Milkweed Editions, 2023, 312 pp.
Thirty-four homes in thirty-four years, nearly one for each of her life. In the winter of 2019, when Kerri ní Dochartaigh and her partner drove south from the Northern Ireland city of Derry to central Ireland, to the 100-year-old cottage he had inherited, it probably felt like just another transition, another station along the way.
Except that everyone knows what happened shortly thereafter, as the new year unraveled. People were warned to shelter in place, and this is exactly what ní Dochartaigh did, what she would have done no matter where she was, no matter the circumstances. Ní Dochartaigh, one learns, is a shelterer by nature, a woman who takes stock of her surroundings.
Thirty-four houses in thirty-four years, as if the idea of putting down roots was anathema to her.
“I came to change my life, which is, of course, the reason any of us go anywhere,” she writes. And change her life she did, putting down those roots she’d been avoiding and recording the process in a journal that chronicled a year like no other, in a place like no other. The cottage is spare to the point of asceticism; furniture must be built, rooms erected. What is found is used. It lies near a bog, at the end of a long lane. She’s as far from the sea as she’s ever been. But she has her beloved, and their companion dog, and it is enough to start.
Ní Dochartaigh organizes her journal month by month, beginning each entry with a list of the names of the moons she will see: Sanguine Moon; Mating Moon; Oak Moon; Cold Moon; Moon When the Cherries Are Ripe; Frost Exploding Trees Moon. The moon, along with bones, birds, water, and light, are recurring motifs, themes that inspire long essays to introduce that month’s reflections. They inform her daily diary entries: “I find the field bathed in amber-red glow, all dappled light and delicate urgency.” And: “February slithered around my feet like an eel.”
She finds wonder in the delicacy of a poppy’s petal, permanence in the antler of an animal who took its last step on this ancient ground where she is finding a new way. It’s a place where wrens fly in through an open front door and out a kitchen window, where rains bring down the heavens but seeds hold the key to miracles on earth.
The quotidian speaks to her on an elemental level: “We are wee paper birds, hung above the firmament, as a wild, untamable wind makes a choreography of our porcelain bones.” And while it addresses the fragility of the moment, it motivates her to cultivate an inner strength that will provide security during the debilitating uncertainty of a pandemic that drags on and on.
Ní Dochartaigh’s prose is both lush and spare, voracious and restrained. A single being as simple as a moth is as magnificent to her as a murmuration of sandpipers cresting over the lake at twilight. Minute by minute, second by second, she appreciates that which is before her, in a year when such acknowledgement is not all that is asked of her. It is a year unique unto itself, a year in which the world is learning how to live with various constrictions: the loss of life, the loss of movement, the loss of understanding, the loss of familiarity. For her, it is also the year in which she prepares her first book for publication and copes with the first tenuous months of newfound sobriety.
And it’s a year in which she grapples with the notion of motherhood. During times of isolation, holidays can mean both everything and nothing; Mother’s Day comes, and ní Dochartaigh feels an “ache for a baby so deep as to keep me from sleep.” Recording her thoughts month to month as she does makes her even more aware of the change that doesn’t come, the change she wants more than anything else. She gets her wish in summer, and the year changes once again: “I only know pregnancy as another part of an already surreal, confusing year.” The cottage’s isolation might exacerbate any newly pregnant woman’s fears, but ní Dochartaigh allays them by immersing herself in gratitude for that exact wilderness, one that allows her to be pregnant in her own space and time.
“We are changed, all of us, I think, by this time held in one place.” The understatement of her observation is powerful in its simplicity, succinctly capturing the consequences of that time. “How does someone learn to stay?” she asks. She has, after all, endured “a lifetime spent running with all that I could carry in my arms.”
Staying is easier when one is comfortable where one is, including in one’s own skin. And yet for her, that comfort did not come naturally, and there is anguish and trauma in her past that carries forward. So, she watches and waits, walks and swims, plants her garden, and writes, writes, writes. “Earth, unteach me the world’s ways. I want to learn yours. How to write the grief that we are all carrying. How not to hollow ourselves into a pit of fear, of worry, of helplessness. How to act, despite it all.”
Ní Dochartaigh’s prose is gorgeous—lyrical, searing, devastating, inspiring, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking, but most of all, true. There is as much honesty in her joy as there is in her despair: “I have never been anything other than solitary but this winter solitude has made a home of me so unstoppably, almost tenderly, as a bird shapes her nest.”
Ní Dochartaigh has a gift for observation that borders on the magical. No detail is too minute, no occurrence too obscure to escape her gaze. She more than sees it all; she feels it down in the sinews of her body, where memory rests, until a disturbance of the cosmos hurls both pain and pleasure to the surface where it can be touched and tasted, heard and understood. Hers is a world where the surreal collides with the real, where she lives constantly in a state of astonishment and awe.
As slowly as her year unfolded in real time, her journal is to be savored as carefully, with time to stop and reflect on the lessons she has learned, the vistas she has revealed, the fears she has confronted, the celebrations she has earned. Take the time, she says, to just stand and be, to watch sparrows flit between the branches, the grasses sway in the breeze. Take the time to revel in friendship and love. Take the time.
Thirty-four homes in thirty-four years. A stone cottage in the middle of an island. A garden, a partner, and, ultimately, a child. A home, a home, a home.
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Carol Haggas is a freelance writer and editor with more than 20 years experience writing for Booklist Magazine, Foreword Magazine, and Another Chicago Magazine. She also offers manuscript evaluation, synopsis development, and developmental editing services. She lives in suburban Chicago with her husband.
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