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Kansas City Irish Festivals, Music, Pubs, & Events by an Artist in Ireland

A perfect blue square through the skylight as the steps of a dog on wood wake me.

Well, not a perfect blue square; it’s a rectangle.

Out the windows it confirms it’s a beautiful day. I see huge frothy waves that should be on television with surfers on them.

We walk outside in the sun but the sun isn’t there. It’s everywhere but the cottage. Payback for yesterday I suppose. The sun has yet to come up over the mountain to reach the cottage.

So we walk into the sheep field, not used by the sheep since our second day, just to stand in the middle of it for the sun. At the edge a robin sings from the highest tip of a hawthorn.

-Oh Dog-dog, we’ll have to go down to the gate. Look how beautiful the mountains are in this sun. And look at the far mountain especially.

Dog-dog hangs on every word.

I go back to the house for the camera. The dog is still in the field. She runs. In the wide open space of long wet grass she runs. Not since Dublin has she had that sort of space to run.

Walking to the gate we get wet as the wind blows rainwater off the trees and bushes 15 feet to one side. At the gate I remember that we are quite a bit lower than at the cottage and so the far mountain has its bottom half obscured by the bog that is also higher than us. We walk around on the road for 10 minutes and then we go back.

I go back to the centre of the sheep field, where there used to be a stone wall, and standing on the rocky grassy mound take a photo of the far mountain. When I leave the field, looking down all the time to make sure I evade the mines of sheep poo, I turn back to Dog-dog to encourage her for another run. She is upside down dancing and I know no matter how loud I shout that my dog is already the wrong shade of green.

Cleaning a dog means hot water. While I take showers, they’re of the drencher kind with no flexible hose to clean dogs. I can use the bath tub, but I need, oh I have a headache trying to work out the permutations available with a kettle, an immersion, almost no containers and, god I need a cup of tea.

At least my nose is still blocked.

I don’t want to do this every day, but now that the dog has dicovered that field and all its lovely poo, what do I do? I could simply close off the field whenever the farmer takes his sheep out, but I have the feeling that would upset him as he probably expects it to be open for when he brings the sheep back. He’s not going to do it but really when he plans on walking the sheep past my front door, he should at least check with me so I can ensure the dog is inside.

The landlord said he’d tell him to do that, because I have a dog. And if he did then he could open the field and bring the sheep through while he’s at my door. But these are likely fanciful notions from a non-farmer.

Outside the window the sun moves like a slow spotlight along the cliffs of the middle island.

For 2 weeks I’ve struggled to talk to people using Skype. The signal is rarely strong enough long enough. So for a friend in England I redirect my Skype phone number to my mobile. It works. We finally have a conversation. For the call my friend pays to call America from Britain, and I pay to call an Irish mobile from the computer. After 15 minutes we are cut off when my credit runs out.

The bin. Yes. Use the bin for Dog-dog’s bath.

Sit outside in the sun.

Hear voices. Voices? From behind. You never hear voices. The dog starts barking. On the mountain behind the house at the very top are 2 figures. Turning my monocular away from the birds I see that it is 2 men. The wind is dropping their voices in our laps.

Rescue a bee from a web on the way out of the cottage. It’s walk time. For 3 miles. On tracks in the bogs. We ford streams, I on the stepping stones and Dog-dog splashing on through. The dog seems especially happy. Sometimes we go off the track to explore a grassy mound or large rock.

We come to a crossroads. A crossroads of tracks. The track we are crossing is a former railway track. We walk on. Another junction. Why are there so many tracks in this wilderness?

I see a sign in the distance. From behind it looks like a roadsign. We’ll walk on to there, I decide, dying to know what could be on the other side and who it could be addressing. Ah, I think. It should have been obvious. No dumping, says the sign. By order of the County Council.

On our way back the old farmer on the far side of our mountain is still out in his field. He is moving cut grass around because I guess the tractor left it in the wrong places.

We are only back in the cottage minutes when a car comes up the drive. It is the landlord. After exchanging quick niceties he asks me where the porch leaks from. As every support beam has its own leak I point to each in the place of the leak and to the big hole where the porch roof joins the house, as well as to the sides. The wood is all stained from the leaks so my pointing is unnecessary.

The landlord then tells me that he is not going to get the roof fixed. This throws me. It’s a bit of a bombshell and I meekly remind him that it was only because he was said he would fix the roof that I moved here. He says he never said he would get it fixed, only that he’d try and fix it but that he was afraid it wouldn’t work as it hadn’t the 2 previous times he tried.

While I should be concerned totally with suddenly finding out I will not now have the space I need to live and paint, I am thrown into confusion by his denial of our agreement.

I feel cornered. I wouldn’t have come if this was the situation; I had been very clear on that. But now I’m here. I can stay, with less than I was promised and need, and a soured relationship with my landlord into the bargain. Or I can leave; leave everything I’ve come to love about the place, and the promises it held, and pay to have everything moved back to Dublin and put back into storage.

Into the bargain there I would have lost a couple of months’ searching for a home and if I did find one now I’d be looking at moving in winter.

-People come here, they look at it and they take it, he says, adding that it’s not perfect.
-I’m not looking for perfection, I respond.

He tells me he has a couple from Mayo who are very keen on living in the cottage and have driven here and looked all around, and he has another couple also interested. He wants his answer as to whether I am staying.

Before I can respond he says he has no problem with me leaving so I tell him I don’t want to leave but this situation has thrown me. He offers to repay me the month’s rent I have given him, but he needs to know in the next couple of days if I’m taking it. I tell him I’ll talk with the people it will impact on if I leave, and give him his definite answer on Monday, which is 2 days away.

Through the porch window I see Dog-dog sitting on the lap of the passenger in his car, happily being stroked.

The landlord goes up on the roof and puts more strips of flashband on top of the earlier bits of flashband that didn’t work. They themselves were additions to an even earlier flashband attempt at a repair.

Before he leaves he comes to tell me that I shouldn’t stay if I’m not happy. Again I point out how happy I am, with the cottage, with its location, and that the only issue is the porch. I wasn’t expecting this but now that I’m here I have to think about it and see if I can make the space work.

The disappointment I’m sure is visible on my face as he says that it might be best for both of us if I left, that I shouldn’t try and make it work, that the cottage just might not be for me. I tell him I’ll contact him on Monday. We both know that will be by email.

When he’s gone I go up on the ladder and look at the roof. The main hole is still not covered.

2 hours later I open my notebook and, on the blank page opposite where I noted down the electricity meter reading, I draw a line down the centre of the page and put a plus sign at the top of the left side, and negative sign on the right.

After nightfall out the window for the first time I see the stars, and for the first time in 6 weeks I go online and once again start looking at houses available to rent.

Read the Next Day at the cottage
Read the Previous Day at the cottage
List of all the Days at the Cottage

More from The Cottage:
   • Day 1 at The Cottage
   • Photos of The Cottage
   • 12 Photos of Scenery Around The Cottage
   • 12 Photos not all Mountains and Islands

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 27th, 2008 at 10:10 am and is filed under 1-eolai, Ireland, The Cottage. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.