Dark days and open fires prompt the mind to wander to thoughts of the inevitability of winter and loved ones we have lost, writes MICHAEL HARDING
LAST WEEKEND Mullingar was abuzz with truck drivers dressed as pregnant nuns, accountants in cowboy gear, and young ladies parading the nightclubs as sluts, whores and dead brides. My daughter went to a party in a marquee with all her friends. They invited me too, but my heart doesn’t warm to the garish black and amber of Halloween.
I prefer the emptiness of a November sky, and the dead leaves and silent stones of old graveyards, as eloquent reminders that winter is inevitable and life is impermanent.
I went to Leitrim on Sunday and cut small branches off trees I planted years ago, and brought them back in the jeep to Mullingar.
I decorated the hall stand, and the piano in the drawing room, and the rack above the range in the kitchen with the twigs, and red rose hips from a shrub my father once transplanted from Clare to Cavan, and which I, years later, succeeded in transplanting to the hills above Lough Allen.
On Monday morning my daughter returned to school, and I lit a fire in the drawing room, and sat alone, admiring all those branches of curled-up dried-out coppery beech leaves.
Initially I was just thinking about the Budget, and the price of fuel, and wondering would this winter be as cold as last year, and where might the tides of next spring carry me.
One of my beech trees came from an island in Lough Allen; I took the sapling home in a boat after making a visit to the island with an old miner, 15 years ago.
He recalled two old ladies who lived on the island when he was a youth. One harsh winter infirmity forced them into nursing care on the mainland. After they left he landed on the island to peep in the windows where their nightclothes still hung above the kitchen range, and poke about in the debris of the abandoned house where the ladies had lived since their childhood, a time when the ferryman was summoned from Drumshanbo by the gong of a giant bell on the island.
The miner was old, breathless from lung disease, and not given to exaggeration or wasting words, so I believed him when he told me that on the day he went to the island he was attacked by two swans on the shoreline, and that ever since then he could not look on swans without remembering the two ladies. After the miner died I used to see a hawk, regularly, hovering above the island and I often wondered was that him.
That’s the way my mind wanders, when I’m beside an open fire.
My teacher often tells me that the mind should be like a sea, not a river: deep and still. It should be as clear and bright as the sky in Mongolia, where everything sparkles in light, and never like the dark sky above Leitrim, where it is easy to be negative about everything. The mind should hover very high over the world, like an eagle that only occasionally flaps its wings to retain height, and not like a sparrow that does a lot of flapping but never achieves much altitude.
By lunchtime on Monday the drawing room was very cozy, and I began to doze, as BBC Radio 3 murmured in the distance – Yo Yo Ma’s cello notes wafting from tiny speakers behind the couch.
I suspect that as a young man I held too rigidly to the idea of Christianity, but over the years my teacher has helped me realise that a boat is for crossing a river – you don’t walk around with it on your head; so I am lighter about religion nowadays, though I still enjoy the rituals that mark out the year, from end to end.
In November I always remember loved ones that are long gone, and friends at whose deathbeds I once kept vigil, watching them breathe their last bubble of air, as their sunken eyes on the pillow watched me.
At dusk on Monday evening, the eve of All Soul’s Day, I ate a little food in the kitchen and cleaned the worktops and the floor, more thoroughly than usual, and left a jug of water beside the range, as my mother always did, when I was young.
I passed my daughter in the hallway. She was coming from school and she wanted to know why the house was full of leaves, but there was nothing I could say to her that would make any sense.