Photographs cannot give you the whole of it. As evocative as they can be, there are too many other human experiences that the eyes alone cannot capture.
As good as the camera on my amazing hand-held minicomputer is, it cannot capture the sounds of an ancient Irish castle: A rhythmic drip of water coming through the stone ceiling, single drops slapping into a puddle in the foot-worn rock floor beneath our feet. A stout middle-aged man smacks the soles of his feet on wooden stairs, purposeful and full of misplaced ego. The slow steps create a haunting feeling against the echoing laughter of a woman in the chamber above us. The cold circular stone staircase in the turret leads to the great hall, where secret conversations can be heard from across the room. Strands of light from slivers of windows streak across heavy tapestries hanging on the walls. The thick woven fibers don’t do much to mitigate the sound bouncing off rock walls, floors, and ceilings.
Once outside, into the damp warm spring air of April in Ireland, we hear the gravel beneath our feet turn soft and quiet as the pathway turns a gentler shade of spongy brown. We hear the squeak and rumble of a wheelbarrow loaded with peat which has been pressed into dark brown bricks. The worker whistles as he shovels the peat into puddles along the path. He pierces the brick with his spade and spreads it around. The thirsty mulch sucks-in the water and obliterates the puddle.
My hand reaches up along the thick stone fence around the castle grounds, behind which a large multi-tipped buck and two doe graze on the castle lawn. My hand springs back from the cold of the rock wall, then returns to gently brush the soft short cropped moss that grows along the tops, flowing down the sides like the hair of an Emerald Princess. It feels like the Spring herself gave the aging stone wall a fresh new crewcut.
I can show you a photograph of tall leafless trees, but it would not give you the piercing caw of pitch-black crows swooping in and out of their winter worn branches, pregnant with new life and almost ready to burst. The absence of leaves makes the village of nests clearly visible to the humans below. A still shot would not give you the comical dance of a hen bobbing her head as she meanders across the street and into a hedgerow.
 |
| You would not know these nests are here once the leaves burst out. |
Pictures cannot create the staccato and bend of the treble tones on the strings of a fiddler. We could hear him from the distance as we rounded the bend in the road of the old village outside the castle, an unfamiliar melody with the cadence of an Irish jig.
I need words to explain the chill in the early spring air, nipping at the tip of your nose.
There’s a hunker-down feeling I get when I walk through a town scented with woodsmoke. Though I tried to catch it, my simple camera would not capture the smoke rising from chimneys all around the village. The scent is the most beautiful and charming to me, more so than any flowers, except perhaps lilacs and hyacinths. I smell woodsmoke and I somehow feel home. Imagine being lost in the woods and smelling smoke coming from somewhere. Would you not follow that scent to the safety of some safe little cottage. (this is how scenes unfold in my sleeping hours. I rarely go to war in my dreams.)
 |
| Each home, from the tiniest laborer's cottage to the castle had fires to warm them. I could not capture the smell of the woodsmoke. |
Furthermore, a snapshot could not give you the waltz of white sheets hanging on the clothesline outside your Irish B and B, or the morning sunlight streaming over the green valley and through your bedroom window. It cannot record the faint clanging in the kitchen below, or the aroma of sausage and rashers wafting up the stairs. Nor would it offer the tang of malt vinegar shaken onto a thick crisp piece of deep fried cod in a roadside chippie.
This photograph cannot come close to the sacred marriage of a crisp schoolboy apple caught between a set of teeth, with a nice chunk of creamy Irish Bleu cheese going in at the same time. Or a hefty chunk of shortbread melting like butter in your mouth, or the satisfying blend of butter and sugar in Thorntons toffee.
If I could, I would add to my photographs the laughter of children racing through the streets, in and out of shops, bending at their little waists to squeeze past old crooked pensioners, or sitting in pretend mode at century old school desks - girls on one side, boys on the other.
No selfie could give you the ache in my legs, being unprepared for so much walking, so much standing, so much climbing steep castle stairs. Or the uneasy feeling of first driving a car in the UK, steering from the opposite side of the car, turning wide and illogically as you repeat in your head, keep left… keep left! Or the shifting of your body back and forth right and left as you drive through narrow hilly, uneven roads and roundabouts.
This photograph cannot show you the acrid tinge of tar and coal smoke in the nostril and the clanging of the blacksmiths hammer, followed by the sizzle of hot pounded iron being dipped in water.
No matter how lovely it may look, a piece of paper will not offer the rush and the ripple of waters cutting through a grassy hillside, or the gurgle where it springs up through the soil. I can snap a photo of the Irish hillside through the car window, but what you won’t know is the warmth of long-awaited sunshine through the car window after a long cold winter. Or the brilliance of the shades of blue in the skies above.
There is a cold nip at the end of your nose, responding from winter trying for spring. And the happy way your nose feels inside, all hydrated and calm, so different from desert dryness in the thin air altitudes of home. I give in to the frizzy texture of my hair. There’s no use fighting the moisture in the air. Having grown up in the humidity of the eastern US, it feels familiar, in an unruly child sort of way.
No photograph can show you the sacred sound of your sister’s voice after a separation too long. The divine touch of her lips on your cheek and her arms round your shoulders. Nor can it truly represent the steadiness of the arm of someone you love, and who loves you, reaching out to reassure the safety of your steps.
And only the holiest of pictures and words can whisper the tender reunion of old friends, meeting once again in a Welsh hospital room. One of us is headed home soon. And in the not-too-distant future, the other is headed Home as well.
Of all we have experienced on this beautiful journey across the sea, nothing can match our experience in that dark little hospital room tonight. Quiet songs and warm rich tears and weary lips repeating "I can't believe you came." The gentle hand of a faithful daughter across the bed from me, and the love of a sister far, far away shining through the screen of a video conference call.
It seems to me no accident at all that we are in this pocket of the earth at this time, when none of us could have known how thin the veil would be for us as it parts for her. It felt like a holy witness, on this Good Friday, that the darkest of days will be followed by light. Godspeed, dear Jenn.
