A time for everything, and everything in its time

The moon illumined the mist that hung over the Lough giving it a mystical hue under which all of nature stood still in the eerie silence of this November night as I walked along the road from McConnell’s cross to Quivvy church.

Only a fluttering of wings in the reeds abroad broke the stilly silence, not even a rustle in the hedgerow nor the barking of a fox, as the woodcock picked her steps amongst the flagging bottoms at Derrycark.

A torch in hand I passed beneath the tall Scots Pines that Lord Lanesborough planted over a hundred years and more ago, few of which remain. Beneath their high slender branches, looking out o’er the Lough, enveloped in the mist, was the outline of a little house, covered in ivy, but a storey and a half that looked so very still and lonesome as the mist skirted its walls around. The front door lay somewhat ajar as the ivy creeped in through the opening, above which the last rose of summer on a rambling bush hinted that once this house was loved and cared for.

In the decades past it was the home of the Fergusons, and the home of the old woman’s people before. It was the first of the houses along the road to greet the passerby and, by its front door, all life passed for generation upon generation; so many people from all the farmsteads from every townland around. For them the light in its window was a beacon along the miles of road they had yet to go until they reached the banks of the river Erne and the townland of Galloon on the far shore in Co Fermanagh. Two miles and more before you cross the bridge into the townland of Quivvy where Lord Lanesbrough built his hunting lodge, a fine country house, where he came each summer with his entourage and, there on its lawns, the estate workers and locals recalled how they were invited to a garden fête in the August of the year.

His car was the first to travel the road at the of the turn of the last century but, apart from this motorised vehicle, the only mode of transport to pass their door was ass and cart to carry the country folk into town. There were times that the cart bore not only the living but sometimes the dead, as a lonesome coffin, hewn from the trees of the forest beyond, was pulled gently along by the faithful ass bound for the chapel and graveyards at Clonocey or Drumalee. There the Fergusons stood at their front door and bade farewell to neighbours they had long known with their heads bent low.

They watched as children walked the miles of stoney road each day to Drumlaney school in their bare feet, picking blackberries out of the hedgerows, the men driving cattle, with a tip of the cap and a slap of the boot, to the town on Fair Day. Neighbours in their droves passing by with tilly lamps in their hands on their way to the town for Midnight mass on Christmas Eve. In the still of a summer’s night the children often stood to listen to the faint tones of Cissy Bawn singing to her hearts content from across the Lough as she milked the cows or in the mornings gave ear for the ring of the bell as Big Lizzy passed on her high nelly, on her way to the town.

The trundle of Aiden Fitz’s open back lorry that brought pigs to the Fair heralded a new age of transport and a new taxi service for the road as he carried the neighbours to mass on the back of it of a Sunday morn, all before Anthony’s Davey Brown, with his Nellie high in the cab, started going the road.

With each and every decade this roadside house watched as the changes wrought by modernity passed by its front door and, with every passing year, the pace of change quickened as those on foot became fewer and fewer. The bicycles that once passed in twos and threes, no time to stop on sit atop of the low wall and talk on the bits and pieces as people in cars sped by the little house.

And so it was that the old couple moved into the Widow’s Row within in the town and there their bachelor son lived and died in the years to come as with the neighbours all along the road and the ivy grew and there it stands forlorn today, once full of life, now still and silent to the passing world.

And so it is that all things pass, a time for everything and everything in its time and in November we watch as nature too gives in and breathes her last. We hardly can believe how time has passed and the year has gone so quickly by, an allegory for our living. We busy ourselves with so many things that fill our time as the months pass unbeknownst to us and we wonder what it was that occupied our days.

For the day will come as nature reminds that our lives too will pass and all that we have busied ourselves with, all that was temporary and fleeting, will one day be covered with ivy. So let us rest a while in our passing, take time to gaze on a house that was once so full of life, to remind ourselves that all things pass so quickly by.

Seek the truth of life from age to age for it is that, which will bring true meaning.

YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY:

Our neighbour, the old soldier we had never known