Madam, – I have been standing at the kitchen table snipping apricots for my father-in-law’s 80th birthday cake. As I snip, I look ahead through the French windows at the table on the deck, and the wrestle the wind is having with its plastic cover. It is a bitter, windy day, and we have bitter news. Driving my parents to the airport this morning, we are passed by a rushing Garda car and fire engine. It is only later that I hear about the man killed in a single-car crash just outside Ballycotton. When the gardaí go to the man’s house, close by, they find his two young daughters dead.
Yesterday, I drove this road with my parents, off for a quick walk along the cliffs in the brief few hours that my son is at Montessori.
We step out in brilliant sunshine, stop to wonder at a circling sparrow hawk below us. Later, we drive back along the bog road to Shanagarry, where we grin over hot chocolate. Meanwhile, my sister-in-law, a financial journalist, also has a birthday tomorrow.
But instead of being at home in Rome, she’s in Brussels covering the financial meeting in which the only item on the agenda is Ireland’s economic crisis. So I snip my apricots, pile up cherries, sultanas, almonds, lemon zest, and curve my wooden spoon through cake batter, and teeter between national and private crises, cherishing my own family with an ache, whilst grieving for our neighbour in Ballycotton, who has just lost all of hers. – Yours, etc,