Expecting nothing, we marvel at the everything that somehow comes with peak summer …

Granted, our daily walks along the bohereen still require judicious layering, even at the height of Irish summer, as the sun conceals then reveals itself from behind Tupperware skies. It is as if the grass grows before our eyes, 40 shades of green, prompting us to riddle our visiting American friends this: what is Ireland’s most important yield? Guesses on a postcard include the Black Stuff, the cuppa, the craic, the GAA, the luck, the writers (Shaw, Yeats, Beckett, Joyce, Heaney or whoever you’re reading yourself), Tayto, Trad, the Troubles. If you guessed grass, genius, you’ll appreciate the dairy; no better hostess gift than a block of Irish butter stashed in a freezer bag during foreign flights, scone-ready and always welcome anywhere the diaspora deems home. But you’re fleeing Ireland during the summer? Are ye mad or wha’?

“God bless the grass that grows through the crack” – Malvina Reynolds

“Even out of the ditches primroses and violets …” Apart from the end stops of her perfumed breasts, gratuitous punctuation might interrupt Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the beginning of the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, a naughty prayer we practically know by heart, our kind of rosary. No better woman to articulate the lush wantonness of wild Ireland: “God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up”. As a friend said at Vicarstown Bridge Café of an impossibly sunny Sunday afternoon over skinny flat whites (at €3.20, where would you get it but canalside in County Laois?) to describe the state of a half-cut friend the night before: “She had a terrible thirst in her.” We, too, have a terrible thirst, for the sun and the sea and the flowers (“the sun shines for you today yes”) for indulgent delights (“we can have music and cigarettes”) and for pleasures of all sorts, (“that awful deep down torrent O”), even at the risk of getting singed.

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Our modest house will never feature in The Irish Times property section, should we ever decide to sell it; truth be told, it’s a council cottage with notions. Himself had the idea to plant out the back field with bamboo we bought from Glengarriff Bamboo Park, West Cork’s lush idyll. A few rhizomes and rainy seasons later, you can likely point to our place from outer space, so dense and luscious the maze of bamboo tunnels, graceful, light-filtering arches creating mysterious paths to wander through, replete with roosting starlings at dusk. The husband, as married to the ride-on lawnmower as he is to me, circles the blackthorn to ensure the doors to the ráths, home to fairy folk, remain accessible throughout the summer. Forgive us for being unable to muster the appropriate measure of envy at your fabulous summer getaways abroad. Somehow, much as we adore autumn in New York, October in Ibiza, winter breaks in Rome and Paris in the spring, nothing and nowhere compares to summer in Éire. With all its heady delights, there’s no better place to languish; we’re stocious with it.