The appointment was at half ten, which meant leaving here before seven. I set the alarm for six and woke at five forty, which is the way of it – lie there for twenty minutes listening to the lane, then get up and make tea before the alarm has the chance to feel smug about itself.
It’s two and a half hours to Limerick, give or take. I took the N21 up through Tralee and across, which isn’t the most scenic route but it’s the honest one at that hour of the morning. The light was barely in it when I passed through Tralee. By the time I reached Abbeyfeale the sky had gone from grey to something almost copper, low on the left, and I thought about stopping but didn’t. You never do, at that hour, when there’s somewhere to be.
The appointment itself was routine. Nothing wrong, nothing found, a doctor who spoke quickly and a waiting room with one of those wall-mounted televisions nobody had thought to switch off. I sat under it for forty minutes reading a very old copy of a magazine I wouldn’t normally read, learning a great deal about a kitchen renovation in Wicklow. By quarter past eleven it was done, and I was standing on a street in Limerick with the rest of the day in front of me.
I walked down to the river. The Shannon at Limerick is wider than you expect, even if you’ve been before – it keeps surprising you with how much of the sky it takes up. It was a cool morning, windy off the water, that particular March cold that knows spring is coming but hasn’t agreed to move on yet. There were a few people out. A man walking two spaniels at a pace the spaniels found unreasonable. A woman eating a sandwich on a bench with great composure. I walked along the quay for a bit and then went in search of tea, which I found in a small café a few streets back from the water, and sat with it for half an hour doing nothing useful.
Limerick doesn’t get a fair hearing, in my experience. People say it in a tone, as if naming it is already an admission of something. But the river is serious and the old streets have weight to them, and there’s a directness to the place – the way it stands there and doesn’t pretend to be something lighter than itself – that I’ve always respected. I went back once more to look at the water before I got the car, which I’d parked in a multi-storey that charged me an amount I’d rather not publish.
The long way home was my own idea, as these things tend to be. Instead of retracing the N21 I came south to Adare first, which added the better part of an hour and couldn’t be justified on any practical grounds. I’ve been to Adare before, several times over the years, and I’m always slightly cautious about it because it can veer toward the self-consciously pretty, all that thatch arranged just so. But on a Tuesday in March it was mostly empty, and the thatched roofs in that light – low and white and slightly exhausted-looking – were fine. Just fine. A few people going in and out of a shop. A woman closing a car door. I walked the main street once slowly, had a look at the priory ruins through the gate, didn’t go in, and then drove on.
I took back roads most of the way from there. Not strategic, not planned, just following what seemed right at each junction, which is a way of driving that only works if you’re not pressed for time. I went through small towns I’ve passed through before without retaining their names, and past farms where the lambs were already out in the fields, small and unsteady-looking, bothering their mothers with great urgency. First lambs of the year. There were daffodils on some of the verges – more than I’d seen closer to home yet, the light being different up there, I suppose, the land a little less exposed.
I crossed back into Kerry somewhere before Abbeyfeale and felt the road change under the car, the particular way the light softens when you’re back in range of the Atlantic. It might be imagination. Probably it’s imagination. But I’ve driven back into Kerry enough times that I’d almost put money on that particular shift in the quality of the afternoon.
Got home around half four. Bess was sitting at the back gate when I came up the lane, just sitting there, nobody else in sight, as if she’d had the appointment herself and was processing it quietly. I opened the gate for her and she went straight for the vegetable patch with her nose, did a full inspection of the situation, then trotted back out again. I went in and put the kettle on.
Donal rang at six, not his usual Sunday call but a mid-week check-in, wanting to know how the appointment went. Grand, I told him. Fine. He said it was a lovely day in Cork, warm, nearly eight degrees. I said it had been fierce cold by the river in Limerick. He said that was typical Kerry exaggeration.
The garlic is showing its first green tips at the end of the vegetable patch. I noticed on my way back in from the gate. Just the very top of them, barely enough to see.