My Mother’s return to Ireland
From my earliest memories, there was an altar in our bedroom. It was the Virgin Mary in her blue and white robes, palms turned outward, guarded by plump cherubs holding our Rosary beads and scapulars. An old postcard leaned against Mary’s inviting hands. It was a photo of the “Three Sisters.” Three promontories standing firm against western Ireland’s fierce North Atlantic, hovering above a handful of farms on the rough edge of Ireland’s west coast. The profile of those dark hills in that postcard was imprinted on me, etched in my soul.
Three Landers sisters were born in the shadow of those hills: Josephine (Jo) the oldest and smartest; my mother Bett, the loyal, hardworking middle child; and Catherine, the childless, good-times, good-fun, woman. It was a place of hard weather and hard living — no electricity, phones, cars, or even running water.
One by one, in their early 20s, the three sisters left their home to make their way in America, the oldest Jo first. They followed a well-worn path born of the 1845 potato famine and the hundred-year
Irish Diaspora that followed. As my mother along with hundreds of thousands of immigrants would say: “Goodbye Old Ireland, I’m going to Cork!”
From Cork, Bett crossed by boat, made it through Ellis Island, and on to the North End of Hartford, Connecticut.
Each sister helped the next get started in their new country, America. Their first jobs were as maids and cooks in wealthy homes in the greater Hartford area. I remember my mother still speaking with a hint of awe about sticking a cord in the wall and feeling the clothes iron get hot.
In 1971, at the age of 30, I scraped together enough money to take Bett back to Ireland. She had not been back in almost 50 years. A bus took her and me over the rise between the town of Dingle and the hamlet of Ballincolla. As the sun sank into the sea, casting long, rich shadows, the Dingle Peninsula spread before us, pointing west, pointing to America the next parish over. The Three Sisters rose before me exactly where they always were. Only this time, instead of old postcard sepia, a verdant green.
Bett smoked a pipe, used Parodi cigars for tobacco, loved boiled pig’s feet, had a rich brogue, and used Gaelic to discuss grownup matters with her sisters. She never made much of her Irishness. It was just her way. I took these things for granted, just as I took her unconditional love for granted.
This was a place of beauty and magic—a place of the open door, close community, and extended family. People had to be there for each other in order to survive. And they did survive—they flourished. Their wealth was in their language, their stories, their music, their laughter.
The harsh unforgiving sea, barren land, long dark winters, dreams lost, and the curse of drink were there all right. But those cold facts only made the magic all the more magical.
The plan was to drop my mother off to stay with her brother Tomás. My friend Jeffrey and I were going to stay a day or two then hitchhike and sail to Sweden, returning to Ireland to bring my mother back to the states.
The only problem was: until I got there, I hadn’t realized Ireland was my real destination.
When we got back to Ballincolla my mother was in full stride.
All her childhood friends — in their late sixties early seventies — arrived uninvited and unannounced at Tomás’s home, where they took a seat by the turf fire and started right in with a story or song in Irish from the good days, the days of their youth.
Often they forgot part of the story or song. My mother finished it. She started many of her own, which triggered another round of memories and laughter. That kitchen was often crowded. The locals really liked my mother.
The 50 years in the states had not much changed her. She spoke Irish like the day she left. She was one of them. Her return triggered a wake—an Irish wake to celebrate their youth gone by. They said Bett’s memory of her youth in Ireland was still fresh in her mind because it was frozen 50 years back.
Perhaps it was not frozen at all but was a small flame kindled, a soft breath on the coals to help warm each day in her new land so far from home.