Julie Helen: 'A visit home has me reminiscing about life and love'

The stretch in the evenings is glorious, As clichéd as it sounds, it feels great.

It really makes a big difference to me. My mood is lifted and it makes ordinary things like travelling in the evening time, so much easier.

I struck off with Ricky to visit home and the grandparents so he could do a spot of farming, one of his favourite activities. Any time school is off, we have to visit for as long as we can muster, weaving around commitments.

On our journey, the sun was shining, the sky was bright even though it was late afternoon, and it felt easy to make the journey of 45 minutes. It’s a well worn road.

There is something very nostalgic about going home for me, even though I visit once a week usually. Holiday times hit slightly differently. We can stay longer and become part of the headcount for mealtimes and row in with the comings and goings of the house and farm. The Easter holidays signal a real change in the season and spring has burst into life. Calving is tapering off now so it means family members are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel of the real intense busy period they have had for the last couple of months.

The road home has changed a lot in the 14 years I have been coming and going from West Cork. David and I met at this time of year in 2012 and the spring was beautiful and sunny. That summer was a wet one, which meant I saw more of Dave than I would have if the weather was favourable to his business of drawing lime and seed to farmers.

I look back on those times very fondly. We were up and down the road to each other with great enthusiasm, spending as much time as we could together. I knew very quickly David was the man for me. He took more convincing and only this week, we were laughing at how the weather played ball so we could work out in the long term.

During our reminiscing, I assured Dave that I would have employed my extreme stubbornness to hang onto him if I had needed to.

Our recent conversation was peppered with Dave switching off a light here and there as he walked through our home, getting ready to leave for his day of work. He chatted about his plans for sourcing and buying fuel for the business year ahead. The current economic climate has him concerned and worried like all business people are. There is a lot of uncertainty.

We are real grown-ups now, strategising around costs and bills and ordinary life stuff.

I had been mentioning about heading home for a few days and we debated routes due to the level of traffic we can now encounter on our journey. After he was gone I was smiling to myself about how far we have travelled together both on the roads and in life. I would choose him to figure it all out with, over and over.

Even when we are talking about routes and costs and ordinary worries, we are very lucky to have each other to bounce off.

If you had told me 14 years ago we would be married with a child and a home and a business and fuel skyrocketing, I wouldn’t have believed any of it.

That’s the thing, we can never predict where the roads will get busy or where there will be new twists and turns along the way. We have to take them as they come, together.