While walking the dog the other day, I stopped by Des’s house to let Sam play with his miniature shnauzers. I met Alfie walking his terrier in a baseball cap and a tweed suit tucked under a lint-flecked navy bathrobe. He was heading home shortly for tea, livened with a bit of whiskey, and told me how my late father-in-law had named his dog Shandy after the dog, a puppy at the time, had whizzed all over the pub floor. Alfie wanted to me to inform Des that he was expected for "tea" soon. On Main Street, Vincent asked if I was going to the play on Friday; he said he didn't understand theatre, he preferred music and cinema. As I approached home, J stopped her car to ask if she could feature my book at her Gender Equali-Tea Party.

It was all the same in town, and yet town had changed by several degrees: there had been a few deaths, from cancer, an aneurysm, and Covid. It was the season for dying, but also for growth and abundance: cow parsley, irises, and hawthorn in the hedgerows, shadowy bowers of rhododendron in the woods, and daisies and buttercups in shaggy tiny spaces at the ends of sidewalks. A neighbour, purple-turbaned and looking well after chemotherapy, watched in amusement as the husband dipped Sam into the river after he had rolled in something very decidedly dead.

Dublin felt like centuries and a continent away. The first night we met the brother-in-law and ate mussels in a nduja-spiced broth and prunes stewed in red wine served with mascarpone. The next morning I rolled out of a hotel bed and straight into St. Stephen’s Green, clutching a takeaway coffee and a weathered copy of the essay I would later discuss that day in a gallery in Temple Bar. I couldn’t pay attention to the essay: I watched the gardeners, loiterers, office workers, and students, all intent on their own purposes, speaking a hundred languages. I watched an old man feed the birds at the edge of a pond. Afterwards he turned the crank of a strange blue contraption, and as he walked away, a disembodied feminine voice recited a poem on the struggle for Irish independence in the rustling green shadows.

In the gallery, staff burned nerve-calming incense before event, which my co-collaborator and I appreciated. I read a passage from the essay, and I was surprised to hear applause and even a little whoop after I finished. Do people regularly whoop at book launches? Then we got the weird news that our work was going to feature at bus shelters all over Dublin in August. Everyone kept remarking on how timely our work is.

It felt unreal, this life, one of purpose and achievement, when I had only ever fled from achievement. I just followed what I loved and treated the rest with ambivalence, indolence, and feigned forgetfulness. Duty had always felt like a burden—now, not much so. I could feel things changing quickly this season, the season of an eclipse in the sign of Scorpio, the sign of death, transformation, and regeneration.

<<