If I had the ingenuity to go home on the eve of solstice, through a starless night, across rumbling seas, I’d arrive in uncertain Irish daylight, on a hillside, where light dances in and out of puffy, blackish clouds, and wind howls at waving, tall fields of drenched grass, and blowing into hedgerows, and onto a Whitethorn tree, where a robin sits, by the Famine wall, where our back garden used to be.
If your spirit communicated in such an extension of place, I’d hear you hum ‘Take me home again, Kathleen’, in shivery impatience, and follow the tune until I’d find it resonated behind a red door of a whitewashed house, an apparition, familiar as a memory.
I can hear you, I’d whisper.
I’d open the door of a musty outhouse where there’d be a key hidden underneath a rubber mat, wrapped in crinkled tinfoil. It’d access a bare kitchen, cold and damp but distinguishable by its Formica counters and yellowed linoleum floor.
You’d invite me into a dining room where you’d be sitting with your legs crossed on an old creaky armchair by a soft window light. You’d have a frayed, leather-bound book on your lap, and your reading glasses would be dangling from the tip of that big nose.
Roman nose, you’d say, and laugh mordantly.
How are you here when you are not alive?
I’d be perplexed to see your eyes large and blue over sallow skin. Your face would be recognizable as yours. Not very young or old, and not the empty vessel of dementia when we last met.
You came here for answers, for forgiveness, for a way to find meaning in the past, you’d say, and walk toward me. Life has its consequences; we only have so much time, and then it’s gone. We hear it in a ticking watch and pay it no mind. It’s unrelenting and unforgivable, and it needs forgiveness. Our most futile time is the time we spend being angry.
You’d direct me out to a hallway where a Golden Pothos once weaved its way upward around the banisters of a staircase. It’d be withered and rotten long ago, starved from a lack of your care. I’d make my way carefully up creaking floorboards. At the top, I’d find no light where a family once lived. It’d be hard to breathe. I’d be aware of a blackened vacuous presence. It’d be too stifling for a living soul to dare stay. All the smells, the sights that bring recall and familiarity could not be here.
I’d realize no living being existed anywhere in this ruined house; just remnants of cravings left by the dead of their anguish and joy. The human choices rendered through lifetimes. There’d be heartbreak there, never uttered, but banished to a dark corner where it’d kept its shape. Its identity is frozen with all of the burdened secrets, yours and those of all the spirits left by the past.
I’d be overpowered by fear and a compunction to flee. I’d search and find a glass door, and rush out through it into a near-bright blueness, with streaks of cirrus clouds like swift brush strokes in the sky. I’d suck fresh air deep into my lungs, hold there the welcoming scent of summer flowers on a warm breeze; the cowslips, wild clay, rosemary and comfrey. And others whose names I’ve long forgotten, and some I never knew but still love.
Why did you want this? You’d ask. After all this time?
I miss you when there’s a stretch in the evenings, when there’s a promise of endless summer days at the height of the year, your favorite time of the year. This is the day of the year you died.
Ironic but true, you’d admit. Loneliness and pain are experiences for the living. The dead do not concern themselves. Their human suffering is the livings’ interpretation of them. You’d point to the old stone wall and say, the desperation of those starving people forced to build that, did so for a futile promise of food that never came. Their spirits are embedded between the layers of stones they placed there. All of their hope that turned to anguish and led to their deaths is guarded by the robin – there to be the gatekeeper of their story and all the stories of this place. But you know, your generation left too.
Yes, I’d reply. How lonely you must have been when we all left before you?
It was hard, but isn’t that what so many generations ever knew? We cared, nurtured, and distilled an agency in you all, until you grew up. And left. Your leaving, all your leavings belonged to so much of our past. What tales you hold are all that remain.
We’d both lift our faces to the sun and feel its warmth and know we are following the precession of the equinox.
The earth doesn’t ever stay on the same path, you’d remind me. Its one constant is change, and it won’t follow the same route as it does on this solstice, through Orion, for more than twenty-five thousand years.
