By Owen Bullock

Clarence and Marion. The steep path to the door. The view of a distant ocean and near clay tips. High tea spread to all corners of the table. Marion’s bosomed embrace. Clarence’s cheerful enquiry. You visit their son’s pigeon loft, with its 68 varieties, some rare. He races them and sometimes wins and coos over their homecoming. And the son who stayed to nurse his mother when their father passed, the last man to leave the village as houses tumbled into the clay pit. The Kendalls’, the Stephens’, the Bullocks’, the Shorts’, the Browns’, all went down, from Avalon to Brigadoon, the last resistance, until that son chose a new house a few miles north and named it . . .