Define home

Among only 'bout 1000 jobs around the house, yes our own house, back in our own street, I miss this geographically-free space of the blogosphere. There's a liberation in this space. I feel very much at home out here, as I do in the galleries, museums, public gardens and bookshops of the globe.

That said, it has been rewarding to get in and DO here, and it is, slowly, feeling like home again. One day last week, turning over the sods to reinstate our vegetable patch, I dug up a silver earring hoop of my own. So that's what coming home means, you dig and turn up your own stuff - from 2 years ago. And the soil which turned up to fill the bed is curiously inert, lifeless by contrast, not a worm in there. Lucky for the racecourse nearby which has a great big painted sign on its corrugated iron fence: free manure. You shovel and haul it yourself. Six sacks done.

And in Cork, the families are getting ready to go back to school after the long summer holiday. On Monday, I will miss them again, as I so often have been.. I see some of them in the streets here sometimes, or think I do.

Our new school is great too, we are happy at the change, with the Bean settling well into his age cohort now. The furniture is assembled, boxes despatched, shelves restored, office set up, letters sent, start-up costs paid, uni courses enrolled in, tip run done, garden jobs done. What's left? Oh just the rest of our lives.

And on Monday, I resume my own postgrad studies. A door closes on a wonderful year of lightness, of returning to myself, of pursuing long-held dreams.