As Birds Bring Forth the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

Gaelic, singing almost unconsciously the old words that are so worn and so familiar. They seem to handle them almost as they would familiar tools. I know that in the other cars they are doing the same even as I begin silently to mouth the words myself. There is no word in Gaelic for goodbye, only for farewell.
    More than a quarter of a century ago in my single year atuniversity, I stumbled across an anonymous lyric from the fifteenth century. Last night while packing my clothes I encountered it again, this time in the literature text of my eldest daughter. The book was very different from the one that I had so casually used, as different perhaps as is my daughter from me. Yet the lyric was exactly the same. It had not changed at all. It comes to me now in this speeding car as the Gaelic choruses rise around me. I do not particularly welcome it or want it and indeed I had almost forgotten it. Yet it enters now regardless of my wants or wishes, much as one might see out of the corner of the eye an old acquaintance one has no wish to see at all. It comes again, unbidden and unexpected and imperfectly remembered. It seems borne up by the mounting, surging Gaelic voices like the flecked white foam on the surge of the towering, breaking wave. Different yet similar, and similar yet different, and in its time unable to deny:
    I wend to death, knight stith in stour;

Through fight infield I won the flower;

No fights me taught the death to quell –

I wend to death, sooth I you tell
.
    I wend to death, a king iwis;

What helpes honour or worlde’s bliss?

Death is to man the final way –

I
wende to be clad in clay
.

Winter Dog
    I AM WRITING this in December. In the period close to Christmas, and three days after the first snowfall in this region of southwestern Ontario. The snow came quietly in the night or in the early morning. When we went to bed near midnight, there was none at all. Then early in the morning we heard the children singing Christmas songs from their rooms across the hall. It was very dark and I rolled over to check the time. It was 4:30 a.m. One of them must have awakened and looked out the window to find the snow and then eagerly awakened the others. They are half crazed by the promise of Christmas, and the discovery of the snow is an unexpected giddy surprise. There was no snow promised for this area, not even yesterday.
    “What are you doing?” I call, although it is obvious.
    “Singing Christmas songs,” they shout back with equal obviousness, “because it snowed.”
    “Try to be quiet,” I say, “or you’ll wake the baby.”
    “She’s already awake,” they say. “She’s listening to our singing. She likes it. Can we go out and make a snowman?”
    I roll from my bed and go to the window. The neighbouring houses are muffled in snow and silence and there are as yet no lights in any of them. The snow has stopped falling and its whitened quietness reflects the shadows of the night.
    “This snow is no good for snowmen,” I say. “It is too dry.”
    “How can snow be dry?” asks a young voice. Then an older one says, “Well, then can we go out and make the first tracks?”
    They take my silence for consent and there are great sounds of rustling and giggling as they go downstairs to touch the light switches and rummage and jostle for coats and boots.
    “What on earth is happening?” asks my wife from her bed. “What are they doing?”
    “They are going outside to make the first tracks in the snow,” I say. “It snowed quite heavily last night.”
    “What time is it?”
    “Shortly after 4:30.”
    “Oh.”
    We ourselves have been nervous and restless for the past weeks. We have been troubled by illness and uncertainty in those we love far away on Canada’s east coast. We have already considered and rejected driving the fifteen hundred miles. Too far, too uncertain, too expensive, fickle weather, the complications of transporting Santa Claus.
    Instead, we sleep uncertainly and toss in