Innisfree

June 2016 - coloured pencil 24 x 32 cm
On tumblr.

Claire in her garden on the Ridge, from Drums of Autumn, chapter 43:

The cabin’s clearing was still filled with sunlight, though, filtered through a yellow blaze of chestnut trees. Claire was in the palisaded garden, a basin on one hip, snapping beans from poled vines. Her slender figure was silhouetted dark against the sun, her hair a great aureole of curly gold.

“Innisfree,” Brianna said involuntarily, stopping dead at the sight.
“Innisfree?” Jamie glanced at her, bewildered.
She hesitated, but there was no way out of explaining.
“It’s a poem, or part of one. Daddy always used to say it, when he’d come home and find Mama puttering in her garden—he said she’d live out there if she could. He used to joke that she—that she’d leave us someday, and go find a place where she could live by herself, with nothing but her plants.”
“Ah.” Jamie’s face was calm, its broad planes ruddy in the dying light. “How does the poem go, then?”
She was conscious of a small tightness round her heart as she said it.

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee.
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”