Another Harvest

Our house in Ireland is a compact white bungalow, sheltered on one side by a wall of towering Leyland cypresses and hidden behind a briar-threaded untamed hedge. Driving in one direction along the road it faces, you may not see the house until you’ve passed. Sometimes there are cattle pastured in the field on the other side of the cypresses. In the bedroom, I found myself frequently startled by sudden deep shuddering exhalations or violent snorts when the large beasts moved, unseen beyond the trees, only a few metres away. From the front windows a field is just visible over a low, tangled hedge; sometimes wheat or barley grows there, other times cattle graze it.

Here in Salzburg, we live on the first floor of stout two-story house, with wide overhanging eaves. From our front windows, we look out on another row of similar houses along a quiet, suburban street. From our veranda out the back, we also look onto a row of houses. Beyond them, however, lie several acres of fields that have been cultivated all summer.

When I first saw these fields, they lay under ragged patches of snow; where raw earth was visible, it was pock-marked by mole holes. The day we moved in, a hot day polished by a wind nearly as dry as a Santa Ana, the droning of an engine drifted in the open window, audible over the scurry of brittle leaves on the pavement. It was a single tractor moving forward and back, turning over black earth in a single long, narrow strip and leaving a trail of dust behind.

Over the summer, my husband and I have watched the progress of the crops growing in relatively small strips ranging over the fields. In the early summer months barley and wheat, threaded through with bright red poppies, ripened. Himself, who likes a good Pilsner and finds wheat beer an abomination, would chant as we passed, ‘Wheat is for brot, barley for bier.’ As the summer stretched on and the grain’s green burnished to dull gold, the heavy pale heads bowed forward, until at last they were nearly doubled over, ready to cut.

Potatoes, too, grew in a long narrow strip, about 15 metres wide and perhaps 300 metres long. Through July and August we watched as the plants sprouted, greened, flowered and then sat, squat and close to the ground, the spuds waiting to be dug. We joked about stealing out in the dark with a spade to test their goodness. One day, though, we passed and realised the plants were gone, the earth churned and brown.

More recently, even as the wheat and barley were harvested and the potatoes dug, a stand of corn remained. Corn in the American sense, it grew taller and taller. Not having seen this type of maize grown before, Himself remarked that for the first time, he understood the lyric: It was indeed as high as an elephant’s eye. In my imagination, I re-lived summer barbecues with ears of sweet corn dripping with butter, sweet kernels salted and savoury with pepper, spurting juice with each bite.

As we’ve driven through the Austrian and, recently, Czech Republic, countryside in the last two months, we’ve passed many acres of maize like this, standing in tall, dense rows, rising high over the grass beside it. Row after row of amassed stalks caught the late summer light; their tassels blazed bronze. It puzzled us.

The sweet corn I recall had been a feature of July and August feasts. Why had so much corn been planted for harvest this late in the summer? I hadn’t seen it in markets over the summer, nor did it seem like something I’d expect to see on an Austrian table. What would it be used for? Was it raised as vegetable crop, feed, corn oil, corn syrup, or, perhaps, even popcorn? The question became one more on our list of Things We Wonder About Austria.

As fall drew closer, each time I passed the corn, I tried to assess its readiness. I searched for the white silken strands emerging from the pale green ears. Young boys wheeled their bikes on the road in front of it, leaving a litter of familiar fibrous leaves in their wake. Were they hungering for it too? I imagined the sweet swelling ears, growing longer and thicker. When would it be ready for harvest? And how would the ears be cut from the stalks?

One morning last week, the quiet was broken by a low but steady mechanical yawl. It throbbed, rising and falling but always there, as the day went on. When I later rode out on my bike, I saw a tractor moving along the tall, green, even rows of corn. As it passed forward and back, the corn disappeared, one row at a time.

Fascinated, I stopped and stood under the trees at the roadside to watch. The tractor, a shiny new red Massey-Ferguson, pulled an faded green and timber trailer. Near the ground, two parallel angular yellow blades, like the arms of a toy transformer, projected from the tractor’s side, just in front of the trailer. As the tractor moved forward, these sheared way the entire corn stalk at its base. Quicker than I could see, the whole plant – stalk, leaves, cobs and all – was felled and swallowed by a side-mounted device. Then, within seconds, a silken veil of green and gold sprayed from a tall narrow spout into the trailer.

