The children were excited but Mum and Dad were silent with wonder

`I never thought I'd live to see it," said my father, his voice hushed and excited. "God grant they get home safe, that's the main thing," my aunt's husband said softly.

We were gathered at the kitchen table in the farmhouse in west Cork, my father's sister's home, his own childhood home, where he brought us for a happy fortnight every summer. As we ate a big hungry tea, my aunt and my mother wondered aloud whether it was happening much too late to allow us and our cousins to see it, but we knew they were only teasing.

I looked at the black box on the shelf and didn't know how I'd live for two whole hours until it started.

All that day, we'd been saving hay. I have, and will always have, as clear as a photograph held in my hand, a memory of sitting on a grassy ditch, watching my father and mother working. My father, the civil servant who'd married late and was fifty-five to my eight years, had his shirt off, his back browned in the sun, and was swiftly and expertly spiking cocks of hay with a pitchfork, hoisting them effortlessly aloft onto a huge tram.

My mother, child of a small farmer herself, though much younger than Dad, had a lovely, rolling rhythm to her work as she gathered the dried wisps of hay. Their whole bodies seemed to work smoothly, fluidly, in harmony, even when she paused for a second to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear, or when he rested a moment on the pitchfork to survey what they'd done.

"God bless the work!" called a neighbour from the road behind me, an old man wheeling a bicycle. He stopped and leaned against the ditch, looking into the meadow.

I left them, gazing at the faint moon in the summer afternoon sky, and went back to my mother, and asked her to show me again the best way to hold the rake, and I tried harder than ever to do it right.

One of the things about my father which used to embarrass me was the way he turned on the TV and that night he was worse than ever. First was the plug. He turned it over in his hand as if to check it. He lined it up with the socket. He pushed it in carefully. He put the palm of his hand firmly against its flat back to make certain it was fully in. That was just the plug.

Then he stood full square in front of the set and seemed to examine it for several seconds, as if the on/off switch might have moved since he'd used it last. He depressed the switch very deliberately, holding his thumb on it, standing stock still in front of the screen, gazing at it as if he'd never seen it before, as if it might never heat up and the black-and-white picture resolve.

"Move over, Dad!" someone said, always said. Maybe it was me.

And so, late, late into the night, we watched the man on the Moon. Apollo 11 landed safely, and Neil Armstrong took his small step for man, and his giant leap for mankind, and the children jumped around the kitchen with excitement while our parents went quiet with the wonder of it. And then to bed and quickly to sleep, for tomorrow there was more hay to save.

It would be many, many years before I understood what I'd seen that long day. That when I'd watched my father tramming hay, I was witnessing a skill which had remained unchanged for thousands of years, and which would soon be lost from the earth and from the hands. That when I became impatient with him switching on the television, I didn't know that when he was a child no one imagined a day when you could sit beside the fire watching a man walking on the Moon.

That as he grew to be a man in west Cork, the moon was what lit his path home through the fields, before there were street lights or flashlights, and only low, flickering oil lamps in the scattered houses.

That, to the child my father was, the world was so vast that when your three older sisters left for America you might never see them again. That to his child, only 50 years later, the world was just a small blue ball in a black box on a shelf in the kitchen.

And that one day I would feel utterly, utterly privileged to have been there, at that time, in that place, on this small island, from where I had such a clear and startling view of both the future and the past.

Linda Keohane is an artist and runs the Hawthorne Gallery in Market Street, Galway.