Talking to Mother

"Talk a me Mammy, talk a me...." I would cry, and she would.

Amidst the business of mothering, the shopping, cleaning, cooking, baby bearing , baby rearing treadmill of a Mother's life, my Mam would talk to me.

Over the years the talking changed. Encouragement. Admonishment. Praise and blame. But it never stopped.

One particular conversation, as we trudged from Wardenstown to Raharney through snow that topped my wellington's and hid road from field, held a special place. I can no longer remember what we talk about, but I remember the joy my little ten year old's heart felt at having her to myself. A grown up's conversation in a magical landscape of white. Its tracks visible decades after the Spring's melting.

Another time. In a quiet kitchen as I savoured the warm smell of the hot iron on freshly washed cotton, she slowly started to speak about the past. A great opening of the family safe of secrets and hidden hurts. History bequeathed as a coming of age present. Time stood still until the clamour of friends at the door dragged me to the noisy mayhem of flashing lights and pounding rhythms. Yet something of me stayed in that kitchen, and never left.

Over the years the talking changed. Testing. Sensing. Tone becoming more important than words.

"Did you know so and so?" she would ask , and I would test her with a blasphemous declaration that I had clearly left it too late to "know so and so". I often thought that we talked like modems. A noisy , senseless clatter of words exchanged until a connection was made, but once the connection was made there wasn't really any need for words. For a long time after she was gone, my hand would dial her number and hurriedly hang up as I remembered that the clatter of my words would find no echo.

It shocked me when she mastered the art of hiding her pain. When I realised that the tone poem of our small talk could no longer be relied upon to tell me when she was upset or unwell. That changed too. When she no longer had the strength to hide the gathering darkness.

In those final days, there was a lot of talk. With spare breath, she greeted speechless neighbours and red eyed friends. Confounded them with teasing talk of football and gratitude for their presence. Confounded us with her resilience in that magnolia painted Gethsemane.

After she was gone. I cried with my sister, realising that it had troubled me that she had not had anything in particular to say to me at the end. No profound final words to hold onto in my sadness.

"Maybe", my sister said, with kind eyes that were part of her inheritance and freshly washed with fountains of her own greater sorrow, "it was because she knew that she had already said all she needed to say to you in all of those conversations over the years".

"Talk a me Mammy" I would ask. And she would.

I miss her.

Leaves

I've done nothing with the leaves,
But watch them die.
Gold become bronze become oil dark brown.

When first they fell, their swirling dances,
were the wind conducted overture of winter.

When the snows fell, they were a quilt to the frozen ground,
but slowly we could feel them fail and flatten,
to rigor stiffened slabs.

Thawed in the warmth of early spring,
their frost blackened corpses
formed layer on layer of slick decay.

Their ghosts became treacherous.
Slippery rotten piles, a trap for the unwary.
frustrated by my broken arm,
I harboured grudges and added them to my list of scores to settle.

Until this morning, when the glimpse of twin leaved, tender, sprouting,
made them a garden.

I've done nothing with the leaves,
but they have done much with me.

Music hath charms......

When I was ten or eleven, a cassette recorder arrived in our house (I think it might have been mine, but I'm not absolutely sure on that one). Aside from the novelty of "candid taping" each other , I remember the warbly recordings I made from the TV and radio of theme tunes and songs. One of those songs came back to me this morning as I was buying my coffee. They were playing a version by Six on the radio, but the version that began to play in my head was the 1975 Guys and Dolls original, complete with the wavy distortions that came as the batteries faded.

Its funny how something so small can change the tone of your morning and take you to a different place.

I'm sure it would surprise no one when I say that I'm reasonably sure that somewhere in all of the boxes I've lugged around for years, I still have that tape.


Enjoy!

Honey Gold

Nutty granola's are not to everyone's taste, but I've always had a fondness for pecan nut and this recipe is as close as I can come to some lovely pecan granola that I've tasted on my travels. It also has a lovely golden colour and is sweeter than my usual recipe.

