The mother-in-law returns tomorrow. I’ve been relaxed, perhaps complacent, using the dishwasher and leaving my things on the kitchen table, a teenager home alone in my habits. I let the dog lie in his bed while I work in the kitchen. Make rich meals requiring the accompaniment of wine. Pour myself a glass of cognac and sip it reading, only to fall asleep on the sitting room floor. Is this who I am when the house is all for ourselves?

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Lately I have been coping with anxiety by writing sentences in Irish, trying out new phrases and luxuriating in new words. Ólaim Hennessy gan uisce sa seomra suí anocht. Doom looms less. The world, mundane as it is, is rendered afresh. What was it someone said to me on the street, after watching dolphins leaping in a Donegal bay? You need a bit of wonder in your life. A gleam in the darkness.

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