On Monday morning the students had their first encounter with an Irish language teacher who was a native speaker. Peatsaí (“Patsy”) is a retired schoolteacher; he knows Latin and Irish (and English and possibly French), and he dresses very neatly and has a good spirit. He is also kind and funny. As a teacher, he threw a blur of words in Irish at them, writing only some of them down, and (I suspect) thoroughly confused them on their first day. The biggest issue has been that I wasn’t able to give them daily lessons or drills in the language when we were still in the States (so much had to be taught!), so they’re only partly engaged in the language to start with. We’ll see how it goes.

In the afternoon we walked again with Paddy Beag (beag = “little”), meeting first at the large,rarely-used Protestant Church of Ireland across the valley. The rain was driving sideways in sheets, but it still wasn’t that cold. I was shocked at the under-preparedness of my students for rough weather! Several were in leather jackets, a handful weren’t wearing sweaters under their raincoats, and many of them weren’t wearing hats. Cary and Morgan and I were fine (they had rainpants as well as rain jackets). We stayed at the church for about 45 minutes, listening to Paddy Beag tell stories about the church, some of the people buried there, and scattered pieces of local, national, and religious history. We also explored a centuries-old undergroound refuge tunnel that had recently been discovered under the graveyard. It was actually quite interesting, and would have been much more interesting to the students if it hadn’t been raining!

Gleann Cholm Cille (the valley of St. Columbkille) is famous as a pilgrimmage site, not only for the Catholics (St. Columbkille is one of Ireland’s three patron saints, with Patrick and Bridget) but also because it has so many megalithic stones and graves and dolmens. The turas or pilgrimmage of St. Columbkille has multiple stations around the valley, some of which are several thousand years old – well before St. Columbkille! It includes standing stones, a holy well, multiple cairns with sacred stones that you pass around your body three times while reciting prayers, etc. People come from many places between June 9 (the saint’s day) and August 15, just to do the pilgrimmage. As we went along the pilgrimmage, the weather gradually improved; it stopped raining, people’s hair began to dry and the wind lessened. Spirits rose! It was a much easier walk than the one we had taken to the Tower the day before, and there were places on the pilgrimmage that the students are likely to return to: we didn’t make it up to the sacred well, for example, but now they know where it is.

The first poetry class was Monday night, with Kate Newmann. I had worked with her three years ago and found her to be very positive and very good with the students. Even with about 40 of us, she demonstrated her stunning ability to remember names at the end of the evening (better than me!). She asked provocative questions, like “what does the rain say to your skin?” and “what has the sea forgotten?” The students responded well to each one, with many moments of nervous laughter and teasing. But for the most part, they were able to let go of their shyness, especially when she asked them to write down their earliest sight memory. Mine was of sitting up in a crib, looking through the bars at my mother sleeping on a double bed (which was later to become my bed), and knowing that I must not disturb her. I think I wasn’t much for naps. But it was touching to hear the memories of my students as they slowly dropped their façades.

One of the strange and delightful things about being here is how quickly the weather changes. On Wednesday morning there was a huge storm roaring in from the sea; water was sheeting down the windows, all the hillsides were rushing with waterfalls, and a minor landslide occurred across the valley, visible from our cottage. An umbrella, as is so often the case here, was out of the question. So we skittered down the hillside to the language class in the morning being pelted with rain. Roads were flooded and it was all very exciting. In fact, Liam Cunningham (the director of Oideas Gael, the institute here) rang up one of the teachers and asked him if he could “swim” down to the school! We had a seminar (dividing the students into two groups) in the afternoon, mostly with questions about what their six months of classes had actually prepared them for, at what point they knew they had come to Ireland (the “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore” moments), etc. It was a very interesting discussion. By the late afternoon the weather had calmed way down, and in the evening it was just light winds. Liam led a discussion with the students that evening about the Irish language – what contributed to its decline, whether its decline was inevitable, how to make it economically viable, etc. My students held their own very well in the discussion.

