stories

new year in county dublin

new year in county dublin

A few days after Christmas I’m eating veggie curry watching the sea through the window. There’s a lighthouse on a little island that appears and disappears through the clouds. Sometimes there are figures walking on the headland near the tower.

I’m here as a kind of halfway house­—after spending Christmas with my family in the suburbs and before going back to my tiny studio in the city centre.

planning flowers

planning flowers

One of my saving graces this year has been an enormous Madrone that fell in the park near my home. Surrounded by old growth, I go there Saturday mornings to sit on the three-foot-thick trunk and breathe. Stretching the muscles of my screen-weary eyes I look up, left, down, right. Birds whisper, the scent of cedar cleanses, and once a coyote spirited by. We looked at each other for a long moment, suspended. The year has been strange.