A County Louth Harvest morning

A County Louth Harvest morning

Driving across the harvest-shaved plains of Louth early one morning recently, my memories re-wound to another place and time when impressions of Autumn were first burnt on to the uncluttered tablet of my mind. The early-day mists were slowly lifting their veil, leaving beaded traces of their presence behind. A shock of whin-bushes on an uncultivated ditch wore white mantillas of finely-weaved cobwebs threaded with dew-drops. I was told at school by my fellow students that these morning dews were very powerful. One of their effects was that they could wash away freckles. I cupped my hands and caught a web-full of magic and smeared it all over my spotted face. The only thing that was washed away was my innocence. The morning vista, seen from the security of my car, appeared as an apparition of October past, a lost play-ground through which I once walked in rapt wonder.

Patrick Kavanagh was born in October 1904 and the month featured in some of his most finely-wrought images. In the epic poem called ‘The Great Hunger’, he spoke of October winds, ‘playing a symphony on a slack wire paling’. He associated the month with his father. What he wonderfully called ‘October-coloured weather’ seemed to remind him of the autumn of life as he had seen it unfold in the life of his late father. He wrote, ‘Every old man I see/ Reminds me of my father/ When he had fallen in love with death/ One time when sheaves were gathered./ That man I saw in Gardiner Street/ Stumble on the kerb was one,/ He stared at me half-eyed,/ I might have been his son./ And I remember the musician/ Faltering over his fiddle/ In Bayswater, London./ He too set me the riddle./ Every old man I see/ In October-coloured weather/ Seems to say to me/ I was once your father’.

As late as 1883, Pope Leo XIII started the practice of devoting the month of October to the Rosary. ‘The October Devotions’ became a fixture in the spiritual calendar especially for the rural Irish. For a few years, while we were still young and while my father was concentrating on farming rather than on life behind the bar, we used to say the Rosary in the evening time. We knelt on the oil-cloth covered floor with our elbows propped on about-turned, hard wooden chair-seats while our rosaries dangled underneath, teasing the kittens and amusing ourselves between ‘decades’. My father called the prayers with great speed, leaving no interval between the two stanzas of the Hail Mary/Holy Mary. It was the audio equivalent of a dog chasing its tail.

The prayer-baton was passed on from one to another with seamless contact as we took our turn, hoping that we would not forget the name of the ‘Mystery’; the number of prayers said and the text of the prayer. The beginning of the end was signalled by the recitation of the Litany of Loreto. This is a list of finely-crafted, poetic praise-names, titles and invocations to Our Lady. My father knew it off by heart. I was puzzled by the meaning of two of these invocations that happened to come one after the other. In my father’s verbal haste, ‘Mother most chaste’ sounded like ‘mother was chased’ and my childish, enquiring and shocked mind wondered why. ‘Mother inviolate’, the following invocation, was interpreted in the concrete imagery of childhood as ‘mother in violet’. Maybe, I thought, that’s why she was chased! Then there was the tail-end prayers or ‘trimmings’ as they were affectionately known. These were a set of ‘One Our Father and Three Hail Marys’, mostly for deceased relatives or for the contemporary concerns of the household. The ‘Hail Holy Queen’ wrapped up the prayer-package for the night.

What we lose in flowers during autumn, we gain in fruits and harvest. H. W. Beecher wrote, ‘October is nature’s funeral month. Nature glories in death more than in life. The month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming – October more than May. Every green thing loves to die in bright colours’. It was a month of conkers and sycamore seeds as I remember it. There was a belt of sycamore trees sheltering our farmhouse from the wind that blew in over the lake. We threw the winged seeds into the air and watched them fall, whirring like a helicopter with only one blade. Chestnut trees were uncommon so we valued them greatly and travelled to collect their polished fruit. With boyish bravado we notched up conquests until a beloved conker finally split and fell from its knotted cord. Nature’s spray of berries and seeds, fruits and nuts could afford to be generous.

All seeds cannot fall on fertile ground. Mellow autumn allows us to stock-take and to prepare. This is what autumn teaches as its flaming trees light up our way into darkness and winter cold.