My hair, unbound, lashed at my face; long tendrils getting stuck in the crease of my mouth. Jon, two steps behind, put a hand to his hat as he looked up at me when I shouted to ask if he'd locked the door to our room. He ran by me jingling the keys in answer, and I followed his lead, the noise of our shoes crunching gravel barely audible over the swirling trees. We reached the steps together and the force of the wind blew us through the massive wooden doors like a couple of forgotten receipts. Our friends already waited in the foyer.
The storm pushed hard at the doors, trying to force its way inside with us, as I finally managed to pull the rusty latch back down into place. Immediately the warm air wrapped around me like an embrace, stinging my frozen cheeks. In the thick quiet, piano keys tinkled somewhere in the next room. A woman's light laughter, hushed conversations, the clinking of glass; all sounds were murmured by the plush carpet under our feet, aging floor boards creaking beneath our weight. We looked around, astonished by the antiquated yet lush interior.
A countless array of ancient family photographs, paintings, and personal paraphernalia hang from nails on the cherry red wallpaper. A large dusty painting holds the suggested lines of castle ruins looming up behind an early morning flight of geese. Below that, a small color photograph of a man and woman catches my eye. He sits on a silver barrel, his bushy brown hair and beard are haphazard, a little wild. His glasses glint in the bright sun. She sits below him on yellowed grass, middle aged, but there is beauty in the shape of her face, and they both hold a glass of something liquid, perhaps from the barrel. Together they give the impression of ambitious confidence gleaned from the fading strength of youth. Maybe they are lovers. What is their story?
I am wondering, lost in thought when a man appears from the kitchen. He is slightly stooped by time, his tweed suit is out of date, his hands are bony, with thick blue veins standing out among the wrinkles. His bushy hair and beard are white now, but the glasses give it away: this is the man in the photograph. When he walks us into the room where the piano man is playing classical music on an upright, I dont know how to ask about the picture. The four of us crowd around a tiny table, our knees touching, the piano much louder now as my back is leaning against it. After hours and hours of driving, we are all hungry for anything, as long as its not more cheese & ham from yet another gas station. Our little B&B for the night is luckily also a restaurant. Beers are passed around. We are happy to wait a little while longer, and we slowly relax into the candle-lit setting.
The waitress thanks the man from the picture, calling him John. So he isnt a ghost. These rooms seem to hold on to frozen time, and deserted secrets. Where is the woman now, I wonder. What is her name? But my meandering thoughts, likely airy from starvation, are brought back and held to the table by good food and even better company. We drink our wine and beer, we eat our fish and beef, we toast to our forever friendship, and laugh and talk long into the night hours about nothing. And that inconsequential nothingness is exactly that which forges us together. Only when the waitress has flipped all the chairs, turned over all the tables for the next morning's breakfast, do we begin to think about calling it. Not wanting it to end just yet, we all brave the still-raging winds outside to get back to one of the rooms, pile onto a bed, and play dice games until we are all too tired and bored to go on.
We woke up that Saturday expecting to have another normal, boring weekend at home. A stroke of genius by the boys made it into a spontaneous over-nighter in beautiful, coastal Donegal. These are the things we moved here to experience. These are the things we'll remember.
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