There was a letter waiting for me on the hall floor this morning, fallen through the slot with the ESB bill and a flyer for a new chipper opening on Parnell Street. I nearly stood on it.
Small envelope. Cream, the good kind, the kind you'd buy in a stationer's and not a supermarket. My name on the front in proper ink — not biro, INK, the sort that comes from a fountain pen and has that slight feathering where the nib drags. Just "Seamus." No surname. No address, even. Which I thought odd at the time but didn't dwell on, because I get the odd thing now, ever since the shrine got busy. People find me.
Inside was a single sheet, folded once. And here's the thing. There was no greeting. No "Dear Seamus." No "hello." It started straight into a verse.
It was the bird-on-the-egg verse. Written out by hand, the whole cumulative climb of it, egg on the nest and nest on the branch and branch on the tree and tree in the bog, all the way down to the bog down in the valley-o. Lovely handwriting. Old-fashioned. The kind they used to teach in the schools before mine, where every letter leans the same way like a field of barley in the one wind.
And then under it, no flourish, no signature, just five words.
You're keeping it alive. Thank you.
That was it. That was the whole letter.
Now. I want to be honest with you, because that's the only way I know how to write these posts. I sat at the kitchen table with my tea going cold and I read it about nine times. Rattlin' was on the windowsill pretending not to watch me, which is his way. And the first thing I felt was — and I'm not ashamed of this — I felt seen. Properly seen. There's a particular loneliness to running a fan shrine for a folk song for twenty-odd years, lads, that I don't think I could explain to anyone who hasn't done it. You do it because you love the thing. Nobody asks you to. And then one day a stranger writes out your favourite verse by hand and says thank you, and you go a bit watery at a kitchen table at half eight in the morning.
So my first instinct, my STRONG instinct, is that this is a shy one. Some lovely soul who reads the verse-by-verse breakdowns and the lyrics page and never posts on the forum because posting is mortifying when you're shy — I get it, I was shy for forty years — and they wanted to say a kind thing without the bother of a back-and-forth. So they left no address ON PURPOSE. They didn't want a reply. They just wanted to put the kindness down and walk away clean. That's a beautiful thing to do, when you think about it. Most people want the thank-you to come back round to them. This person wanted nothing.
That's what I've decided it is. A shy fan being lovely.
(I have decided this firmly. I am writing it down so I keep deciding it.)
Because there's the other small detail I keep stepping around, which is that there was no postmark. No stamp, even. Now before you say it — yes, of course, it was hand-delivered. Somebody walked up the path and pushed it through the slot. That's the mundane answer and it's almost certainly the right one. Half the village knows where I live. It's Ennis, not the witness protection. Mick himself sent me one with no return address back in the spring and there was nothing strange in that at all, just an old man and the post.
It's only that Mick's had the Ennis postmark on it, faint but there. This one had nothing. A clean cream envelope that has never been near a sorting office. Which means whoever it was, was here. Stood on my path. In the dark, maybe, or while I was at the shop, or while I was asleep with the radio on like an eejit. Close enough to read the number on my door.
And the handwriting is the writing of someone older than me. I'd put money on it. Which doesn't square with my shy-young-fan theory, but theories are allowed a few loose threads, and I'm choosing to leave them loose.
I'm not going to make a thing of this. I want to be clear about that. The internet would have me convinced inside an hour that it's the same fella who knows verse eleven, or some grand pattern, and it ISN'T, it's just a kind letter from a kind person who likes a song. The song does this to people. It always has. It reaches in and it makes them want to give something back, and some of them are shy about it, and that is the whole of it.
I've put the letter in the notebook. The good notebook, the one with the elastic band, between a setlist from a session in 2011 and a pressed bit of bog cotton my nan gave me. It fits there grand. It belongs with the lovely things.
I'll probably never know who sent it. And do you know what — I think that's right. Some thank-yous aren't meant to be answered. They're just meant to be kept.
Keep it alive yourselves, wherever ye are.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin' sat on the letter for a full hour after I read it, the big lump, and would not be moved. I had to lift him off it like a coal scuttle. Whatever's in the ink, he approves.