Cotton sheets flying

On the line capturing the

Essence of sunbeam

 

 

 

This week in Corrogue…

 

We still are subject to frost at night but we have been having a spate of surprisingly warm days. It’s as if we skipped the slow, stately progress of the typical Irish spring, with its increments of snowdrop, daffodil, primrose, creeping buttercup and then field buttercup and jumped forward to the usual cool Irish summer. Our damson tree sported a single blossom this morning. The apple trees are budding. I hope the frosts will dissolve. A late hard frost last year put paid to any fruit.

With the damp showery weather temporarily in abeyance I strung up the washing line this week. Load after load of damp laundry was pegged out in the sunny breeze to dry. I have to confess that this is an occasion for one of the most primitive (or is it primal) pleasures to people who make and keep homes. There is nothing quite like the scent of laundry that has dried in sun and wind. I bury my nose and inhale deeply. I sniff essence of sunlight and ozone.  

Here in the Northwest of Ireland we enjoy the cleanest air in Europe. This is very unlike the laundry days of my friend Brenda’s childhood. In Salford near Manchester during the 1940s smog enveloping England before the Clean Air Acts, they hung out clean laundry and pulled in dry, sooty ‘washing’. The smog was everywhere – inside and out. There was no way of escaping it, so Brenda informs me. So I feel especially blessed as I breathe in this scent. It’s such a simple pleasure. But it is was that very few people may experience if they live in built up areas with lots of motorcars or manufacturing nearby. 

It’s a singular experience perhaps as endangered as the corncrake or the capercaillie. 

A number of years ago some advertiser used the tagline “Accept no imitations!”  There is no way that the scent of sunshine and a stiff breeze blowing over gorse bushes and flowering blackthorn can be synthesized and put in a bottle of fabric conditioner.  

© 2006 Bee Smith

Mrs. Should

•  

  • Mrs. Should, I could murder you today!                                   

  •  Stifle or smother her maybe? 

  • Why can’t you take a holiday? 

  • I have helped you on                                   

  • With your coat, handed you your hat, bagged   

  • And baggaged you.  Just for one day I want   

  • To wave you away and let myself play.         

  • But honestly!  The nerve of the woman!      

  • She keeps coming back from the bus stop all

  • A flurry of “Mustn’t forgets!”   I bar          

  • The door and barricade myself in the      

  • Bedroom.    I take to my bed with the cat     

  • (Surely as good a role model of steely     

  • Indifference and determination                      

  • As I know.)        I pretend that I am again         

  •  A teenager, impervious to all                

  • Injunctions, enjoinders, wheedling at    

  • Conscience.  But it’s no good.  Hopeless even.  

  • My husband says I shouldn’t sack Mrs. Should. 

  •  After all, domestic help is so hard           

  • To find these days.  She needs managing though.

  • She’s become a bit of a bully of late.                

  • “Be Firm,” he counsels.   He advises, “Take Charge!” 

  •  It’s so hard to have this great guilt machine

  • Cluttering up living room.  “WASH THAT!” she shrieks, 

  • Sharp-eyed, noticing all.  Right down to the       

  • Flea dirt on the slipcovers.  She likes to clean

  • Does Mrs. Should.     Or rather, likes to            

  • Keep me busy.    Oh, so verrrrrry busy.                                      

  • So for my next project                                   

  •  I shall take apart the Great Guilt Machine.          

  • I shall treat it to a folk cure for clocks which         

  •  Time has stopped.  First, dismantle from case.    

  • Boil workings. Add a handful of soda.       

  • When water is black remove from heat and          

  •  Oil with a tad of tractor grease.  Pop into a 

  • Moderate oven with the Sunday joint.               

  •  By Sunday evensong that clock chimes like    

  • A dreaming spire.  A very Mrs.Should 

  • Remedy.  Always so happy to help.     

