Moved by the fair and the wild cherry trees

Displaced in Mullingar:Fifteen years after planting trees in his home, a spurt of nostalgia at Lough Ennell sends Michael Hardingback to Leitrim

I went to a filling station for a breakfast roll. Young men in yellow jackets and safety helmets were chatting in European tongues, and purchasing cigarettes and coffee. Then I drove five minutes out of town, to enjoy my sausage on the shores of Lough Ennell, in the company of 20 swans, paddling on the blue water, and a curlew, wading in the straw-coloured rushes.

I was surprised to meet a curlew in Westmeath; she made me homesick for Leitrim. By midday I stood again in a windy arbour of trees and shrubs I planted 15 years ago, in the hills above Lough Allen. Birch and alder, beech and oak, hazel, chestnut, and lovely willows. I wanted to see them again, as they opened into leaf.

When I put them in the earth as saplings, I had a sense that I had found home, or maybe paradise, under a wet Leitrim sky, full of birds calling, and wings beating in the air above my head.

I planted them knowing that if I lived a long life, they would still be young trees, and I would have to bid them farewell before they reached their full height. But I never reckoned on exchanging them for an apartment in Mullingar.

These trees used to keep me awake at night. After winter's ferocious storms I would go about the land, to make sure the wind had not upset their roots.

Perhaps they will be there later, when I am old and fit for nothing more than sitting on the patio, with glasses of red wine. Their dense leaf may welcome me home, and shelter me, as they shelter a sky full of birds. Their big strong limbs may embrace my old bones, when all the gallivanting is over, and I return to sit on the porch. But between now and then there are miles to go, through the streets of the world, looking for things that glitter. A child must go to the fair.

They don't have fair days any more on the streets of Mullingar. But sometimes I see an old fiddler, or a lorry of circus musicians, or a Romanian man with an accordion standing outside one of the buildings opposite the Market House.Long ago there was a man in Mullingar called Sequah. He sold patent medicines and did basic dentistry at the fairs. He had a horse-drawn caravan known as "The Temple of Healing". He parked it at the Market Square and a small noisy band would help him draw the crowd.

Some said the reason for the band was to drown out the shrieks of agony that came from the caravan, when he was extracting rotten teeth from the poor folk of Mullingar. When he died, another man took his place, and even his name.

There were, in fact, a sequence of Sequahs, through the 19th century, pulling teeth at the fairs in Mullingar's market square. And the last of all the Sequahs cured baldness and TB, before retiring to Constantinople.

Mullingar was always a town of fairground attractions. George Farquhar's play The Recruiting Officer was staged in the Market House, almost 300 years ago. Theatre companies often arrived by canal boat, and trooped through the heaps of mud on Dominic Street en route to the square.

The building was then open to the wind on all sides, while the audience stood in the street. An actor might have had a view not unlike that Shakespeare would have had when he gazed from the stage of the Globe in London, just a century and a half earlier.

Standing in a Leitrim field this week, I was amazed at the wild cherry. It was drenched in white blossoms. Never did I see it so spectacular. It made me think of a Japanese writer who once said that love is beyond any single embrace. It is a capacity. It makes us dance. And it shimmers in the leaves of the cherry tree. He was not talking of my wild cherry. He meant the pink Sakura, which blooms in the gardens of Japan, and the suburbs of Mullingar.

But for me the full white flush of a native tree on the hills above Lough Allen will do, as something to remember, in the fairs of the world, or in the queue for breakfast rolls, at the Texaco filling station. And I wonder do the construction workers in the queue, from the banks of far-off European rivers, have their own trees somewhere, that make them weep.