The View From My Window 2

Sitting at the computer, the desk is behind a wall of glass the length of the room. So it's a perfect light room for an Australian family, top floor - which is great for us. I'm sure our noise travels to the floor below...

I look out and see an ancient stone wall, with some of the window arches bricked back in, weeds growing in the cracks, old corrugated iron on the roof. The owner of this building tells us that they excavated lots of bodies when he built this building about 20 years ago, exhumed them and took them away. We're just outside the city wall, so there are many burial grounds nearby.

I see a courtyard of white houses with grey slate roofs, and into lots of windows - probably 8 different places over there that we can see. LMM points out how many bathrooms we can see into, I notice the women cooking at the other windows, at the same time each evening as I am. There are satellite dishes, pot plants, lampshades, clothes airers. Sometimes clothes on a line, wet for a week.

We're all in our own versions of Rear Window, a hidden courtyard life, separate from the much more cheerless streets around us. It's neighbourly, we're part of a place with other people's lives nearby. It's never isolated. But no-one waves or speaks across it - that would be intruding.

UPDATE: In early June, the entire wall is green and pink, in wonderful flower. The sky has often been blue.

Dirty Veg from Caroline

We're back from a big trip, so it's time to settle now into another kind of life here: school, making lunches, dropping and collecting both boys (I'm off the 24/7 shift, hooray, that WAS a hard 2 months), getting to a workout often if poss, and shopping local.

Caroline's pesticide-etc-free vegetable stand at the Coal Quay every Saturday is pure pleasure. A request for a handful of spinach gets me a boy's backpack FULL, and then throw in some carrots, beetroot, cucumbers, salad leaves: with the dirt still on. She is definitely the gardener, with the dirt deep in her hands: I admire them and her, it must be a hard life, growing here in Ireland with this weather that won't really play nicely.

So I get home, wash dirt off and plan what to make with all this indigenous stuff - soup's good, parsnip goes with most everything as it turns out. Multi-veg mash is another Magic food: boys eat parsnip, celeriac, zuchini, carrot and potato, and I'm happy. Magic. Not all at once, but they all go in. Under sausages, it makes a regular appearance as dinner. Spanakopita. I love it. They all taste so damn alive, different from one another, like a true vegetable should! Makes me think of my father standing in the garden in Canberra, dirt on his hands, colanders full of the latest abundance. He grew, and still grows, most everything.

A thread right through from my Saturday mornings here in Cork, to my father's sensational plots in Canberra, with echoes too, of all the grandfathers that had their gardens in Bohemia long ago.

And now for some Motivation

Have decided to join the gym, around the corner, for the discount rate of E300 for a year. I tried for a 6 month commitment, but the deal isn't offered for that. So we'll just see.

It's been a process of elimination: can't attend a course with regular hours, as Leathermanman's shifts change, and then every month or so, we'll want to go away for a week. Needs to be vigourous, to give me a place to vent frustration, sweat, go hard, move fast. Oh and if I could lose the weight I gained in my stressful job earlier this year, that'd be great too. Can't attend classes, should be cheap because of all our other expenses. So. Here tis.

Very exciting to start, feels like I'll be able to take this seriously here, while I'm not working or studying or what. My own little thing to commit to. Better than just being there for everyone all the time. Much.

Paris meets Paris

Years of lead-up, this! Paris the bear gets to Paris today.

Driving up from overnight in Orleans, droping off the car at Orly airport, then train and Metro to our hotel. Me now with my boys, in Paris again! Wow. Lunch for E10 at a corner bistrot, fab fab, we're here. This, I can do.

And hitting the high notes immediately, we set off for the Eiffel Tower. Long wait in the queue. This will be the one time we do this. I never did when I lived here at 16, or in later visits - always too touristy. But now. The boys are hopping, I'm getting cold, the queue is full of tourists on shorter holidays, we get to feel that we really do live in Europe now. What a stream of life we're in.

Up in the lift, to the very top. EArrgh. Vertigo. I'm almost sick with the height of it, the headtrip of it moving up here, the wind, oh I know it's a safe structure, and it's been here, but suddenly I've got all teh bad thoughts rushing in. The Bean beside himself with excitement, the Pumpkin falls asleep on Leathermanman's shoulder and misses a real lot of it all. We go to the top, gaze into the museum boxes, stare out over this amazing city, roar into the wind. I'm back, I'm back.

