"All he can do is grip his crutches ’till his knuckles go see-through"

WE’RE about to make a road trip to my sister’s house in Sligo, to help revive us after recent hospitalisations.

Out of the blue, my husband’s friend offers us the use of his Land Rover; an offer he doesn’t retract even now when I hand him the keys of our old Toyota, which makes a noise like an aeroplane taking off, and has bird shit down it.

He just waves us off, all bonhomie and zen. “Enjoy the trip,” he says, “relax.”

But relaxation, I find, is hard to discover, for any joy I might derive from the novelty of driving a shiny, road-safe, grown-up car is completely offset by the fact that I cannot reach its pedals.

I cannot reach its pedals all the way to Sligo, which makes relaxation hard for everyone to discover, if the rigid posture of my daughter, son and girlfriend in the back is anything to go by. But it’s particularly hard for my husband, whose recent hip surgery confines him to the passenger seat for the time being, where all he can do is grip his crutches ’till his knuckles go see-through, and attempt to drive from there.

“How are you?” my sister asks when we bumble up her drive at last.

Taking one look at my face, she puts me in a sunny chair outside the kitchen, calling loudly for Lola, her youngest daughter, who appears round the side of the house with her windblown dandelion clock of hair and chocolate all over her face.

Spending time with a four-year-old will restore me, my sister says. “Don’t look at her though,” she warns, “it’s benign neglect all the way with that one or else you’ll pay.”

Lola’s wearing one of my sister’s dresses — a long blue kimono which trails three feet behind her, and under her arm she’s wedged one of their bottle-fed lambs — for all the world as if it’s a clutch-bag — which bleats fiercely at me when introduced.

Already I feel a bit better.

“You can help me put her to bed in a minute,” my sister says, “I’ll call you when she’s ready.”

Upstairs, Lola’s face, scrubbed clean of chocolate, pops out from behind a curtain, one of three pairs which hang in a row under the roof-eaves, behind which my sister’s youngest children sleep in homemade bantam beds, laid end to end. It’s a sleeping arrangement charming enough to revive anyone’s drooping spirits — and that’s before Lola lifts up her chin and smiles like a loon.

I climb in and look up at the eaves. She says she’s going to give me her “hardest, hardest kiss. As a speshulest treat”.

After she’s bruised my cheek, she shows me Colin the cat, who sleeps on her feet. She looks down at Colin and then back up at me, her eyes showing everything she’s seen so far in her life: smiling benevolence from every single quarter, fresh air, warmth and safety — and a puckish glint besides.

It is good to be around eyes like that, I think, saying goodnight as I walk downstairs.

She shouts down the stairs to my sister, “love you with my golden heart, mum”. And then shouts the same to me as I sit next to my sister on the sofa.

“I love you with mine,” we shout back.

Now Lola’s screeches down the stairs like a love-struck fishwife, “I LOVE YOU WITH MY SILVER HEART AND MY DIAMOND HEART AND MY PRINCESS HEART”.

My sister yells back, “hey you, golden-heart girl, no more nonsense — straight to sleep”.

And then there is quiet.

The next morning, I watch her from outside the donkey shed. She’s in cut-off denims and sturdy ankle-boots, sitting under the flowering cherry, alone in the front field.

Behind her, Corrigeenroe lake glitters in the early sunshine.

From a distance she appears to be talking to a pile of picked dandelion heads while sorting them into two separate piles.

As I move a bit closer, she picks up a dandelion head from a central pile, and says “holy god” cheerfully, as she dumps it onto the mound on her right.

Then she picks up another one. “Holy f**k,” she says, dumping it onto the mound on her left. She continues with placements to left and right, and with every placement, repeats “holy god” and holy f**k in turns, until all the dandelions are sorted.

And I am restored.