Damien Enright on the beauty of a November morning.
WHEN the sun shines in Ireland in November and the wind blows away the clouds, it is easy to forget the gloom. Like Americans on the morning of Barack Obama’s victory, we wake in another country.
Here, the dark days will return, part of the natural cycle of the seasons. There, we hope that whatever the weather, the glittering future will not fade. It is a great country, America, and it was tragic to see its ideals sullied by the Bush-Cheney gang. The measures necessary to restore its economic stability may impact on Ireland but, in the long term, an America that begins to achieves the ideals of its own constitution will be a beacon of hope for humanity.
Meanwhile, out on the mudflats of the bay on this rare, glittering November morning, how companionable are the birds! Knot, which may have come from the Canadian Arctic, feed alongside whimbrels from northern Scandinavia and Russia; they are all heading south and the Irish coastline is a grub-stop on the way.
As I watch, a squadron of tiny dunlin comes winging fast and low down the estuary. They flick over and for a second their white breasts flash in the sun. They swoop, bank and set down amongst the knot as lightly as feathers falling. It is a wonderful morning to be alive and to be out and about. The slob still has acres of weed plastered across the mud but it is dark green now and shining, easy on the eye and no apparent problem for the birds.
The shelduck feeding far out on the mud appear as moving flecks of brilliant white. Through the binoculars, they are seen to be gorgeously patterned, with chestnut collars, black heads and red beaks vivid against the snow white of their backs and breasts. They strut between the pools of sea water left by the tide, bright mirrors in the sward of green. Along the channels carved deep in the mud by the falling tide, flotillas of widgeon and teal cruise slowly by while others roost, head under wing, along the banks. It is a peaceful kingdom. Like myself and the walkers I meet, all nature seems to be glorying in the sun and sharp air. Teams of oystercatchers and godwits pick over the shining grass in the fields opposite the water, painstaking and systematic as they quarter the ground.
The beeches across our garden stream still have leaves and the low sun filtering through lights them in every shade of gold. I saw a single butterfly fly between the falling leaves on November 10. It may have been a tortoiseshell unseasonably stirred from indoor hibernation by the heat of the morning and flying out into a false summer. Unless it returned indoors, it could not have survived.
The beech leaves are resplendent in the light. The reds and golds are unparalleled. They have a sort of luminosity, a sheer brilliance. Poets have compared them to the last flare of embers before they die. If one subscribed to the concept of a celestial vision, one could seek it in the woods on these bright November days.
It is warm in places, too.
I sat for half an hour scanning the slob and the birds from behind a sheltering wall — one of the few left — in a ruined Cistercian abbey on the shores of Courtmacsherry Bay in west Cork. The abbey had been there for some 800 years. How often had the stones I sat on soaked in the warmth of a November sun and lost it again to a December snowfall? How often had the walls split in the heat of bygone summers? The walls crumble but the stones abide.
So, too, the low, stubby headstones that mark the graves of long-dead monks and parishioners. If ever they bore names, they are long obliterated but I doubt they ever did. They are no more than shards of unhewn rock stood upright, grown with grey lichen. The peals of the angelus ring distantly from Timoleague. How many angelus bells have these stones heard?
It is here, sheltered by these walls, that the first primroses of the year come into flower. They may have been flowering in this holy ground for centuries. I have been recording them for a dozen years or so, scarcely a footnote in their history.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, November 17, 2008