Ingredients:

500g Flahavan's Organic Jumbo Oats
100g Flaked Almonds
130g Chopped Pecan Nuts
150g Sunflower Seeds
60g Sesame Seeds
25g Dessicated Coconut
100ml Sunflower Oil
200g Honey
1tsp Vanilla Extract

Method:

Heat the honey, oil and vanilla extract in a saucepan over a low heat (or in a microwave until the mixture is warm and fluid. Mix well with a wooden spoon (I'm always tempted to add some bizarre instruction like "made from a piece of wood that has been carved from a hawthorn at midnight on the night of a full moon and dried under your true love's pillow for 7 years, but I guess that might just undermine the principle of simple, unfussy cooking advice and invite all sorts of contributions on whether hawthorn spoon would even work!).

Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. I blitzed them together in a blender very briefly both as a means of mixing and of getting to a more consistent mix, breaking up the larger nuts and shredding the coconut but this is by no means essential.

Add the honey and oil to the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Leave to stand for an hour or so to allow the oats time to absorb as much of the liquid as possible.

Spread the mixture on parchment lined baking trays and cook in an oven, pre heated to 150 degrees centigrade, for 30 minutes , stirring frequently (and certainly no less than every 10 minutes).

A personal tip is to empty the finished trays into a wok and allow to cool. The wok retains a fair amount of head and ensures that the mixture dries thoroughly before you transfer it to storage jars.

If you plan to add dried fruit , this is the time to do so, the heat of the wok will also allow the fruit to expand, absorbing any remaining moisture in the mix.

Serving:

Serve with fresh milk or yogurt and , if you have a very sweet tooth, some extra West Cork honey!

Enjoy!.

Johnny Allen

I didn't play much football as a child , but one Friday afternoon in February 1975 I played brilliantly. I'd been sent to play with my friends on the green two or three roads away, where I had never dared venture before. A special treat to distract me from the sadness in my Mother's eyes and the hurried whisperings of adults making arrangements for black clothes and the sewing on of dark diamonds on overcoat sleeves. I talked about football, Leeds and Arsenal , my friends patient with my chattering ignorance. I tackled and weaved, passed and scored as I had never done before, nor would again.

Later, just before bedtime, the great dam of grief burst in the green armchair my sister always claimed for hers, my Mother hushing my sobs as tears washed her enfolding arms. He was finally gone. "No more Grandad" my Grandmother has whispered over and over , weeks before, when she finally let us use the good room, a sanctuary we hardly knew existed.

Johnny Allen was my Grandfather. A hero. A neat , quiet man who smelt of soap and soil, and on Saturday's , before confession, the tidying of graves and a bottle of stout in Mrs. Quinn's , he smelt of 4711 cologne. Born in the early years of the last century , he was the last of generations of Allen's who had, since at least the beginning of the century before, worked as stewards and gardeners at Wardenstown, a Georgian manor that stood on more ancient foundations, in Co. Westmeath.

In later years, his bushy eyebrows became the playthings of my baby cousins but I imagined the younger man to have been as handsome as any Hollywood star. My great aunts told tales of his rakish youth, leaping from windows to avoid an approaching girl whose eye he'd taken. Her arrival had been announced by the creak of the Garden Gate that in later years I would listen for in anticipation of his return from the yard for lunch, following the hollow scrape of his wellingtons on the gravel of the laurel walk until he appeared at the little green wooden gate that marked the boundary of "the Big House". A generation before, an infant boy, his lost and only son, had listened for that same gate. I imagined that he too was called "Gosun", or "A mhic", and felt the gentle , tousling hand.

A father to three daughters, the youngest barely an infant, the eldest my Mother, only five, when childbirth made him a widower. Later, he married the woman I knew as my Gran , who had loved him since her teens and loved him to the end. Guarding him, sometimes too fiercely. She bore him a son, taken cruelly by the vaccine that was supposed to protect him from smallpox

Towards the end, when he must have sensed that time was short, having already cheated the black hatted diagnosis once before, his stories poured from him and I was admitted to the company of men, behind the cream painted screen that separated shop from bar.

