Wayne King Livingston
Published: 2009-06-09
Total Pages: 118
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ANOTHER WINDOW WITHOUT A LIGHT Another house that is not a home. Reposing on a lush Irish lawn and free of any direction, my mind rests. High above I see clearly as I peer deep into a typical soft and rosy afternoon’s sky. No longer do I soar at forty-one thousand feet or so, emitting a set of frosty contrails, no more do I fly out of somewhere like London to New York on business. Those lacy traces above my life now are etchings wavering high and signs of all-too familiar sky engravings usually observable by blokes on the ground who might longingly wish to be up there as a birdman. No, with me now, it is hands on hips with feet or body planted firmly on Irish soil and sorting out another day on the Head. It is Toe Head, the then center of my universe. Looking beyond the frosty stratospheric doodles and out to the west, icy winds that had formed recently are now raging incessantly down from a frigid arctic basin, located far to the North and are booming my way, covering the furthermost tip of Toe Head called Koch’s Bluff. The promontory sits about a rocky mile from my ocean-side cottage and is always the brunt of weather that can be seen coming for miles. Soon the blasts would of necessity snuffle out my balmy breezes that normally made my day in life on the Head, my world in Ireland. They are feckless. The blustering gales reek of ancient sea life and kelp that the frenetic ocean currents stir up from a temporarily unsettled bottom of a normally placid bay. I had spent an entire life aloft it seems,battling such effects as these that mother nature threw at me and others who suffered the same ilk. Looking seaward, the surface of Toe Head Bay this day mirrored the mottling of its normally glassy gleam as the flotsam of the bottom greenery rose in anger at the stirring of its usually equable bed. The hasty winds would be here in but moments and I might retreat to my toasty hearth that simmers with the umber-looking wonder called peat. The treasured fuel had lain mostly untouched for a millennia or two until the people of the bogs came to find respite from the fierce tribes on the European continent, some few thousand years ago. They had appropriated land of little use and made do with the silty ponds and marshes that would have been rejected by any less resolute than the bog habitants would. There were names for the hearty that lived in the watery moors. Names such as Firbolgs or the ancient Druids. Once hearty trees such as the Oak, lined the rocky promontories and pastures that rimmed our Head, but many deprivations eroded the once staunch sentinels and now have been consumed by centuries of hearth fires,countless roof spines and a myriad of cottage doors worn down by large families ghosted repeatedly by famine and poor times. Now the Icelandic winds drive straight in to me, wresting up any objects let loose by careless abandon. Not withstanding mother earth’s foibles, life was simple here,politics having freed Ireland to go its own way in 1922. www.waynekinglivingston.com
