This was, to put it both bluntly and succinctly, designed specifically to right a wrong.
The Meelick House is the Perfect Ireland Holiday Rental Vacation Home.
That the Meelick House, an elegantly rustic stone coach rental home set on a rural patch of electric green in County Clare, came to represent such…let’s call it a kind of cognitive dissonance in our lives, was a fact in need of mending, a careful stitching up of our fabric torn during a tumultuous five days spent in Ireland during the summer of ’16.
It was like coming back home again. Our return to The Meelick House.
On this occasion, during Thanksgiving week ’17, we ended up there again, purposefully, but this time only after having completed our explorations in, and of, Kilkenny, Killarney, Ring of Kerry, Limerick, Ennis and Galway.
The pacing along the way allowed for restful breathes; the three days back at Meelick, a full exhale.
This is what we longed for, this time together in the house, in the most perfect rental home we have ever known; time to venture outside gloved and mittened, bundled in hoodies and rain slickers, exclusively on foot and no farther than the stretch of undulating country road beyond the cream colored pillars and propped open metal gates, with its linear patch of perpetually damp grass sandwiched between the spaces where tires crunch stone, beneath a thick canopy of autumn in the Irish countryside.
Oranges against greens with puffs of cloud peeking through when the breeze happened to blow correctly, which it did repeatedly for three perfect days; the flag as nature provides it.
I pulled our black Audi up to the pale yellow main house, beneath where ivy serpentines up walls, parking at a 15-degree angle so as to face our coach house, to set even our idle ride’s focus there for the duration of a perfect Ireland holiday vacation.
Before the engine rumbled to a stop, the two doggies, Arthur Guinness and Bailey, one vanilla, the other a stout, were alongside and leaping, wanting licks of two girls’ faces, two girls who, for the last 15 months, have been waiting to be leaped up upon and licked by a pair of rough Irish doggie tongues.
It’s them, those two girls and those two dogs, who made our perfect decision to stay put, who gifted us a perfect Ireland holiday, who righted the wrong, who mended whole cloth to its original sheen.
A goodbye selfie with Guinness and Bailey as we leave Meelick House.
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