Ice cream in hand, postcards in bag, I’m lounging on the lawn that divides the old town from the lake. Behind me lie a canal, a château, a maze of roughcast buildings. On the lake, swans drift past pedal boats. …

The road outside the train station was dingy, and only a handful of people had disembarked from the rail cars. Together, we stumbled toward the nearest bus stop, really just a couple of benches beneath a low-hanging roof. Tacked to the wall was the timetable. Beside it was a poster…

Still thousands of feet above the ground, I peered out the airplane window. My brother Alec and I were moments away from reaching our home for the summer: Ireland. For the next three months, we would live in this country, taking in everything offered to us by the Emerald Isle. …