Update

Now that the snow has melted, we are seeing our land for almost the first time since moving in, and is it ever a mess. In front of and behind the house the former trees or gardens are now fields of muck peppered with builders’ rubble, and we have to turn it back into a garden.

The cardboard from moving boxes, spread across the land, will keep out weeds, and the chest of drawers can be made into a coldframe. The evergreens have spread far beyond their bounds, and need some severe pruning.

The pruned boughs have made a trail over the mud, and more of them might make good bedding for underneath the soil – forming a barrier at the base of the garden bed, drainage for our frequent rain and gradually composting away. They are acidic, though, so they might not make a good bed for things like brassicas.

We have mixed feelings about the evergreens – they are an invasive species that must be hacked back frequently, but they are also a good windbreak in this flat and whistling bog-land. One idea was to cut back the branches and weave them into a fence, and plant seedlings of something more desirable on the fence’s sunny side. In theory, the branches would collapse and the trees die over a few years, by which time the native trees would be strong enough to thrive.

Suggestions?

The road

The view from our front gate yesterday. Compare with this photo taken from the same spot a couple of months ago.

Cold snap

We are settling into our new home, but we chose to move in at an interesting time, and not just because it was Christmas. Ireland is experiencing something of a national emergency – temperatures have dropped to some of the lowest on record, and it has snowed, sleeted and hailed for weeks now. The roads are iced over, and the cities run out of their salt supply tonight.

At the same time, we moved into our new home, where the underfloor heating was not at first set properly, the hot water was not very warm and the gas kept freezing. We have a fireplace and many piles of wood, but not all are of suitable size, and while we have a hatchet, it is not very sharp. So we stayed well stocked with turf – the main fuel here – and kept well huddled around the fire.

Even worse, I also had to work at my day job the final week of December, when I was one of the only people in the unheated building. This week the buses have been so delayed by the ice and snow that my usual three hours a day on the bus has stretched into more like six hours, and I am spending almost as much time on the bus to and from work as I am at work.

Luckily, our home heating situation has much improved – we boosted the underfloor heating, so it is now more like 13 degrees inside (55 F) rather than five degrees (40 F). I’m all for living on less, but I want to get there in stages.

We are, however, learning that many of the household practices of 19th-century England or America were time-tested to help people live in such temperatures. Tea cosies were not just a quaint affectation of Jane Austen’s time --- they keep your liquids hot in a cold house, and hot liquids keep the body warm. I associate bed-robes with Ebeneezer Scrooge or Sherlock Holmes, and long undergarments with cowboys in old Westerns -- but they conserve the body’s heat. Hot water bottles in bed, poking the fire – all eminently functional details, now dimly remembered from old novels and films made in the foothills of history’s energy needle.

On the evening news in our new home, we watch Irish newscasters and political leaders speak in increasingly strident tones about the urgency of this crisis. Towns have not enough salt reserves and few ploughs, and businesses are not likely to allow for working from home. People do not always know to drive more slowly, keep more distance between their car and the next, or to allow for more time in their schedules for commuting. Thus, the country is slowed to a crawl by weather that would not be unusual by the standards of Minnesota, or even Missouri.

It is not that the Irish are not hardy. When I am coming to work in a coat and scarf, many Irish around me are wearing much less, and a co-worker of mine is perennially wearing a T-shirt. As I mentioned, many people here keep their homes at temperatures Americans would find frigid, or work in long stretches of rain I find oppressive. But they are no more prepared for a Midwestern summer or winter than they are for snakes.

As we face stranger weather, more expensive energy and less money in the future, we would do well to remember this --- that hardship is what we are not accustomed to. Adapting is difficult, especially when it is unexpected – but we can adapt to much more than we imagined.

Photo: a thatched house near us, taken today.

The Girl

The Girl’s wobbly tooth had been threatening to make a bid for freedom since before Christmas, and we joked that Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy would bump into each other in the dark. But it waited until last night, and she placed it in aside while she diligently picked up her toys downstairs, cleaned her room upstairs, brushed her teeth and got into her jammies. At length, though, she could no longer resist proudly dancing around with her tooth – accidentally flinging it somewhere in her room.

We searched every inch of her room, it seemed, but no tooth – a catastrophe as far as she was concerned, for it meant no Tooth Fairy and no coins under the pillow.

Finally, while she was searching under her bed, I ran downstairs and took down from a high shelf a tin of sentimental things – including her first lost tooth. I slipped it between my fingers, went up to her room and slipped it onto the floor.

Look, honey, here it is, I said.

“You are the best, Papa!” she said.

Update

I'm about a week late in announcing this, but the Dallas Morning News published an article of mine recently -- it was a condensed version of the one that apppeared in Front Porch Republic a few weeks ago. My sincere thanks to the DMN editors and to the departing Rod Dreher, whose blog is one of the few I check daily.

I'm taking a break for a few days while we try to get proper Internet out here. See you in the new year. Have good holidays.

White Christmas

Snow and ice are rare in Ireland -- the winter hovers just a few degrees above freezing -- so no one we know here can remember a white Christmas.

But today, temperatures dropped to several degrees below, the lowest I've ever heard of here. There was a brief moment of real snow on Christmas Day, and everything around us is frosted.

