Since Christmas brings us back to family,loved ones and our memories of those who are gone, I thought I'd post this memory. It was another time, the mid-sixties.(from "Sunfire")
Visiting the Corsetmaker.
Miss Gately, you know, the corsetmaker; her cottage thatched and whitewashed beneath sycamores ragged with crows and their bickering.
A Sunday afternoon, my mother walking to the red door and it opened and closed and nothing else stirring for ages but ourselves in the back of the white consul with the red roof at the end of the avenue, just outside the gate;stone walls and lichen patches wallpapering our afternoon.Father dropping off in the driver’s seat while Micheal O'Hehir commentated on matches, one after another, without ever taking a breath in all that pipe smoke; matches collecting in the ash-tray all burnt to tiny black bird bones and the condensation all used up with words and faces dribbling pathetically into shapeless bad temper. Over and over: will she ever come out, can’t we go now,why do we always have to come, move your legs; till eventually she would reappear, a slap in the doorway, motor jauntily, red-headed,back to the car like it’s been five minutes or something, and Dad’s awake, reversing from the gate, back into the remains of a Sunday afternoon.
And I never knew what went on in there; never saw who opened the door,never saw a package, never heard anything about it. My father didn’t know either. I remember she took my sister with her when my sister was in secondary school;I wouldn’t have wanted to join them anyway,it was obviously a woman’s house.
