(my Mother) Glenvilla Poem by Janice Windle

The house was Georgian.
Four square walls and a shallow roof
in a hollow by the River Forth.
A portico with steps and pillars.
Gardens gone to seed.
Box hedges in the rose-garden
becoming straggling hedgerows.
The orchard full of
twisted lichen-covered boughs
and wormy windfalls.
The drying green a forest of cow-parsley,
giant sugar sticks coveted by the friendly pigs
rolling and grazing in the lower field.

Too big, too cold and too far north,
wept my mother that first day,
crying angrily in the echoing kitchen
among unopened crates.
My father, stoic but apologetic
as always, waited for the storm to pass
while outside we three little girls
fed parsley to the pigs
and picked up rose-petals and apples
from the grass.

[This poem is about a house that my family rented for three years,1957 - 1960 or so, about a mile from Charlestown, near Dunfermline in Fife. It was a wonderful place for children to play in. My mother grew to love the place, and was as upset when she had to leave it as she had been when she first arrived there, on the day that this poem describes.]