I stood there watching, the low-lying sun of the equinox white-hot on the side of my face. After a few runs, the farmer, a well-tanned man with white hair tonsured like a monk’s, wearing in the heat only loose white shorts, manoeuvred his rig along side two large trailers parked at the edge of the narrow road. Another, younger, man operated the mechanical jaws of an enormous scoop to lift the load from the small trailer into the two waiting ones. Then the white-hair man reversed his tractor and trailer, turned the rig around, and aligned it with the three remaining rows of corn. With a nod towards me, he lowered the heavy yellow shears into place and slowly rolled forward, corn stalks vanishing before him.

As the tractor rattled away, I called out to the younger man, ‘Do you speak English?’

Only a little, he told me. As I struggled to frame my question, I thought how his ‘little’ English was so much more than my poor store of German.

‘Was machst du . . . ?’ I gestured, mortified, suddenly aware I had addressed him using the familiar, as if he were a child.

If he was offended, he didn’t show it. He simply answered my ill-framed question. The produce would be used as animal feed, he said. One mystery had been solved.

The next morning, all was quiet. Beyond the houses opposite my office window I could see the alternating stripes of the field: deep green, brown, pale-green-and-yellow, then deeper brown. In the slanted morning light, they glistened with a silver sheen of dew. In a few weeks’ time, they could well be glistening with frost. The field was, as far as I could see, empty, save for a few crows, like black-coated burghers, ponderously nodding while they stepped from side to side, gleaning what was to be had.

Irish Harvest

I wrote recently about fall in Southern California, but it was only this morning, a glorious day, the sky above Salzburg deep blue and cloudless, that I realised that today is just two days from the autumnal equinox, the point in the year after which darkness overtakes daylight, creeping slowly, day by day, each night’s length exceeding the previous day’s hours of daylight.

The realisation brought to mind Ireland, where I spent the last three autumns. I recalled the bronzing of the beech leaves there and the reddening of the rose hips in the hedgerows. And I remembered the harvest.

I’ve spent most of my life living in towns or cities, so the three autumns I lived in the Irish countryside were a revelation to me. In those three years, I found myself watching the skies each fall almost as anxiously as the farmers, looking for weather fine enough to bring in the harvest. Last year’s pleasant warm and dry early fall seemed a reward for enduring a miserably wet summer. I revelled in the sound of the combines droning in the fields surrounding us. I delighted in the shorn stubble shining pale gold in the sun, field after field of it, abutting in the distance green pastures. It was lovely to see, and surprisingly reassuring considering I have only an indirect stake in it. There was something peaceful about knowing the corn is safe in.

One golden day about this time last year, on a Sunday afternoon in Co Tipperary, I stood at the edge of a field watching a neighbour harvest the wheat. In the day’s heat and under the intense sun, I looked over my shoulder at what my husband’s family call the Old House – the now-deserted stone cottage built by my mother-in-law’s grandfather –  just across the road from where I stood. The sun glinting off its black slates suddenly seemed to solidify them. I saw as if for the first time the broken tiles and blotched greying walls. The golden light that bright September afternoon made me see it as a painter would. Its crumbling walls and chipped slates seemed more real, more weighty, than they had been a moment before.

That afternoon, it occurred to me that in three years, I’d never watched a combine at work harvesting the grain. So I stood at the entrance to Pat Murphy’s field, leaning over the gate and watching as Pat, working with his cousin and neighbour Johnny Donnell, manoeuvred the combine and tractor into position. This took longer than I expected, with Pat periodically jumping down from the cab and climbing back into it. Thick grey exhaust billowed from the combine. After 20 minutes or so, the combine, with Johnny driving it, rumbled off up the field, and Pat manoeuvred the tractor out the gate and onto the road.

The combine crossed and recrossed the rich ripe field, there at the foot of the Galtee Mountains, the din of its engine rising and falling as it approached and retreated. At last it pulled up to the large blue trailer placed at the edge of the field and aimed its towering cylindrical spout over the container. Down poured the golden stream, heavy, full, dusty. The door of the combine opened and Johnny jumped out. He stood by me and talked of the goodness of the harvest. He said, 'It is dry and the wheat is dry and falls nicely.' He spoke of its fall into the trailer as a thing, a noun, not a verb, an entity that was lovely, even, smooth. He talked about the price being dependent on the corn’s being dry. For each point of moisture above about 18%, the price drops because the corn buyers have to dry it, he said.

Standing in the heat and feeling the freshness of the fields, the trees and hedges, I felt exhilarated and connected to the countryside. Even the noise didn’t bother me. It seemed necessary, productive, reassuring. I remembered how the previous year, the combine had been brought to that very field and the next day the rain poured from the heavens, for days on end. The very fact that the corn could be cut filled me with joy.

