Distant Connections

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.

Shameful Saturday

There's nothing quite like waking up at 5 am, finding oneself still fully clothed in yesterday's work outfit, laying face to face with an infant. Oops, I did it again.

Also, if it's true that the state of your home is a reflection of your inner self, I'm the emotional equivalent of pile of junk mail and unfolded laundry, with baby toys and wet towels scattered around the perimeter.

That reminds me of a guided meditation we had to do in secondary school years ago. All of us gerruls jammed into the refrectory at the convent, a sea of green wool jumpers and knobbly knees. It was meant to be a treat - a break from the stress of exam prep. We were told to close our eyes and imagine ourselves walking in the woods. Along our way, we were told to find some kind of drinking container, and an animal. It was up to us to decide what those items looked like.

The drinking container I imagined was a partly-crushed plastic water bottle with dirt mushed into the creases, and I could see that there was some grit rattling around inside in the small amount of water that was left. I didn't imagine myself drinking from the bottle (would YOU?) The animal I pictured was a deer.  I didn't pet it because I could see that it had ticks crawling on its body. Realistic, right?

At the end, we were asked to share what we'd imagined. The other girls had not grown up in North Dakota. Irish-born, they had spent their childhoods frolicking on blue flag beaches and mixing with organic farmers from Germany, so they had imagined beautiful stone bowls and chalices filled with spring water, noble elk pausing in the distance or remarkably tame horses who came up for a nuzzle.

Heh. Cute. Then the home ec. teacher shared the meaning of our imagined objects. I think you know how this is going to go... The animal represented how one imagined oneself, and the drinking container was how one envisioned love.

Ah. Righteo, then.

With that, it's Saturday. The sun is shining, and the baby is yodeling at his father. Bring on the coffee!

The book sale

Thursday morning:
Library sale, all weekend, starting today. Books $1 per pound.

Oh, yes.

Rang up the mammy, agreed on a meeting time, and hurried into my clothes in the icy morning air that filled the upstairs rooms of our house. The earlier post from this week was about right - yesterday, sleety rain came, covering the sidewalks, handrails, picnic tables,  leaf piles left too late, all in an glassy layer. The trees looked heavy by mid-afternoon The sky has been a low, slate gray since early this morning, and if not for the wide roads, you might think you were on the shores of the north Atlantic. 

So heavy socks it was, a sweater and wool coat bundled round me, scarf up to my nose, and I fairly ran out the door, down the street, hopping over the streams of wet leaves laying in the gutters. Nobody else raked, evidently.

Just a few streets over is the library, where many adult bookworms of today spent their precious summer hours as children, curled up in a beanbag chair with The Boxcar Children or Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the meeting rooms, downstairs, a line of middle aged women was coming out the door. I spotted a friend's mother and said a quick hello before heading in. It was after 11, which is the lunch hour, officially, in North Dakota, and is the time when many people 'get stuff done.' The bibliophilic crowds were there, all right, nosing through the boxes of books laid out on long banquet tables. I headed into the fiction and non-fiction room, buoyed by the thought of new books and a winter filled with long stories by the window.

Immediately, treasures surfaced. A book of American short stories. David Sedaris. Rebecca. Folk songs as played by Pete Seeger. Chocolat.  A Passage to India. Julia Child's My Life in France. A volunteer walking through the crowded room spotted the growing stack in my arms and offered me a blue cloth bag with a tree printed on it. As I walked about the room, the bag grew fuller and fuller. Jodie Picoult and Jacob Have I Loved joined the others in the blue bag, and I had to put it down from time to time to keep the handles from cutting into my arms.

The mammy wandered by, and we shared our finds, plotted a coffee for after we finished.

I found Germaine Greer's 'The Female Eunuch' and Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring' in the fiction section. Might be an indication of the politics of whoever was in charge? Let's assume it was a second-thoughts buyer who left them there. 

One book stood out, with gilded page edges and gold lettering on the front. Magpie bait. I cracked open the cover, thumbed through the pages to see what it was, exactly. 1906, gorgeous illustrations, and pages framed in flowering vines. 

It had to be bought, if just for the beauty of it. 

We laid our purchases on the scale, and paid sweet little for them. $7.50 for ten books. That's a frobisch.

In the line, a dark haired woman heard my mother's accent and snagged her into a conversation. This lady had just come back from her father's foreign birthplace, and wanted to talk with another north islander. She was very pleasant until a moment before we said goodbye, when she launched into a critique of immigrants today... reminded me of an older person's 'kids today' speech. The current wave of immigrants into the United States made her heart hurt, she said, with their insistence on clinging to their language and traditions, those people who don't become citizens immediately, those people who come here on work visas and then go back home because they can. Yes folks, you read right - she was complaining about legal immigrants.

My mind went to the Nepalese and Bhutanese refugees I taught in Grand Forks, who are trying so hard to eke out a living in the northern Red River Valley, illiterate refugees in their later years who spent seventeen long winters in mountain refugee camps, ghosts in their own parents' country; who take buses back and forth across the towns each day in the bitter cold so that they can take basic English classes, so that they can improve their job prospects, so that they can feed their children and move their lives into modern America. Why shouldn't they hold fast to their language and traditions? It's all they have left of their old life. I thought of my mother, who waited twenty years before becoming an American citizen, because that - waiting - was her choice.  I could scarcely stop the glower from creeping into my eyes.  What can you say to a person who says things like that, publicly and proudly?

At the same time, across town at the park, my husband was  in conversation with a woman from the Czech Republic, who was there exercising her dog.  Some of the other Americans who came into the park ignored his hello. She was glad to talk.

It makes me angry when people speak of immigrants disparagingly. I came to immigrate in a place of privilege. I am Irish American, which means that I'm a white, English speaking, educated, dual passport holder with an easily pronounced name. Those are the reasons that I'm accepted effortlessly when I go to Ireland, or when I'm in the United States. I know that I've had it very, very easy.

But it's so easy to throw less convenient immigrants under the bus, it's easy to imagine that your own foremothers adapted to the American way of life immediately, that they learned English quickly, and didn't bemoan anything whatsoever about this country. But that can't be the reality. They were not beyond the human tendency to hold fast to the comfort of familiar things.

Look at how immigrants moved in pockets: they settled together, in places where their language and culture could be supported and survive, where they could pass traditions on to their children. Just look at all the German speaking grandmothers in North Dakota. The Ingas and Arnes of the Red River Valley. Our state paints a portrait of bordered homogeneity. 

Of course they struggled, and they missed their homes with an ache that can't be understood without making the same permanent trip across the sea.  Their grandchildren still steadfastly cling to language and tradition and culture, remembering that they are of another country as well, one that they've never set foot in. This dark haired woman, neither German nor Norwegian, who spent eleven 'magical and charming' days (her words) in her father's country, who was so proud of his poverty and struggle as an immigrant, had sadly missed the irony of her prejudice. 

My mother and I, immigrants both, went upstairs for our coffee, and felt a little sad without really knowing why.