‘Our Time Turn to Fable’
Here’s one of the houses where we lived in Ireland. Matt was in Dublin last week and had dinner at our (former) next-door neighbors’ house. Looks like they’ll be getting new neighbors again.
We were tight-budget renters and moved here after an unceremonious and possibly illegal (but certainly ethically questionable) notice to vacate — in very short order — the first house we lived in. My networking skills went into overdrive and somehow this home got on my radar. The previous tenants — the owner’s sister and her American husband and their children — were moving to California, and while I’d like to say that our ragtag crew saved the day, she surely could have found other tenants in a snap. So, lucky us.
As Matt commuted there on the DART, he sent this second picture to our family group chat — a photo taken by our neighbor on our last morning there. It hadn’t occurred to me that 2025 marks 10 years being back in the US, which of course sounds like a lot of hubbub about nothing. (I mean, we only lived there 4 years + some change. Let’s find meaning in every sort of date or anniversary!!! [Indeed, that does feel like a very American thing to do.]) But the culture shock upon returning was very real.
Our landlady sold the house after we moved, and the new owners gussied it up quite a bit according to the listing photos (and this one). But structurally everything is the same, so I thought about:
Family talent shows in the kitchen;
The incredible original floors that nonetheless provided way too many entry points for mice;
The calls to “turn on the immersion!” if one wanted a hot bath after a damp Saturday match.
But those are just gauzy half-remembrances. Mostly I remember 5 kids — 2 on one side of the stone wall, 3 on the other — who finally, after days of peering at each other over said wall, picked a garden and began playing. As Matt said goodbye to these friends-who-were-once-neighbors, the wife said, “But of course our families’ lives will always be intertwined.” Lucky us.
“May we all be so lucky to live long enough to see our time turn to fable.” — Niall Williams, ‘This is Happiness.’ Not sure what the fable is here … maybe it’s just “Lucky Us.”
originally published on instagram