The combine rumbled back and forth all afternoon and into the evening. Later that night, I walked over in the dark and stood watching it work. Its lights illuminated the field as it worked the hidden sea of wheat. I watched the light move across the field at the foot of the mountains to the north, which stood silhouetted against the horizon. The road and the hedges were black as I walked the short distance to our house, following the light I had left on. In the warm darkness, alone, far from crowds, I was comforted by the humming of the combine and the late song of birds.

They were at it until past midnight, Pat told me the next day, when it got too damp to work. The morning was overcast, so they waited for the sun to emerge and dry out the field to continue harvesting. When it’s damp, the straw doesn’t cut well and it clogs the header, Pat said as we stood in the mud at the edge of the field. Halfway across it, the uncut wheat swayed gently above the rough stubble with its litter of straw. At home not long afterwards, I listened to the rumble of the combine as work began again.

Later, just as evening set in, I walked up the road to see if Pat had finished harvesting the wheat. The light was gentle, the edge of pale grey, and the air as soft as a sigh. The hedgerow enclosing the field was luxuriant, its bracken still bright green, but I could feel in the air the coming chill. In the near-complete silence, I heard the deep lowing of a single beast, cow or bullock, from a nearby pasture.

I entered the field through the gap in the hedge and crossed the uneven muddy ground. The combine’s tracks seen from the distance appeared even and neat, like ridges of corduroy. But seen up close they were choppy, carpeted with chafe, ragged stubble and torn straw fallen every which way. I thought at first the ground was littered with the gold of wasted wheat. But then I picked up fingerfuls of the stuff and could see it was hollow chafe, as weightless as the pale light trickling through the shadows.

Leaving the field I looked back. The fading sun, low and red-orange, lay tangled in the spikes of the tree tops. Dozens of pale-gold straw cylinders, each over a metre in diameter and perhaps two metres long, were all that remained of the harvest. In the days to come, these would be loaded onto a tractor-drawn trailer and stored in sheds for use over the winter. For now, though, they were scattered across the field, washed pale pink and burnished gold by the sun’s last rays, like so many spools tossed aside by an outsized toddler. For the moment, they looked magical.

Not 'The Sound of Music' Tour

Some weeks ago, I spent a Friday afternoon strolling the streets of the Altstadt. It was a week or two after the opening of the Salzburg Festival, so the city was more than usually crowded with tourists, buskers and ordinary people going about their lives. Tiers of seats had been erected in the Domplatz for the performances of Jederman – Everyman – that, as is tradition, opened the Festival. The Universitätsplatz in front of the Collegiate Church was jammed with stalls under striped awnings displaying meat and fish, vegetables, fruits and flowers, honey and salts, carved wood and straw ornaments. Having bought vegetables for dinner and treated myself to spicy wurstl, I wandered aimlessly, stopping not so much to look at shop windows but in front of posters, trying to make out what they said. My German is coming along, but it still is halting and full of holes. Slowly I made out the news of upcoming concerts, many of them in churches. Mozart’s Requiem Mass was to be performed at 10 a.m. mass in the Dom the following day. A series of organ concerts at the Franciscan church began that evening.

A huge screen had been erected in the sprawling Kapitelplatz beside the Dom. Rows of folding chairs faced it and a tented café set with small tables stood behind the seats. For the first month of the Festival, there were screenings of past performances every evening, free for all of us too unfortunate, too poor, or perhaps too lazy to have got tickets for this year’s Festival.

Pushing beyond my comfort zone, I ventured where I’ve not been before. I passed the Neptune foundation in the far back corner of the platz and, coming upon a pair of narrow lanes winding around in the direction of the Festung, turned left. I found myself in a narrow cobbled alley that rose and curved slightly as it led away from the platz.

One of a welter of nearly hidden lanes that weave around the base of Mönchberg just under the Festung, it was nearly deserted. I passed only another man and woman as I moved up the slight incline. The buildings looked neglected, even desolate. At the corner, several windows of an deserted hostel had been smashed. Entrances were padlocked and paint faded and peeling. Warped wooden doors, varnish worn away, faced a blank wall lined with rubbish bins. A small grimy workman’s van stood beside them. Over one doorway hung a sign for a stub’n, ‘1 stock’, the sign said – one floor up. On this dark afternoon, the pub didn’t seem welcoming; I couldn’t tell if it were closed for the afternoon or abandoned. Above me, though, sounds of carpentry came from an open window.

