Vignette of Eire

Driving: Autumn ferns, now turned brown, hug walls of rhododendron; Tunneling through clean-shaven hedgerows like burrowing critters; Round-a-bouts and wrong-way steering wheels; Bumping up the mountain road, playing chicken with a thin, winding fencepost-lined cliff; hang on for dear life; Trade me seats?

Dwellings: Pastels used as the pallet; New paint covers ancient concrete; Palest yellow, coral, mint, lemon, aqua, and dark yellow stucco; Streets speckled with remnants of times past; Thatch roofs adorn the small towns; Tall sprigs of tropical surprise delight the villas.

Vistas: Valleys surrounded by warm earthen majesties outlining the horizon; Barely pink and orange loomings overhead look like smoke billows or plumes of steam rising to the sky, yet close enough to touch; Hillsides like patchwork sewn with stone lacings lined with linens of thicket; Random darning's of horned wool in an ever changing Polk-a-dot patterns, neatly seamed in green and gold. Such a quilt I've never seen!

Weather: The Oceans Gaelic wind pelts salty, angry tears, rattling windows in the night; "Anam Cara", our home, stands strong against natures attack; Peat pungent, carried on the wind to Kenmare, calming, raging, then calming again; Slivers of liquid glass caught in the sun's rays, glistening, slowly feathering down to nourish the green carpet below, then going on to join other droplets in the stream, eventually merging with the River Sneem and swiftly rolling, rolling home to the sea.

Rainbows: Multilayered, natural art; Water-color ribbon-like arcs stretched in double rows, one beginning to fade... one showing the way to the pot of gold. Leprechauns?

Pubs: Crawling for mussels and pints; Touring and cold, warm soup and Irish coffee; More mussels and pints!

Cheryl Bobbitt