the may month in ireland

 

At the edge of memory glimmers lilac blossom.

This year's purply burgeoning blooms with their poignant musky scent evoke the blossoms of other Summers long lost to me.

The dandelions carpeted on the lawn have a timelessness too.

Then there's the cherry blossoms on Mrs Moran's tree which seem more luscious than usual.

The much loved white flowered plant called Summer Snow is flooding along the borders as is a veritable copse of Honesty plants also white flowered but with blooms that later in the season, in a strange and beautiful genesis, will turn silvery and take on the texture of little coins.

Summer Snow is known technically as Cerastium Tomentosum.

Honesty Plants are referred to as Lunaria.

I commend both to your attention.

The flowers that is, not the Latin names.

A further forest of white flowers is beginning to show but I don't know what they're called.

I planted them one year and then complained plaintively to the Deity: "Nothing I plant ever grows."

The following year they sprang up again in strength all over the place and have been with us in fine effusion ever since. Their blossoms look like bells.

I call them Mabel flowers after a neighbour's child who practiced her gymnastics among them one year and changed the shape of the bells somewhat.

The gladiolusseses have shown up with their incomparable pale pink hued opalescent translucent pearlescent roseate blah blah blah.

Me and the gladiolus have a shirty relationship.

I mean what sort of a flower shows up just for one week in the year, outshines everything else in the garden, and then goes as suddenly as it came, without a backward glance.

If a woman did it, a poet might get miffed.

Not to mention the fact that my refusal to write gladioli for the plural reduces me to gladiolusseseses and such like.

There's already one pink rose showing on the big rose bush. Very promising.

The poet Dorothy Parker has a verse about wishing her boyfriends would stop sending her one perfect rose and send her one perfect Mercedes Benz instead.

I think the singer Janis Joplin borrowed the thought half a century later for a merry little song that includes the lyric: "Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz."

Personally I find that there are too many unseemly characters driving around in luxury cars paid for with the blood of dead junkies, cars like BMW's black Audis and the aforementioned Mercedes Benzeseses (Mercedes Benzi?) for the brands to retain any appeal.

I prefer roses.

With a bit of luck my brave hyrdrangeas will be back soon too. They've never flourished but they've never died out either. I want to have an ocean of them in blues and cerises.

The garden is full of my old pals, Jackdaws, robins, magpies, thrushes, blackbirds wood pigeons, Tom Tits, bullfinches, doves, crows, hooded crows and other hangers on. (Hint: The hooded crows are the ones that used to chase Penelope Pitstop.)

The Jackdaws have built a nest in the chimney. Last year they built it a bit loosely and it fell down into my living room where Cloudie Budgie normally lives free, ie not in her cage. I returned home that day and found the two Jackdaws in the living room and no sign of the budgie. I figured out what had happened and thought to myself: "Poor ould Cloudie. The wild birds are after eating her."

Somewhat ruefully I had opened the windows and the Jackdaws made their exit.

Then I sat quietly on the couch to think of the little budgie, a mourning session which only came to an end when Cloudie gave a little cheep from her hiding place in the bookshelf crouched between a James Thurber collection and CS Lewis' The Great Divorce.

There was life in the old budgie yet.

The blackbirds move across the grass like a wave of the sea. Their grace is quite distinctive. And that's even before they start singing.

Some darling startlings have built a nest in the eaves outside my bedroom window. I expect to be wakened by the sound of fledgelings twittering for the moon any day now.

The thrush has taken to smashing open snail shells on my front doorstep. I like the thrush. He's a big fatty. But smashing open snails on my doorstep is a bit primal for me.

There are also some scarlet plumed birds who are definitely not robins or bullfinches. There are little pippit birds which could be anything. And yellowy green things which just might be Yellow Hammers. The smaller birds have to be careful of  Tiger cat from up the road who has adopted me and another purposeful looking Tabby, this one with an unknown owner, who comes by in the afternoons apparently with the intention of ingesting my parrot. (I mean the cat wants to ingest the parrot not that the cat's unknown owner wants to ingest the parrot.) When this cat stares longingly in the window, Beaky parrot positively loses the run of himself. I don't blame him.

The nights are still.

It's not the Christmas hush.

It's something else.

Very close.

I think of Ukraine which is being bombed to smithereens in an attempted land grab by the resovietising dictatorship of Vladimir Putin in Russia.

Yet I have found peace in my own place.

A haven for sinners.

At the edge of  memory.

Where the lilac blossom glimmers.