Dear Nobody Too,

Remember how I used to write a "Letter From Home" for the Clifden web site? I left off more than a year ago -- I guess I felt more reflective and less like talking, for a while, and this fitted in very well with being out on my bike, and spending an afternoon or evening trying my luck with the fly rod. Lately I’ve also spent some time reading over Emily Dickinson, and this has gotten me interested in writing these letters again.

I think I might sound a little different now, though. One of the poems that I thought about a lot begins "I’m nobody -- Who are you?/ Are you nobody too?" Well I’m comfortable being that nobody, it seems to fit my sense of myself, and I thought that since I’m Nobody, the very person I would want to talk with is Nobody Too. As to how I would talk, well, her poem "This is my letter to the world/ That never wrote to me" seemed emblematic, as I could wish nothing better for myself than to pass on the simple news that Nature told.

I’ve been out on my bike nearly every day through the winter. I was out today, and I can only report that yesterday’s bright afternoon has done away with the light dusting of snow on the upper reaches of the Bens that I noticed that morning. The signs of spring are few -- bird song, some yellow flowers on the furze along the roadside, and the daffodils that Brother Oswald planted along the road near the Community School are up, showing a hopeful green, and white at the tops where the flowers will be.

There was a pub quiz at Mannion’s last night -- Mary Hession, Timmy Gough, Gavin Lavelle and I made up a team. It was hosted by TnaG, the Irish language television station; the questions were given in Irish and English over the telly, and of course there’s a telly in all the pubs. Four hundred pubs in the country took part and staff in each pub kept their own score. I don’t know what score you needed to go through to the next round -- we came in fourth at Mannion’s, and I’m sure we were nowhere near good enough to go through, but we were happy enough with that because the questions were quite hard.

Fishing season begins this week end, so I’ll be off again to the lakes to amuse, and possibly catch, some trout. So you could be on the Bog Road and see what appears to be something like a whiskery Emily Dickinson, wearing wellies and riding a mountain bike, with a fly rod lashed to the top tube -- but it would only be me, in search of trout and the simple news.

Now maybe I’ll get a shower of e-mail from intimidatingly learned Mount Holyoke undergraduates, assuring me with lofty contempt that Emily was handier with a fly rod than I’ll ever be.

Love,
Nobody