Hi everyone,
Still hot where you are? We are enjoying unprecedentedly beautiful weather here in Ireland. Day after day of sunshine, lots of time spent on beaches and in rivers and lakes, so much washing has been dried in record time on the line! I am certainly not complaining about the experience of this weather in the moment, but I can’t help feel a sense of unease alongside it - it isn’t quite right, is it? Ali Isaac wrote very well about this strangeness in a recent post.
Solastalgia : sadness or melancholy due to environmental changes and related loss especially as it affects one’s home place. Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Walking out in the bone-dry woodland yesterday (still smouldering in places from recent fires), I was reminded of the first summer after we moved back from Berlin nine years ago, the first summer with my new-born, premature third baby. Similar relentlessly warm days, same sense of something being not quite right. In my memoir I write about how, as the heat continued through June and July and into August, it created a drought. About how the land grew cracked and hard and there was an official hose pipe ban in place in many counties just like the one announced for my area yesterday. In Blessington, Co. Wicklow the levels in the Poulaphuca Reservoir fell to an unprecedented low. Photographs taken from the air by a police helicopter clearly showed the abandoned remains of a farm, flooded in order to create the reservoir in the late 1930’s and 1940’s, now rising out of the silt.
In the aerial photographs I could see islands that had surfaced on the depleted lake bed. Outlines of walls were marked out across their backs like spines, pock marked with rusted farm machinery that had lain on the bottom of the lake for nearly ninety years. Remnants of abandoned lives.
In my memoir, I write a few chapters about this ‘summer of exposure’, examining the similarities I felt between the laying bare of the landscape and the laying bare I felt in myself and in my body as a new mother.
Below I share a short excerpt from this part of the book for you to read. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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