I hear the winter waves from my warm bath but my pandemic preoccupied mind won’t rest on the pleasure that ought to bring me. The beach is wild and exposed, the waves are big, carving a new shoreline with each tide and yet I yearn for the rocky seaweed outcrop, more sheltered from the winds, familiar, predictable. A longing, unsettled, disrupted feeling, out of sync with what I think I should feel. I berate myself for lack of gratitude.
The next day I force myself to rise with the sun, sanctimoniously I’ll admit, and I did actually feel better, and consequently, more self-satisfied. It helped that on the day I got up early to create a new routine and to feel more awake, the most exquisite sunrise appeared as if from nowhere just when I thought I’d missed the show. I was dwarfed under the rainbow as it stretched over the nearby mountain peak, with the sky entirely pink a light sun shower speckled my face. It was truly spectacular and I was left with a feeling of being welcomed to this new place with which I have been struggling to get acquainted.
I’ve been assuming I’ve had a sort of discontent with this new landscape but really, that’s not it. Sure, it wasn’t the first place I would come to live for a variety of reasons but it ticks all the boxes of my imagined paradise. Quiet, remote, no shops or main street, it’s a rainforest by the sea, I should be in utter bliss. But we’re in the middle of a global pandemic and that takes the shine off a lot of the things that would ordinarily feel positive. New and different is harder to accept right now, maybe I like the old and familiar better.
I couldn’t enjoy the sound of the waves from my bath because we were teetering on the edge of another lockdown and with insecure employment amidst a career change, another lockdown, after moving house four times during the pandemic seems almost laughable if it weren’t true. We’ve adapted, my partner and I to uncertainty, we think. But let’s face it, our reptilian brains and bodies can’t adapt to these constant changes so as the cortisol surged we couldn’t pretend that it was just a momentary blip, some anxious days have been weathered. More than a month in, we’re doing ok, albeit with night owl routines replacing those early mornings, mammoth Netflix runs and indulgent snacking tempered by beach walks, bush explorations and homemade soups to warm the winter nights.
This second lockdown is different, unexpected, and much more difficult for many than lockdown 2020. For many reasons, whether living alone, away from home, job losses, working from home, home-schooling etc, the list goes on and we thought we’d nailed it here in Australia. We were feeling a little smug. The pandemic continues to disrupt our previous notion of normal in ways we probably never could have imagined. I have a newfound appreciation for the migrants of the past who left their motherlands with no notion of when they might if ever, return home. Many didn’t.
Recently at the entrance to a local bush track, I discovered a dead Monarch butterfly, it was under a bridge in the gravel by the roadside, hit by a car but still almost entirely intact, delicately swaying in the breeze. I picked it up and marvelled at its beauty, and the amazing species it is, a migrant like me. It got me thinking about the sense of place, what makes us feel connected to a place that is not our birthplace and about how many people who did not grow up in the country they are living in feel, away from home with this new lens of a pandemic creating a different view of what home means.
I’ve been longing for a landscape, a local one, just a short drive from my current home where I lived up until recently, but in reality, I’m longing for the landscape that it resembles, my rocky seaweedy waters of Sandycove in Dublin. I long for the Summer breeze blowing through the open sash windows of my childhood home, the smell of fresh-cut grass and the distant sound of the ice cream van. I long for proper tea, and chats with my Mum and Sister and Aunt, for long walks on the pier with my friends and the rapturous laughter about childhood memories of divilment (an Irishism for up-to-no -good) “in the field” or down one of “the lanes”. . As I look at photos now on social media of the sun beaming down on the dusk waters of my home, I know deep down that the Ireland I will return to is not the one I left in 2011, or even on my last visit in 2018. It’s not the rose-tinted version I have in my head either. It will be different. It’s been different since my father died and it will be different again in its post-pandemic form, things will have changed, shifts will have occurred. Still, the landscape remains the same mostly, save some development along the streets, but the natural landscape, the rocks and the sea, the flowers, the trees, the smells, that all remains unchanged, mental signposts in my mind, repositories for memories and stories.
The “field” doesn’t exist anymore, I know that much, I won’t see the Laburnum fall over our back wall, or walk knee-deep in the long grasses in the “lane” as butterflies dance around the Buddleja. I won’t hear my dear neighbours call out over the adjoining wall. The rocks remain though, that familiar outcrop of limpet encrusted rockpools which I loved to explore on my way for swims at the beach. Crabs, anemones and crisp packets and the rusty ring-pulls of ancient aluminium cans. The screech of seagulls overhead, popping Bladderwrack underfoot and the lapping and crashing of the Irish Sea. An overturned rock might reveal a starfish if you were really lucky, but mostly, the thrill was in the hunt. The Peoples Park, Teddys Ice Cream, the Baths. The Baths, the site of the notorious Rainbow Rapids, where rumours of unspeakable horrors still abound. The East Pier, wind, rain or shine, people will walk the pier no matter the weather. I have memories of being pushed in the buggy along the granite slabs, cheeks redraw from the wind. The clinking of the sailboats moored in the harbour. The relief of the wind hitting your back as you changed direction to return home, glimpses of wide-eyed harbour seals.
This connection to the land is perhaps something that can not be explained in words, it’s a heartfelt, sometimes gut-aching umbilical pull. I love where I am now, but I do long for home. I feel for the migrants who like the Monarch Butterfly may have inadvertently, or by whatever means found themselves somewhere other than their original home and feel the push and pull, ebb and flow of being here, but wanting to be there.
We all have our places, our landscapes, our stories intertwining with the paths we walk and walked, etched like maps within us.