Finding right words with time aplenty
A’Mhoine is a desolate but beautiful bog-scape with a mountain backdrop, and the house provides the lynchpin for the view.
‘Imagine you are standing by the house...In my time, our time and your time the black burn (altan dubh) and the firebrand sky are joined in this house, the pivot, and they nodding as the day is long to the bog of ages, and beyond to where the violent sea breaks gentle across the apple green strand at the Kyle of Tongue.’
Edna thought this too wordy, so I came back with...‘For fifty years, the flux that is A’Mhoine has guided my hand.’ ‘Getting there’, she said. Never fear the critic. I’ve called the following ‘Little Victories’, after I thought that the precious little stone with it’s quartz oval was lost years ago.
I found the stone on the beach on Iona; I had camped in a small barn and was watching an otter eating an octopus, and reflecting on the rat which criss-crossed my sleeping bag in the night.
I was also debating whether to get my long curls wet in the ocean, Yep that’s me at 18, no joke.
The stone was my lucky charm, for thirty years, and it was on my person every day.
Then it was gone, who knows where, but I’ve just found it during a big sort out.
It was inside the silver bowl my Dad was awarded for Best In Show Blue Beveren rabbit in 1963, inside another treasure, one of my daughter Niamh’s milk formula tins which I had painted and displayed in the Cellar Bar for 10 years.
‘My own little Russian Doll, behind me all along.’
Send entries to sean. wood@talk21.com by May 15.
(There will be one winner and my decision final, although entries may appear here, and runnersup invited to the Tap Open Night).
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