thought I might be able to rent. I’d been staying with her in her caravan in a field under the shadow of a round tower in Turlough and we’d already gone by bus to Foxford and walked up a mountain road to the cottage a forester friend of hers had offered to me to use. It’s remote, he said, and not fancy but it would be good to have someone staying there to caretake it. We were too late. People had already found it, though they were gone by the time we arrived, and they’d been camping around it, and in it, burning the floorboards for warmth. Sheila was philosophical. She was sure she could find me something else. That wasn’t the case, as it turned out, but on the way to look at the little house near her caravan, the one where everyone ended up crippled with rheumatism because the house was tucked up against a seeping bank, we stopped to look at primroses growing in the hedgerow. I’d never seen them wild before though the Butchart Gardens, where I’d worked for 4 summers, had every species (it seemed) known to man. They grew in rich profusion, with cowslips, garlic and celandine, fuchsia coming into flower. And I bent to them, taking in their honeyed scent.
More than 20 years later, I returned to Ireland with my older son to search for information for a book I was writing. It was May and there were still primroses in the hedges. At every turn in the road, my heart followed, as though a young woman beckoned. Remember this, she was saying, do you remember cutting wild garlic for your soup, do you remember cutting little clumps of primrose to put in the jug on the table of the cottage you finally found for yourself, the one on the island near Clifden? And you did, you remembered every hawthorn, every glimpse of a collapsed stone wall smothered in woundwort or pimpernel. The song you hummed as you drove was “Donal Og”, the same song you heard first in a pub in Clifden, a woman from out the Ballyconneely road rising from her glass of vodka to sing in the most unearthly voice you have ever heard:
It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
and that you may be without a mate until you find me
Is it because it’s spring and my book is coming out, with sections about my time in Ireland — it was a hinge between what happened with the painter and the rest of my life with John and the family we made — and my heart is already tender towards that younger self, the one walking with Sheila on an Irish lane, trying to work out what to do with the experience she had just fled from, is it because it’s spring, the earth damp and the primroses yellow as the sun?
