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