Our ordered take-out arrives before we clear any of my garbage from the spare bedroom downstairs. As a break from my cooking, a regular couple of Friday treats a month for Caoimhe is to dine on a take-out ordered in.
It arrives hot and ready to serve and means that there’s only a couple of plates and sets of cutlery to load into the washer, no pots or pans to bother with and no missing ingredients that I didn’t know were missing until well into the food prep. Yeah, it happens a lot, we have had some odd dinner combos over my daughter’s short life. So I guess take-out every other Friday is a real treat for us both.
Today it is Chinese food from Qian Kee, always generous portions and this evening it seems that Caoimhe has cell-ordered enough for three that is actually double our normal order, including a couple of dishes we’d never included before.
We only have a small breakfast table in the kitchen, the house is still small even after extending it to more than double its original size, so the dining area is in a corner of the kitchen and what you would call cozy, especially with little table-top space left for plates amongst all these aluminum cartons. After I fill up three glasses of water from the kitchen tap for us, there was little space left for elbow room.
I always use chopsticks for Chinese food, I was brought up using them naturally back home. El used to eat Chinese from a blue porcelain bowl that sits in the dresser long unused, because I was brought up to use round dinner plates. Caoimhe is strictly a right-handed fork user for everything except soup, a habit formed copying me at home before they unsuccessfully tried to reeducate her in Irish two-handed table manners at school dinners.
Yeah, school dinners not lunches, that gets me every time. Over here in Ireland ‘lunch time’ in the middle of the school day is always referred to as ‘dinner time’; now that’s Irish, who would’ve guessed?
So, Caoimhe sets the table with the plates and cutlery, I get my chopsticks and Etain is given a fork to use. Our guest watches me with interest as I overconfidently grapple with a sweet and sour pork ball completely dunked and redunked until completely smothered in sweet sticky sauce with my favourite chopsticks and promptly miss my mouth completely and drop it with a sloppy ‘plop!’ into my lap.
Smooth, Richard, really smooth. Show up the whole family to a stranger as damn slobs why don’t you?
Of course my daughter thinks my clumsiness is a total hoot and makes no attempt at maintaining any decorum in front of a stranger.
Caoimhe almost spits out her mouthful of masticated egg noodles, swallows it quickly and laughs so loud and long that her puffed cheeks are tracked by runs of salty tears.
Then she laughs even more as I pick up the hot rogue pork ball with the fingers of my left hand and drop it onto my plate like a hot potato and immediately suck my sticky fingers, not so much for the taste but because the lava-hot sugary sauce has really burned my fingers after the pork ball had made its presence felt, and not residing too comfortably I might add, in my lap.
Etain regards me with an amused look on her face, then she looks at my helplessly amused daughter and she starts to laugh herself.
"I’ve an ointment in my bag for your burned fingers," she states helpfully between what I have to admit are delightfully childish giggles, "Do you want me to fetch it?"
"No, I’ll be fine," I reply as I use a paper napkin, rather ineffectually, on spreading the sticky stain on the front of my pants but at least lifting the stained cloth with a pinch of my sore fingertips so the sauce’s heat stops conducting to more delicate parts fleshwise. "I’ll just go change my pants, won’t be long."
I can hear the unchecked laughter as I ascend the stairs to my bedroom, Caoimhe’s raucous high notes, Etain’s deeper, softer giggles and, probably, punctuated by my daughter’s rhythmic slapping of the table with the flat of her hand, the orchestration clearly a soundtrack to a father’s total self-embarrassment.
But hey, aren’t fathers put on this earth to amuse and entertain their munchkins and, by association, their sleepover guests?
I’m only gone for a minute or three. By the time I get back the conversation is more excited than amused between them as Caoimhe is showing Etain something interesting on the tablet that she normally uses for school. They both look up at my arrival and regard me with smiles, of amusement on one side and what seems more like pity on the other.
Ice cream for dessert or "afters" seems to be a new experience for our guest, she appears in raptures over every mouthful of Murphy’s sea salt flavor, Caoimhe having consumed all the less-adult flavors in the chest freezer without telling me we’d run out.
