There’s an anticipation to being “home” again, that bubbles from seeing a parent for the first time in a while. I’ll get this medley of memories kaleidoscoping around in my head in an instant.
Thinking back to teenage days….walking in the front door at Polesden View in Bookham, Surrey (where we mostly grew up) after a term at Edinburgh University or Mum or Dad meeting me at a train station arriving home for an overnight stay from days working in London – with the gentle scents of Surrey in the air. Being reunited at LHR after 18 months in Australia in 2002-3. In the last decade, the sliding doors at Dublin airport opening face-on to a crowd of people (and so often too, in the Christmas visits, to DUB’s choirs of angels). Or pulling up to our nowadays home cutely called “Dumela”, Mum and Dad’s home in Donegal, with its peaty odours at Christmas when the sky is a dimming grey at three o’clock in the afternoon. (Dumela meaning “hello, how are you?” in Botswana’s Bantu). A dark-colored fleck in that kaleidoscope of the harrowing first return home early July 2019, those sliding doors at Dublin opening to Mum with a heavy cancer diagnosis in her eyes.
This time arrival was to the miniscule and charming Donegal Airport, eighteen hours later than scheduled, at Monday lunchtime.
The anticipation had started the night before, as we cruised above pink sunset clouds before the pilot tipped the nose into the thick grey cotton wool of the cloud bank somewhere around 7pm. And then hauled the nose back up at the last minute, emerging onto the cabin microphone to share that he was unable to sight the runway from four hundred metres even, the fog too dense for us to land (Donegal Airport is a tiny single runway affair). Engines hit a soaring whine as we arched back into a now magenta layer of dusking cloud. And ran a big long slow loop around the Donegal and neighbouring counties’ coastline, before making a second attempt.
Twice the anticipation, and then twice the disappointment on the Sunday evening of arrival, with Donegal being blanketed in a low-lying cloud. (This led to the little plane flying all the way back to Dublin, Aer Lingus paying for a hotel overnight, and that moment of “arrival” finally being Monday…!).
As arrival finally came, I could immediately feel a spirit of Spring in Dad, after another dark Donegal Winter – albeit a very busy one – still gently growing with the glove of grief. In an instant, per usual, the kaleidoscope of arrivals past souped together into this warm feeling in my gut. While Donegal has never been a home we’ve lived in, it’s certainly become some kind of emotional HQ and the seat of our family lineage and culture.
It was a trip that came after an odd winter for us. Weird viruses spooked an otherwise magical Christmas in Ireland (losing my voice to the extent that I’ve been in vocal therapy since February..!). The more than 30 “atmospheric rivers” (rain deluges) that slurped through the California coastline. Worrying a lot about Dad’s loneliness while his three kids stay littered around the Pacific Rim – but seeing too a grit and courage in this spirit that dripped in just enough reassurance.
Over those first days, I so appreciated the rich light of Donegal in Spring, even more dramatic than the hues that pull themselves up the walls early morning and late afternoons in San Francisco.
We spent two days playing golf in Donegal’s swirling landscape and ruthless rough (for me…), Cruit Island being a stunning highlight, and three days whizzing around the backroads and craggy coastlines of North West Donegal – with all but one of those rides smothered in a wonderful energetic May sunshine.
See Trip Notes – Donegal May 2023 for the thread of our itinerary 🙂
