The most constant and striking thing about being back in Ireland is the relief. It still feels like coming up for air, or water after a dry hike. I’d expected it to wear off, maybe after the walk from the plane into the airport; after my father’s arms beyond the gates; after the first chicken-fillet roll, or the first can on the canal. I’d expected to be over it by now, the delight of being here, of being home.
I’d expected to find the short days of these months claustrophobic after the heat of my life abroad.
I'm eight months back, and somehow I still don't miss the sun. California, the Golden State, is characterised by stunning weather. During the three years and three days that I lived there the heat and the dry turned to drought. The grass became brown, as the life of the place wound back. Blue lakes farther up the bay near Santa Cruz turned to deep cavities. It was on the edge of every conversation: "How about that drought?" The sky felt very low. It was very still. Seasonless. Winters came and went with barely a change in the colour of the world. Time doesn't seem to work the same way there, which I felt most in the Decembers.
Last Christmas we didn’t even decorate our flat. My husband, CB, and I Skyped our parents on Christmas Day. We saw their festive world through pixels and mild interference. Hang up, call again.
We were passed in spirit around our old homes on the iPad, our voices delayed, our faces freezing and glitching. We said goodbye to the clink of wine glasses thousands of kilometres away and talked later about how this had to be the last year. The missing had gone too deep.
CB managed to find a job back in Dublin, so we packed up and moved back in April. The first summer was a gift. I’d forgotten about those long stretches of evening. But then a shining Irish winter screamed in on top of us in November; one moment it roared with wind and rain, the next it was bright and crisp. The Irish winter is lunatic and beautiful, inhospitable and indifferent to our presence. It is full of texture. There are so many kinds of rain – it can come in sharp or soft – and I’m shocked that I can feel it, still. I like the cold burn on my cheeks, the flecks of ice. I can’t believe I’d forgotten how it feels, literally, to live here.
The first time I saw my breath in the air in two years I was on Bath Avenue, going into the middle of Dublin from Ringsend. There it was, shocking, like I was seeing something for the first time. It’s what two years without a visit can do to you. This weather is the opposite of the flat screens through which I participated in Ireland while I was abroad. This year I don’t have to use them at all. Least of all on Christmas Day.
Christmas, the cheek of it, rustles up lights on greenery all over Dublin city. It’s in before it’s wanted, just as Halloween is cleaning off her make-up, before all the sweets are eaten and the pumpkins have even gone soft. Christmas suggests pints, even though it’s only Tuesday. And there’s mulled wine, and laughter; even more laughter than there was in summer.
Christmas makes a national hero of Teresa Mannion, the RTÉ reporter; it dares you to walk home from town, makes a tipsy pilgrimage of South Great George's Street to Ringsend in the small hours, a cold already catching in your nose, a cough casually rattling your throat.
Christmas brings out the best in us, and I am better for being here, for all of it. There is no flight with my name on it this December. Or in January. I will ring in 2016 in Ireland. I will open all the doors of our rented house, all the windows. I will open the now empty suitcases, too, to release all the dead air left from elsewhere back into the world. I’ll let the next year in, all the cold and rain and trouble of it. All the home of it.
