Our second summer, and of course we throw ourselves into it as if it is our last summer. A day on the beach with my friends from Galway, chatting under a grassy dune about art, mother-in-laws, and oysters in New York bars; we return salt-and-sun drenched, with sand-scraped heels and pomegranate seeds, the fruit Persephone ate in the land of the dead, in our bellies. Walks in the woods, now dark with leafy shadows; woods in fairy tales, realms of peril and transformation. On another day on a beach, we eat ice cream looking out at the tranquil bay where a fishing boat, carrying an earl, his family and a young boy from Enniskillen, had been blown to smithereens by the IRA in August of 1979. Nearby trad musicians play in the grass, their only venue for the time being, fiddling during a pandemic. Vacillating between beaches and newsfeeds, feeling alternates between lightness and heaviness.





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