It was a sunny day. The wind blowing gently over the top of the mountain, the sheep grazing, the sea below whispering its song. The town full of tourists, ice cream, sand, the lilt of Welsh voices, and up on the ranch, my grandfather.

My grandfather in his favourite place. Quiet, secluded, our family’s land. Two minutes and you can see the whole of Snowdonia, the mountains in the distance grey and purple, the tops snow-capped in the winter, bringing memories of the day we trekked up the Miner’s Track, the day we visited Beddgelert, the day we went to Anglesey. But there on the ranch, you can see nothing but the thick, lush vegetation, and over the top, the gentle slope of the Little Orme and the blue-grey sea.

There were always animals on the ranch. Always my grandfather’s beloved pigeons, cooing and fluttering in the hut. Sometimes I thought he loved the pigeons more than the company of people, the pigeons he tended with jealous care so they flew faster and further than others, the pigeons that won him the gaudy plastic trophies too numerous to house. Losing the pigeons was, I suppose, the beginning of the end. With the pigeons there used to be cows and horses, and, my father tells me with nostalgia in his eyes, pigs and hens. I once got hay fever from feeding the horses up there, sneezing and sniffing for the rest of the day.

Whenever my grandfather was not at home, he was on the ranch. He came down like clockwork for meals, ate them, and disappeared again. I don’t think my grandmother ever really minded. She knew where he was, he knew where she was. It was a situation that had lasted comfortably for fifty years, through the birth of three sons, their marriages and divorces, the grandchildren, the difficult jobs and the peaceful retirement. The perfect couple; my busy, organised, chatty grandmother, and my quiet, observant, humorous grandfather. The perfect grandparents.

On the sunny July day, the sky clear and blue, the ragwort was over-running the ranch, spilling over the undergrowth on to the grazing land, invading like an army. With the sun high in the sky, my grandfather ate his lunch with his hearty appetite, said goodbye to my grandmother, telling her he would be going to a friend’s to watch a sporting match on television after clearing the weeds away. It did not need to be said that he would be home for tea. He was always home for tea, always, always …

But he never got to his friend’s, never saw the match, never got home for his tea, never finished with the ragwort. Should he have been more careful through his long life, eaten less, done more exercise? Should he have left the ragwort another day? Would it have helped?

Over the half-filled wheelbarrow he lay, the ragwort tumbling out (this is how I imagine it), his eyes closed, at peace with the world. And two hundred miles away, over a bowl of rice salad, I heard the phone ring, and answered it, and heard my grandmother’s voice. And the world came tumbling down.

My father and his youngest brother cleared away the ragwort that week, in one afternoon, finishing my grandfather’s work, whilst the cards poured in and my grandmother received the phone calls and the visitors with stoical acceptance. Cards and sympathy covering the shelves in the room where my grandfather used to watch the sheepdog trials in Welsh, his blanket still lying on the sofa, waiting for him to come and sit down. Another blanket, of eternity, waiting for him behind a small old church below the mountain, and a quiet space where you can smell the sea and hear the wind. Crowds of people come to say goodbye as they took my grandfather away from the village where he’d been born and brought up and where he had lived and married and finally, on that July day, gone forever to sleep in his favourite place.

The memories are fading, slowly but oh so surely. It is now only with difficulty that I can hear his soft lilting voice in my mind, the last words he spoke to me as I sat by the phone in Blue Boar on his eightieth birthday. I have a photo of him on that day, and a itchy grey war blanket stitched with the initials W.H., and a collection of happy visits stored away in my mind, and that is all.

The ranch is still there, cared for by friends, but the people who loved it and worked it for so many years are going. First my grandfather, now his sister-in-law who kept horses there, and my great-uncle is fading out of life as quietly as he always lived it. But the sun still shines on the grass, and the wind still blows over the gorse bushes, sending the sweet sickly scent into the fresh air. The ragwort, creeping out again, still grows, and ever upon that land will live the memory of my grandfather.

© Joanne Harris 2002