Country Living with Francis Farragher

As one ‘shoves on’ in life, there tends to be an increasing attendance at anniversary masses of friends and family — at the back of the mind, there’s always the nagging feeling at such occasions, that you’ve moved up in the queue.

Regardless of the intensity of one’s religious fever though  — or the lack of it — there is always something special about remembering the passing of a loved one: gone but not forgotten, is probably the best way to sum it.

The great and warming tradition of the chat with neighbours after the preacher has finishing his words still persists, and especially so across rural Ireland, and inevitably the conversation seems to switch to the weather.

Last Sunday morning as I walked out from Brooklodge Church in Ballyglunin — a lovely little prayer place nestled in one corner of the old Blake estate — I was reminded that I shouldn’t have praised February too much over recent weeks, as March was always waiting in the wings to deal with such buds of early spring optimism.

The theme of the advice was to never count your chickens before they hatch, because if we enjoyed a good spell of weather in the late-winter, early-spring period, nature’s scales would soon balance things out. There were also murmurs too about the price of bales of silage.

For those of you not of a rural hue, these are essentially big bales of grass wrapped up in plastic to preserve them, a commodity you couldn’t ‘give away’ in February as we all looked forward to an ‘early spring’.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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