Room With a View

I’ve been living too near the sea.

I’ve been reading too much Virginia Woolf.

For I want to talk of things in terms of the tide. Of life as an ebbing and flowing, of the slate-gray peaks, the riding white horses of the crests, of the tumultuous raging of a storm and then the dead still silence of calm.

After three weeks of traveling, exploring, and adventuring with my family, now I have time to sit and think. I have time to recall the motion of the sea. Loads of time. It’s the calm. But for the chickens, the cows, the dogs, the cat, the children, the rabbit, the birds, and the buzzing flies it’s the dead still silence.

For a brief moment in my first hours here, I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to have chosen a place closer to the city rather than this charming and remote location.

For even after the wildness of a storm, isn’t there still a catching of the breath, a gasping at the sudden stillness (“What’s wrong? What’s happened?”), a need to release the remnants of pent up adrenaline? Isn’t there still within me that need to be completely independent?

It’s five and a ¼ miles roundtrip walk to the nearest shop.

With four shopping bags full of food behind me which my parents got for me on our way in, I stand in my room looking out at the distant hills, the glinting river, at the snow globe sky.

I hardly know what to do with myself.

My parents and sister have only just dropped me off at my new home for the next two and a half months before heading off to Dublin for their flight back home. We had a final cold lunch together at the long kitchen table with my new housemates—human and animal—flitting about.

I waved goodbye with mixed emotions; satisfaction at having done our trip successfully, the inevitable sadness of parting, and a touch of relief at being able to stand still.

“What is this, maybe three or four times your normal level of activity?” my dad had asked at some point during our trip. In between stone circles, ruined cathedrals and churches, ivy-grown castles, restaurants, pubs, walks, hikes, and the long, winding, narrow road.

Yes and no. More than that. Or rather, it’s that the activity held more constant interaction than I’m accustomed to. I’m a strange fish. I know it. Like the solitary panda. That seems fitting, doesn’t it? (Although I just read a few articles that state that giant pandas aren’t as solitary as formerly believed. They do, data suggests, also like to spend time with their friends. Which I also do. So, in addition to my name (Amanda Panda, in this case), yes, I suppose, I really am like a giant panda.)

Still, I’m adaptable. A chameleon, although my colors seem to change just a bit more slowly of late. Still, I’m a creature of habit. I can be both. Can’t I?

With each new place I live, there’s this rocking into place (cresting wave, falling water). The settling into my own old rhythm while trying to simultaneously settle into a new place and its rhythm. It’s the ebb and flow of learning others’ habits and being comfortable in my own. Some places this is easier than others. Sometimes authenticity comes more naturally in one place than in another.

The first morning (long after Bob Dylan the rooster has first crowed), I get up and go downstairs to make my coffee. Here, they use an Aga—a cast iron stove that transfers heat from its core to hotplates and ovens in some mysterious way that’s different from conventional ovens. It seems to take a long time to boil a kettle of water.

Patience is a virtue, I’ve heard.

As I wait, I acknowledge that I’ve grown spoiled to electric kettles, to speed, to convenience, to a faster pace. I wait. To fill the time, I prep my coffee cup, I bring out a bottle of single cream from the refrigerator.

“You put cream in your coffee?” my host asks.

“I do,” I say. Single cream is the closest thing to Half & Half that I have found.

“That’s a bit indulgent, isn’t it?”

“I guess it is,” I say, still listening for the kettle to sing. “It’s a very American thing to do, I’ve been told.” Another host at another place had said so. And surely, it is an indulgence to know what I like, an extravagance to be able to have things my own preferred way.

Yet, it’s not even my most eccentric trait, I think, taking the kettle off the hot plate to finally pour water into my cup, stirring the cream into my coffee, and then putting the cream away.

How am I odd, let me count the ways.

Of course, I catalog other people’s habits too. And naturally enough, I know myself best. So, how would I see myself as strange from the outside? What habits would I remark upon? What rituals would I note? Those vast hours of staring out the window, perhaps. Those hours walking to clear my thoughts. All those hours sitting. Hours writing. Hours reading. Hours talking to myself. Hours talking to others on the phone or in person. Hours watching the clouds cast shadows and the Blackwater River change from mirror glass to blue to the green-yellow reflection of the adjoining land. My habit of living wherever the wind, opportunity, and impulse take me, perhaps.  

Well, here I am. I’ve come to this place to live in a room with a view for two and a half months. I stand at the window and wonder what I’ll do so far from things, limited (if it can be called that) to where I can walk and the kindness of my host to take me occasionally into town to grocery shop.

The cows move down the field in a straggling line. The setting sun turns the sky pink and then purple. The chickens peck the ground within the confines of their coop. The rabbit runs up the ramp into the upper story of its home. The still river, so unlike the sea, turns pink and purple too.

My family sends me a message that they’ve made it to Dublin. I breathe. They’ve made it without me. They’ve made it.

I breathe.

Traveling with others can sometimes feel like an action movie; jumping from place to place, moving quickly from scene to scene. Being alone is like a poem; sometimes hard to understand but still lyrical. Alone, see, already I’m thinking, overthinking, rethinking.

What will I do with this beauty? What will I do at this place?

I know, I think as if an ocean of inspiration has suddenly struck me, rocked me back to the rhythm of my own life. I’ll make the most of it. I’ll do exactly what I should do. I’ll do exactly what I like to do.

I’ll write another book.

I’ll turn this desk the other way round and sit so I can stare out the window at this unbelievable view as I make things up.

I’ll settle into the rhythm of this place, whatever that ends up being, and I’ll be authentically eccentric. I’ll put cream in my coffee and do, who knows, what other odd things. I’ll do all that while, somewhere not so far from here, the sea will continue to move in and out. It’ll rise and fall, always changing, always moving, while still also staying somehow always the same as it has ever been and ever will be.