Photo: Our elderberries in ice.

We move in Monday

... to our new house, on our land by the canal. It has been more than two years of work, but the house is almost complete. This weekend we need to spend all our time oiling floors, finishing up details, cleaning everything in the new house, packing our things in the old house, and after that, moving all our belongings.

I might not be blogging a lot. Stay tuned.

I'm also appearing

... over at the admirable web site Front Port Republic, which has run this article of mine.

If you are not familiar with FPR, it is a haven for "crunchy cons," old-fashioned conservatives, distributists, conservationists, agrarians, Luddites and a diversity of other thinkers. They tend to be genuinely conservative in a way that modern neocons are absolutely not, but lie as far outside the US media's left-right spectrum as Duluth and Biloxi lie outside the St. Louis/Kansas City spectrum.

Bees

People have worked out relationships with all kinds of animals – cows and other grazers for milk, chickens and other birds for eggs – and we care for them in exchange for a share of what they produce naturally. We have very few relationships, though, with the vast majority of animals, the insects. Except for silk caterpillars, raised by specialists, there is only one insect that most of us can cultivate – bees.

People have probably been keeping bees for thousands of years, giving them a place to live in exchange for a share of their honey. For most of that time, though, they were kept in simple containers like skeps – essentially baskets – which had to be broken and the hive destroyed any time the honey was harvested. In 1852, a Pennsylvania vicar invented the beehive that is still used today – a wooden box with several frames inside that the bees can use to make honeycombs, without sealing the frames together. Each frame can be pulled out and checked, the bees inspected for disease and progress, and the honey extracted, all with only a brief disruption to the hive.

Bee hives can be kept easily on a small plot of land, and some people keep them in their back gardens. Most bees will forage for pollen in a radius of several miles, so it doesn’t matter much if a hive is located near homes. All the same, most bee experts recommend keeping the beehive inconspicuous and pointing away from neighbour’s driveways, so the bees’ runway flight is not likely to get in people’s personal space.

Honey is the most obvious advantage to keeping bees, and the honey can also be made into mead, or honey wine. But bees also produce wax that can be used for everything from candles to skin creams – some people chew it like bubblegum. Also, bees of course have the natural function of pollinating plants, and most beekeepers say their garden yields increase dramatically once they have a hive nearby.

What would ordinarily be a diverting hobby takes on a special urgency, of course, because so many bees around the world -- the source of so many of our crops -- are dying from obscure causes.

Most beekeepers recommend placing the hive on the north-facing side of a windbreak, open to the southeast sun so the bees get warm as early as possible in the morning. The hive should be level on dry land, and water should be set nearby so they can get a drink – one beekeeper recommends putting a small bucket of water nearby with a piece of Styrofoam floating on top, so the bees can have a place to stand while they drink.

To get started, you need a few basic materials. Of course you need a hive, and you also need a bee suit, gloves and a smoker – the smoke keeps the bees calm while the beekeeper does their work. Most of these materials can be purchased for a few hundred euros from any one of a dozen or so companies.

I can’t speak about beekeeping from firsthand experience, but I plan for that to change this spring. By March or so, I hope to give a step-by-step account of how to set up one’s own hive – and perhaps what not to do.

And the waters prevailed

I might be repeating myself with so many water images, but that's what we're getting right now. Rivers that ordinarily creep gently under towns are now crawling the high stone walls that bind them. This is another photo of the River Liffey running through a nearby town, and you see how far the river has climbed up the trees.

Last week the floods were still something on the news, from the West Country and from England. Now some people have been evacuated in our own village, and we called friends of ours in the next village over to see if they are okay.

In one town, the river demolished a 300-year-old bridge, the only connection between the town's two sides. Rescue crews had to thread an emergency pipe across where the bridge used to be -- ironically a water pipe, so the villagers on the other side can drink safely.

I remember well living in Missouri during the Flood of '93, when hundreds of people worked to build a wall of sandbags between the river and Jefferson City. I remember driving with a friend through wooded country and having to stop the car suddenly when the trees ended -- there was water almost to the horizon, with telephone poles and electrical towers poking through here and there. I visited my old state in 2008, when highways across the floodplain were closed, covered either by the second 500-year flood in 15 years or by animals driven out of their habitat by the waters.

This is said to be Ireland's worst flood in 800 years, and while the country is much smaller in scale, this might be proportionately greater than those Midwest floods were.

In Missouri the river settlements and levees may only have been a few decades old, and people could chalk up a flood like that of '93 to the chaotic river's cycle. Here, though, towns date to the Middle Ages, if not to Roman or Celtic times, and the walls lining the rivers were set at their heights long ago and for a reason.

This is not just a rainy day. This is not normal.

I don't mean that this is a 2012-style deluge. Too many people, when writing about climate change, peak oil or other aspects of the Long Emergency, reflexively invoking Hollywood versions of the apocalypse.

The reality might look more like what we are seeing -- a few houses flooded that were never before. Towns slowly retreating from some rivers and most seashores. Christmas season a bit "worse" and more traditional than they used to be. I would venture that the Long Emergency might take lifetimes, long stretches of normal life punctuated by moments of crisis.

Perhaps next week the 800-year flood will recede, and people will return to their homes. And we will forget, and dream that we are in control.