I’m wasting time, aren’t I?
Well, at least you finally understand that you need never come back here. This is your past, not mine or anyone else’s.
You’d beckon me away then and lead me along a winding country road where overgrown briars would brush off our sleeves. You’d stop when we came upon a high brick wall with a wrought-iron gate in the center.
You’d disappear without notice, and I’d recognize it as if your funeral day had returned. Composure would’ve left me; despair and sorrow would take me. I’d walk with my head down on a narrow concrete path, new once, but where moss now grows out of its crevices. It’s only a short distance to where you were put to rest. How should this be a memory I’d want to relive?
There are far more in this graveyard than there were then. Popular for the dead, I suppose. I’d stop at the grave beside yours; that of a baby. The incomprehensible, most confounding death of all. When we first laid our eyes upon this small mound of earth beside your giant one, we had joked that at least you were there to care for and comfort her. After all, who was more playful than you?
You weren’t here, I’d scream into a void. I never got to say goodbye before you were interred forever in this damn mud.
You are still real to me, even in death, but reality changes from within: our bodies change, our minds change. With time, grief is possible to live with, but time does not resolve it. I want to tell you I think of you differently now. I’ve learnt so much in the years that followed the last day I was here, when we first walked up the slope to this wet ground.
Your headstone is made of marble, not much different from the other headstones that occupy the acres of decay here. My eyes would drift over fading engravings, that of an easel without color. But my attention wouldn’t settle there. My mind would drift for a moment to a drawing of yours still with me, a keepsake of imperfect art. A depiction of a fly fisherman’s rod with the wrong reel. A trusted pursuit of yours where you spent time close to nature, late in the evenings.
At the bottom of the stone, that book I saw you reading earlier would sit there like some sort of oracle. I’d pick it up and realize that the message you’d left me is in its title: ‘Lovely is the Lee’. On every page, your delicate penciled thoughts and sketches would be scribbled in its margins. The answers to my quest are remembered on the headstone and kept within the book’s pages. To move forward, I must find the source of our people’s origin.
I’d follow a long, winding river, through a wide valley of heather ridges, and bursts of yellow gorse, and hills that would change to craggy grey mountains. I’d travel throughout the day until I found the edge of Gougane Barra’s lake. I’d find the same sanctuary in its unaltered beauty that you and all those before bore witness to.
A still permeates and is remembered there for those who wish it. Walking over a grassy bridge to a small island past the dignified remains of monks’ cloisters reminds us that mind and soul are held within its calm embrace. I’d begin to feel its restorative powers.
I’d head past an oratory, to a small grove of tall trees and sit on the well-worn stone slab that juts out into the lake. I’d feel tired after such an arduous journey, yet emboldened by the knowledge of spirits that exist within the inkiness of the lake. I’d sit with your book on my lap to watch the sun at dusk descend beneath the sharpness of the steep mountains. Three wild geese would land in a flutter, and with a raucous sound disturb the silence of peaceful, glass waters. They’d have come home also. They, too, are part of the tales kept deep within the waters here. It’s an ancient existence, passed by word of mouth. There are mystical deities here too, worshipped by a people who existed long before the monks came here to be with their God.
A ray of final solstice light would drift across the lake behind the geese and settle on a mossy rock only feet from where I sit. I’d spot another sharp blue light in the shape of a bottle. This one would emerge from the depths of the lake and float to the water’s edge. You’d told me of the Druidic mysticism of this light and how it contains all our most precious memories. It exists always from where the voices of the past meet. The collective souls join, and all their stories are accumulated, each generation merged into the next. These are part of all who belong to this place or wish to seek its restorative powers.
The lake is a mirror of the mountains. When the sun has disappeared, it would be replaced by a sea of endless stars that had been camouflaged in the brightness of a solstice day. The water reflects all the constellations in the heavens as if painted on it by nature. You are among them now, lost somewhere within, at once almost touchable, yet a little sadly, light-years away.
