Coming Home

There are three of us packed into the back seat of a small Ford, me in the middle. The Dutch girl beside me laughs in my ear, and at first I look to see what is funny. It's a moment before I realise that I'm reaching out to grip the two front seats every time we round a bend, knuckles white. The roads here are barely wide enough to allow one car, but our driver appears gloriously unaware of this. He glances back at me with a grin.

Don't trust my driving? he asks.

Road, I say. Eyes on the road.

Brambles scrape against the car door. The Polish girl on my other side bumps against me as we round another corkscrew bend, and we're giggling, all of us, because it's high and airy up here in the Wicklow mountains and the scent of gorse flowers is being blown in the open windows as the scenery whips by.

Wait, our driver says. I'm going to take the scenic route back. Just up here.

He takes a sharp turn off. The road rises in loops and twists, and here and there the grassy bank disappears and the feathered tops of fir trees fill the downhill slope. I grip the headrests tighter.

And then it happens. The bank to our right falls away and I can see clear to the bottom of the valley. The car is suddenly quiet.

It would look mundane if photographed, just as sunsets do. Too many times already someone has tried to capture it.

But to be there, in the presence of that view, is another matter. It is something that can never be shared, although it feels too big to be to held inside just you. It is to be silenced.

The valley below is a patchwork of fields, of the most vivid green. A green that doesn't exist anywhere else but here. Great shadows from the clouds above are slipping across the valley floor, and for a little while that is all there is, shadows and sunlight and different shades of fathoms-deep green.

No-one speaks for some minutes.

Do you ever get used to it? I ask our driver.

No, he says. Never. Every time its like this.

The giggles are gone. Beside me, someone sighs.

I continue to watch out the car window.

This is my country. My brother said to me recently that he doesn't feel he has a country, that being born somewhere within certain invisible limits does not give him a sense of belonging. Who he is comes from his friends and family and the decisions he makes.

I understand that. And yet that green, it belongs to me.

Funny how although I wasn't born in these mountains, and have rarely been here, I seem to have an old old memory of them. Funny how it feels like coming home.