Day 13: Westport Bound (in more ways than one)

Before I fell asleep last night, I was thinking about a conversation I had with an older man in a pub last time we were here.  He wouldn't accept my claim that you can miss a place or a landscape.  He said, "You can only miss people, never a place."  But he had never left Ireland. 

 

In my blog yesterday I referred to our first Dublin-Westport train trip last February, where I was nervously hoping we'd done the right thing.  Yesterday on our train trip, I was excited to be heading back to Westport but was also a little nervous: was it really as wonderful and lovely as we'd remembered it? Were we over-romanticizing it?  One glimpse of the town from the taxi window told me it was everything we'd remembered it to be.  We were welcomed back by the kind inn staff and our room had been upgraded to a top floor harbour view room.  My iPhone picked up the wireless like an old friend.  The feel of the key in the lock, the weight of the door in my hands, the sound of the wooden floors were all beautifully familiar.  We put our things where we stored them last year and went out to buy a few groceries.  Walking to the grocery store, our feet were on autopilot and once at the store, I remembered where everything was shelved.  I couldn't recall what it was but I remembered there was a snack I liked on a particular shelf and went to look for it: aha: organic dark orange and chocolate rice cakes (80 calories: "organics for the real world").  On the way back from the grocery, I remembered where a neat little bit of graffiti had been and was happy to see it was still there.  We put in a load of laundry last night: to confirm how little has changed, we are still baffled by this odd combination washer dryer.  Although there are probably better ways to do this, a small load takes 2 hours and comes out steamy but not dry (wondering if one could also make rice in this machine?).  But no matter: I can't tell you how happy I am to be writing at the same dining room table as I wrote at last spring, though with a harbour view this time and Croagh Patrick viewable from our little balcony.  

While it was wonderful to connect with all the tangible, physical, concrete things of Westport and our lives here last spring, perhaps the best part of our return last night was connecting with our friends D and J.  It seemed like no time at all had passed.  We had a few drinks, went for Indian food that we've been craving for months, stopped at another couple of pubs, heard some music, and laughed a lot.  J posted a picture of us at dinner last night and commented that it all "just felt so right."  It really did.  Last night was the first time I've had a full night's sleep since we left Windsor two weeks ago.  Maybe it's because it feels so much like home.