The cobbled lane rounded slightly, like the curve on an archer’s bow. Pale green walls of a building rose from thick, sloping stone walls. Across its windows, darker grey-green shutters lay closed like eyelids. Overhead an iron sign dangled, like the medieval signs of old that advertised shops through images rather than words. This one was the silhouette of an elegantly turned out woman, small-waisted in billowing skirts, a boa flowing from around her neck. There was a date: 1501

Illuminated red lamps hung from under the eaves; deep pink lights glowed in its windows. A hand-lettered sign taped the door said the door was kept unlocked and that one could enter between the hours of 10 a.m. and midnight. Pinned next to it was an array of photographs of women wearing thongs and bustiers, suspenders and stockings. Passing on, I made careful note of the sign on end of the building, ‘Altstadt Laufhaus’.

While on that afternoon last month some idea stirred in the back of my brain, naïve as I can be, I hadn’t given much thought to prostitution in Austria. As it happens, however, Himself and I had encountered street walkers on our first visit to Vienna. Our hotel was far from the city centre, and, on our search for a place to eat that night, we were surprised to find ourselves passing street walkers as they stood along the kerb, waving broadly at the passing cars. It was early in April, a chilly evening, but the women wore short skirts or tight shorts, their legs covered only in fishnet tights. To a one, they wore knee-length silver boots with inch-high clear Lucite soles that made them appear to float woozily just above the pavement. Eyes dark, they stared through us as we passed along the sidewalk. I, on the other hand, had trouble resisting the urge to study their dress and their posture, their behaviour and expressions.

Himself said he’d never seen working girls before, which seemed surprising, given our time in Los Angeles. Myself, I remembered one bleak afternoon on Christmas Day, many years ago, seeing a girl work a corner along Hollywood Blvd. But I’d never seen the boldness of these women as they nonchalantly ignored the Austria’s prohibition against street solicitation.

Prostitution is generally legal but highly regulated in Austria. And, it turns out, a laufhaus is a kind of brothel where prostitutes rent rooms, leaving their doors open when they are available. Lauf means ‘walk’; in a laufhaus, clients walk through the house to choose a woman of their liking or not, depending on their inclinations.

In fact, the Altstadt Laufhaus I stumbled upon may be the country’s oldest brothel. It’s located on Herrengasse, ‘gentlemen’s lane’, just at the edge of the university and cathedral precinct, which makes perfect sense to me.

I’ve been back to Herrengasse since, most recently on a bright afternoon when the afternoon sun illuminated the domes of Salzburg against a clear blue sky. Tourists clogged the platzes, snapping pictures and lapping ice cream. The narrow lane was, again, nearly deserted. Wisteria tumbled over a wall, leaves lit translucent green. Someone out of sight, in a room just over my head, stood by an open window practicing the violin, and notes and chords filled the lane like sunlight. On this afternoon, the entrance to the stub’n, one flight up, was inviting, its menu board boasting of the day’s specials. I realised it was St. Paul’s Stub’n, a well-known gasthaus, popular, I’m told, with students and locals. Voices floated down from the restaurant’s balcony, which was strung with bright coloured lights. What had seemed drab and grey weeks ago swelled with colour and life.

I pushed my bike along, stopping every so often to take it in. Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw, several metres away, a tall woman in blue jeans slip quickly through the door of a house, a pale green house with grey-green shutters.

Above me, through an open window, someone laughed. From which window it came, I could not say.

Demons

The demons have been pernicious lately. They slither slowly through the grey nether regions of my consciousness, unseen but felt. Their utterances are soft but compelling, reminding me of the pointlessness of this struggle. My tongue is stopped, a red sore swells on my throat, burning and itching, now scabbing over, nearly healing, then angrily erupting again.

I tell myself to sit, to write, that unstopping my voice may release the poison. That may be pure superstitious bullshit. The one may have nothing to do with the other. It may be my need to make sense of things by seeing patterns in coincidence. I’ve had the eruption on my neck before, frequently, in times of stress, always in the same place. It generally fades with time, but this occurrence is stretching longer than usual.

‘You’re lazy,’ they whisper.

‘You’re right.’ I agree with them, shame, then despondency, drifting like a dull net over me. ‘What’s the point?’

‘You have nothing to say.’

I turn the sentence I have just typed over in my mind, wondering if it should stand. The red spot on my neck burns hotter. 

