And in seven years I have heard my mother-in-law describe that transaction, out loud, to other people, in about four different ways.
“The children took over the farm.”
“We kept it in the family.”
“Dermot came back to the land.”
Once, at a christening in 2022, in front of about nine people, she said: “We handed it on.”
She has never once, in seven years, in my hearing, said the name Hugh Bright.
Neither has Dermot.
That is the thing that actually sits under all of this, and I did not understand that myself until about the middle of June.
It is not that they eat my food.
It is that I am the help in a house my dead father bought.
So here is what I did, and it took six weeks and it cost two thousand eight hundred and forty dollars.
The twenty-eighth of May. I rang a man called Sylvan Doole who does outdoor catering out of a van and who did the Ostler wedding in 2023, which is the best food I have ever eaten in a field.
