Those Moments

A Passage

So, this isn't exactly a short story; I'm reading a beautiful book right now about a woman who looks back on her life as an actress and her love affair with a playwright and I definitely recommend it to anyone who loves stories about life and hopeless romance.  I recently read this passage and I just had to share it.  So here goes. ~~~Smurfette

    "She rises earlier, in the quarter-light, at the first reddening of the mountain, so as to make the days last longer.  To walk the wet fields through the wakening birdsong is to feel the marriage of joy and sadness, the black miracles of the trees.  A tinker comes daily with buttermilk and apples.  Breakfast often lasts an hour.

    To stir in sleep beside him.  To know he is there.  The warm male aroma and the rhythm of his breathing, and the moon making shadows of the oak boughs.  But close to dawn one morning he flails awake from a nightmare.

    'I dreamed I had lost you.  My father was there.'

    'Your father?'

    'I think so.  Sweet Christ.'

    One day, having lain together, they laze on in the heatherbeds looking up at the corncrakes they have frightened off with their cries.  The scent of bog myrtle and lavender and willowherb.  There is sweet sleepiness in him at such moments; he is like a tender boy.  He tells her his imaginings of New York.

    'We shall go there when I recover.  They would adore you in America.  You would conquer whole cities.  They live very freely.  They are like every people who have rid themselves of aristocracies: obsessed by the differences between the classes.  They love beauty and bravery.  I do not understand them.  They are the most magnificent people in the world.'

    He cuts his hand while shortening firewood; she bathes it dresses it.  He vocers her pillowslip with wild asphodels from the heath.  He carves her name in an alder."

~~~Joseph O'Connor, Ghost Light