Waiting on the step

Here in Vienna I have often thought of home.  There are mornings when I wake up in a daze and almost feel I am in my childhood bed.  The large window to my left, the giant poster hanging on the wall to my right and the broken TV adjacent to my bed.  But as my perceptual vision is restored and my brain begins to distinguish the sounds of busy traffic just outside my window, I realise I'm not in sleepy Oram at all.

There's great comfort in home and reminiscing.

The green green grass of home is always greener from continents afar.
The smallest slightest coincidence can send your mind racing back to yesteryear, and into a dazed nostalgic stupor.  A chain reaction of memories that have little in common other than they're all mine.

I remember...dancing on frozen puddles on a Saturday relishing that satisfying crack as the thin sliver of ice breaks and the sting of the morning air teases my skin, before my mind moves on, each memory held to another with the thinnest thread, and I think of guiding a ladybird as it tickled my fingers, coaxing it up my arm and trembling at its delicate touch.

I think of tea and figrolls; sitting with my grandmother and reading her snippets of 'Ireland's Own' even though she's likely already read it and playing card games: patience, snap and more-all forgotten.

I remember sleeping on the couch in my other grandmother's sitting room, waiting for my parents to collect us after a wedding, watching Playbus and CBBC when I stayed over, trips to Dundalk and Faughart.

And I come back home, thinking of cows and tractors, milking and silage.  I remember sitting by the gate, waiting on the step for my father to drive by so I could sit and ride along in the tractor.  Sometimes I fell asleep on that step, the warmth of the sun nursing me to slumber or maybe I was tired waiting.