This post may contain affiliate links, where I receive a small commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no additional cost to you. Please read my Affiliate Disclosure for more info.
The other day I reached for a book that’s long out of print, Monica Carr’s Country Diary, somehow drawn to take it up as I looked for inspiration, now that January’s firmly here and the cozy razzle-dazzle of the holidays has come and gone.
There’s something about January, a month that seems to slap you in the face and yell: “Snap out of it!” The party’s over. Time to make tracks and get on with the business of a new year.
It was a muted holiday season this year, with a zombie-like pandemic that seems to keep rolling on and a host of troubling events unfolding by the day.
Time for a little new year’s inspiration.
And so it was that Monica Carr’s Country Diary unexpectedly handed me some homespun wisdom in this compilation of articles by the late Irish journalist Mary Norton.
For many years she wrote the legendary Country Diary columns in The Irish Independent‘s Farming Independent.
Writing under the pen-name Monica Carr, her popular weekly diary traced farm life in rural Ireland, sharing stories of times gone by and dispensing recipes for everything from plum jam to old cures for chilblains and back aches.
As ever, her down-to-earth advice is tied to nature, reminding us that our lives are cyclical and just as the seasons change, so too do our lives.
Her advice? Don’t wish time away, since it gallops by way too fast and anyway, springtime in all her hopeful beauty is just around the corner. And the big reminder? Basically, to look out of the window of your life with gratitude.
‘The Trough of Winter’
She wrote these sentiments in an article from January 1994 titled, Mean, Hungry January!, pointing out that although we’re in “the trough of winter, it is losing its grip” as spring creeps nearer.
And she points out that it also helps to “reflect on our blessings when January moods take over.”
Wow! I put the book down, struck by how this advice from so long ago still rings true today, all these year later.
She wrote: “‘Don’t be wishing your life away,’ my mother used to say when we wished for Easter as Christmas holidays neared an end, or in summer that it was already Christmas.”
“‘Time goes so fast nowadays that I know exactly what she meant,” she continued. “I didn’t then, when a week, a month, a year, seemed interminable … Maturity … does not prevent me, however, from deriving comfort from the fact that January, like all the months before and after, will ‘gallop.'”
She admitted January is her “least favorite of the year’s twelve children” when the sun “has only the cold stare of a headlight, slanted and shifty. Not an iota of heat in its brightness.”
And even though January is her least favorite month, her respect and appreciation of nature is evident.
“In a way there is honesty about a winter’s landscape, leafless, flowerless, just brown-hedged fields and trees, their bare branches like pencil strokes against a background of grey sky,” she wrote.
“Good to look out through the window of a warm kitchen until your breath fogs the glass and seals out the chilly world; to think back on an era when we didn’t have great machinery to help us combat the elements.”
Generational Inspiration
I used to watch my maternal grandmother Katie read the Country Diary when she’d come to visit. She’d chuckle and give intermittent sighs of agreement as she read through Monica Carr’s latest musings about life on the farm with her family.
When she’d leave down the paper, too young to read its words, I’d gaze at the column’s signature sketch, a line-drawing of sweeping fields with neatly corralled hedges. These are some of my earliest and fondest recollections of my grandmother, who lived on her own farm in beautiful north County Longford.
Chapters from Monica Carr’s Country Diary provide clues about the kinds of inspiration my granny and my own mother, her daughter, were reading in her columns.
These chapter titles included gems such as: Dogs in the Kitchen; Glorious May; Candlemas Lore; Polishing and Superstition; Summer Blooming; Joys of June; Winds of Change; Seán’s Dilemma; Home From America; Salty Bacon and Autumn Scents.
Mary Norton was born on a farm in County Wicklow in 1922. She spent many of her early years farming, until the 1950s when her Country Diary was published in the Farming Independent, appearing every Tuesday for decades, according to my mother.
Her articles were published in this book in 1997, the year she died.
So here’s to Monica Carr and a little timeless wisdom to pass along on this chilly January day!
By the way, these photos were taken in the following locations in Ireland: Endrim, Co. Offaly, the village of Ballinahown, Co. Westmeath and Birr Castle, Birr, Co. Offaly.
No Comments