Knocknarae as seen from Sligo.
“UP THE MOUNTAIN ye were?” the woman said to me. I tried to look at her from the passenger seat, though my glasses were bedazzled with raindrops.
“Picked a day for it, too,” I said, and she laughed, and clicked her tongue. She was in her mid-seventies, wearing a corded cream wool sweater and speaking to me in that rough thicket of an Irish country accent that I encountered anytime I left the main towns and met a sexa- or septuagenarian. “My name is Aidan Ryan, by the way,” I said – appropriate, it seemed, now that I’d been soaking her upholstery for a few minutes. “Oh, not many Ryans here,” she said. And that was all I got out of her. I never learned my driver’s name.
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