THE TRAVELLERS' TENT Down at the cross-roads on my way to school, I would cycle past the travellers and watch the steam rise from the dark brown dusky tent. Shaped like the last quarter of the moon, it was tiny, a family lived here quietly mending our buckets, making pongers in different sizes. We exchanged vegetables and milk for the goods they provided tin pongers, buckets and crepe paper flowers. After nights of heavy rain they woke to find the sagging canvas sink into the tiny space, their only heat the closely packed bodies within the small tent. -- Mary Guckian, born 1942, Kiltoghert, Co. Leitrim,"Perfume of the Soil" (1999). Mary has lived/visited several places in the world including England, the United States and Australia. She presently works and lives in Dublin. "We're queer ways travelling people. One night we'll stay and one night we'll not and we'll have the whole camp gone up and thrown into a cart, cocks and roosters and goats and all the crockery and the kettle bar and all your belongings heaped together in a heap on the back of the cart." -- Excerpts of conversation, "Irish Tinkers," Wiedel & O'Fearadhaigh