What is it about beaches that make you think of Paradise? There isn’t much to do on beaches but to roam and ponder as your feet sink into the wet sand, examining seashells and faraway figures and the rivulets of a stream rushing toward a briny welcome. Oh, perhaps I lifted my head, glancing at my nephews and nieces as they played in the sea, framed by a view of mountains, all touched by the heat and languor of summer.

The mother-in-law, the brother-in-law, and I walked away from the children, away from the shore and toward Lissadell House, up a sandy paved road lined with bluebells, buttercups, and valerian, past warnings of dead-ends and a stone house that had been discovered under brush which, the brother-in-law said, had been unmarked on the estate plan. After he dropped off his mass cards for his friend's parents at the gate, we walked back to the beach, pausing to admire saltspray roses whose scent billowed over the stone boundary. The mother-in-law remembered the walled gardens beyond the locked gate, and I thought of how the first Paradise was a walled garden, safe and secure from interlopers, its scents wafting over the boundaries to entice the faithful to the possibilities of the divine.

On the drive home, we spied hawthorn and elderflower, frothing over stone walls and green fields like sea foam, and I thought of how in certain heavily blooming areas, it smelled like cordial, fizzy and floral, heavy with the promise of summer, all the languid brief heat of an Irish summer, when children play at the edge of a beach, smelling of salt and sunscreen and salt-and-vinegar crisps clutched in a small sweaty hand on the giddy dash to the sea. The greedy child ran to her people, and her world was the sea and the sky, the exhilaration of risk and knowing one was completely safe in the presence of her loved ones.

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