The language classes were pretty overwhelming for the entire week – so much Irish, not enough English, few things explained, lots of tangents. It was challenging for everyone, including the teacher. Clearly there are at least several sets of expectations. On Wednesday afternoon the students participated in a bodhrán drumming class (it’s the round frame drum common in a lot of Irish music); the sound was thunderous both inside and outside the room. The teacher, Paddy Mór (“big Paddy”) is very soft-spoken, congenial, and a great teacher (encouraging them all to play very softly, to attend sessions without playing at first, etc.). He did a fine job of encouraging good session etiquette. Later that evening about 20 of us went to the Gleann Cholm Cille folk village (a cluster of traditional houses with a school and a tea shop) for a class in hand weaving. It was all fun, easy-going, and it was lovely to see everyone working and chatting. We didn’t have quite enough weaving frames, so people (including Morgan) strung up the backs of chairs and wove there!

On Thursday the weather could not have been more perfect. It was clear, no wind, and about 70 degrees. Not a cloud in the sky. None of us could believe it, especially compared to the days before! In the afternoon after language class a bus came and took many of the students to Bunglass (“green hill”), a lovely place near Slieve League (a mountain with extremely tall sea cliffs, often breathlessly advertised as the “highest in Western Europe”). Conal McIntyre is an art teacher who lived for seven years in Sudan; he’s a very interesting man, and an accomplished artist himself. We scattered all over the mountainside, looking out at the cliffs, and did our best to capture something of the stunning three-dimensional scene in two dimensions. Some people drew in black and white, others in pastels, crayons, colored pencils… It was not an exercise in futility, as frustrating as it might have seemed to sit in front of something so large and beautiful. It was certainly humbling, however. I was drawing with colored pencils and a large drawing pad, wearing the pencils down to desperately-need-sharpening stage, and enjoying myself very much in the beautiful weather. Then when it was time to go, I discovered that I had been drawing on the back of the front cover the entire time! Tsk! The results were, um, not suitable for framing.

Things went very differently from the other days on Friday. For one thing, the language class went much better. The teacher was asking students to produce sentences directly, one by one, and they had a chart from which to choose phrases or sentence fragments that they could put together. So everyone felt pretty good about that (at last! a chance to speak Irish!). But then I needed to take one of my students to the clinic, which then turned into an emergency room visit all the way in Letterkenny, an hour and a half away. At least it was a gorgeous day for driving over the beautiful Glengesh Pass! My student felt pretty ill, though, so I don’t think he enjoyed the drive as much as I did. Poor guy. The hospital in Letterkenny is large and very 1970s, with patients lining the halls, cramped little waiting rooms, peeling paint, blaring TVs, etc. A toddler was fussing in the emergency room waiting area, so her mother bought her a big candy bar to keep her quiet, which the toddler promptly threw at me. It hurt! As it turns out, my student will be fine with antibiotics; he saw a very nice doctor from India (who I also met). He was given the option of staying in the hospital for a few days or coming back to the Gleann, and he (wisely) opted to come back to the Gleann to rest up (It was a chest infection, not the meningitis that the Gleann doctor had suspected). Evidently the pennywhistle class (which took place while I was gone) wasn’t as successful as it could have been, so I’ll need to rethink this option next time.

I gave the students most of the weekend off, so a handful of them opted to do a two-day hike. More fine weather!! I gave them lifts to the starting place (Bunglas, the same place we’d drawn a few days before), came back for a second group, then took my ill student to Killybegs (about half an hour away) to pick up his prescription. On the way back from dropping off the second batch of students at Bunglass, a large sheep strode toward the car, baa-ing fiercely. I slowed way down and finally had to bump its nose with the car. It backed away, then charged my car and bumped it. As I sped off, it broke into a run and chased me, baa-ing all the way! I’ve never been chased by a sheep before. On the other hand, the caretaker for our cottage has a large herd of sheep, and his black-and-white dog must herd in order to call himself a dog. Whenever our car comes bouncing up the hill, he crouches, trembling in anticipation, then darts out at the car. You can hear his eager growling and then the whump as he throws himself at the car. I always think I’ve run him over, but I look in the rear-view mirror and there he is, trotting off with his tail wagging. Got one!

