New Hibernia Review

the fieldfares have arrived to our garden with the scent of snow on their wings, traveling all the way from Scandinavia to make their home with us over winter. Their conversations fill our morning as they fly from tree to tree, checking out the variety of berries we have for them: the claret jewels of guelder, the blaze of haws and rowan, the fire of holly. They are a constellation of new stars in our autumn sky. And then their cousins, the redwings, follow, taking up residence in the hawthorn, glutting on its fruit as if there is no tomorrow.

This is the signal for us to put our vegetable garden to bed. The little patch of earth that we are caretakers of is on the west coast of Ireland at the Gateway to Connemara, on the edge of the Atlantic. This wild and unforgiving landscape, with its ferocious seas, its mountains, its trees crippled by the winds, its stony pinched earth, is the largest Irish-speaking area in the country. Tim Robinson says in his book Connemara: Listening to the Wind that it gets its name from an early tribal grouping, the Conmaicne, that had a number of branches located in different parts of Connacht. Because this tribe lived by the sea (mara), they became Conmaicne Mara, and from that the name Connemara was derived.

I cannot read the ocean, cannot write the sea, and never have been drawn to it. Maybe it's because I was born with a caul over my head. The nurse who delivered me said I would be very lucky and that I would never drown. My mother kept it hidden in an old suitcase at the bottom of the wardrobe. Sailors would have paid good money for it. But she wouldn't sell it. She showed it to me once when I was ten or eleven, and I couldn't believe that this little dried-up patch of cling film once covered my face.

Unfortunately, it got lost, thrown out in a house move. Maybe that's why I stay with my feet safely on the ground, for I am a landswoman. I follow the [End Page 9] garden in all seasons. Trees have seeded themselves in the shelter of stone. Alder, ash, and hazel are now sentinels along the old stone walls that were bare when we first moved in here. Tiny purses of silver lichen hang from the bare branches. The dull pheasant hen, her chicks so invisible, is like old grass moving, while the cock pheasant struts around, delighted in his flamboyance. And yes, there are more than thirteen ways of looking at the blackbird. Leaves falling to the ground are at their most glorious, tints and hues a hairstylist would happily show you if you wished to recolor your fading tresses. All of this place is the gathering hub for our migrants.

Despite my lack of relationship with the sea, in this season of fall I call on its nourishing plants for our soil, so we go to Silver Strand after a storm and pick up any seaweed that has been washed onto the shore. Packing it all into the boot of the car, we drive back with the smell of salt washing over us. The fieldfares wheel across the sky as we spread it over the ridges to protect the clay from the erosion of winter rains. We harvest the last of the apples, the beetroot; plait the onions for storage. Going to seed carries a whole new meaning for me since I've taken to gathering the seeds. I never tire of their miraculous nature, some so tiny they are mere pinpricks, yet they have packed all their power worlds within their shell, ready for when they get the right conditions to become themselves.

The fieldfares like to snack on some of the grasses gone to seed. I wonder what the collective noun for these temporary migrants is. A solace? An anticipation? And where do they call home? Our little patch, or the skies of the cold north they return to when instinct reverts their leave-taking into a homecoming?

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