CEILI "The wind is wicked over McCabe's today" - an old neighbour calling to see my grandmother. They feel a greater chill set in - the oldest now for miles around - sensing their past slowly ebb away. Settling around the hearth for the ritual of words, drink is offered and taken. Stories, hesitant at first, catch the music of memory and dance the slow dance of remembering. Old friends sing in the snatches of laughter: a laughter that cloaks a half-understood regret for times now stranded on the islands of ageing minds, naming names of once familiar places (Knockacullion, Mullinasillagh, Derrynawana) townlands of spruce and pine, and stone mounds that once were homes. To sit in this room of ghosts is to know the power of the past, people, places, great events in a small world: knowing them when they were more than inscriptions on the headstone of a dying community. Now a litany - the only words to name such absence. The heady balm of talk, The warmth of fire and whiskey, the calming glow of nostalgia: I remember, as he rose to go, his big, tanned, awkward hands lifted in some vague salute like great dark sea-birds blown miles from shore flirting with the wild and restless waves below. -- Jim King, Knockacullion, Aghacashel, Co. Leitrim