The weather is perfect for editing: rainy enough to check my restlessness, and so gloomy, I’ve lit candles, which sharpen my focus. I am reminded of my first summer in this country, those startlingly green fresh solemn moments in the Burren. The light was ever crepuscular, a shelter for shadows and unsaid things and feelings that need time before they can emerge. Sometimes the rain said those things, singing from leaf to leaf, pattering on pavements and jackets, gushing poems as it sluiced along the gutters of a house. I’d keep the front door open, as if the weather was a friend I had invited over for tea. People talked about the rain, as if it’s a neighbour or a friend they can’t understand at times, someone who has a mind of their own, making their way, regardless of what you thought of them. A person to be admired. The landscape also responded to the rain, talking back: trees, bogs, grikes in the limestone, ruins, even the new houses, resisting or acquiescing to its demands. The weather shaped the people, amiable, gregarious, and above all resilient in the face of its whims and power. I felt then, as I still do, that I had found, after the aridity and heat and dazzling light of California (beloved in a different way), the true refuge of my spirit.





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