text: First story I've written in almost 10 years, since I was 15. Any feedback is appreciated. \ I stared out the passenger window as we drove along the slender lane. The laurel hedges were marvelously beveled, the fence was given a fresh lick of paint and a fern green coated the house. Much had changed since my last visit here. Like the towering, smothering birches that sheltered the home house, granny was reaching the winter of her life. As beneficiary to the farm, Uncle Graham was committed to caring for granny in her old age. The timing of this deterioration and the shuffling of the pack which followed were both unexpected and unwelcome to everyone. Change, especially ageing, always is. But Graham had really done a lot to the place, granny was well looked after, and his kids finally had the space they always dreamt of. Today, my dad and I had come to pay granny a visit. But that was not all. Christmas was fast approaching, daylight levels were dropping and the crisp, winter air could have skinned a brass monkey. A trailer load of sticks was on the agenda, and Graham had plenty of them. The couple of bags we got from Farm Relief didn’t go far, and Graham had hinted at a small mountain of firewood beyond the back fields. Dads days of labour on the family farm had long left him since college, but he never turned down a day’s work when the opportunity came knocking. We parked ourselves up on the sloping driveway, climbed out of the car, and rang the doorbell. No answer. Dad tried the door and as expected, it opened. Let’s just say my granny always operated an ‘open door policy’. I wasn’t in Dublin anymore! Graham and Anne were out, but the kids were playing upstairs. They quietened as we entered but still sensed our familiar faces and managed to softly whimper a “hello”. We pulled down our face masks and scaled the stairs to grannies’ room. She was napping but awakened as her bedroom door creaked open. Her room remained just as it was when grandad was alive. To our right, stared the Child of Prague. To our left, Padre Pio. Dad helped granny out of bed and escorted her to the television room, arm-in-arm. We planted ourselves on the new recliner and muted the TV, keeping our distance from her. Like clockwork, the kids entered the room bearing Viscount biscuits and tea in Nicholas Mosse mugs, on a silver tray. “Oh, would you look at that. You’re so good, lads!” Dad raved. Anne must’ve drilled them for visitors, I suspected. Once the kids left, I had the chance to properly take in the interior decorating which had taken place over the past month. It was as if I had been transported three decades into the future. What was once archaic, cluttered with furniture and outdated in colour, was now minimalistic in style with earthy, grounded shades and tones. Everything about the place was more spacious and refreshing. “Anne picked the furniture, but I had my input too!” granny affirmed. “Ah yeah!” we replied appeasingly. “She picked the marble coffee table too I’d say”, I muttered to dad under my breath. He chuckled in agreement. After 30 minutes or so of circling COVID, potential cancellation of the GAA season and the predictable unpredictability of Irish weather, and we heard the crunching gravel of a car pulling up outside. Graham and Anne were home. Graham entered, slouched down on the couch beside granny and chatted mart prices with dad. After 20 minutes, dad, eager for us not to outstay our welcome said “Right, sure we were coming over to pick up a few sticks, if that’s okay with you?”. Graham said there were some down in Byrne’s old farmyard, already cut. There was just the small matter of getting there and loading them in the trailer ourselves. We began to make our way out to the yard. He pointed us to a Toyota Hilux from the early noughties. It was fair to say it had seen better days. “I bought that lad a couple of months back. Páidí Kelly was just getting rid of it. Load them up in that” he suggested. “That bloody yolk!” Anne lamented from behind us. “I absolutely read him when he brought that back, can you guess how much he paid for it?”. I guessed it must’ve been over the odds, but it felt a bit rude to start with too high a price. So, I lowballed her. “About €1000?” I guessed, half-jokingly. “HIGHER, one seven” she exclaimed. “The Banger” one of the kids, James, chuckled. “She doesn’t even have a handbrake!”. We were clearly taking our lives in our hands here. We finished our chit chats and headed over to ‘The Banger’. Dad took the driver’s seat while I sat in the passengers. Dried clay and dirt covering the fabric of the seating and steering wheel. I gingerly rested my feet on the floormat, sweet wrappers and bale twine below them. He turned the key in the ignition. A ferocious rattle erupted from the exhaust behind us. The jeep might have been weak, filthy and unsteady on slopes, but she moved all the same. We left the main yard and drove down towards Byrnes. Left and right of us were neatly fenced fields with cows observing us pass by, legs folded and gently chewing cuds. The road was bumpy, with bumps and potholes in equal measure. I recalled a story my dad told me before. He said his neighbour, one of the Byrnes, committed suicide around here. We didn’t talk about it much, not because dad wouldn’t but because I guess it didn’t hit home with me. I never roamed these parts nor knew those people. But as it was the scene of the incident, I felt appropriate to ask. “You know that Byrne woman who died here years ago? Where did that happen exactly?”. Dad stared ahead and reminisced, “Just over there, at the river, under the Bloody Bridge”. “We got the alarm that she was missing and began searching. I found her at the edge of the stream, already dead, and picked her out. I’ll tell you one thing.... there’s a reason they call it ‘dead weight’...” he reflected, morbidly. “Jesus that must’ve had you shook?” I stared back at him. “I never thought about it much back then” he replied. I chose not to prod any further, as we’d arrived at the farmyard. “Open up the gate and I’ll back her in” he instructed. I stepped out and did as I was told. I was a novice on the farm and didn’t have a leg to stand on in such matters. “You can’t bluff a farmer” as the adage goes. Dad turned the jeep and began reversing through the front entrance. I went ahead to get a sneak peak of our treasure. There it sat, a large pile of firewood, right beside an orange hedge cutter. He inspected the pile as if to devise our plan of attack. I could almost hear the gears click in his brain as he instructed “I’ll climb up and throw the good ones down to you”. He began pelting four to five stick at a time down to me and I threw them in the back of the Hilux. His plan worked well. Although each time I bent down to collect a load, I felt slightly nervous. I was right in the firing line, as blocks flew past my head from above. Starting off felt like pure hardship. I hadn’t pushed much beyond a pen since I moved to college, and now I was in a pair of wellies launching timber into a car trailer. Yet, the crisp, cold air and the time to think was almost medicinal and I began to enjoy the immediacy of the task at hand. As we picked in silence, I peered beyond the barn we were in, to what seemed like the remnants of a dwelling. I asked and dad explained how his cousins, the Byrnes, used to live in this very barn. They lived off the land, unmarried, and milked what cows they had by hand. “What did they do with themselves?” I asked curiously. “They got by really, that was it” he reflected, “that was a different time. A different Ireland”. I thought of the poor lady he had told me about earlier, and how perhaps this scarce and bleak existence led her to make that fatal choice further down the line. Then again, to me, there was something peaceful about this simpler way of life. It’s tough to truly put yourself in someone else’s shoes, or wellies in this case. I snapped out of my thoughts as the trailer was filling up and my bones began to rattle from the cold. I suggested we call it a day. “Yeah sure, let me have a quick look” dad said. He threw in a couple more for good measure, but we had collected most of the good ones. We finished up and headed back for the main yard. Job done. Dad popped in to throw Uncle Graham some cash for the sticks. Humbly but perhaps foolishly, Graham declined any reimbursement. “I'm not taking your money” he muttered, as he batted dad’s money away. Home we went, with our trailer load of firewood, leaving the old birches in our wake.