Seedling 21: Donegal One
I gripped the armrests in enough of a claw-like fashion to come off as the consummate nervous flyer - which I’m most definitely not. But as the turbulence shook me up and out of the seat, my head dangerously close to smacking the side of the airplane, I dug in. It’s always like this flying into Derry. When I’m on the Ulster ground I often look up at the sky and marvel as to how I’ve never seen clouds pass by with such speed. And when I’m in the air, I watch those same clouds peel and swirl around the aircraft in violent fashion and feel my stomach lift and drop with the incessant twenty-five meter swoons of the plane. Had I been flying into Boston, LA or Barcelona, there would have been panicked cries from the passengers and threats of mayhem. However, this is a cabin of locals and this was nothing out of the ordinary.
Not a peep.
The forty-seven seater touched down with some gale-induced body roll and then executed the brash, diving stop necessary on Eglington’s short runway. I could see the single, tiny boarding area lit up in the distance. There was nobody in there. This London flight was one of two per day and perhaps the last flight into Derry from anywhere, this night.
De-planing consists of collecting your hand luggage at the bottom of the rolling steps, pulling a hood up and over your face to block out the driving rain and marching across the runway to a side entrance that had one rickety metal checked luggage belt - rarely used by anyone on this short flight. I scarcely gave it a look as I passed by and exited into the reception hall(and ticket hall and car hire hall). Mum was already on her feet to meet me, her bowl cut grey hair short and neat, wearing a loose wool cardigan and a pair of jeans that dangled a good four or five inches about her feet. I gave her a big hug before shaking hands with my Uncle Colm. Neither of them looked like they were dressed for winter, whereas I always wore my ski parka and knit cap for trips to Donegal.
‘It’s so great to see you!,’ Mum exclaimed, as if she hadn’t expected me to be at this Northern Irish airport, in the first place. ‘So glad when we heard you were able to come for Christmas, after all!’.
I dug a coin out of my pocket to pay the one pound parking charge and my mother crawled into the back seat since I’m ‘the tall child’ at five foot eight and therefore need the ‘legroom’ up front by my Uncle - so Mum says. It’s not worth arguing, because she would have stood her ground; and the sad truth is that I am ‘the tall child’ - and lucky to be so since my mother is four foot ten. I bunged my travel bag into the back hatch and my Uncle Colm eased himself into the driver’s seat, a challenge wedging his gigantic pot belly between the seat and steering wheel, his furry nether regions peeking out from under the strained, mustard-stained tee he wore most days of the week. The sub-compact notably tilted starboard as he closed the door, his heavy breathing fogging up the windows before the key was even turned. As always, he didn’t remember to fasten his seat belt until we were two miles down the road and we shimmied back and forth over the center line while he tried to do it one handed at fifty-five miles per hour.
‘Yes, Paul; how’s The Big Smoke treatin ya?’
Colm’s questions were usually traps. You know, where they ask you something and don’t really want an answer - just setting up an argument or a story or both. It’s pretty stock-grade Irish of a certain age. This one was a combination of both. Some ‘Two flatmates?? I told you it’s wile expensive’ and then ‘took yer cousin there one year to see the football and I can’t rightly remember but twas near a stadium’. Colm would occasionally ask a question of my mum mainly to keep her in the conversation, but she couldn’t hear anything in the back seat of this 1995 Renault as it rattled it’s way down the A road circling Derry Centre. She’d yell back ‘what was that?’ and he’d ask it louder again and she’d lean forward between the two seats and say ‘aye, aye’ and then we’d move on to something else. At times it would be a question about the car. ‘Kathleen, what’s the tire pressure on these here wheels of yours?’
As if my mother had any idea what the tire pressure was on the radials of her nineties Renault Clio.
‘Your Uncle means well and it’s so good of him to pick you up. Heaven knows I can’t do that road into the airport - all those roundabouts!’
Roundabouts, and some aggressive drivers, yes - Derry isn’t easy I couldn’t blame my Mum for refusing to do it, not at seventy-five years old, at least. I’ll do the driving after tomorrow when we put me on the insurance, but in the meantime we depend on my uncle for the journey to and from the airport. It’s not that bad, really. You’re over the border in fifteen minutes or so and then we have to get cross to Mum’s town on the Fanad Peninsula. In the summer we can get the ferry from Buncrana, sail Lough Swilly to Rathmullan and continue north. But the boat doesn’t run in winter, so we’ll go straight on through Letterkenny and then up by the hospital. Not the prettiest ride, but for this part of Ireland, a fairly real road with intermittent passing lanes and everything.
The gales occasionally broadsided the car and my uncle would instantly take his foot off the pedal. I kept glancing at the sinking speedometer as a sea of headlights backed up behind us - never a safe situation on Irish roads. But, I also just wanted to get there. This short trip always exhausted me for some reason and I wasn’t looking forward to what could be a late night - more aunts, uncles and cousins coming by for a cup of tea and a bit of a chat with me, the not-so-often-in-the-town relative.
