LET THE BUSY WORLD BE HUSHED: Silence reigns in this house of welcomes
She sits in her armchair next the Rayburn in the quiet of her kitchen, only the sound of the burner in the range reigniting itself breaks the stilly silence of this autumnal afternoon. She turns her head towards the kitchen window to catch the movement of humankind crossing the cobbles of the back street that might lift the latch on the scullery door. As I enter into this cosy kitchen, I savour the sweet air of contentment that wafts in the quiet of this hallowed place, made sacred by all the prayers that are recited in the chair by the range far removed from the busyness of life around.
As I greet her in familiar tones, that she has come to know of a first Friday for many’s a year, the warmth of her welcome is like a soothing balm after the maelstrom of teenage voices in the morning that has been. ‘Ah Father it’s good to see you, who’d ever have thought that you’d call this way?’
Just to know that you are welcomed unconditionally into the kitchen of her heart eases the weight of the oft-times heavy burdens that you carry with you in your mind from day to day, sometimes unbeknownst to you. Burdens that you place upon your shoulders, which seem to dissipate in these quiet moments of simple conversation, moments of ease where you know you are accepted for just being you, drawn back to a time that was, a time without care or worry in a kitchen of your childhood. The memory of such a place you can pull without effort from the attic of your mind and there in her presence you can reimagine that very place and time.
For these too are moments that will never be again, to sit on a sofa in a kitchen without marble counters, a kitchen that has been a place of welcomes for over a hundred years, a kitchen that she came to as a bride some three score years and ten ago from the townland of Aughadrumagullion, a name that evokes a poetry. Not that she dwells too much on rhyme for she is one that courts pragmatism, befriended over a life of continuous work and at times hardship, though enjoying contentment over a century, living each day by the rhythm of time and season, never having driven a car or sent an email but having time to listen and to learn a little as each day passes.
At her side sits a novel to pass the quiet moments of the afternoon, Patricia Scanlon no less telling the story of ‘city lives’ that she has never known, living in the shadow of the Drumlins that in her salad days she watched her husband plough.
Her daughter visits from Dublin to spend a week away from the hub bub in the quiet of this place and, when no one is watching and the kettle is off the boil, they both sit in the warmth of this kitchen with eyes engrossed in the descriptive words of other lives written on a page. Lives lived far from the quiet of the back street on to which she looks where once cows drew in of an evening to be milked in the parlour that now, of cattle, stands empty.
Silence reigns in this house of welcomes, a silence that invites the company of another to ask how you are and how your mother is? After she recalls ‘I remember your father going the road’ as the bright autumn sunshine, that illumines her begonias grown in pots along the wall beneath the tall Chestnut tree, streams through the window.
Oh how the Autumn calls us inward to sit by a fire to spend a while listening and indeed being listened to. The fall of the year that beckons us to rest from our labours, to lay aside the heavy burdens gathered over the months of the year, as nature lays down her spade and shovel so too we are called, as the days shorten to draw in and to leave a lot aside.
To spend time in the presence of this lady who has known much over the course of a century is indeed a privilege, to benefit from the gift of her hindsight, that all things come and all things pass and that about which we worry and allow to occupy our minds are matters that are but fleeting.
Contentment is found in the silence of the everyday, the simple routines of living, interactions that are life giving, which restore the soul, time spent with people who will listen in the shadows of an Autumn evening, who have lived much and learned much and have much to give by way of hindsight and perspective.
Time given in the presence of God be it in the flicker of candlelight in a quiet Church or by the range praying silently, garnering wisdom and insight to offer comfort and consolation unbeknownst to you when a weary wanderer happens to pass by your door.
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