The Gleann has dogs. Biddy’s pub owner Seán has two big black labs, one of which (don’t know the name) loves coasters. He goes around from table to table, picking up coasters and proudly redistributing them. We saw him outside at night carrying a large plastic bottle. He just loves to pick things up (and his big tail will knock a pint of Guinness off the table if you’re not careful). Most dogs here, as in all of Ireland, are black and white border collies for herding sheep (and cars). I have seen a few animals that have been hit by cars (porcupine, for one, and red foxes) but never border collies. Somehow, in spite of their need to herd cars, they seem to steer clear of them.

Cary and Morgan and I had a lovely, relaxing day after I came home from the Killybegs pharmacy visit, with a nice walk out to a whole series of dolmens (megalithic-era [stone] structures). Most of them seemed to be buried beneath the bog, but two were remarkably intact and several others were clearly visible. They’re near a promontory across the valley, so we climbed up to the top and had a terrific view. It is great to feel so relaxed and to live so much in the present, not worrying about yesterday or tomorrow. I would love to be able to duplicate this feeling at home. I’m sure my blood pressure must be way down, even though I’m pretty busy managing the students and their lives. I’ve been making brown bread most days; it’s so easy and delicious. [recipe: mix 2 cups each oatmeal and buttermilk and soak overnight. In the morning mix with 2.5 cups of whole wheat flour, 1 T salt and 1 t. baking soda. Form into a circle about 1.5” high, cut a cross through the middle and bake for 1 hour at 400 degrees F.]

Our cottage has a kitchen/dining room, a living room, a bathroom, and three bedrooms. The kitchen has a small (half-size) fridge, a dishwasher, a washing machine that sometimes stops before the spin cycle, and a dryer. That’s more than a lot of cottages have! The fridge has a tiny freezer inside; I think most people here buy things you can eat right away and they don’t freeze much. It makes me blink to compare it with our big stand-up freezer at home with all the frozen berries in it from last summer! Taking a shower here is also different: there’s something called an “immersion heater,” which is a gallon-size container of water that heats water for the shower as it passes through the little tank. You hold the showerhead and you can adjust the heat of the water easily. If you have very short hair like Cary, it’s easy to wash your hair. Otherwise, it’s sort of like standing out in the rain in terms of the water pressure. Come to think of it, it’s not that different from home!

On Saturday night we attended a concert in Kilcar, about ten miles away. We had hoped to have dinner out, but the restaurant in Kilcar had closed since the last time we were here, and the only other dining option was a “chippie” (greasy spoon), so Cary bought some brown bread and cheese and rice pudding in a shop and we ate in the car (with dozens of other cars parked outside the Catholic church where Saturday evening mass was being held), listening to Irish musicians playing “bluegrass” on the radio. Then we went into the parish hall, and I was so pleased to see that all the signs up on the walls were in Irish (slí amach – way out, ná caith tabac – no smoking, etc.). People were speaking Irish all around us. In fact, the poster for the concert had been entirely in Irish; luckily Cary knows enough Irish to have figured it out and alerted me to it.

The prelude to the first part of the concert was a couple of songs (in Irish) by a local singer, probably in her late 70s. She had a quavery voice and a rapid vibrato, but it was obvious that she and the songs were respected and known to the audience. Her song announcements were all in Irish. Then the first half of the concert began; it was Laoise Kelly and Steve Cooney, who live near here. She’s an excellent harper (really fine precision playing) and he’s a steel-string guitarist. Together they were a real joy to listen to. They did all traditional tunes for about forty minutes, and all three of us loved it. I would LOVE to have a CD of theirs; I’ll be asking about it in the shop on Monday. In the States you don’t often get a person who can play the Irish harp with great confidence, but this was excellent.

The second half of the concert (started, again, with two songs in Irish by the local singer) featured two fiddles, a guitar, and a bouzouki. I was riveted by the playing of the fiddlers! Not only were they good musicians, but their styles of playing were radically different. One of them had a really loose wrist and was flexible and natural, while the other had perfect economy of movement (you could barely tell he was playing from looking at his left hand holding the fiddle). Both of them used the Donegal-style single-bow technique (almost no slurs, just lots of up and down, note by note). They chose great tunes. During the intermission there was tea and piles of scones: fun! The whole evening was so nice – our first musical experience since coming to Ireland this time. Morgan lasted all the way to 11 pm! I was touched by the fact that the local singer had people chiming in on the last line of her songs, rich and enthusiastic applause, and total support. The audience was all ages (well-behaved children, too), both genders well represented, and full of enthusiasm. Meanwhile, the great Donegal fiddler James Byrne was in attendance, before leaving for his gig playing at a pub down the street. I should add that much-smaller Gleann Cholm Cille, where we’re living, is not like this in terms of music; the pubs (Biddy’s, Roarty’s, and the Glen Head) are just regular chatting-and-drinking pubs with a TV playing in the background. Still, they have their charms.

