Ready for snow, and the chance to do sweet nothing

Displaced in Mullingar:The snow was falling, but would it swarm like bees? Michael Hardinggoes into a daydream as he waits to find out

'What do you do?" a young man asked me on the last night of January. I didn't have an answer for him.

I said: "I do nothing." I could have mentioned the writing. But that literary stuff doesn't wash well, on the streets of Mullingar. And it would only lead to other questions about how often I sit at a desk trying to write. The fact is, I don't. I sit at the back door, and do what I used to do in school. I daydream.

My back door is a patio door, and it opens out on to a tiny patch of grass and a wooden shed where I keep the ash bucket and the turf briquettes.

There is a green oil-tank, masked by trellis, on which grows a bare web of ivy.

On the first of February I looked out at tiny flecks of snow falling, and confused starlings hopping about like lunatics with sexual urges, and a coy blackbird sitting on the trellis waiting for other birds.

A blue flame in the fire is the sign of a snowfall coming. But only if the flakes swarm like bees will it whiten the earth. I knew this snow would not last. There was no blue flame in the fire the previous night.

And these flakes did not swarm.

Sometimes I ask Polish people, is there anything they don't like about Ireland, and they say: "You have only one season. You have no snow."

I was ready for snow. I was standing there waiting for it to snow and thinking that it must be beautiful to be born in the snow, or to make love in the snow, or to die in the snow. Because snow stops the ordinary world. And it opens a gaping hole in the cluttered mind.

Years ago, when I walked out on snowy mornings in the Leitrim hills, the silence made work impossible. Finishing the novel, or clearing the drains, or writing cheques, or fretting in front of a computer screen about things as absurd as a career, were not permissible when the soft snow fell to earth; enveloping the leafless naked bark of birch; weighing down the rusty beech leaf and the handle of a spade; covering and silencing everything.

Snow was a chance to check out of life; to abandon the empty Self. To forget history. To leave aside every feud, wound, hurt or disgrace and begin again to play like a child and construct a new identity with frozen fingers in the big white wonder of a world made new.

Snow meant time off, to feed the birds and turn away. And on the first day of February I was ready for snow.

I remember one time being at the bedside of an old man. The family were in the kitchen praying. They thought he was dying. But he looked at me wickedly and offered me a cigarette. We smoked. It seemed strange that we would do something so mundane. He winked at me and said: "I'm not ready to die yet." And so he didn't.

Not for another decade.

We puffed our smoke and listened to the dirty rain splattering against the window and the galvanised roof.

"It's a dirty night," he remarked.

He pointed towards the kitchen and said: "There's a lock of neighbours down there in that kitchen, and they'll go before me." He was right.

When he did die, it was snowing, and it covered the field where he fell, so that it was difficult to find him. And the neighbours brought him home to his house on the back of a door, and it was no exaggeration when his son said that he was frozen solid.

I asked his wife what was he doing in the field on such a day.

"Nothing," she said. "He wasn't doing anything. He was just standing there."

It was him told me of the blue flame and the swarm of bees, as he smoked Sweet Afton in a cosy bed, 10 years before that unmerciful snow folded him up in its blanket and took him away.

On the first of February, I turned the radio off and stood at the back door, watching the flakes fall. I had three horses of clothes against the radiators. One in the kitchen. One in the hall. And one in the bedroom. I had a lot of work to do. But I did nothing. I just stood there, waiting for snow. Hoping for snow. I was ready for snow.