Elder Friend

I have an elderly friend, soft as an angel's feather but tough as flint. She is a constant inspiration to me and a wonderful breath of fresh air in a sometimes smoggy world. She has  encyclopedic knowledge and is, to some extent polymathy in the ways of rural, garden farming and small town politics...a never ending teller of stories, a seanachai of golden prose.
I was reminded of this when I photographed this mountain...so different to yesterday's snow capped peaks. I remembered of a story she told me.... In the early nineteen fourties her father brought her brother a bicycle so he could court ladies in a different village a few miles away to enveigle new blood into the town in the form of a willing bride....How times have changed.... Men would leave the town at three in the morning to get their potatoes, or cabbage or tomatoes to market in Dublin eighteen miles away and hope to get home before nightfall. These days we travel the country, indeed half the world, without too much thought...just saying

The Small Window