Annie Dunne

The years return us gradually to the afflictions and shames of childhood, it is a curiosity of existence.

What is this growing old, when even the engine that holds our despair and hope in balance begins to fail us.

I cannot hardly speak to myself let alone to him. I feel the world is against me and at the same time I feel miserably at odds with everything. I have the awkward sense that if I open my mouth people will know me for the villain I am. At the same time, or in the next breath, tears keep surging up into my eyes, tears of some righteousness, because my mind keeps rising to righteousness. All in all I am like a ragged wind in a tangled hedge.

There is only a whisper of time between then and now, it seems to me. The clock of the heart does not follow the one on the mantelpiece.

Now all my mother’s things are dispersed also, and only this ladle has come from that time, passing through two or three sets of women’s hands. It scoops the bath water well enough, the little boy’s back glistens at me, with its slender spine, his skin as soft as gloves. I think of my grandmother, Bridget Dunne, and him, the past and the present. Her long set of bones lie in against the church in Kiltegan yard, his fidget below me.

The marriage coverlet is woven and embroidered for the happy pair, the house is built in a few summer weeks by the meitheal of neighbours, the last twist and stitch is put to the thatch, and in they go, the fortunate couple, with strength and purpose – and at length the house is desolate and empty with only rain for a roof, the stranger comes and opens the rotted hope chest, and puts their fingers to the folded coverlet, which falls from their hand in mouldy fragments. And that’s all we can say about it, the shortness, the swiftness, and the strange unimportance of life. But when June is queen, eternally in the grasses, in the wood pigeons, in the dank rooks, in the potato gardens, in the cabbage patches, wild dreams are given birth to with all the mighty energy of the full-blowing year.

has been changed. The jars of boiled sweets still hypnotize the children after school. Even the newcomers

There is a soughing in the beech trees and the ash, and the small music of the hens.

They had a house there below Kelsha, one of the old mud-walled jobs, that has long disappeared back into its garden of fuchsia and orange lilies that the mother herself had planted in her first days of marriage, as women do in their gardens, all full of hope.