Chapter 3: The Teaspoon

Almost as soon as I offer to put my new neighbour Etain up for the night or until the power to her cottage is restored and the place aired and cleaned up, I realise that the spare room I have offered for her use is filled with what Caoimhe would consider ‘junk’. But all that stuff is my stock in trade, broken servers which I could strip for spares, Ethernet leads, connectors, screens, printers, manuals and files. We did have some limited storage in the house but mostly it is a tiny room upstairs next to my daughter’s bedroom, and only accessed through her room, next to her own little bathroom in the eaves of the cottage.

Our pair of cottages was originally a single cottage built, as far as our former neighbour Katie knew, about 200 years ago as a single room 20 foot square, with walls made of mud, cow dung and straw topped by a straw roof, sitting in arable land of about four acres. By 1870, which was how far back the local history society had transcribed old rent books donated to the library, it was then stated the pair of cottage was now 80 feet wide, 20 foot deep and equally split into two dwellings down the middle, although the land had been split three acres on Etain’s side and one acre on ours. The actual deeds of the property dated only from 1922, the originals presumably lost and needed to be submitted for registration to the new Irish Free State.

According to the deeds, by the 1920s the original walls had been lined with concrete render and the straw roof replaced by concrete tiles. Each cottage had incorporated a shared porch in the front and a butted up kitchen scullery and bathroom/privy across half the width of the back.

As newly-weds my wife and I wanted to move out of Cork to somewhere within an hour of Cork and Ella fell in love with this cottage even though it was an hour and twenty minutes away from my work by train. It was very reasonably priced so we mortgaged ourselves up to the hilt and were able to built into the loft space. This extra room upstairs becomes our master bedroom with en-suite bath and second bedroom with en-suite power shower and storage space in the eaves at the end. Downstairs we knocked down the scullery and across the 40-foot width built in a new kitchen, a garden room and downstairs bathroom. The original sitting room had doors leading to the front door and porch, the kitchen and the original bedroom, which was turned into a spare room with a double bed and fitted wardrobes.

Etain’s cottage next door had replaced their scullery with a new 20 foot square kitchen but is still a single storey one-bedroom bungalow.

Our spare room is regularly used by my parents, every summer they would come over for two weeks from Florida, waiting until outside the normal school holidays to catch cheap fares. My eldest sibling Monica and her two children came every other year, all she could afford since her divorce in 2015. My brother Don, wife Lou and two young boys come here for between 5 and 10 days every summer. But these visits were planned in advance and I was always able to clear out the accumulation into the storage behind Caoimhe’s room in plenty of time for those visits. I had blow-up mattresses for the children but quite often, if the weather was good, they were happy to camp out in a tent on the lawn.

“Right, I say, as we enter our part of the building, “Caoimhe, if you order the Chinese food for us first, then show Etain around the place and put the kettle on for tea, while I clear out my rubbish from the spare room and put fresh linens on the bed.”

There, I’ve admitted that most of the stuff I keep in there is rubbish. The truth will seek us out, they say.

I run up the stairs to fetch the folded cartons I keep for the purpose, a roll of tape and a Sharpie, actually a locally-made magic marker. When I get downstairs, while I was looking out the packaging and Caoimhe ordered the take-out and made the tea, Etain had already tidied up the room on her own.

I am speechless, the bed itself, usually the first drop-off point for additions to the room, is clear and looks freshly made. Along the wall furthest away from the front window, the servers are stacked together, as are the half-dozen flat screens, the manuals and files together, discs in two stacks, and the leads neatly rolled and on the floor at the end of the stacks.

I manage a stuttered, “How...?”

To which Etain replies with a smirk, “A woman’s work is never done ... never done by halves, Richard. I’ve been doing housework all my life. Leave the boxes there, I’ll pack them up for you after tea.”

“No,” I insist, “you’re a guest here. So, Caoimhe and I will pack them up and take them upstairs.”

She smiles, “Why don’t we all help clear that stuff away? We’ll get it finished quicker and I won’t feel uncomfortable being waited on when you are already being kind to allow me to stay.”