On the way down, the Bean and LMM run the stairs (like LMM did when he was a kid here), the Pumpkin and I catch the lift down. Incredible experience, a real highlight. And then we search for toilets, go to a playground. Of course.

And into the 6e, past my old school, photos there!, amazing to BE HERE, shop for postcards. A shred of home it is. Dinner near St Michel in a Greek restaurant, staring at a statue of a nude white bum, over the shoulders of my two boys. LONG walk home, all the way past Notre Dame, the Seine, Place de Vosges, rolling, savouring every step. Just got here, wish I could stay.

(Paris the Bear is Paris because Painterwoman bought the bear for the Bean on the day he was born. Then 2 weeks later, she flew to Paris, to paint. That bear has been wanting to get here for 7 years!)

A driveway 5km long

We arrive in Osses in golden late light, driving from the small town with fountain/church/convenience shop with roasting chickens on a spit and local chestnut cake up to the house. It's a winding green road, across a narrow bridge overlooking perfect-green-river, past farmhouses, one lane of road often coated in dirt off tractor wheels, reversing a bit to let the tractor by, hairpin bends in green gloaming forest, up into open fields and across an endless view straight to the Pyrenees, and into the gate to the house.

Which looks exactly like the pictures online. Difference being, the walls are paper-thin, and there's only one bathroom. Cousin B chooses the bedrooms for her family again, it works better for all that way, and we begin to fill the house with our week's intentions. The view across the terrace is one of those I drink in, store in my fibres, because I'll b eneedign to draw on it again for years, later.

The next day, all we manage for the days is to pack some food, swimsuits, books, and drive to the bridge over the river and swim, eat, laze in the sun. The photos are completely idyllic. This is the holiday we wanted. Perfect after the move from Spain-week to France-week, via the Guggenheim in Bilbao, yesterday. Perfect.

Update: this is one of the most memorable days for the 8 of us. For different reasons: Cousin B was in such agony with her knee, she almost couldn't read her book, much less enjoy our larks in the water. Me because we all stopped, really played where we were, invented stories and cities for the children in the middle of the riverbank, swam them in the strong, cold, current, ate a delicious picnic, which we had really sorted by then - cutting up and making for the children, wine for us in tumblers! A day when we all just were. Together.

A Day Alone

I'm on a bus all day today, from 10am to 4pm, across the top of Spain. I've got water, food, a book, maybe half a dozen words in Spanish.

Then I'll catch a train over the border, get to Biarritz airport, collect my husband off the plane, after he's finished a run of night shifts, and drive: in a hire car, on the wrong side of the road, in the dark, all the way back to Celorio, near Llanes, and our holiday will really start!

The boys meanwhile, are at our house, overlooking the Atlantic, a Spanish holiday house. The house has a lovely garden, parking, two bedrooms upstairs, two down, a kitchen fitted out with all sorts of stuff including an electric spaghetti fork, a fireplace, and the view over the sea! Lovely, very glad to have it. The boys will have a whole day with my cousin and her family, a beach day. I was going to take Alex on the bus because, at 7, he's a big step up for her, with her 2 kiddos, who are a) more peaceful and b) younger, almost 3 and 5. But they talked it over, and I'm off alone. What a treat, even though I fret.

I think of Race Around the World, and this is not it. But I'd love that degree of adventure, race, with one other person. And settle on the bus. So I look out at the summer orchards of fruit trees, sparkling coastline with hills rising straight off the coast, one timber Spanish house after another, one town after another. And read.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville. I brought it, to read about the Hawkesbury River - where I celebrated my 40th, spent a week on the same river. A book with a new perspective on Aboriginal history in Australia, but a writer who knows her words! I could see the gum trees there, as I looked over the gum trees by the side of the road in Spain - they're more spindly, smaller here. I could see the river, feel the anguish of early Australia, the endless journeys. Feel the heat, the sense of others gone before, feel a deep understanding of this book and its country. Not a strange book to me at all. Which it might be to others in Europe reading it.

And I was glad to be here, right side up, this side, not that remote, harsh, mysterious far side of our globe. Odd. I thought I'd get homesick reading the book. Instead, I grew calmer, didn't fret so much about this big day on the bus, needing to find a connecting bus in Bilbao and then the train at Irun to France. This, I can do.