Fewer Teas More Songs Me Ol' Mate (Heaveho)

If O'Donnell Farm was quiet living at the top of the drive, sunrises and sets, poetry to little foals, and solitude, then Drummin Farm is rambling life in a little green nook, days half rain half sun, rainbows therefore, words, sea shanties and colorful words. Our words sound something like this

L --Who fancies a cupo?
K --Cupo tay!

Len is seventy, but you wouldn't guess a day over sixty. He loves all things seaman: ship, knots, boats. At fourteen he left school and home, went sailing around the world. He makes hundreds of different knots watching tv with us in the evenings. We watch three types of shows: shows about how to make stuff, history shows primarily about wars and weapons, and mystery series. And Mash sometimes. In the grocery store he charms a little girl--Hallo, blue eyes!--and gets shouts of ''Santa Claus!'' He does look remarkably like Santa. He's also British and speaks a lovely little Cockney, so picture that. He whistles and sings from a wide collection of hilarious and scandalizingly dirty shanties and can't abide things like this: vegetarianism, hippies, hunters of animals, religion in general and Jehovah's Witnesses specifically, faint-heartedness, his ex-wife.

J --Cupo? [something in Icelandic] Why, certainly.
K --I'll put the ke''le on!
L --Wait, first. Jon hand me those grips and hammer.
K --Hamma!

Jon is another Wwoofer here, from California. It's so nice to have a buddy. Though we are quite different, he is someone with a relatively familiar background, similar lexicon, identical American hiking shoes. Before this, he was wwoofing in Poland, and Iceland before that. He loves boats, and Len builds boats, so together they make wood into boats here in this little Iglish bowl of sunlight.

It is. It's refreshing to be around people who are having a good time and sharing it around. Len's favorite thing to say is that life's just a big joke and if you're not enjoying it then the joke's on you. He's lovely. Though I miss to some extent my own quietness, I feel sort of lifted up here. There is hardly time to think, with all the silly songs and hammering to be hammered and sung.

L --Jon, let little tiddler--
J --Haha, tiddlah!
L --- get past you so she can hold this--oh not like that, you grotty old sod, turn her around. Okay, good, now bugger off to the kitchen willya love and put that soup on simmer.

Len's partner is Pat. They've been together for twenty years, but they aren't married. She is British too. She is also seventy, and beautiful. I haven't said much about her because she only just came back from the hospital a couple of days ago. She had major back surgery and was still in there when I arrived. Len does all the cooking and cleaning, on top of building boats and making the sweetest little toys for local kids (really). He beats hell out of Pat for staying in bed all day, for drinking instant coffee, for not knowing how to ''boil water to heat her arse,'' and you can tell how much he bloody well loves her. He's like a fussy and colorful mother, worrying over our dinners and lunches, that we'll have enough to eat, that we'll like the way it tastes. He makes excellent food. He gives hugs and tells us his stories and teaches us how to tie a million different knots, what they're for and why. They have had over four hundred wwoofers in the past sixteen years, and I do believe he thinks of all of them (except the bloody obnoxious ones) as his kids. And I bet they all felt at home here too. Good old Lenahd. I told him in passing one day that I wanted to see the Atlantic Ocean before leaving Ireland, and today he drove me around the countryside showing me castles, old ruins, different kinds of boats docked in a little port town. We had a picnic of bread, onion cheese spread, orange fanta by the ocean.

K --Simma!
J --Simma! [cracks up]

It is totally ridiculous, to hear us talk. We use any words we know for anything we want to say. We say it in broken or flawless Spanish, Latin, German, French, Icelandic, Russian, Irish, words we make up. We tell each other all the interested word origins we know about. We compare our words. We say our words like some gibberish that carries nearly no meaning. That's how we say them usually. Though sometimes Jon says things he knows, about palletization, and I find anagrams. Len gives us cockney rhyming slang. And we repeat everything over again in any accent we vaguely know--Scottish, Dubliner, old southern, carrot-cruncher. We are saying all the time and the things are color-changing skipping creatures that make us laugh if we pay them any attention. And usually we don't.

L --Oh bugga this bloody stupid thing. This stuff should be sticking like shite to a blanket...