Driving Rain, Pylons

Something strange happened to me yesterday.

Washed out midsummer, listening to my iPod on the car radio, driving into driving rain, heading down to my wife's parents' place in Wexford. I pulled over to take this, of those pylons I always notice. Something antiquated about them now (even though they are still being erected): the brave new modernist world of the 1930s.

I think the feeling was setting in around there, or perhaps it was with me already. My mother, over four months gone now. She used to enjoy driving. It wasn't just that association though, more like a sudden cascade, that welled in me a few miles later. What song was I listening to? I forget, though I can hear now the waves of percussive rain, feel the lowering unsummerlike gloom, the way the grey road melted into grey cloud, into my mother's lightness and lovingness, her immense and ineffable absence out there, and inside too, streaming right through me, a whelming of here-and-goneness, so tingling I had to blink and ask 'Are you here mum?', and listen to the nothing-in-everything, rain's ring-tones.