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giovedì 24 novembre 2011

My irish fairies

I was, at that time - aproximately, some twenty or maybe even thirty years or so ago - spending a couple of months in Dublin in a pretty little house, with a staircase winding up towards my bedroom and a little green garden sparkling day and night, in rain or shine, at its back. It was a long and narrow garden, and it looked like the dainty tail of my little irish home...
 In the house, only me, my hostess and her old mother, slim and tall, skin like pearls, who baked the loveliest soda bread I had ever tasted in my life. I ate and drunk and chatted and spent my time reading and visiting museums and prehistoric ombs. Always ever so nice and polite with Miss and Mrs Ro who were ever so nice and polite with me. Of course I had no friends of my age, but as I had always loved the company of poor little me (even if I had four brothers of my own at home in Rome) that was not a big problem at all. I could survive, I reckon. And I did.
But one day a phone call arrived and my miss, in frenzy, announced me that the daughter of a friend of hers, a Susan (maybe...) who studied history of art, wanted to invite me at a party somewhere out in the country. It was arranged for me to go. Of that night, I only recall a funny egg and mushroom dish - "frittata" we call it in Italy - that seemed to be the humdrum of the party. Everybody, asked for more. Except me. It had a weird and funny taste. After dinner everybody crammed outside, in the dark and cold, to spot - they said - the little people. And thery did. At least this is what they told me. I looked and looked, no lepricauns, no fairies, no pixies.  Only a black and bleak night and around me, dropped on sofas like old duvets, only sleepy faces and, when they glanced at me, funny round eyes and laughing mouths...
I did see the little people, though, but some days after that funny party. I saw them at the Hellfire hotel that haunts from the hills the quietness of the Liffey. I saw them all, fairies and lepricauns and trolls too, running up and downhill, changing the colour of the grass as the wind came and went, sweeping the earth, with its rich, silky mantle,,,   . 

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