Nostalgia and possbily another beetle!

Minding my own business at home today and a car pulls up outside. This is odd. We live miles out in the countryside, and we live down a farm track. So no traffic passes the cottage directly...and its not the kind of track to attract Nosey-Parker's...it just looks like a boring old farm track.
I wait for the driver to come and knock on the door...but she doesn't. She gets out and goes for a wander around the place. So I stir the dogs up and make them bark lots...just so she knows I'm not here on my own...then I stick the biggest (and softest) on a lead, and march out the door to see what this visitor is up to.

Turns out she was born here, and her family lived in this cottage for a few generations. When she lived her, she lived with her siblings, her parents and her grandparents! Yikes, this place is tiny, and with just two of us living here it feels like a squeeze, I can't imagine how it was with 8 people living here!

We spent a lovely couple of hours wandering around, while she pointed stuff out to me and gave new meaning to things I pass and mostly ignore on a daily basis. She showed me where all the farm buildings ( now long gone) used to stand. She showed me the area, now overgrown with brambles, where flagstone steps led down to the stream, which in those days was their only source of fresh water. She told me the names her family gave to all the fields that belong to this cottage, and we reminisced and wallowed in nostalgia together for a good while.
She didn't want to come in the house as she was afraid of the dogs (who were still barking), but she described to me how it used to be, and I know that previous owners have changed the inside structure around a lot, so much of what she told me I had heard before from both my landlord and my nearest neighbour (who incidentally lived here for a good few years too).

Then she discovered one of my Beetles, Tipsy parked up around the back of the cottage, and asked me if I liked old cars. She told me she had a few dotted around the farm where she lived with her husband...and had at least one old beetle there too. I asked her how much she wanted for it, and she laughed and told me she fully expected to pay someone to take it away...and that I could help myself. Whilst it maybe totally rotten, I'm sure there will be bits on it that will come in handy with the current, and future, restoration projects. Can't look a gift horse in the mouth, so hopefully I'll go and have a look, and see just what she has got, over this coming weekend.

Feel like I have the startings of a good friendship here...and I hope to see more of her soon.

Also, if we have any ghostly occurrences in this very old Irish cottage, at least I can now put a name to them....her Grandmother, Granny Walsh died here over 30 years ago...knock three times Granny Walsh...