Through the window beyond my blazing red comfort blanket one of my eyes follows the movement of Mulcahey's artfully arranged towels flying on the line in the sinking sunlight. They are sculpted by the Atlantic wind and wrapped in movement and alive with unbearable streaks of colour. I have never seen so many gradations of hue or such violently dyed texture. It pulses semophorously in my direction. I cannot read the message.
I close my eyes and after the pounding in my head fades away I have reset the clothes line in a meadow of my own lifetime. It seems only moments back but it is half a century and more. There is a gentle slope of grass and flowers not too different from my field here in Páirc Loch but with a green and white trim frame house up there to the right in the background high on a rise. I am lying sprawled and comfortable in the grass, looking up at the house. Michael’s world. It is not exactly the picture you might remember. For that matter it is not precisely the one I know
, but the perspective is true and it fits in its deep particulars.
I have added more than the washing. There are two square cows looking on made of planks and painted barn red. I found them in Alberta one afternoon, travelling with the lady harpists across that brilliant and empty desert of grass, on a ranch of wooden animals where the only flesh and blood was the rancher, and he was almost as dried out as his planky animals. And in my picture there are three hardboard sunflowers spilling their shadows jerkily onto the ground like whirligigs as the sun becomes a crescent and slides away down the back end of the afternoon.
I lie in the grass and remember a time of complete loneliness and safety. The place was Compton. It was in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. There was nothing there either, apart from maple sugar and wild strawberries and turtles half as big as barrels and bullfrogs twice as big as truth.
That was before they sent me away to boarding school where I soon learned why turtles have shells and wasps have stings. I learned about self defence long before I learned that you could run away. But once I found out about running I never looked back.
I close my eyes and after the pounding in my head fades away I have reset the clothes line in a meadow of my own lifetime. It seems only moments back but it is half a century and more. There is a gentle slope of grass and flowers not too different from my field here in Páirc Loch but with a green and white trim frame house up there to the right in the background high on a rise. I am lying sprawled and comfortable in the grass, looking up at the house. Michael’s world. It is not exactly the picture you might remember. For that matter it is not precisely the one I know
, but the perspective is true and it fits in its deep particulars.I have added more than the washing. There are two square cows looking on made of planks and painted barn red. I found them in Alberta one afternoon, travelling with the lady harpists across that brilliant and empty desert of grass, on a ranch of wooden animals where the only flesh and blood was the rancher, and he was almost as dried out as his planky animals. And in my picture there are three hardboard sunflowers spilling their shadows jerkily onto the ground like whirligigs as the sun becomes a crescent and slides away down the back end of the afternoon.
I lie in the grass and remember a time of complete loneliness and safety. The place was Compton. It was in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. There was nothing there either, apart from maple sugar and wild strawberries and turtles half as big as barrels and bullfrogs twice as big as truth.
That was before they sent me away to boarding school where I soon learned why turtles have shells and wasps have stings. I learned about self defence long before I learned that you could run away. But once I found out about running I never looked back.
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