And it was all yellow

on my dad's birthday

On my dad's birthday, we walked through fields of gold.

Every year, a crop of rapeseed blankets the gently sloping clifftop overlooking Greystones’ North Beach – a high vis runway between the harbour and the Cliff Walk. Rapeseed is a surprisingly sturdy plant, with a sweet sickly scent that clung to my hair and clothes well into the evening.

Under a thinly overcast sky, full of skylark song and the gentle breath of an outgoing tide, we soon reached the start of the Cliff Walk. There, where the trail winds and ducks and climbs between gnarled trees, an old boundary wall and the vertiginous coastal cliff, the verdant verges were thick with spongy grass, tall nettles and wood sage, lit by a constellation of star-bright stitchwort. The coconut scent of gorse flowers, at their most fragrant in springtime, floated on the air. With glee, E stuffed handfuls of egg yolk-yellow petals into his younger brother’s open mouth, as if feeding a bird. They have grown up knowing that the sunny blossom…