Years later, visiting the barely changed yards of Wardenstown, I found his scythe , hanging on the wall where he'd left it thirty years before and remembered his slow steady rhythm. Later still , a friend , who had not known him, shared a poem and I was once more, a ten year old boy , grieving for his lost grandfather.


Scythe

by John F. Deane

He has been moving
On the widening circumference
of a circle of his own making;

eye bright, back straight, and head erect;
his shirt-sleeves folded, sweat on his flesh,
intoxicating clover-pollen, daisy dust,

rising to him, and the high grass -
in breathless ballet - falling at his feet;
he has achieved a rhythm

that takes him from us for a while,
his soul a hub of quietness,
his body melting into the almost perfect

elliptical orbiting of the world,
soon he will flop down tiredly amongst us
his thoughts, as after sex, moving

on the heroes of myth and literature
while the grass at the centre of his circle
has begun, imperceptibly, to green.


In memory of Johnny Allen, of Wardenstown, Co. Westmeath, who died on 7th February 1975.

And in the morning..... I'm makin' waffles!

Waffles to me were always synonymous with the catchy advertisements for a certain "versatile" potato version, much loved by children when drowned in tomato ketchup. Occasionally I'd come across a waffle iron at the breakfast table of an hotel but the dripping jug of porridge like goo that usually stood beside it was rarely an attractive prospect. In more recent times the idea of waffles (rather than the actual eating experience) took a little hold thanks to Donkey's much quoted catch phrase.

Then, thanks to those lovely people at Lidl, the Waffle Maker arrived. Competition for Sunday morning pancakes. I also had visions of a jug of mix always at the ready, a quick option for a warm start to school days. The Waffle's initial outing was well received, or so I thought. As the iron cooled and returned , reboxed, to its shelf I realised that my first buttery sweet creations hadn't been quite the success I had imagined.

Being just a little obsessive about these things, I went on a quest for more interesting waffle recipes and last evening turned the kitchen table into the floury equivalent of a science lab bench, carefully measured variations mixed and logged. This morning, I am happy to report some small modicum of success. Waffles that were not only well received but may actually be good for you!


Butter Free Waffles


Ingredients:

100g Wholegrain Spelt Flour
100g Plain Flour
1Tbsp (15g) Vanilla Sugar
2Tsp Baking Powder
1 pinch Salt

375ml Milk
3 Eggs
1/2Tbsp Vegetable Oil / Sunflower Oil


Method:

Mix the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl.
In a separate bowl, beat the eggs, then add the milk and oil, beating again until well mixed.
Add egg, milk and oil mix to the dry ingredients until the mix has a consistent, smooth texture.

You can make the mixture the night before and leave in the fridge but you may need to give the mix a quick stir before you use it as the oil will tend to separate.
Pour a hefty spoonfull of the mix onto your pre heated Waffle Maker and cook following your "manufacturer's instructions". One thing to watch out for is the relatively large quantity of baking powder in this mix which causes the mix to rise rapidly when it first begins to heat, so you may need to apply some additional pressure to the lid of your Waffle Maker.


Serving:

This is where the "butter free" bit may go out the window! I like mine with honey and washed down with lashings of coffee (why was I about to type ginger beer? ), but I'm reassured that Nutella, sugar, butter and peanut butter work just as well.


Healthy Oatmeal Waffles

So this is definitely a case of saving the best until last. A small variation to the basic recipe above is to replace the wholegrain flour with Porridge Oats (Flahavan's naturally) and add half a teaspoon of cinnamon.

A healthier option that is simply delicious. Enjoy!

Music and Memory

Thirty years ago, a classmate was so upset by the death of John Lennon that he took the day off school. One of the reasons why I've always remembered it was because to his classmates, and many of the teachers, it wasn't that surprising a thing to do, given his well known devotion to the Beatles and Lennon in particular (and he certainly wasn't the kind of guy to miss class without a very good reason). While not at the point of taking a day off, I did have a moment of pause when I heard that the composer John Barry had passed away.

If my memories have a soundtrack, much of it was written by John Barry. He will be missed.

One of my favourite John Barry pieces has to be the theme from Midnight Cowboy but there are so many others to choose from.