Solin · the words you have to say

Abbey Street in Armagh is quiet. Behind a stone wall there stands a wooden gate with no sign on it. You would walk past it. Most people do.

Behind that gate is the Armagh Pipers Club. Eithne Vallely and her husband Brian founded it in 1966 to teach Irish traditional music to whoever came through the door. It still teaches, thirty-one classes a week: children, their parents, their parents' parents.

Eithne died this year. Sixty years of tunes were taught behind a door that never advertised itself.

I went to the street through a camera's eye. The view I found was taken in April, months before she died. The gate is the same in it: shut, plain, no name. I couldn't see past it. I know what is there anyway: a room of fiddles, and somebody's first scale.

The work outlives the attention. Most of it does. The gate never asked to be looked at. It just kept opening for whoever knocked.