This week in Corrogue…

 Tony requested that I post this poem as a companion piece to this week’s Blessing for YOU! It’s part of a trilogy of poems with the second one about Mrs. Should’s cousin Mrs. Must and the finale is Christmas with Mrs. Demento. Mrs. Should and Mrs. Must have finally unhinged our heroine and all the tinkly musak has finally made her go off her rocker. Everyone has this inner voice about should and must. Some of those are useful.  The ‘Thou shalt not’ of the Ten Commandments does spring to mind. But that is the point. They say what we should not do.  They are ten simple pieces of advice on what it’s really not cool to act out. They don’t create this never ending and increasingly demanding list of  ‘I should be doing this’. Instead of…what? ‘I really must do…’ Just what exactly? Should the weather be warmer just because April should be?  According to whom?  My impatience with the weather acting in an unpredictable way will not make the soil warm any faster. But the gardening books and seed packets say I should be doing such and such in April!  But April is behaving much more like March and occasionally like February. After five years of looking at the lie of our acre of land I am squelching the impulse to press on just because it is April. This is very uncharacteristic. Nature has it’s own wisdom and it’s own timing that has nothing to do with calendars or clocks. It’s an enormously resourceful teacher but not in a didactic way. It will get around to everything in it’s own time. It does feel a bit unnatural not to press on with certain tasks.  But I am trying to pay more attention to my intuition then that roaring Mrs. Should who wants me to tick off the  ‘To Do’ list for April.  I am trying to not take responsibility for everything – especially not the weather. What Mrs. Should never realised is that there are some things we are never meant to control. Those matters that are out of our control are not necessarily an enemy to be eradicated. They are just like the phases of the moon, an eclipse of the sun, or the shifting of tectonic plates. Discernable, sometimes understandable, but not always explicable. © 2006 Bee Smith

The sun room is my
Rain room – restful patter -plash
Of April showers.

This week in Corrogue

Springtime beckons visitors. This week my writing friend Helen came from Yorkshire for a break. That it was typical April showery weather did not dampen her holiday. She was content to lie on the ‘sun lounger’ in Shannon Park’s conservatory and be lulled by the sound of raindrops on the glass roof.

Like me, Helen is fair skinned. “I like rain. I know people think that is strange but I am fair skinned. Too much sun makes me uncomfortable.” Helen and I are in unity about this. I am also one of those strange people who appreciate rainfall and a temperate climate. Too much sun and I get itchy and irritable.

This week we are still getting frosty nights and early mornings but the sun is warming up the earth. I finally tackled the polytunnel to get ready for some late sowing. ‘Late’ is a relative term. I could have sowed seeds and watched them creep along in germination. Intuitively, I know that the climate is more benign now. It is a kindness to hold back and let nature dictate the timing rather than rely on a calendar. Last year I went by the book. I sowed basil and then waited and waited and waited for it to germinate and begin to leaf. When I talked to one of my fellow students on the horticulture course they noticed that their basil was ‘standing still’ too.

It was too early and the poor plant was struggling. This year I am practising plant compassion. The polytunnel is now warm enough to nurture them so long as the door is kept closed for part of the day to help retain the heat to get through the cold nights.

In the meantime, while the rain slashes our field I am weeding, digging, manuring and preparing the ground for them. The raindrops pound on the polythene greenhouse. Rain is my companion and sings its own April song. After the extremely dry winter it is reassuring to hear a gurgle and glug in drainage ditches.

Water is so precious. So I bless the rain and welcome it.

© 2006 Bee Smith

This Week in Corrogue …

Finally winter seems to be loosening its grip on the landscape. The starlings have returned again this year to nest build under the eaves of our porch. As I walk down our lane the air is alive with much birdsong.  There is courting, mating; nest materials are coveted and carried in beaks. Blackbirds and thrushes dart low out from hedges. Coal tits sweep out of the pine forest beside us. Pied wagtails dip up and down by the River Shannon’s tributaries. From the boggy meadows, not yet in bloom with ‘bog cotton’, comes the harsh call of the water hens. 

The swallows have not yet returned. Nor have I heard the first Cuckoo of spring. It will be nearly a month before I expect to hear that totemic bird of the Cuckson clan.  April 20^th is the earliest I have ever heard the cuckoo’s springtime call.  

The reality of our country life is that death strides behind all this burgeoning life. Mink, also with hungry young, have taken a number of my friend Isabella’s chickens. A young kid died when its mother’s got into difficulties with delivering all the afterbirth. The nanny is hanging onto life by a thread.  Seamus has lost some of his guinea fowl to pine martens. The pine marten is becoming endangered because the mink are out competing them in their native habitat. What the mink and pine marten do not prey on, the fox will stalk. With ewes in lamb at this time of year it is an anxious time for hill farmers. 

The cycle goes round and round.  Death is in the midst of life and life, certainly as celebrated with the Irish wake, is in the midst of death.  Sometimes the wake can be sedate with whispered condolences, passed out with the cups of tea and slices of brown bread; by the end of the evening it turns raucous with singing fuelled with tots of Power’s whiskey. 

Life and death are like a courting couple. Emily Dickinson once characterised death as a gentleman caller.  Certainly with her ever observant eye trained on the changes and character of nature Dickinson is not proved wrong with nature’s ritualistic unfurling in springtime.   

© 2006 Bee Smith