Michael Harding: Some people claimed the hawthorn bush smelled of sex

I was in a hotel in Blanchardstown recently for the first time since I had a heart attack there last winter.

I got a room on the same floor and it was a pleasure to walk across the foyer and saunter into the very lift from which I had previously been taken out on a stretcher.

I felt grateful just to be alive as I walked through the car parks that spread in all directions outside Blanchardstown shopping centre. The glittering lights of an urban landscape always seduce me.

Although Leitrim too is beautiful at this time of year, when the hawthorn is in bloom. In the old days people found the hawthorn forbidding. Some folks wouldn’t tolerate its white flowers in the house during May. They said the white bush was an icon of an ancient goddess.

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And others claimed that the bush itself smelled of sex; a conviction held so firmly in the school bicycle shed, when I was young, that some senior boys enticed their girlfriends out to the lakes after dances in the Sports Centre, not to admire the view, but in the hope that some musky fragrance in the foliage would trigger in them the fire of love.

I was wary of the hawthorn because my mother treated it with a mixture of reverence and terror.

There was a bush of it near Fore in Westmeath, where my mother once left an old glove hanging on a branch before blessing herself three times. When I reached towards the tree she turned and said, “Don’t touch it”.

She believed that when someone was cured, the tree took upon itself the disease from which the afflicted one had been released. I often wondered what disease she may have endured in secret, and that warranted placing a glove on the tree, but I never asked.

There are lots of mysteries about motherhood that cannot be answered.

Rotund and still, his eyes were hidden in the fleshy face, like a bodhisattva in contemplation, or like an orangutan bored in a zoo

I met a man one time who claimed that his wife was having an affair with the milkman. It was of course untrue, but the man insisted it was proof that his life began to fall apart on the day he drove a digger into a field and dug up an old hawthorn that had stood in the same spot for generations.

And you can’t blame him. A big hawthorn with elaborate knuckles winding around itself is a formidable sight, and is likely to have stood in the same spot for hundreds of years. So it’s no surprise that after digging it out a person might be filled with remorse.

By moonlight

But there is something terribly tender in the white bush that lifts my heart every year.

I asked a man in Donegal last week how he felt about the hawthorn. I had stopped at the filling station and I was eating a boiled egg sandwich in the van when he came over and sat at one of the picnic benches beside me.

He wasn’t having a picnic. He was just sitting there waiting. Rotund and still, his eyes were hidden in the fleshy face, like a bodhisattva in contemplation, or like an orangutan bored in a zoo.

When I got out of the van to put my sandwich wrapping into the bin near his table he spoke.

“Not a bad day,” he said.

I agreed.

I reached out my hand to the tree with the affection of a child touching its mother

“You’re not from around here.”

I agreed again.

And after measuring each other up for a while in this manner, he told me that he was waiting for a lift and that he and a friend were heading off for a weekend in Mount Melleray.

The hawthorn was in bloom all around us, its white blossoms dripping off branches in every ditch.

“Will I tell you the best way to see the hawthorn?” he said.

“Please do,” I replied.

“By moonlight,” he said. “If you get a good moon, you must go into the fields and see for yourself; ’tis like snow.”

So out I went that same night. I crossed a beach and passed a man walking his dog beside the waves, which established a strange kind of intimacy, like walking through someone else’s dream.

But the moon was high and in the end I found a bush full of scent and flower that hung in clumps like snow in winter, and I remembered suddenly how dark and broken my heart had been last December, and I felt grateful again for having survived, as I reached out my hand to the tree with the affection of a child touching its mother.