Mary Banotti has a new hairdo, a fresh attitude and bundles of energy. She's cutting up pieces of chicken for a five-year-old, telling a story about a widow who kept her husband alive with rat poison and all the while explaining why she should be president.
We're in the heart of Collins country in west Cork, on what Banotti describes as a kind of emotional pilgrimage to the birthplace of her granduncle, Michael Collins. The country cousins and local Fine Gaelers are there to give her an early campaign boost.
Cousin Helen Hoare (nee Collins, of course) welcomes Mary to Woodfield, outside Clonakilty, "with the greatest of pride and muchness of love". She pays tribute to Mary's "integrity, her great heart and her ability to empathise with people's struggles".
Banotti is at ease with these people. She stands before the ancestral pile, nothing left but a few stones and the remains of the chimney. "My mother was 10 when the family was burned out of here by the Black and Tans. She had to run back into the fire to retrieve her school-bag."
Years later, Kitty O'Mahony brought her daughter (Mary) down from Dublin to show her the ruins and relive old memories. "This was where she was happiest, before the difficulties of the Civil War began. This was the place she thought of all the time she lived in a suburban housing estate in Dublin."
Civil War memories live on here longer than anywhere else. Under leaden skies, a woman tells me that Fianna Fail are just a "bunch of splitters" from the IRA. She swats wasps as she gives me her opinion of "that murderer" Eamon de Valera.
A local Fine Gael stalwart recalls teaching the grandniece of Michael Collins and the grandniece of the man who claimed to have killed him in the same classroom. Among the crowd are relatives of the man who raised the Tricolour in the GPO in 1916 and a nephew of Kitty Kiernan, Collins's fiancee.
There's a touch of Cinderella in Banotti's speeches, the slight defensiveness of someone who believes her day will come - eventually. I won't be re-invented, she tells her relatives. "I am what I am, warts and all." Later she tells journalists, not for the first time, the presidential race is not a beauty contest.
From her family, she explains, she learned the duty of service to the community, the shared values of city and country and the need to pass on these qualities to the next generation. "Especially in these times of economic boom, they should be reminded of the old-fashioned, idealistic values."
Wisdom and experience, she tells us, are the main qualities which recommend her to the Park. Never mind that her famous forbear was a civil servant in his teens, and an army commander and Taoiseach in his 20s. Indeed, Collins was dead well before reaching 35, the minimum age for standing for the Presidency.
Though not yet audible to the Dublin pundits or the opinion pollsters, there's a developing buzz about Banotti's campaign. People warm to her quickly, regard her as a safe pair of hands.
On Tuesday, she clocked up 350 miles, taking in a warm welcome in Terryglass, the Tidy Towns winner, and a packed meeting in Clonakilty. In between, she went to Listowel races and ran into Albert Reynolds. "He wished me well and I told him to watch out."
In Cork city, she has lunch with Catherine Hughes and her twin five-year-olds, who were abducted by an estranged French husband. Banotti played a major role in helping Catherine get her children back to Bantry last November.
She talks to reporters of the need for a "mature" and "resilient" president. She declines to comment on Adi Roche's difficulties, except to wish for a clean campaign.