A Spy Visits Across the Pond

I ‘met’ Christina Schweighofer at her blog, Across the Pond, a few months ago. A journalist born in Austria, Christina and her husband lived in Prague and Los Angeles before moving to Vienna, where they and their children lived for two years. On the move again, Christina and her family have returned to Los Angeles, where they are now settling in.

I enjoy Christina’s blog for her insights into Austria, particularly Vienna. In fact, I turned to Christina for advice on a recent weekend trip to the city. She very graciously invited me to write a guest post, which you can now read at Across the Pond.

In the meantime, I'm working on the next post, which I hope you will find here very soon.

The Sound of Music

Months ago, during my first week in Salzburg, I got lost.

I had walked through the Altstadt southward, away from the Dom, and wandered through the winding lanes near the Kajetanerkirche until I reached the southeastern toe of Mönchsberg, the mountain on which sits the massive white fortress, the Festung Hohensalzburg. There I turned right, thinking that I could keep walking clockwise around the mountain and come back round to the Altstadt.

I was wrong. The geography of the city is not that simple. The footprint of the mountain is larger and more complex than I had, naïvely, assumed.

I’ve been to the corner where I turned right several times since, wanting, in part, a clearer mental map of where I went wrong. But I also wanted to find Nonnberg Abbey, which I knew was somewhere nearby. You can see its distinctive red onion-topped steeple from most places in Salzburg, rising over the large blue-green dome of the Dom, nearly as high as the Festung itself. It should be right there, along the streets I walked. But like a mystical city lost in the interstices between this and a parallel universe, the abbey eluded me.

Nonnberg Abbey is a Benedictine convent founded in the 8^th century by St Rupert. It’s reputed to be the oldest convent in the German-speaking world. Part of its fame for tourists to Salzburg is due to its having been the convent where Maria Augusta Kutschera had begun her novitiate before going as a tutor to the family of Georg von Trapp. It is where the pair were married in 1927, and its exterior was a location during the filming of The Sound of Music. I was curious to find it if only to tick it off the list of things to see in Salzburg. (Researching Nonnberg since, I’ve realised there are cultural and aesthetic reasons to make a special trip to visit the abbey.)

Sunday, a warm day with the rain holding off, Himself and I set out on our bicycles to explore the area again. We followed my original route, turning right at the southeastern toe of the mountain, and soon found ourselves on a tiny square opposite a church looking up at the southern aspect of the Festung. There was no sign of the abbey from there. So we turned back and cycled through the twisting lanes again. Still no sign of the abbey, until, at last, we noticed a small street sign set into the stone wall in a small fold in Kaigasse. ‘Nonnberggasse’ it read.

Securing our bikes, we found ourselves at the foot of a very long series of steps that disappeared as they ascended along a narrow passage between buildings. From our vantage on the street, we couldn’t see any sky above them. Exhausted after a long uphill cycle earlier in the day (but that’s another post), we started climbing. A few minutes into the climb with no sign of the end in sight, we spotted a group coming down the steps.

‘There, the man in the green shirt,’ I said, pointing to the figure at the top of our field of vision. ‘If we don’t get there by the time we’re at that step . . .’

Himself completed my thought. ‘We’ll reconsider our options.’

But, when we reached that point, we were at the top of the steps and Stift Nonnberg was to our right. A gravel path swept around the edge of the mountain; spread out beyond us was the green Salzach valley. Directly below, we could see the narrow street with its domed church and tiny green square we had recently left. From here, I could see the steep path than ran from the street level to where we were, another way to reach the abbey. Nearby, a large sign outlined the geological history of the valley. We were standing where once, hundreds of thousands of years ago, an enormous glacial lake had covered the region.

At our backs was the small gate to abbey itself. Inside it, we found a compact courtyard in front of the church. Inset in its stone walls were memorial stones carved in low relief, some of them with naïve-looking images, some with ornate death’s heads and inscriptions in German Gothic script. Several graves ranged along  the wall, three of them seemingly completely overgrown with ivy. I thought of the women who lay there, their names obscured, with no children or grandchildren to remember them. Does the same oblivion await me, I wondered, with no descendents to recall my life?