After putting the Chinese leftovers away in the frig, for Saturday lunch, no waste in our house ever, and leaving the dishes in the washer for tomorrow, we sit and visit in the sitting room.
While I had dealt with the dishes, the girls had swiftly boxed up and stowed all my junk from Etain’s room into the storeroom upstairs.
I watch the news on the gogglebox but the two girls are shoulder to shoulder on Caoimhe’s tablet, talking in whispers, then Etain takes over control of it. Kids today just seem to take tech in their stride. They’re probably playing an educational game.
It’s a tablet she needs for school, it has teacher/parental controls so it cannot access sites designated for adults, or download commercial games, but some of the educational games for early years do have a certain charm and I was impressed when she first got it programmed at school two or three years ago. It came in handy when school was in total Covid lockdown.
The kids are supposed to be limited to a certain amount of online time each day, I think it’s six hours a day, but a long time ago when I noticed she was still using it at home during a long lockdown day without having to pause its use for hours at a time, she explained that when her time expired, she was offered a 15-minute extension, which she accepted and, fiddling with the set-up she discovered she could force it to give her unlimited 15-minute extensions … so much for parental controls!
Towards Caoimhe’s Friday bedtime, extended by an hour to nine o’clock, the tablet has been put away and the girls’ talk is about bee hives, with Etain promising to show my daughter how to weave a traditional Irish skep in the morning.
While I watch the news I half-listen to their conversation which is interesting. I never knew that the Patron Saint of Bees was an Irishman called St Modomnóc.
“I’ve never heard of him," I say.
"He was the missionary that first brought bees to Ireland," Caoimhe says with confidence, looking at me with the chin-up superiority of a youngster speaking to an idiot adult, but she wavers when glancing at Etain’s raised left eyebrow, she rallies with, "we learned that at school."
Etain smiles gently, quite sweetly, "To be sure, Dominic O’Neill did bring Welsh bees over with him on his return to Ireland, after training as a missionary with St David, but bees were here for at least a hundred bliain before him. And St Gobnait was also patron saint of bees before Modomnóc. No wonder Gobnait was spending so much time talking to bees, though, she was the ugliest woman you ever saw, or so people have said about her; her nose was so sharp Caoimhe, your father could have used her face to shave every morning as her nose was a blade as sharp as the rest of her looks were dull. Becoming an abbess of a convent was a necessity for her, it was not by choice.”
With Caoimhe off to bed at nine, Etain wants to retire too, so I look out a new tooth brush for her. While finding that in my bathroom, I quietly remind Caoimhe to lock her bedroom door, with a stranger in the house, which she does without any complaint. We both have our own bathrooms, although her electric pump shower was inside the bathtub.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
The downstairs bathroom is where the old scullery used to be on the back of the house, behind the sitting room. Once Etain goes to bed in the room on the other side of the sitting room, I retire to my bedroom to sleep. It would’ve felt uncomfortable staying in the sitting room watching TV. Besides I am tired, I haven’t entertained anyone at home since at least six months before Covid changed everything.
***
I wake early in the morning to the delicious smell of fresh baked bread. We’ve never made bread before. I am up before Caoimhe, but then I’m always up before her. I rub the sleep from my eyes and throw on a tee and shorts.
Etain is in the kitchen, plating up three plates with chopped runny eggs, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, and hot buttered toast. I look at the cooker, none of the electric rings are showing hot which is odd. She looks up and smiles.
"Good morning, Richard, our break fast meal is nearly ready. Would you rouse Caoimhe, please?"
"Yeah sure," I say.
As I turn I see the three place settings are laid with tea already poured in the mugs. I don’t want to spoil it by saying I always have coffee, but, hey, I could put up with drinking hot mud every morning if it means a traditional cooked breakfast that I haven’t cooked for myself.
"Keef, you up yet, honey?" I hiss through her bedroom door.
It unlocks immediately, she knows it’s me, as if she’s waited for me to knock. She’s washed, dressed and almost jumping up and down excited as all out.
"Hi, Daddy," she greets me, kissing me lightly on the cheek with her hands on my shoulders. "I kept my door locked all night and we’re both still alive. Guess we can be a little more cool tomorrow night, huh?"
