A while ago we visited the family farm, walking in the fields, ewes and lambs scattering at our approach. The husband showed me the site of our future house, pending planning approval, a field just beyond the cow shed. He shaped our house with his hands: here the front door (where Sam promptly poo’d), our bedroom with walk-in wardrobe and huge bathroom, the granny flat for the mother-in-law (with separate entrance and concrete floors, so that we’ll finally have the privacy we haven’t had for the past two years), large open-plan kitchen/living room/diner, and my study. There a separate building, a studio, for an office, perhaps, and guest accommodation. Finally: a home, for us, for my books, and prints, and our wee dog.

Sam approved, gamboling and sniffing in the rushes, trampling primroses and lady’s smock in excitement. From here I saw May flowering hedges and Benbo, town and surrounding hills, and beyond that, the Donegal mountains, blue, the colour of distance, melancholy, and yearning, rain clouds sweeping across the glen from the west.

I posted photos of the site and views of the surrounding landscape on Instagram, as if to make the dream more real, tangible. As if the childhood nightmare of a house falling in the sky, plummeting toward the earth, would finally cease to haunt me.

Afterward we walked up to Granny’s house, followed by a sheepdog she-pup fascinated with Sam. So small and wriggly and mewling even, while her human roared “Come! Come! Come!” to the sheep on the Rock.

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