As we passed Kerner’s diner and Burt Castle appeared faintly in the distance, my phone sounded. I figured it was a text informing me I was now in the EU and ‘subject to roaming charges’. But when I pulled the mobile from my coat pocket I saw it was a text from an unlisted number:
‘I like you - xx Wale’.
Perviness seems extra pervy in a place like Donegal.
*
‘You coming in for tea, Colm?’
My mother had already shuffled in the front door of her bungalow and switched from her clogs to her charity shop Crocs. She was limping a bit and looked somewhat hobbled - probably down to sitting in the back seat of the Renault for the hour it took from the airport.
‘Naw, I best get back and see what our Daniel has got up to’.
Colm was standing in the small hallway picking away at the leaves of one of my Mum’s plastic plants when she elbowed me in the ribs and and whispered to give him ten pounds for petrol.
‘Mum - we took your car,’ I whispered back.
‘Oh, so we did. Right, nevermind’. She turned back to my uncle. ‘Right Colm, thanks very much again for the lift. Tell Daniel I still have some of that scone here for him when he’s ready’.
My uncle promised as much, gave a wave, strode out and walked the fifty feet to his own home across the driveway. Which is how it is here at ‘The Compound’.
Colm and one of my other uncles, Joshua, had purchased this plot of land on a hill overlooking the main village when they were in their twenties. Nobody wanted to live this far out of town in those days and they got it for song. Together they built two - it must be said, very interesting ranch style homes - side by side with enough room for them both to contruct workshops, as well. I remember the first time I’d come up here as a kid. Two houses only a few feet apart, set an an angle to take in mountain views across fields of grazing sheep, with distinctive tiled roofs and a fierce little brook running through the property. Colm never did build his workshop but Joshua built one on the interior side of the property line, then added an extension of a cottage or ‘bungalow’ for my mother to live in when she returned back from The States. In the last twenty years the two idiosyncratic homes have become surrounded by cheap duplex developments and cul-de-sac rejects with unsuitably bucolic names. Like, ‘The Pines’, though there were no pines in this part of Ireland; and ‘Morning Clover’ which, to my knowledge, clover exists pretty much twenty-four hours a day.
Nowadays, the twin houses didn’t quite live up to those childhood impressions. The drive was deep and pitted; giant potholes of standing water that sloshed against the underside of the Renault as you tiptoed your way in. Colm’s house had three cars in front of it, two which hadn’t run in twice as many years but which held great ‘sentimental value’. His lawn was a pile of gravel, ostensibly destined for repairing the drive, but languishing for such time as to have grown their own crop of (all day) clover and scrub brush. Joshua’s wasn’t much better. The front windows hadn’t been cleaned in a decade and were thick with film; some of the downstairs ones led to rooms that had never been finished - even after thirty years. The support arch that ran from the front door to the ground had split in the middle and was patched with new cement and even newer water damage. And around the back - the view from my Mum’s kitchen - was an old Sprinter van with four flat tires that now served as permanent storage for various lumber, pails, dry-vacs and an array of stray cats.
As for my Mum’s bungalow - it was spotless. Though it was overwhelmed by the spectacle surrounding it, the two-bedroom home was an oasis of flower boxes, and thoughtful details - artfully arranged stones and driftwood she’d collected from the shorefront, an expertly rusted antique letter box and a painted ‘slainte’ sign next to the front door. Inside it was more polished than its quaint exterior suggested. Beautiful tiled marble floors led to twin etched-glass doors that opened onto an expansive parlour with large-framed windows and a working fireplace. The wainscotting swung back into the adjacent hallway and the massive bathroom, main bedroom with built-in wardrobe and then on to the single bedroom and the Irish country kitchen most sought in this corner of the world. Out back there was an extensive utility room and second bathroom with frosted glass and silver-plated faucets.
It was beautiful, and it was hard to believe that something this attractive and impeccably crafted had been built from scratch - by my Uncle Joshua, holed-up in his half-crumbling home ten feet from Mum’s front entrance.
I looked out at the faint glow from Joshua’s window as I closed the entryway door. Sometimes I wondered why these two brothers even decided to go in on ‘the compound’, in the first place. There had been nine kids in total, and Joshua and Colm weren’t complete opposites, no - but not so much alike, either. Joshua was known as a complete eccentric; a Fanad ‘Dr. Emmett Brown’, living off-the-grid, hoarding frozen dinners and locking himself in his tiny bedroom above the kitchen watching old VHS copies of the ‘Tour de France Collection’. He shuffled around in dollar store trainers and barged unexpectedly into my mother’s bungalow several times a day for various supposed reasons, but really because he just loved to gab. Colm, by contrast, was harder to peg. His current physical state belied his past as a professional Irish footballer; a bit of a local celeb and one-time ladies’ man. And after that youthful swan song, he didn’t do much else. Colm painted himself as much a carpenter and handyman as Joshua, but it just wasn’t the case. Really, Colm spent most of his time in front of the telly or scrapping his way through the skips behind the local Lidl, collecting treasures of only recently outdated biscuits and almost regular irregulars. And whereas a conversation with Joshua was a whirlwind of bizarre but good-natured anecdotes, Colm was more reserved and circumspect. There were a lot of pauses before he spoke - not because he was carefully choosing his words, but rather carefully choosing where he wanted the conversation to go.
