Michael Harding: Fiddles fall silent when someone you love comes to the end of the road

I have a friend who grows vegetables. So when the good weather arrived I phoned him thinking he’d be out in the field, stooped over his onions and courgettes. And as I know nothing about vegetables I asked him what he had blooming at this time of year. But he couldn’t say. Because his garden had gone mad with weeds since his mother-in-law got sick.

“We brought her home from hospital last week,” he said, “after the doctors found another cancer, because they could do nothing more for her. And this morning she died.”

I expressed my sorrow, and said I thought she was a beautiful person.

“Sure we’ll have to get through it,” he said, “and maybe we can have a few tunes later on if you like.”

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Only then did I remember that he played the accordion, although the thought struck me that it was no time for tunes, when someone had died. It stands to reason that fiddles fall silent and gardens grow wild when someone you love has come to the end of the road. We finished our chat with a promise to meet, and to pray for the dead.

‘My husband is a Leitrim man, and we used to go up every summer to stay with the mother,’ the electricity woman said. And why did you stop? ‘She died’

And then I decided to pay my electricity bill. I decided to phone in the meter readings because I didn’t want another estimated bill coming in through the door. I endured the phone queue for 20 minutes before I got talking to a woman from somewhere far away.

But she had an Irish accent so I presumed she wasn’t in somewhere like Cairo or Bangalore, and when I gave her my address and the number of the account she declared that I didn’t have a Leitrim accent. The observation came out of the blue and I instantly replied.

[ Michael Harding: The day started badly, with a burst of flame and lots of smoke. It got worse ]

“I’m from Cavan. Where are you from?”

“Cork,” she confessed, “but my husband is a Leitrim man, and we used to go up every summer to stay with the mother.”

“And why did you stop?”

“She died,” the woman replied. “And the homestead has been overtaken by forestry. It’s terrible how things get abandoned when someone has died.”

I was tempted to share with her the story of the abandoned fiddle; but it felt like we were too long on the phone as it was. So I gave her the numbers and bade her farewell.

Once upon a time an abandoned fiddle lay on a shelf for half a century, “It belonged to my father,” the owner told me.

It was closed in its case, all dusty and frayed, and lay in the dark on a shelf under the stairs.

“My father cherished it,” he said, “and he asked me to mind it, so I still have it here.”

I wondered was his father a great fiddler, but he said no, his father never played it either. Apparently it was the grandfather who had the music, and who first asked his son to take good care of the instrument.

The fiddle had travelled down two generations, and, according to family lore, it was the work of a master fiddle maker from Donegal, but in those long years no one had ever played a note on it.

We won’t let our instruments rust. We will use them as gifts. And try to make music as long as we can

When he opened the case I marvelled at the instrument’s curves, and the twists and turns in the wood, but like a body embalmed in a coffin it was lifeless. And the strings, all rusty and broken, were as useless as black teeth in the mouth of a corpse. And even if it were in mint condition I could never have played it because I didn’t know how.

[ Michael Harding: Sitting out on the street in the middle of any town is an education ]

Although I have a tin whistle. It sits in a drawer from one end of the year to the next, and if ever I play a few tunes that I learned long ago I’m riddled with guilt, because my playing is so poor and I’m haunted by tunes I never bothered to learn.

After I finished with the woman from Cork I picked up the phone once again and reached out to my gardening friend.

“What you spoke was the truth,” I declared. “We should play a few tunes sometime soon. Now that your mother-in-law has gone to her rest we should gather around and make a good night in her honour. In autumn perhaps when the harvest is done and the apples all plucked, and laid in their boxes, and the leaves are beginning to fall.”

Because we won’t let our instruments rust. We will use them as gifts. And try to make music as long as we can.