BLINDSPOT

By Cláir Ní Aonghusa

I’ve lived in a small, secluded cul-de-sac on a narrow road not far from Dublin’s city centre for over thirty years. My husband and I reared two sons in this house, and now it’s just the two of us.

The locality is a settled area. Fourteen semi-detached houses line either side of our street, with a mix of house styles. The houses themselves date from the 1920s, ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s. The expanded villages of Rathgar and Rathmines are close by, as are parks and a river walk, amenities that provide welcome respite for locals chafing under restrictions imposed during our 2020 Covid 19 lockdown. I’ve always been ambivalent about living here, almost as if it’s a stopping point, until I figure out something better.

As a child I was passionately devoted to my parents’ home village in Tipperary, loving holidays there and weekend trips to visit family. My connection to the place meant so much that I used to wish I had been born there, and, years later, I even took to describing myself as a hybrid.

In my teens, I temporarily transferred my allegiance to the Gaeltacht (Gaelic speaking) area of Corca Dhuibhne in the stunningly beautiful Dingle peninsula in Kerry. My dream of living there came to grief when I realised how difficult it would be to make a living there, and I balked at the financial risks I would have to take.

When our children were growing up, my loyalty swung back to the village of Ballyporeen. Within a decade, first my father, and then my mother, died, and I inherited the house in which he had grown up. I don’t know if Daddy used the traditional Irish chat-up line, “Would you like to be buried with my people?” when he proposed to my mother, but that’s where, after decades of living in Dublin, the two of them ended up.

Last year, very reluctantly, I parted with my lovely little village house. It was a difficult decision, and quite a wrench, but we weren’t using it enough to justify keeping it on. The whole process resembled a bereavement, and I mourned the loss of my ancestral abode, the place I considered to be my true spiritual home. I found myself regretting that, when I die, I won’t be buried there.

I’ve always liked my Dublin neighbourhood. Everyone’s friendly, and we greet each other easily. In September we have our annual Neighbours’ Night party. During the Covid lockdown, people have been having long conversations on the street or calling across to each other from their front gardens.

Last Friday, a physically distanced outdoor drinks party took place on the street. David and I were in a room at the back of our house and didn’t hear anything. We found out about it when one of the neighbours asked David if we’d been at it. When our neighbour heard that we didn’t know about it, he urged David to give him our mobile numbers, so that we could be added to the road’s WhatsApp group. The following day my phone started to ping with WhatsApp messages welcoming new neighbours onto the road. Suddenly I realised that, while lamenting the loss of my community in Tipperary, I’d somehow overlooked a ready-made community on my own Dublin doorstep.

In all the time they lived in our capital city, my parents kept themselves at a remove from their day-to-day surroundings. Reserved and watchful, they were never fully at ease with neighbours. They clung to an idealised version of a long-ago past in a different location. The lure of this place that, in theory, they longed to return to, never lost its grip on them.

As the child of two ‘Culchie’*(*anyone from outside Dublin) blow-ins, I bought into the myth that my ‘real’ home was somewhere else, and believed that communities flourish only in rural areas, or in small villages and towns. My Dublin neighbours have always been perfectly friendly and open, but I took on the role of a semi-detached protagonist by engaging with them only superficially.

The 2020 Covid 19 lockdown has exposed as fanciful my prejudice that people who live in cities can’t connect with each other in any meaningful way as their origins are so disparate. Equally deluded was my presumption that such people simply aren’t interested in their neighbours. Later today, when I go to drop a letter into the post box at the end of our road, I’ll be keeping an eye out. You’d never know who I might meet!

© Cláir Ní Aonghusa 2020. All copyright reserved by the author

Cláir Ní Aonghusa was born in Dublin where she still lives. She is a writer, teacher and lecturer. Her short stories have been published widely. Her published novels are ‘Four Houses & A Funeral’ (Poolbeg 1997) and ‘Civil & Strange’ (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2008, and Penguin Ireland 2009). She is currently completing a memoir about what she learned when she made the difficult decision to sell her father's family home, twenty-three years after inheriting it, and how she feels now that it's gone. Cláir may be reached at clairniaonghusa@gmail.com