For the winter solstice, the husband and I visited Sligo for the night. We were tired of feeling like errant teenagers always underfoot (see live-in mother-in-law). Plus we craved hot baths—the husband more so, since he had two, TWO, that night. Our hotel room had a view of the Garavogue, and a band of pagans, horned and attired in white, paraded around town under swaying lanterns, drumming at the end of the darkest day of the year.

After dinner we visited Uisce in his pub, where two entwined swans are painted on the front window. He showed off his latest book acquisitions, first editions of a novel by Seumas O'Kelly, an Irish journalist who died of a heart attack in 1918 when the Black and Tans raided Sinn Fein's Dublin headquarters.

I recalled the books Uisce gave me at my 40th birthday party, second edition copies of New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson, Vols. I and II, published in 1882. I haven’t read them yet, as the day after that party, Dad passed away from a heart attack. They were stuck in a box, and then moved from bungalow to shed to wee prefab office, never thumbed or even opened. Meanwhile the father-in-law passed away, I finished my PhD studies, the husband and I moved above the pub, and the pandemic hit. I should read them soon, now that the days will get brighter.

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At lunch I watched a couple eating oysters. I don’t know why I thought it was decadent at the time. Christmas week, why not? Nearly every worker and patron waved at Uisce; he knows their family histories, he is old-school Sligo. Charming and cheerful, despite his cold. The husband’s the same. Witty and charismatic. Friendly to nearly everyone. An excellent negotiator, sly and fearless and bold. Almost sociopathic to me, misanthropic and saturnine by nurture.

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I could just live in our hotel room for the rest of my days. Read all day. Go out to the nearest bookshop or library for more books. Use room service. See no one except whom I choose to see. Coffee in Heart’s Desire, wine in Uisce’s pub. A bath, a bath every day. A kind of convalescence after this hectic year.

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