"Sure, honey," I chuckle, "I guess she checks out. Breakfast is ready and Etain’s done the whole nine yards."
We get downstairs and Etain is sitting at the table where she sat last night, we take the same seats as before.
"Good morning, Etain," I say with a smile, “I must thank you for this fantastic spread. I hope you slept well, you must’ve got up at the crack of dawn to do all this magnificent spread."
"I always wake at dawn," she smiles in return, "I found the eggs, bacon and sausages in the pantry, the buttermilk for the bread I got from the farm and I can usually sniff out mushrooms in the wood, even this early."
"Er, wild mushrooms, er, are you sure?" I ask tentatively, knowing I wouldn’t know a mushroom from a toadstool and I’d poison us for sure.
"Daddy, Etain knows an edible mushroom when she sees one," Caoimhe’s eyes roll back in her head. She’s been doing that to me a lot recently.
"Aye, of course," ships in Etain, "and I must get some chickens as soon as possible, so we can have our own eggs."
‘Our own eggs?’ I think to myself a little worriedly. It’s been just me and Caoimhe against the world like, forever.
"So where did you cook all this, the kitchen’s virtually spotless?" I ask.
"After checking what breakfast foods you had in the pantry, the one with the light in it, there were none of the fixings needed for soda bread. Sure, the bacon and sausage was there, but no blood pudding, so I checked er, Aunt Katie’s kitchen and found some plain flour still sound, lots of dried herbs and of course the soda, so I took a can over to the farm behind us for some buttermilk, which was no problem as they were up just as early with fresh milk to spare and were happy to oblige. Then I passed back homewards through the woods and found the mushrooms. Oh! Guess what else I found?"
"A faerie ring?" Caoimhe suggested rather hopefully.
"Almost. I spotted a faerie rath deep in the wood, completely overgrown. And to think Aunt Katie never let on it was there. If I’d known, it would’ve saved me a walk."
"What’s a ‘fairy rath’, Etain?" asks Caoimhe quickly.
"It could be a number of things," Etain replies, "It could be a doras na sióg, a faerie door into the Otherworld, or a burial ground, or even a place where a defensive fort was built. This one is big, on a very slight rise, with fallen stones quite far apart, with hawthorn, blackthorn, whitethorn and hazel planted there, both inside and out, growing so thick that the rath’s well hid."
"Well," I say, "I’ve not heard any fairy music or seen naked cavorting going on around here. I might’ve been interested in visiting otherwise."
"And have you been in the woods, deep into the two acres of woods, Richard, all alone, and precisely at the middle point of the dark night?"
"No fear, I really don’t believe in fairies, but I know what would put the fear up me, and it’s being in dark woods at night. I’m a city boy and those woods behind your place are dark, with slippery deep green moss everywhere. I’d instantly lose my sense of direction and if I slipped over and broke something I’d end up probably haunting the place for the next thousand years."
"That doesn’t sound so bad, Richard," Etain smirks, "you’d get used to it, I’m sure."
"But who would look after the munchkin here, while I rattle chains, shelter under a white sheet and howl at the moon like a werewolf?"
"We girls would be all right, we could stick together, couldn’t we, Caoimhe?"
"Yes, Daddy, we’d cope," Caoimhe grins at me, "just think, I could have cooked breakfast with toast every Saturday."
"Every day," Etain says, "gotta start every day right you know. The most important meal of the day."
"And that, young lady, brings me back to cooking this breakfast," I jump in, "You must’ve used Katie’s cooker. Did you manage to get the power turned on next door?"
"Power? Only the power of kindling and tinder, Richard. I lit the fire next door, filled the kettle using the spigot like thing in your kitchen, and hooked the kettle on the chains in the fireplace to boil. I mixed the flour, salt and soda with the buttermilk—"
"From the farm, yes. You know, I’ve never found Farmer Cormack very helpful. I don’t think he likes Americans."
"Oh, Carrick’s a pussycat," Etain scoffed.
‘So, she knows the farmer and is on first name terms already’ I think.
