Fuchsia blooms all over West Cork - in the hedgerows, the ditches, gardens, and in the windows of long-abandoned houses. When I saw one in bloom at the garden centre here three years ago, the only one, I had to have it. Now it winters in a large south-facing window in North Dakota, and this week, it flowered. Holding a blossom in my hand, I could be the teenager I was, standing in the bohereen by my parents’ house on the hill by the Atlantic, the sea wind blasting as hard as it does on the prairie. I thought I might mash a blossom in my palm and taste its sweet nectar, but the blooms I have are too few, and too precious, for that.
Real connections with Ireland have been few and far between over the past few years, and I’ve no idea when I’ll taste coarse brown bread again, see a pint of Murphy’s poured properly, or when my ears will be filled with the Cork sing-song that I used to hear all day, every day. It’s almost as if that life were a prolonged daydream to me now, it’s so far away and so different from what I’m living today.
But since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there is a new connection (and an old one) and it’s not just the fuchsia blossom.This connection is with a group of cousins who meet via Zoom every evening to say the Rosary together to pray for the end of the pandemic. The times that I can join in, the family Rosary is providing its own miracle for me, though it’s not the one we’re praying for. It’s restoring a bit of my sense of still being connected, of belonging to that place that was home for so many years.
The cousins do not recite the prayers in unison, but each at their own pace after the first portion of each Our Father or Hail Mary is recited by whoever is leading that decade, voices and words criss-crossing over one another. Like the responses at Mass in Ireland, everyone starting at the same place and ending whenever they end, never at the same time as anyone else, then waiting for the next part to pick up again, and all off at their own pace once more. It reminds me of how we go to communion or board buses in Ireland - in a big rush, all together, somehow orderly but without order. Oh, I miss it.
Then, afterward, a sing-song. I close my eyes now and think of the screen in front of me filled with familiar faces chatting away, laughing, smiling, and singing in my mother’s accent. Someone got out a squeezebox, a tin whistle was fetched, an organ played off-screen, and one cousin even broke out a stage mic with his guitar. After the rest had finished renditions of Raglan Road, The Wild Colonial Boy, The Rare Auld Times, and Spancil Hill, my American dad sang ‘Sioux City Sue’ and kicked off a spate of American tunes. It always made me giggle, being from the Dakotas and never knowing all the lyrics to the Black Hills of Dakota, while everyone I knew in Ireland learnt it word for word at school - it was no surprise when that broke out too, along with Home on the Range and even a Dolly Parton song. So much fun squeezed into a conference call. And then it was over, and I was back in my prairie kitchen, but my heart was full from such a real and close connection to people and a land that I love.
Having a whole world disappear from in front of your eyes and be replaced with a different one - every emigrant knows that too well, and now everyone knows it, at least a little bit. What a gift it is that we live in an age when we can see those people and hear the voices, prayers, laughter, and songs that remind us of who we are.
