The Season of Beltaine (“Bright Fire”)
FINALLY, SUMMER SURGES IN. GREEN AS only Ireland can be. Iridescent greens that sting the eyes with their brilliance. So many greens that a painter could go mad trying to capture their permutations. And humid-hot too. Particularly in the southwest and Beara, where the Gulf Stream nurtures palms and hosts of exotic species once planted by eccentric, decadently rich “intruders.” (Lands given away to the English elite by Oliver Cromwell back in the seventeenth century are still indignantly decried by some indigenous locals.)
In this season the sap races faster and smoother than stout and porter from the pulls in the pubs. It’s a time of increasing abundance—stacks of fresh-cut peat turf (although far less than in the past), vast catches of seafood, sweet “salt-meadow” lamb, a furious surging of vegetables “in the sod,” a surfeit of praties (potatoes), and the searing sheen of newly golden grain fields.
By this time, the menacing midges of May are being forgotten, festivals are being organized, the Garda (police) are preparing themselves for controlling “excessive displays of exuberance,” and villages are being repainted and dolled up with hanging flower baskets for the Tidy Towns Competition. Eyeries is invariably the odds-on favorite. Allihies is pretty colorful too—particularly the bloodred walls of O’Neill’s pub (now with a fancy new restaurant upstairs)—but Eyeries has gone all-out rainbow. This tiny community seems to be determined to match the abundance of colors in the landscape all around—golden gorse, brilliant green ferns, explosions of fuchsia and honeysuckle, carpets of cornflowers, and the sprawls of moor-hugging purple heather.
Butterflies are everywhere—Red Admirals, Tortoiseshells, Speckled Woods, and the ubiquitous (but still virginally dainty) Cabbage Whites. That beautiful blond beach of ours at Allihies entices us once again to abandon projects and productivity and go flop down by gently lapping, lolling wavelets and thank whomever we normally thank for the soothing pace of summer, the glories of golden-honey days, and the sepulchral silences of those long velvety evenings.
Although—and we hate to break this flow of hedonistic images—summer is not always so. Our summer was punctuated with a return to England to celebrate Anne’s father’s ninety-fourth birthday. Although his health was not good, his Yorkshire humor and determination to enjoy each day was an inspiration to us all. And for those who were on Beara in the summer of 2007, we can only empathize with their perseverance through “one of the worst wet summers in living memory.” And the old Irish adage about “if you don’t like the weather here, just wait five minutes” didn’t quite reflect the reality of day after day of downpours, mud, and murk.
But—eternally optimistic—our Beara friends assured us that next summer would be superb, and, anyway, there was still the mellow autumn to come…