Months and seasons out of our hands

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Our months and seasons are not arbitrary artificial affairs, decided upon by committee and vote. They are periods of time defined by the experiences of hundreds of generations before us. Nature doesn’t follow our calendar: it created it.

I love to sit outside, watching the seasons emerge, burst into life and then sigh, fade and die.

Elevated, surrounded by trees and fields of pasture, the ecosystem hereabouts is thriving. Clearly it’s not pristine, as there are sheep and cattle being farmed by humans, but over the last nine months I’ve seen an incredible diversity of plants and animals around my patch.

Every week, sometimes it feels like every day, there’s a shroud of different small flying things draped over the walls of the house, or crawling in their thousands, like a living carpet, over the metallic silver of my car Joey SX.

My life here has improved immeasurably since the landlord cut back the huge laurel that stood at the end of the cottage. Millions of midges disappeared from my immediate environment, leaving only the other gazillion trillion who live around the trees.

Great news for me, with a clean fresh breeze able to flow around the western gables, but disaster for the two spiders who lived in my tiny bathroom.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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