Opinion

Nuala McCann: My smiling primrose, frilled and yellow, is a little of home

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

The early appearance of a primrose smiling in the garden makes your heart sing
The early appearance of a primrose smiling in the garden makes your heart sing The early appearance of a primrose smiling in the garden makes your heart sing

A SMALL yellow primrose smiles up at me from the front garden.

When I chanced upon it last week, it made my heart sing.

It's not just any primrose. I took a trowel and lifted it from our front garden before I closed the gate on the family home for the last time, a year ago.

I whispered goodbye to the star magnolia, the bridal laced hydrangea, the eucalyptus and the camellia that was home to a coven of small squawking birds.

My mother believed so fervently in recycling that those birds were hooked on Barry's tea.

She'd chuck the remains of the cold teapot over her prized camellia bush and, later, they'd reward her with teabags sucked dry and plopped back on her front doorstep. "Thanks a million, missus."

The time she decided to recycle a full bag of plain flour caused alarm under the bush when she poured it on top.

They rose up, white squawking ghosts of themselves, indignant at her cheek. But that was then.

"Leave it," said my son putting a hand on my shoulder, "it's not your home any more."

So I left the ghost of my mother, on her knees in her beautiful garden, old straw hat on her hat, lost and never more happy than with her hands in the soil.

And although my heart broke with a small sigh – light as the creak of the hinge on our old front gate – I thought that life goes on… and on we go.

Still my primrose, frilled and yellow, is a little of home. I'm not a huge fan of wild primroses but this one is special.

My mother took a slip from her sister's Donegal home – planted it in her own – and now it blooms in mine.

"Here I am," says the yellow primrose with a touch of ma. "There's a little of me looking up at you every time you fly out that door, always rushing somewhere."

On days when I'm thrown together in the wardrobe department, the primrose shrieks: "You're not going out wearing that? I like you in your blue dress."

When I do dress up, the primrose says: "You look so good when you make an effort."

"Another word and I'll dig you up," I tell the primrose. But she knows I'm joking.

Yellow is my favourite colour – faint spring yellow lights up our morning windows now.

You can feel a warmth; a whisper that the days are on the turn.

The sky is lighter at 5.30am; the Lagan sable grey; serene. By 7am, the crows who roost in the nearby woods, are up and out on their daily commute.

You could set your clock by them; morning and evening. Later, we watch them swirl, black snowflakes at dusk, on their way back home.

"Look up quick," said my husband one day, "They are flying in pairs, they're all in pairs."

We stood, hand in hand, gazing up.

Last week, on my morning break, stumbling out the door of work in search of a coffee made by the beautiful Italian woman from Venice, I saw a woman on a bicycle talking urgently on her phone beside a small girl, stood silently on the street.

The bicycle woman said she had seen the child running around through the busy city streets.

"I have a nine-year-old and a three-year-old, I couldn't leave her," said the woman.

She wasn't from here – she sounded German. She had rung the police for the child.

And all the time, the little girl stood looking up at us, still and silent as a small bird.

She had tight brown curls and sharp blue eyes. She held herself just so. She told me her name and that she was five years old and that she had run away.

She seemed older than any five-year-old I had known... composed, still.

No, she wouldn't take my coat even though it was Belfast baltic; no she wouldn't have anything to eat not even a small piece of chocolate.

The German woman was warm and able. There was little I could do.

So I went on. But she stayed in my heart... this sparrow of a lost child on a busy street corner.

Maybe she touched what is lost in me too… the part that talks to a yellow primrose in the garden or gazes in awe at a swirl of crows flying in pairs across a twilight sky.