Still treasuring my time in Ireland last month with my amazing husband and have a few more nuggets to share. In typical Sarah style, they are (surprise!) in bullet points:
- Get out of town with a beloved for a week or more. Before our trip to Portugal last year, Yancey and I hadn’t taken more than a 2- or 3-day trip alone together. We’ve been great about weekend getaways these last 20+ years (something I’m really proud of), but it’s not the same. It was a breathless pack up, leave kids with grandparents, fill the fridge, leave an everlastingly detailed note about dog care and basketball practices, and then talk about the kids half the time we were away! I am so grateful for those years. But let me tell you what: I’m loving this. And being in one another’s sights for 10 days, eating every meal together, listening to hours of music, having long conversations about mundane, silly things? The absolute best.
- Stop halfway for a pint. At a pub in Ennis, we sat at the bar with a 70-year-old Irish farmer and musician and shared stories. He plays at this pub about once a week and lives an hour away. “So, I stop halfway for a pint on my way home,” he said. STOP IT. Can you imagine your average American, on a 60-minute drive, stopping halfway for a pint?! We’re not talking about a Starbucks drive-through or stretching your legs at a rest stop. We’re talking get off the highway, park the car, enter an establishment, settle in, make conversation, slow the *%# down!! I hope my enthusiasm for this approach is coming through here. Americans (yours truly included) tend to work hard, play hard. We save the “stopping halfway for a pint” for vacation. Or worse, for retirement! By then, we’re so exhausted that we overdo it or underdo it. Or we stroke out before we get there, literally or metaphorically. Lord, let this not be me. My mantra for this winter is “Take a break.”
- Find the music. Our dinner plan every night was this: Find the town square (always old, dense, and usually car-free.) Walk around for a bit, peeking into pubs. Pick the one with the live music and the most chaos. We had some unforgettable nights, singing along with local folks and people from all around the world, staying much longer than we intended to, feeling the glory of music and how it is always so much better than words.
- Get your body into the mix. Besides the music, my favorite moment was swimming at the Forty Foot in Dublin. Yancey would probably say his favorite moment was the sauna and whiskey barrel cold plunge we discovered on a sheep farm in the middle of nowhere. In both cases, the experiences involved our bodies. They were immersive. We weren’t just seeing something with our eyes. We were cold, hot, wet, can’t-intellectualize-or-ideate-uncomfortable sometimes! And those are the moments we remember most.
I’ve been loving Kate Baer’s new collection of poems How About Now. Here’s the last stanza of the title poem. I’ll bet you’re dreaming about something. It’s not too late for you.
You say you want a garden,
beds of lavender and daffodils.
You say we have a lifetime.
Love, we’re in our lifetime.
How about now?