On Sunday we went out to Maghera strand, a (very pretty) flat beach that goes on and on. It has caves on one side, where people hid from Oliver Cromwell’s army a couple of centuries ago. All but one person were discovered by the army, and you can guess what happened to them all. It’s a sad history but a beautiful place; you can go into the caves in low tide, but the tides come in quickly and I’ve never stayed long enough to see if the caves fill up with the tide. We stopped at a waterfall – the same one we stop at on every visit to the Gleann, and enjoyed it enormously. It was confirmation day for a number of young children, because when we stopped at the Highland Hotel in Glenties for lunch there were big families celebrating. It is always so fun to see the little kids all dressed up. We were quite hungry, and it was about 2:30 pm, so when our chicken pie came (like chicken pot pie with four scoops of mashed potatoes, a pile of steamed carrots and another pile of broccoli) we were very, very happy. It was enough for lunch and dinner combined! We split a small apple tart for dessert, but somehow without the cinnamon or ginger or anything else, it seemed rather wimpy.

Last night Gearóidín (“Geraldine”) Breathnach came to teach old style singing to my students. She is a two-time winner of the all-Ireland Gaelic singing competition (the Oireachtas), and her voice is clear as a bell. It rings! It’s beautiful! Her accent is absolutely confounding because in her area (an hour to the north) they pronounce things very differently from the way they do here. She also gave my students four challenging Irish-language songs in just two hours and wore them out completely. It was even challenging for me, and I already know something about how to do this stuff.

The smells here are quite different from home: you can smell the fresh saltiness of the ocean, of course, because it’s right out there. But we’re surrounded by sheep, so they have their own set of smells. People around us also burn coal or peat or a kind of coal-peat briquette, which gives off a very pungent scent (more peat than coal, to my senses). It’s a strong mixture that I associate only with being here in the Gleann, so naturally it smells like… home.

The Morgan Report:

Hi Everybody! Last week it was quite the weather! The first day there was a huge storm with waterfalls pouring down the hills. It gradually became clearer over the week, until it ended up with four days of bright sunshine. It’s definitely spring. The classes we had this week were poetry, bodhrán, which is a type of Irish drum, weaving, drawing, dancing, and pennywhistle. During weaving class there weren’t enough looms to go around, so I had to do my weaving on the back of a chair. That was quite interesting! During drawing class we all went up to the top of a mountain and drew landscape pictures, except for one student who drew cartoons. I completed an oil pastel picture of a rock in the middle of the water with cliffs behind it. Dancing class was really fun; we danced the traditional ceili dances such as Shoe the Donkey and The Siege of Ennis. I danced with my mom, and my dad. It is May 1st today and I am very happy. I only wish I were back at school for May Day, because that is my second favorite school holiday of the year (my first is St. Nicholas Faire).

The lambs have grown really big. I can hardly tell Louie and Petronella apart from one another now, because they look so much alike. There were two new lambs born to the flock: a very small white one with a speckled face, and another very small white one. They are very cute.

On Sunday we went past Ardara to the caves on the beach. In one of the caves there is a hole big enough for me to stick my arm into. So I did! It turns out that it seemed to be leading into a different cave, because I couldn’t feel the end of it. Dad didn’t want to stick his arm in, even though his arm is longer, because he was afraid there was some little weasel creature hiding in it. I asked my mom to stick her arm in too, but her arm isn’t any longer than mine. That same day on the beach I took off my shoes and socks and got my pants thoroughly wet by splashing through the shallow part of the ocean. Dad has some interesting pictures. I found many snail shells and put them in the inside of the car door. Later, my dad saw this slimy trail on the seat! A snail has escaped! I did not think that it was alive; it didn’t seem to have anything inside of it. Poor snail, I wonder what it thought of our car. Well, that’s all for now. From Morgan.