The gate lodge

This evening the wind has suddenly come up. It comes through my open kitchen window and leaves by the open front door. I can hear it in the trees as I sit at my little desk. Tonight the temperatures may dip into the 40s, possibly chilly enough to need a fire in the wood stove. As for now, my old grey sweater and black terrycloth slippers are keeping me warm.

The diamond paned window in front of me as I sit at the desk is one of four such windows in the gate lodge where I live. The lodge is at the very edge of Ballindoolin, a 250-acre estate in the rural midlands of Ireland about an hour outside of Dublin. The house itself is down a long drive that begins just in front of the lodge. The walk from lodge to house is about 7 minutes. I walk it nearly every day, sometimes more than once, up and back from the tiny lodge to the middle-sized mansion that is Ballindoolin House. 

Ballindoolin is a Georgian house with 34 rooms on four floors. The ground floor has an enormous front hall, and two very large reception rooms for formal entertaining (the dining room table could easily seat 14). These are the rooms that Esther, the current owner, shows when she does house tours. There are portraits on the walls, mementos in a small glass case in the drawing room and taxidermied animals in clear glass boxes. Behind theses formal rooms, kept shuttered unless there is a tour, is the real living space of the house. The back hall is chaotic, with boxes and bags of stuff everywhere, strollers and other evidence of baby belongings for Trina’s two boys, a refrigerator (one won’t fit in the kitchen that was literally carved out of as storeroom when the cooking had to be moved up from the basement during WWII), the odd grocery bag, a table piled with papers, a baby gate protecting the stairs. There is a family sitting room off the hall on one side and an office off the other. Up the front staircase, past a nearly life-size toy tiger that sits inexplicably on a settee on the landing, to the second floor: Off yet another hall there are eight bedrooms but only one bath.

 My lodge has two main rooms, a sitting room and a bedroom. There is a compact kitchen off the sitting room and a bathroom off the bedroom. The bathroom is called a wet room: the shower is in the middle of the room, and the sloped floor carries the water to a large drain. When the lodge was refurbished from a derelict state in the 1990s the wall between the bedroom and what had been an attached outhouse was knocked down to make modern plumbing possible. The lodge used to house the coachman and his evidently prodigious family. I suspect that a good deal of the family’s life took place out in the small stone yard behind the house. Now the yard holds a couple of desultory loops of clothesline as a substitute for the broken drier that is in the stone shed at one end of the yard.

The lodge has been fixed up for me. It lay empty for a few years when Trina, Esther’s older daughter, moved into the main house. It now has a fresh coat of paint and two grand old chairs that belonged to Esther’s grandfather. The chairs are a color somewhere between salmon and plum, with mahogany legs. I moved one of the chairs to the bedroom and added a table from the second-hand shop to the sitting room.

There is a sort of fitting irony to my living at the lodge. At one point—actually, for nearly 100 years—my family, my mother’s relatives, occupied the big house. My great uncle William evidently wrenched it away from the Bors, the family that built Ballindoolin, when they were going through some difficult times. William was universally known as Billy the Devil, although it is always pronounced to rhyme with civil: Billy the Divil. Billy’s son Robert left the house to Esther with the understanding that she and her family would renovate the property, a promise they have kept.

As I write this, the wind has settled—no fire tonight after all. Outside on the porch the swallow, who hasn’t yet figured out that she has no nest there, is on her nightly perch on top of the porch light; she’s the reason why I have to come home to a dark house if I’m out late. Maybe the swallow comes back every night because she, like me, feels the happiness in the place, an implacable sense of wellbeing and peace that belies much of the history of Ballindoolin but beautifully reflects its current caretakers.