Our old Renault 4 - which is sinking up to its lug nuts behind the piggery, white mould misting its windows, a lichen-like efflorescence blooming on the dark blue vinyl seats –– has become our own permanent automobile sculpture garden between the stone outbuildings of Ballylinch where nature quietly metamorphoses the fabricated into the organic, where people might pay to admire the aesthetics of rust, decomposition of the late twentieth-century artefact in rustic surroundings.
The sculptor might have titled it "Going Home," thinking of its hundred-thousand-mile trip up and down interminable motorways of boredom, avenues of déjà vu, streets of small errands, messages and hotels, back and forth (Swansea to Cork, Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire, Fishguard to Rosslare) and ending as marriages end, leaving recollection to worry its way into the thin loam of the steep hillside patch overlooking the sea, where bindweed pulls at the wheels and fails to move them, the battery dead, leads corroded, plugs burnt out.