A walk in the early spring sunshine

Fr Jason Murphy

The faces of three young deer peered out at me from the opening of a window in the abandoned house on the side of hill as I began a morning walk in the dazzling Spring sunshine.

The breathtaking blue of the sky gave the perfect backdrop to the greens and browns of the countryside as black faced sheep grazed fornent the cottage with its tin roof to which ne’er a path led. This was the house where Biddy Fitzpatrick returned to from the United States in the 1930’s to spend her remaining years, as old people recalled when as children, they gathered in the kitchen of that now abandoned house to dance to records played on the turntable of the first gramophone ever to be seen in the country that Biddy brought with her from New York.

Alas, no more the music can be heard through the opening of the window, but I often think on those little children dancing in the house in the spring times of their lives where deer now take refuge in their passing.

Two mallard ducks fly high from a watery ditch behind a freshly cut hazel hedge at the sound of my steps and I recall an old man stopping in his passing, to remind me that this was the day that the crows began to build their nests, as the chorus of elated birdsong emanated from high in the branches of the Sally trees, heralding the start of Spring.

All along in the flagging bottoms each side of the narrow laneway of the Bog Road, the purr of frogs could be heard in their spawning, covering the flooded waters with clouds of eggs in perfusion. Yellow Lesser Celandine and white Anemones lined the banks of the hedgerows as I climbed the incline out of the rushy bottoms in to the townland high of Shancorry. Pretty little Anemones which have greeted those on foot for over a century, as they walked the two miles or more to town from the edge of River Erne in the townland of Bunanumery, these delicate little flowers which spread only six feet, beneath the dappled shade, every one hundred years or so.

Each step of the road I am greeted with another ordinary thing, transfigured, the little one roomed dwelling place on the side of the hill with its rusted tin roof transformed to a golden brown with the shimmering light of the morning sunshine. A heron flies high in the blue sky over me, taking its time as it floats in the air before coming to land in the bottoms beyond the lake at Derrycark.

On up another incline to the highest point on the road to pass what was once a Quaker meeting house where the lovely couple Dan’s John and his wife Eileen used to stand at the door and greet the passersby with a big hello. ‘You’re slowing up’, he’d shout with the pull of the hill to the top of Dernaglush. ‘Come on in for one of Eileen’s fancy buns now that you’ve come to a stop’, and therein he would regale you of his days growing up along the streets of Liverpool before he fell in love with the brown eyed Corrigan girl who worked in Leonard’s drapery shop on The Diamond of the town who at weekends, and took in the money at the hatch of the Palais Hall where young revellers entered, hoping to find love 60 and more years ago.

How lovely she was all through the years, always a joy to meet and share in conversations with but as with so many of the touchstones along the way, they too have turned the road for God.

Down the hill beneath the elegant pine trees and across the ‘Running Bridge’ where huntsmen once traversed with beagles in pursuit of the scent of a fox, but as with the curlew no more the sound of their call.

On I walk the road through Creeny, the cottages and the sound of the Milking Machine in the parlour of McElgunn’s farm- a little boy who has come into the world much to the delight of his parents, and who will one day, please God, carry on the milking that has taken place along the road for three generations past.

And as new life begins in this townland, so it is that another lets go. As I pass the red house of McConnell’s on the corner, the old man’s life of 99 years is slowly ebbing to its close.

He has been a constant in the lives of his neighbours. Not one rememberd a time that he was not there- a wave of his stick as he crossed the road to lean over the gate and gaze on his herd basking in the meadows below.

Therein his wife of 60 odd years watches on his every breath, united in all things they have been, since first they chatted over the hedge as he dug potatoes in the garden, all those years ago. Here they have farmed and here they have lived in the midst of their neighbours, working each through the other, as oft -times he whizzed by me in my passing, with what seemed the fullness of youth, down the road in his late nineties, as the exhaust of his tractor shook in full throttle. Oh how it is that everything reminds as you walk along in the Spring time of the year, faces to remember, so much and so many to give thanks for, as we rush and hurry in the maelstrom of our lives, taking little heed of the beauty that surrounds.