Day One

On the 6 1/2-hour flight in to Dublin, I read The Road. I already have trouble sleeping on planes, but Cormac McCarthy's book—the tale of a father and son desperately trying to survive in a brutish post-apocalyptic America—made sure I kept awake. The dreams would've bared razor teeth, for sure. Though I didn't overthink my reasons for picking it up at Barnes & Noble a couple days before my departure, the plot has interesting resonances with my current situation. A difficult journey. The life-support that is family. And, to be sure, the pervasive, world-swallowing gray. In the book, ash. In this new country, sky.

As our plane neared the runway, it crept low in the sky over fields so green they appeared black. Pale light barely crouched on the horizon. My groggy eyes stung, searched unblinking through the morning haze for my new home. The city lights glowed orange like thousands of tiny beacon fires.

Even life's most poetic moments eventually screech headlong into the mundane. My plane touched down and there were bags to fetch, a not-quite-familiar airport to navigate. During my move planning, I'd come across testimonials of people moving to Ireland from the United States who said they'd been held up for hours at customs, waiting to enter the country. They'd been interrogated Jack Bauer-style, asked to provide 18-24 months worth of bank statements, birth certificates, marriage certificates, signed resignation letters from former employers in the States, rental or purchase papers for their residence in Ireland, on and on.

After flashing my Irish passport on the way in, I never saw another customs agent. I piled my bags on a cart, almost high as my head, and pushed the car with one hand while I dragged my monstrous rollerboard behind me with the other. I'm sure I looked like a one-man gypsy caravan. I kept expecting someone to stop me and ask to see all the papers I'd meticulously prepared and stashed in a manila envelope. But no one cared, as long as I didn't run my cart over their foot.

Brian, a friend of mine who, up until recently, played keyboards in a band called Bell X1, picked me up at the curb and we somehow managed to squeeze all my stuff into his small-ish four-door BMW. Granted it took us about 10 minutes, testing out different methods of putting together the storage puzzle, sliding, twisting, swiveling—sliding and swiveling, swiveling and sliding. Finally we squeezed in the last instrument case and were on our way. Brian grew up in Straffan, the town right next to Celbridge in Co. Kildare where I'll be staying. He didn't have any trouble finding Springfield.
The Springfield estate belongs to Libby, an American-born friend of my parents whom they met while living in Dublin in the early '80s. Decades before she moved in, Irish author Aidan Higgins grew up in the house and wrote about it in his 1966 prize-winning novel Langrishe, Go Down. The manor house on the property is a majestic, imposing place with centuries-old oil paintings, antique furniture, chandeliers and two different wings that stretch the length of the house. Once you pass through the tall, wrought-iron gate from the road, you follow a gravel drive that winds through lush green horse pastures all the way up to the front door. It's a breath-stealing approach.

I'm writing this post at the kitchen table, looking out onto the back courtyard and stables, the latter of which her son Myles has converted into a garage and workshop for his motorcycles. A mottled cat yawns and stretches both paws forward on the windowsill, apparently empathizing with my jetlag. There's no shortage of animals around here. More on that later.

The sky is a teeming, impenetrable gray and appears to be threatening rain. I haven't learned its tells yet, but I'm smart enough not to trust it. Eventually I'm going to have to walk into town to open a bank account and I know the clouds are waiting for me to get halfway there so they can welcome me to Ireland with a freezing, pissing downpour. That's ok. I'm happy to be here. And if the rain can make the pastures look this sublimely beautiful, Summer should pray it drenches me as well.