There was a constrained feeling about the courtyard, enclosed narrowly between the wall separating it from the outer path and the walls of the church itself. Himself remarked that he could still not see the distinctive red onion steeple, but, craning our necks and searching overhead, we saw it at last, rising overhead with a gilt clock on its tower. It was quiet on this late Sunday afternoon, in the small courtyard far above the busy plätze and gassen below, most of them filled with tourists, festival goers and ordinary Salzburgers enjoying a dry warm day. A bird sang in the tree, and we spoke quietly, conscious of the privacy of the nuns within. At last, though, we mounted the worn red stone porch, pushed open a thick, battered wooden door, and passed between the carved figures on the jambs of the Gothic doorway.

The interior was illuminated faintly by dim light passing through high clerestory windows. It is small, a late Gothic church, containing a nave, two aisles and side chapels under groin vaulting. Completed in 1506, it replaced an earlier Romanesque church destroyed by fire in 1423. We could barely make out the soaring winged altarpiece beyond the chancel arch, its gilt flamboyance dulled in the half dark. Beneath the altar is a crypt where the remains of St Erentrudis, the founding abbess, lie. Steps on either side of the altar lead down to it. Peering into it, I could see stone floors and wooden benches reflecting the half light. At the back of the church, under the nuns’ choir and behind clear panels, one can see the faded colours of the remains of graceful frescos from the older, replaced Romanesque building.

These details we noticed later, though. What we were first aware of, after the creaking groans had subsided when the heavy door clanged shut, as our eyes adjusted to the low light and we seated ourselves on uncomfortable wooden pews, was music. A choir of women’s voices was singing, their voices drifting towards us from somewhere above. Opposite us sat a young man, alone, motionless. A few pews in front of us was a couple, also motionless as they listened. We sat, rapt, enchanted. It was the nuns at their afternoon office, sung gracefully with rich, sweet voices, accompanied by organ. Now and again a soprano voice rose above the rest in melodic solo before rejoining her sisters in the chorus.

Conscious that we had, once again, been lucky in our timing, we sat in the near dark listening for some minutes. I turned round to see high above us, at that back of the nave, the windows into the nuns’ private choir. They had been swung open. Looking up, I could see frescos decorating its shallow vaulted ceiling. I could see nothing else, though. The nuns were secluded in their own world, celebrating their centuries-long monastic tradition.

After a time, the singing stopped; the organ continued, swelling majestically. Then there was silence. Silence above and silence below, as we eavesdroppers in the half-dark sat still, still wrapped in the heavenly voices, still held in the magic middle passage, that enchanted space that marks the transition between song and absence of song.

The silence stretched out. At last came a quiet swish, swish, swish from beyond the windows above. Himself leaned toward me and whispered, ‘It’s the chair seats flipping up.’

That it was. We stood, ready to let the day continue in its flow as we slipped once again into the life of Salzburg.

Katzenstrasse revisited

I’ve written before about Mona, the cat who, with her sister Lisa, shares the house with our neighbours Edith and Hannes. Mona is as audacious as Lisa is shy. She roams the neighbourhood, coming into this house as well as others. She appears suddenly and pushes herself into our legs, demanding attention. She needs no invitation to settle herself on the bench at the breakfast table. Grey and white, she’s fat, sleek and confident.

Edith and Hannes are away on holiday this week. They left Mona and Lisa in the care of me and another neighbour, who goes into the house twice a day to put down fresh food. The cats came come and go into their house as they please through cat flaps. But they are lonely. The neighbour with the keys tells me the food is not being eaten. Even shy Lisa can be found at our doors, hungry not for food but attention.

Mona, bold as ever, has taken to spending even more time in this house. First thing in the morning, before Himself is even up, she appears at the door that opens from the bedroom onto the flat roof of the garage. Let in, she snuggles on top of the bed or settles purring in my lap. I’ve put a towel on a chair in the living room so she can make herself comfortable there. Holding her in my lap, I recall our beloved cat Puisín. How hard it was to leave her in the care of our neighbours when we were away for two, even three, weeks at a time. When we returned, they would tell of her loneliness.

‘She missed you,’ they would report. ‘She seemed depressed.’

I knew they had done what they could to care for her, but the pangs of guilt and fear that thoughts of her loneliness brought haunted me during every trip we took. I think of that as Mona presses her head against me, purring as I stroke her.

It looks, however, that Mona, affectionate as she is, is fickle, quite fickle. For Edith and Hannes have been gone only a week and already she seems to have transferred her loyalty to me. As a mark of her appreciation, she has just now laid at my feet a love offering. A very small, still warm, inanimate but only recently so, dark, fur-covered token of her affection. She is extremely proud, brushing against my legs then moving toward the tiny still thing, anxious that I should see it.

If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.

I hope Hannes won’t be jealous.