swan

The dog and I went out for a late night walk. The rest of the world is his toilet. It is snowing! It must have been snowing now several hours. The purity general, all over Ireland. I walked along the still, dark canal following his trail and we passed not a single person. The unbroken […]

Yesterday I saw two people having a very cute picnic in a park. They were sitting side by side on one of the benches facing in to the path and had a card table set up with checkered blue and white tablecloth, two glasses, an open bottle, bowls of nibblies, real napkins… the whole nine […]

On the lake, ducks and ducklings, geese and goslings, and a pair of swans bobbed about with the tiny grey morsels of fluff my dyslexic ex used to call ‘swanlings.’ “Look, Oel! A mamma and a pappa swan… and all the little swanlings.”  

Chic girl in the sunny gardens by the duck pond, at an outdoor cafe where we had lunch, cutting her toenails at the table while her companions ate their bowls of sardines.

Tramping through the fresh snow, everything soft and white and powdery. Like daylight the snow lies unequivocally on everything. Six bursting, screeching, whumphing shapes pass overhead like white explosions and resolve themselves, by a process of frantic backpedalling, into swans. As they land on the water they one by one become graceful and fleet. I […]

River is freezing over and the swans and ducks have a narrow, darker path that they can swim through. Feathered ice-breakers. The ice is flimsy and resembles the scuzzy glass of an uncleaned shower cabinet but there are pure, sheer white patches where the overnight snow lies untouched and I can see two yellow leaves […]