Offerings
all through the fabric of this place those who have lived and died here from the beginning I dream that I dig up two unbroken pieces of glazed pottery that are part of a household altar to the ancestors. They’re separately fired in the same five-sided shape and decorated with slightly fuzzy prints of people and landscapes like the fragments of 19th century crockery – broken dinner plates, teapots, cups – that turn up around the farm in the stump holes and pits dug for long-drop toilets that were used as rubbish dumps at that time. In the dream I keep finding more pieces of the altar and as I do, its overall design becomes apparent – the five-sided pieces are part of the base for a central column with niches for photographs, candles and other offerings. Summer comes. After all the rain, a thick pelt of flowering grasses and herbs and clover ripples green, greengold on the hillsides, before some of it falls, silverg