"He was getting the cows in ready to milk and I asked nicely and he gave me all the milk I needed. When I mentioned straw, he even pointed out where I could help myself to straw for my skeps, because he usually uses shredded paper in the horse stalls nowadays. Carrick was interested in seeing the finished skeps. Anyway, I’ll keep the fire going next door which means we’ll always have hot water for tea."
"So you boiled the kettle for the tea on the fire?"
"Yes. And I put the lid of the oven on the fire to heat up, so after I mixed the soda bread dough I formed it into a ball, the size of a football, cut a deep cross in the top, and popped it into the oven and hung it over the fire and put the heated lid on, covered it in coals, so it cooks quickly, takes about 20 minutes. In the other oven—"
"Also on the fire?"
"Aye, there’s one iron bar across over the fire and three chains hanging down, one for the kettle that’s always on, one for the bread and one for everything else. You see, Richard, I don’t need electrickery when it’s daylight and anyone who keeps bees always has candles at night and I have the fire for cooking."
"The eggs and the toast?" I ask,
"Soft boiled them in their shells with hot water from the kettle long enough to cook the white but leave the yolk runny. Plated it all up in here, shelled and cut the eggs to release the yolk and toasted the bread on your living room fire which I had lit before I left. I used Kaetlynn’s toasting forks, you don’t seem to have any."
"I can’t believe how you managed all that," I shake my head in disbelief.
"I can believe it, Daddy," chimed up Caoimhe.
"Not only that, Richard, but I also made a start on the first of my skeps, after I found Kaetlynn had set out some blackberry fibres she had already spun into thread. She was always better at spinning than me, and Bebhinn makes better skeps than me but they’ll be grand when they’re done."
"Well, I think this breakfast is fantastic, thank you," I say, credit due where it’s due, but a young girl taking the old spinster cat lady lifestyle a bit too seriously was worrying to a shallow guy like me.
***
The fairy fort thing is disappointing.
We visit it mid-morning after I finally managed to get through to the power company to get them to switch it on remotely, but they had to do it from their local junction box and that would not be until Monday.
So I invite Etain to stay with us Saturday and Sunday nights, which she accepts.
As for the fairy fort, honestly, it is all moss-covered stones here and there, lots of dense undergrowth and dark trees completely blanking out the sunlight. If there were ever naked cavorting fairies dancing, I wouldn’t even be able to see much of them in broad daylight. As I said, disappointing.
I warm up the Chinese left-overs in the microwave and we eat more of Etain’s wonderful buttery soda bread for a simple lunch.
I try to tell Caoimhe how Etain’s soda bread is a traditional Irish method of making bread which does away with laborious kneading the dough and using yeast to aerate the dough before cooking, the addition of acid in the buttermilk reacting with the alkaline of the soda creates the bubbles in the dough and the heat of cooking enlarges those bubbles. "A traditional Irish tradition that has probably lasted thousands of years," I add.
"It’s not an Irish method at all, to be sure," Etain points out, "it’s from the American Indians. They’ve been using soda for centuries. It was Irish settlers returning home to Ireland that brought the recipe here, around 1830 I think. But we have made it our own ever since."
I have online work to do in the early afternoon after our lunch, so Etain offers to show Caoimhe how to make skeps. My daughter is keen, so I agree to leave Etain in charge.
I’m finished checking servers remotely by half four in the afternoon so, before starting our evening meal, steak, corn cobs and hot dogs on the BBQ, I check on Caoimhe. She’s in the next door back yard and I’m amazed, they’ve woven a dozen bee hives between them and set them into the garden wall.
I just thought it was simply decoration in the dry walling behind the house but there were spaces in the walls in which the funny, round-topped straw bee hives are fitted into. I went over to the nearest to check it out and I can hear buzzing and then I see bees flying out and off to find nectar for the nest.
"How the hell," I ask, "did you not only weave these hives today, but manage to attract swarms of bees each with a queen?"
"Oh, we had help from the faeries," Caoimhe says with a know-it-all smirk on her face.
‘Really?" I say, turning away to sort out the evening meal, "and how many of them were dancing naked?"
"Not a one," Etain replies, with a matching female smirk, "but patience, Richard, it’s nowhere near the middle of the night yet."