Skyler White

I’m sitting by a peat fire (and I know it’s peat in the grate, because there’s a big basket of the stuff on the hearth) in an honest-to-god thatched cottage eating brown bread and oysters at Moran’s Oyster Cottage in Galway. It’s the kind of food that makes you close your eyes to eat it. The only thing that could make it any better would be a half of Guinness, but I don’t trust myself on the Irish roads enough to risk that. The fire is warm, the food nourishing and I still have the mud of Coole Park on my boots. It’s been a very good day.

Moran's Oyster Cottage, Galway, Ireland

Yesterday was work — good work, but tiring and a little scary. Today was work, too, and driving the rental car into Dublin airport traffic was a touch intimidating, but once I was out into the countryside, I remembered how much I love the interior of Ireland. I have to keep up my mantra of “empty on the edge” to remind myself to put the yawning space of passenger seat on the left of me positioned against the (mostly non-existent) shoulder, but the land is relentlessly beautiful and truly the greatest road hazard is rubbernecking at the scenery.

I arrived at Coole in a slow rain, but the sun obligingly broke through as I wandered Yeats’ refuge, lighting the lake and park, the grazing deer and the fabled autographer tree. It was so dramatic, even a dyed-in-the-wool romantic like me thought it was really just a bit much, until four women came jogging towards me down the Seven Woods Path in black and aqua and neon pink spandex. I couldn’t help thinking, “What would Mr. Yeats say?” He’d laugh, I think, at the wonders of my world, just as I do at his.