At Oldcastle, Co. Meath I crunch along the grey gravel path beneath a thick February sky. Alone, I find peace in the apple orchard where dried up apples hang from the trees. I pick one, shrivelled into itself, a mottled brown, half the size it once was, and I too feel shrunken and worn, grief has reduced me to half of who I once dared to be. But I walk on, out over the wide fields down the riverbank trail where I connect to the trees, to new buds, lost to the changing season. There are Buddleia bushes rooted in cracks all around these ancient castle walls, long silver branches offer themselves to me, to my darkened heart and I am reminded that out of the black soil comes the seed, a rebirth into the light. Máire Morrissey Cummins 30
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