Donegal Summer

Silage rolled in black plastic, bearing mysterious symbols in white, lies in the corner of fields. The smell of turf-smoke mixed with silage is very sweet. The walls of old houses crumble rapidly once the roof has given in. Mobile homes lie in their yards awaiting money, permission to build, someone’s death. Where the roof remains sound, the house becomes a byre: cattle sleep in the living room and are milked in the parlour. Young men raise the walls of new brick houses at the edge of bogs, at dusk on summer evenings. They look up as you pass by.

Be-All and End-All

When he brought my mother and me to a place in the corner of a field near an old path—only he knew the place now, the path overgrown, no longer used, large farms the be-all and end-all of life in what was once called Queen’s county—and when he pointed us in the direction of where my mother’s family had lived, I could see nothing at all. I don’t remember if I even thanked him before he drove away. He was a distant relative, a devout person who went on pilgrimages, a man with the time to remember such places. I followed my mother, already walking with a cane through fields she might once have known as a child, feeling perhaps the sharp jab of memories of her parents and siblings and the grandparents who’d once lived there, the way lives and stories could disappear forever and quickly. We approached a spot where the wild bushes and greenery seemed to have huddled together in order to hide something. I did not ask my mother later, in the car, how she felt, or if we should have gone there at all. I never asked what it meant for her, this little collection of stones that formed the last remaining sign of human habitation: the right-angled corner of a small stone dwelling, merely waist-high, slumbering beside a once-path.

Mary Byrne was born and raised in Ireland, has lived in France for a very long time, tweets at @BrigitteLOignon, and is the author of the short fiction collection Plugging the Causal Breach (Regal House, 2019).