"Today the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs; and the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove. Now it is time to sit quiet, face to face with thee, and to sing dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure." - Rabindranath Tagore
A familiar winding road enjoyed on a recent Sunday morning was like a librarian’s dream. And so it should be at such on a time when most humans within its environs, bar those tending to dairy cattle were probably - and rightly - still in their pjs and slippers.
There’s much to be said for a day of rest, despite what the 5am disciples on LinkedIn tell the rest of us plebs. Out with the dogs, inhaling the morning, trying to forget the things that need forgetting, even if only for a short while.
The ditches, perhaps as old as the State itself, are dense, brambly in parts while lush in others. Along the route, some overgrowth has long since colonised waist-high stone walls diligently built in my grandparents’ generation or even further back.
Angkor Wat’s Irish outreach remains in its infancy here, as nature slowly finds a way to reclaim grounds ‘civilised’ by God-fearing boundary builders who wore tweed caps, drank tea from glass bottles and took dinner in the middle of the day.
Not a half-mile from these walls, a ditch has been breached on the double where foundations for four new houses have been recently constituted. The cookie-dough-like soil, cleaved clear of the earth to make way for these new Eircodes in waiting, sits stacked, like a mini Uluru at the east end of the site.
A year from now, that stack will be a memory. The foundations will be invisible beneath a quartet of near completed properties. The ditch will have been entirely replaced by a fresh boundary, be it a low standing wall or a gleaming new fence. The neighbourhood will have gained new residents while longer established four-winged regulars may well have lost a nesting area or two. This quiet road will be a little less quiet, maybe even on those lazier Sunday mornings.
Much more sizeable developments are advancing a couple of miles away and the prospect of further builds barely a mile in the opposite direction will soon be in tow.
This neck of the woods will probably lose a few more trees while gaining additional exhaust fumes as 4x4s - rarely fully populated as they zip past pedestrians - dart one way and then the other.
Several motorists who use this narrow strip of tarmac between Waterford City and Tramore, are way too heavy on the accelerator given the route’s dimensions. And since they’re speeding away from University Hospital Waterford, it’s hard to believe the person driving is ferrying someone either in labour or experiencing intense injury or pain. So why the need for such speed?
Cyclists populate this route on a Sunday morning, the vast majority of whom offer a warm, happy to be alive ‘hello’ to those out for a walk with two or four-legged companions as well as those with just a thought or two for company. People living on or just off this route, who began exchanging pleasantries during those first Covid lockdown walkabouts, continue to do so. Strangers have become neighbours.
“I hadn’t seen you for a few weeks,” a man in a hi-vis jacket and baseball cap, volunteers in my direction. Half-jokingly, he proffers: “I was wondering if you were after moving or if something worse than that had happened.”
Having assured him that I was still only ‘over the road’, firmly above ground level while referencing some other recent goings-on, he was happy to see me just as I was pleased to see him. There’s much to be said for the warmth of familiarity and someone sincerely asking: “how are you?”
Turning right, away from the boreen and back towards suburbia, the front door and the uncut garden lawn, there’s solace in both the good company inside these home walls as well as that experienced along the winding road just a half mile away I’ll venture upon again that evening. For it provides a familiarity, a silence and an overflowing leisure, that I couldn’t be more grateful for.
"Leaves of the summer, lovely summer's pride,
Sweet is the shade below your silent tree,
Whether in waving copses, where ye hide
My roaming, or in fields that let me see
The open sky; and whether ye may be
Around the low-stemm'd oak, robust and wide;
Or taper ash upon the mountain side;
Or lowland elm; your shade is sweet to me." - William Barnes
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