MONDAY, AUGUST 19
Other than a quick visit to Skibbereen for breakfast and gift shopping for Patrick’s family, the day belonged to walking. Chloe wasn’t feeling well again so it was just Patrick, Saffi and me. We headed to Castlefreke, dashing the idea of going all the way to Mizen Head, and walked to the old church ruins and cemetery (through the crazy, dark, primordial feeling forest), then back to Chloe’s and my usual path along the stream to Warren Strand.
It was intermittently cloudy, the sun broke through enormous rolling clouds in shades of grey. A day of walking and talking.
I picked up Bruce Chatwin’s “The Songlines” at Olive’s and brought it to Fiona’s. I’ve read some of it in the last couple days. It was one of my favorite books when I was younger, and travelling all the time. I thought then as I do now that we are walking animals, much healthier if we walk all the time. I also love the idea of singing land into existence, walking its song as a means of understanding.
I don’t know that many people today have the ability to map and understand land through song, but what we do have — perhaps as close as we can get — seems to be talking. I thought of this as I walked with Patrick, and listened as he tired to weave a cohesive meaning of himself, to talk himself together, as a way of understanding his life. And while his story has nothing to do with the land on which we walked, he talked of places he has lived or travelled as he moved through his story, connecting event with place, creating a map in his mind of where he exists. I listened mostly, told a few stories of my own, but not as a continuum, merely as punctuation to his story.
Walking has been one of the great gifts Chloe and I have shared this year. So many songs sung in our hearts in so many places as we walked together.
