October a month when sheaves are gathered and the lights dim

Country Living with Francis Farragher

There’s always a little tinge of sadness about the onset of October and maybe after the glorious September we’ve enjoyed that shouldn’t be the case, but our 10th month of the year just carries too many little reminders that our summer has come to a close and that winter is on the way.

It’s a month, purely by way of coincidence, when anniversaries of father and friends occur, and that tends to add a little strain of poignancy to the time of the year, going back to the days of secondary school at Tuam CBS, when we read Paddy Kavanagh’s poetry and especially his four verses entitled: Memory of My Father.

“Every old man I see, Reminds of my father, When he had fallen in love with death, One time when sheaves were gathered . . . . Every old man I see, In October coloured weather, Seems to say to me, I was once your father.”

Out in the country farm, the experience of seeing a father grow old can be the first major undermining of innocence when the realisation strikes a teenager that one of the great influences on their life is not going to be around forever.

In rural life where animals come and go, being treated humanely and kindly before then being sent for slaughter, our sense of transience should be ingrained in our young minds, but the memories of a father gradually forgetting the little tasks such as putting the dog in the shed, of ‘raking’ the fire with ashes to keep its embers alive for the morning, and of taking twice the length of time to walk to the callow field and back to the house, curiously tend to become fresher with the passing of time.

Despite all the rebelliousness and stubbornness that plasters the surface of the consciousness of most teenage boys, probably the most sobering thought that flashes through their minds at times is the thought that there will be a time when those people just won’t be in their lives anymore. All contained in that turbulent and often confused world of growing up.

October tends to be symbolic of that decline in our lives, as the evenings close in, torches are recharged for the darker nights, the fires are put on that bit earlier in the evenings, and our intake of natural daylight and sunshine declines fairly dramatically.

Those little reminders of the change from light to darkness have over the past 20 years taxed the minds of psychiatrists and researchers into mental health, and it is now pretty much accepted that an association condition results from that we all now know as SAD – seasonal affected disorder.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.