Average

My average morning begins by throwing open the front door to the yard and letting the day in. Even in the depths of winter the door stays open for as long as possible, heat quietly dissipates from the house exchanged with light and air and the sounds of the woods and weather. A fair swap I think. Living in a small “traditional” Irish forester’s cottage, deep stone walls and tiny windows perched in an acute valley that doesn’t see the sun until gone 9.30 am in the summer; my need for light is severe and so I let it in through the door.

This cottage shows on the first edition of the Irish O.S map, exactly the same footprint since the 1800’s, more than likely squatting here all through the famine always surrounded by woodland broadleaved, bluebelled and old. The ground here is Clashmore sandstone and Knockboy podzolic cut through with seams of Portlaw steep phase sandstone till, amazing then that the slow drift of subsidence that has begun to occur at the gable end of the house, precariously close to a steep drop of about fifteen feet, has only just begun to show as a fine deepening crack running through the concrete yard and up the wall of the house, skirting a bedroom window like an interesting scar around an eye. One day I suppose the house will take a slow slide down the bank, the extremes of climate change kicking it along. I don’t think it will be dramatic, just an incremental falling away, leaky tile by leaky tile until eventually the job of underpinning will become so monumentally expensive it will just be left for nature to reclaim; oak trees seeding themselves into the chimney, brambles and gorse colonising the floor of the rooms, irate wrens fashioning domey nests in the remnants of kitchen.

For now though I exchange the warmth of last night’s stove for the freshness of today’s autumn mists and consider the soft peachy glow in the triangle of southern sky I can see from the window. The wrens blast urgent chirps around the door where they hunt spiders, white noise of the swollen Owenashad river, the creator of this valley its river cobbles left embedded in the soil of my garden, hums a backdrop to the day. The odd car on the wet road rips the peace. My feet grow cold, a shiver begins at my back, I pull over the hood of my novelty Christmas dressing gown. I will get dressed soon. One average day the only trace of this moment will be a fallen cottage and some piled stones marking the graves of my dogs among the trees.