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a trip
Emma has just returned from a trip across the pond that was absolutely marvelous from start to finish. Her destination was Dublin, but she took a sidetrip over to Leeds to meet up with Frewin, who had kindly offered to show her around Bronte country, in Yorkshire. As it turns out, Frewin--a handsome bear of a man who has retained ancestral Irishness in his reddish hair and facial features--knows all about stonework, and so everywhere they walked, he knew something about the soft stone used to built the Salts Mill (now gentrified into a David Hockney museum), the cobbles buried around the house he's renovating (he being a very handy sort of person), and the stone walls that have partitioned the moors for centuries. Frewin has built walls himself, and knows how to lay stone, and it is quite amazing that very sturdy walls can be built without mortar, just through the skilll of tiny adjustments. It was delightful to meet Frewin, who has a questing mind about everything, from the ferns growing under the rock and the kestrels to the science underlying all of these ordinary things. He is much more, Emma can now say, than his blog can ever represent, and it was extremely generous of him to take two days of his time to show an eccentric old American lady around.
Then it was on to Dublin where Emma was hanging out with some generous academics (a rare breed, in fact), some of whom she had met before, and it was so very good to restore some old ties, and Ireland and the Irish are just wonderful anyway. For example, as she and her academic friends were drinking late into the night at the local pub, talking about everything from Irish cinema to the Hurricane Katrina tragedy, she went into the bathroom where a sturdy, compact Irish woman with dyed jet-black hair greeted her in a very friendly manner and when they related that they both had grandchildren, and Emma expressed surprise that the woman looked too young to have grandchildren, she said that she was indeed well preserved because of the hearty country air of Ireland and a good dose of life-long joy in the midst of many tragedies.
Emma had a day to herself in Ireland, and so took a local bus to Bray, and hiked the cliff walk to the next town, a two-hour walk looking down upon the sea as the weather went from bright sun to windy rain to bright sun again and again, as is typical of the weather in those parts. And all along the way, there was a very persistent rainbow that started out on the sea and arced back to strike the town of Bray, a rainbow at her shoulder during the whole walk. How Irish is that?
Then she was on the late-night radio where she and other folks talked about art and terror, and it was a good show with lots of insight, and after that, drinking with a famous scholar with a very dark take on the world who talked brilliantly and at length about Richard Avedon. On the way home she read some fabulous short stories about post-Kobe Japan by Haruki Murakami.
My God, and this was all a week before spring break!
Posted by: EmmaPele at March 01, 2007 17:51 |
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