spend a month in Ireland

I want to spend a whole month in Ireland as a gift to myself on my 30th birthday. I’ve always wanted to go and when I do go I just know I’ll want to stay longer than a week or two. It’s going to take some real time to save up the ammount of money I’ll need to make the trip but I just can’t wait to get there.

But it’s much pleasanter than it used to be, with the smoking ban. mmm.

At last! It’s arranged. We’re going. Can’t back out now!

I’m going to spend 8 hours travelling with a 15-month old. Somebody shoot me.

I’m taking my daughter home in June. I’m that most traditional of all Irish things – an emigrant. But I’m looking forward to a month in my mother’s summer house, on an island, near the beach and so on. It will make up for the time we have to spend in the winter house in Dublin.

Ireland. Just say the word. Feel how it fills your mouth like warm caramel before you swallow it. For me it holds… redemption…. rebirth.

I’ve longed to go for years and years now. Each time I fly over it into England, I want to shout, “Stop! I have to get out here!” It’s so painfully beautiful from the air, glowing a green I’ve never seen anywhere not even in the proverbial gem, the emerald. —but still I hadn’t gotten around to it.

Then…

I knew… Well, it came to me that I must go. Now is the time. I need a place to heal my soul; a place that could be simultaneously elegaic and dreamy. There is only one place that comes to my mind that would meet those two criteria so perfectly. Ireland.

So I’ve booked passage. From June 3rd to June 30th (almost a month) I will be encased the the color that symbolizes transition and growth: emerald green.

I’ll arrive in Belfast and essentially make a clockwise journey until I return to that city again. I know not a soul in the country. This is the first time that I’ve gone abroad without a companion AND knowing no one in the country of my destination. I find that exciting in itself.

My tickets, my journal, and me. Wish us well.