Church Street, Dublin 1913
source: historyireland.com
A young fox is sitting on the path in my back garden as a fierce tomcat from over the road tucks into meat my neighbour's thrown out. The fox is cautious, checks the wall, stands on it to see if the cat's still there. This tomcat's legendary. He spent a night and much of the next day at the top of an elm tree before he was rescued. The fox is back now but the food is gone. He's elegant, his brush full and healthy, no sign of mange. He walks confidently but is wary, sniffs the ground, jumps back on the wall, back down to the garden to sniff again. Nothing left.
I've moved back into this room, once my office until the children became too old to share and it became my daughter's. She's grown up hardy - it's the coldest in the house.
(The fox has run through my garden with a piece of chicken, off to a shed roof or the graveyard. A dog's now in the garden sniffing.)
My desk, once a Victorian washstand is back in front of the window, but now only the wooden top survives, held up by four extendable legs. On it, my laptop and sewing machine.
Most of the apples have dropped from the tree in the drought but the tree made me want this house, and my daughter's arrival. She was born six months before we moved in. She'll be 32 in September and we'll be in Dublin celebrating her birthday, her photography, a prize and walking the banks of the Liffey, retracing my grandfather's routes. There'll be nothing left of where he lived in Church Street, a notorious slum. The family's there at No.37 in the 1901 census - Edward, Mary and eight children. It's the last time they're recorded together. By the next census in 1911 Edward's dead and Mary's living with just three children in Queens Square, South Dock.
The view through this window with its old, distorted glass, often becomes a tunnel. I live in the city and last night coming home late from a friend's I met a badger on my path. Sometimes the past gathers like a migraine's glittering distortions and stars around my eyes.
Ten Poems About Sewing ed Jackie Wills Candlestick Press 2026
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