NORMALITY in a rural area is not what most urban folk would expect, the singing of birds, wind blowing through the trees and the gentle lowing of cattle.
Normality, is the deep roar of tractors in the fields, bulldozers taking out hedges, slurry being spread on fields and machines of various kinds doing all kinds of jobs at breakneck speed.
And it was these sounds last evening which signalled the return to normality of the twin townlands of Owengallis and Drumlougher, Co Cavan, where a stand off between the gardai and Gerrit Isenborger ended quietly yesterday morning.
The local people were stunned, however, by the arrival of the hearse in their townlands to take away the body of Mrs Pauline Isenborger, whom they hoped would have survived the drama that began last Wednesday.
Her weeping son had been taken out by a back road from the house. Within two hours of his arrival in Ballyconnell Garda station, the engine of the country side had restarted and the machinery began to grind the Garda tape that had been placed at the end of the boreen into the area on Wednesday, into the roadway.
With media attention now focused elsewhere the locals began to take control of their lives again with a sense of relief.
Shortly after 2 p.m. the first post to be delivered in the area since the drama began, arrived, and was delivered at the pace at which post should be delivered, the length of a short chat.
Then came a school bus, which dropped the children back to the houses along the rutty road that had been more or less taken over by the gardai since Wednesday.
The house cleaners team sent in to tidy up the O'Reilly household used as the incident centre had to negotiate its way around a bulldozer that had already taken up the work so hastily abandoned.
The lowing of cattle was stilled too. Animals in the immediate vicinity of the siege site had been short of fodder for some days and their hungry calls were no longer heard. Hay and silage was being ferried in by farmers now freed to move at will in their own area.
The gardai had retreated back in the boreen to the front of the Isenborger house 1 1/2 miles from the road. The yellow Garda tape forbade entrance to a "crime site", the austere cottage beside the large hayshed that had been the focus of so much attention over the past few days.
And the locals, looking for answers to the events of the past days, found, as country folk do, the answer in folklore.
A holy well where locals used to pray had been filled in by a previous owner of the land. Such things bring continuing bad luck, they said.
That attitude, too, is rural normality.