I jerked the door handle upwards and spun the key left until it clicked. The rubber seal laid into place, designed to keep out the damp Fanad cold, a near impossible task.
‘I’ve already gone and turned on your electric blanket, Honey’.
Seems it was later than I thought. Which meant we’d not have any unexpected guests, after all.
*
Jesus was gazing down on me. My mother’s lingering penchant for religious artifacts hadn’t waned in all these years. The gold-flaked frame matched perfectly with the glowing halo over our saviour’s lily-white face. I rolled onto my left side and pulled one of the pillows over my head. But, if not for the rumbling of my uncle’s adjacent workshop sending the entire bed into earthquake vibrations, I might have slept a full day. My head was heavy. I think there’s something psychological - a relief that takes over when you’re finally outside your normal sphere of anxiety and frustration. Your daily stressors are out of sight and you let your defensive interior guard down. Suddenly you can relax, breathe, sleep. The same thing happens everytime I visit family back in Boston. I used to chock it up to the fresh air. Certainly getting out of LA or London is good for one’s pulmonary constitution. However, now, I feel it’s something more psychological than physical. Even with the entire bedroom wall behind me vibrating in my skull, I was sure I could have pulled the duvet up to my chin and spent the entire day comfortably under the covers, if that’s what I so decided to do. Instead, I doffed the pillow, pushed my sleepmask up onto my forehead and blinked my eyes open trying to see what the 1980s digital alarm clock had to say for itself. 8:45AM. Beyond the nightstand, through the arched decorative window topping the blind, I could see a small child rhythmically leaping above the fence separating my mother’s small garden from the housing development just beyond. He looked like he would land on the roof at any moment.
‘It’s a trampoline’. Yes, Mum, I know it’s a trampoline. ‘Are you having some scone?’
‘Does it have raisins?’
‘The trampoline?!’
‘No, Mum, the scone.’
‘No, I made one without, for YOU’.
My mother seemed in better shape, this morning, milling about the kitchen in flannel pajamas my sister got her the last Christmas. Her back truly is ruined, though. When she still lived in Maine she had to work full-time just to have employer health insurance; eight or nine hours a day on her feet as a cashier at a liquour store; got to Ireland and the first doc that looked at her scans told her she was completely disabled.
‘Did your uncle wake you?’
I poured the kettle’s hot water into my coffee mug and then back out again; added a tea bag, water back in. ‘Yeah, sorta. But I was mostly awake’.
‘Listen, he’ll probably come by to say hello this morning and I don’t want you to ask anything about his teeth’.
‘Why? What’s wrong with his teeth?’
‘He can’t find them’. Seems the confusion on my face was obvious, so she continued. ‘At least, we think that’s the case. A couple of months ago he showed up and his front teeth were gone’.
‘Has nobody asked him?’
‘Heavens no’.
I’d never realised Joshua wore a bridge or a partial, but none of this conversation surprised me in the least.
What about he and Colm? Are they speaking, yet?
‘Nope, they are not speaking’. My mother sliced out two massive chunks of the soda bread and placed it in front of me with a tub of margarine and some Lidl-brand jam. ‘We should actually hustle up and get ourselves ready, because if people start coming through that door, we’ll never get out of here.’
‘Well, after the insurance, where do you want to…’
‘Shush’, my mother interrupted me. She shuffled over to her tiny kitchen transistor and turned up Highland Radio.
A death has occurred in Letterkenny Hospital….a death has occurred in Moville…a death has occurred at Sisters of Mercy in Raphoe…
These matter-of-fact notices would continue on for a monotone four minutes, my mother riveted by the vague information, convinced she might know the victim or the family. Which, she might have. Donegal is a small place. But it’d become a macabre habit of hers as she’d grown older. When it ended, she rolled the volume back down and continued our conversation, non-plussed.
‘Right, let’s do the insurance on the Renault first and then we’ll just head on to Fanad Head, if you’d like? Or what about Dunfanaghy? Probably have to go down through Letterkenny in that case; might be icy up and over High Glen. Or, at least that’s what your cousin Siobhann told me….’
Either destination was fine by me. Neither was new, both of us knew them like the back of our hands - but it’s beautiful in that part of the world. You can’t go wrong and you don’t really want to leave not having driven up Portsalon or out to Horn Head. In summer, we’d go further afield - cross to Inishowen or down into the Gaeltacht. But the weather was seasonably changeable and tomorrow was Christmas, after all.
‘It’s just us tomorrow,’ my mother said. ‘I hope that’s okay’.
‘That’s perfect’.