Skip to main content

Cae Cottage, Penceilogi

1 & 2 Cae Cottages in 2014
From 'Three Houses'

wiping the dust off
my grandmother's clock
another year

Memory paints my grandparents like the characters in a Dutch interior: Granny in the doorway between the porch and dark scullery, D’cu sitting in a low chair by the fire where two brass horses rear on blocks of polished oak. I enter silently, from daylight on the unpaved lane, stepping down over the stone hearth into the shadows, as if even the slightest noise could tear the membrane that divides remembering from not remembering. 

I am sure I stayed here once although my mother cannot be sure. But I know the two connected bedrooms in the eaves, the cool lino beneath my bare feet, lying in an iron bed with my sister watching the squeeze of sunlight and dust around the edges of the pulled curtains. 

The garden is a field with long grass and trees and an outside privy where, a young woman with auburn hair tells her two wide-eyed daughters, I was once chased by a goose. 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

haiku

sunrise barred light on the walls of the deportation centre tinywords May 2019

Water-Ways: A Haiku Journey in Ghent

International Haiku Festival in Ghent, Belgium 13th to 19th September 2010 Zilvervisje glimt Langs ’t onzeekre watervlak En hapt er een ster August Vermeylen (1927) silver fry flicker along the shifting waters and snaffle a star Trans. David Cobb (2010) The festival haiku by Vermeylen is one of the oldest haiku written in Dutch but also a natural choice given that Ghent is a city of rivers and waterways that weave through and around its gothic buildings and cobbled streets. And the theme of water was more intimately introduced to the delegation of assembled haiku poets after dinner on Monday and Tuesday evenings with candle-lit ‘ginko’ in hand-made and man powered, long-oared, wooden boats. With blankets over our knees and notebooks in hand we were steered silently along the dark water, under low stone bridges, with the lights and stepped gable roofs of the city above us. someone singing from an open window the boat drifts Lynne Rees ...