It’s that time of the year again here on the wild west coast when it is not only our feathered friends who fly south away from the wind and the rain.
Although while the swallows and the swifts, the house martins and the arctic terns have already fled for fairer climes, there are still a few flocks of the visiting human species filling our hotels and guesthouses.
They are mainly silver surfers who are not curtailed by the temporal demands of a working life, their retirement lump sums allowing them to discover the untamed beauty of the wild west of Ireland: Americans disgorging from cruise ships in Cobh; wide-eyed tourists being guided around the higgledy-piggledy streets of Kinsale; nervous French drivers crossing through the boggy frontiers of stone-pocked Connemara en route to Clifden and Westport.
May God bless this Indian summer and its tentative, and undoubtedly transient, hold on the weather gods. As the old people used to say so wisely: “Let it keep the dew on the grass and then no rain will come to pass.” Which, as it happens, coheres with my circumstances at the moment.
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I am writing here from my sylvan idyll in the suburbs of Westport and the vista through my window is offering blue skies and lush green trees. There is a cheeky robin peeping through the violas in a window box and the garden next door is singing to the hum of a lawnmower.
This sunshine is like a breath of fresh air challenging the usual seasonal changes which, with one gust of wind or hailstone shower, dismiss the frivolities of summer, blow the rich autumnal hues to kingdom come, augur the imminence of Samhain and its banshee ghosts.
As a celebration of this unseasonal sunshine, I plan to head to town very soon, indulge in an alfresco coffee while engaging in some most satisfactory tourist-watching. Always for the sake of science.
Before I even leave the house and put up my parasol, I can confirm that all the young families from the cluttered satellites of our capital city vanished back across the Shannon and up the M50 during the last week of August.
Instead of making sandcastles on Bertra beach or kayaking out from Sandycove in Kinsale, they are on the dawn to dusk merry-go-round of school lunches and camogie classes, ballet lessons and homework, work conferences and NCT appointments.
Life is just a whirlwind of buses and trams, washing machines and dryers, batch-baking and Saturday evening sundowners.
The maelstrom brought by each day is only bearable because they managed to book the midterm-break holiday – I know, I know, it is still September – during that Aer Lingus sale last spring.
Naturally, it is for somewhere abroad. Somewhere with a bit of sunshine, where there are activities for the kids, and loungers by the pool for the mammies and daddies who have been flittered by the exigencies of every day life: the cost of living, ordering oil, praying that there is something for them in the budget.
On the positive side, though, they’ll be sipping margaritas at resorts in the Algarve or Tenerife, Disneyland Paris or Gran Canaria.
And would you blame them? I ask myself as I now sit here in the sunshine sipping my decaf coffee and gluten-free brownie.
However, will it be that bad when the rain and the wind arrives?
After all we live in a relatively safe and rich country despite the fact that we are being fed a daily diet of doom and gloom that, in its latest incarnation, is being dominated by the ominous impacts of artificial intelligence, the straits of the Middle East and dire straits, medieval monuments to an orange oompa-loompa and predetermined election results from a vast morass of land where Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova once railed against Stalinism by weaving the magic of poetry, even across the minus-30 degrees snow-covered steppes, depicted in Dr Zhivago.
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No matter how vibrant my imagination may be, I am not feeling the cold here at the moment. Instead, I’m curious about the etymology of the term Indian summer. Seemingly, one theory is that 18th century New England settlers believed the transience of this weather phenomenon mimicked the unpredictability of the native “Indians”, while another suggests this short period of warm weather would allow the native tribes to increase their winter stores.
A more equitable description of an Indian summer was written in November 1922 in the Omaha World-Herald by Sandy Griswold, a celebrated writer and journalist.
He observes that “the characteristics of the season, when it appears in all its glory, are a mild and genial temperature, gentle southwestern breezes, unusual brightness of the sun, extreme brilliancy of the moon, a clear blue sky”.
More than a century later, even if the rain clouds are gathering over the horizon, or even if this winter will brew up a storm or two, isn’t it uplifting to know that there are still days like this?
