WANDERING AMONG THE ROOTS

Sept 9, 2019:  Yesterday was a traveling day and we bid goodbye to the folks at the hostel, to the lumpy bed, and the chaotic kitchen. They'd had a good run at an eco-conscious hostel in the old mill with beds for twenty, recycling, a garden, and the folks that arrived were mostly young and enthusiastic and unattached to a work world. But the manager told me it would close down in November; the owners want to make it into apartments (a HUGE and expensive remodeling project) to have steadier income and less wages to pay out,

Our next residence, in Roscrea, the Slidala Inn, where we are now, is incredibly clean. The owner, Marie, has maintained it for 23 years with sleeping for seven. She does the cooking, visits with everyone who wants to visit, and she and Andrew exchanged family/clan information for quite awhile. When older Irish come together they check in about who's related to whom, who's died, and where are the cousins. This can go on for quite awhile. I recorded two men today for a bit, a momento I will treasure. The cadence of the language is working in my brain; I can hear the soft vowels and the rhythms. I feel it creeping into my writing and I'm ok with it! Marie met us when we came in tonight to ask about our day, to let us know she'd turned the heat on in our rooms, and her voice was like a lullaby to me.

Brian sleeps with a huge sigh now and then. I wish I could post the picture I took of him at his birth mother's grave. She rests beside the church she was married in, and her daughter was married in with only a few dozen other graves overlooking the green fields. Some gravestones are so old there is little to be deciphered on them. Others had been re-etched and easily read. She is there in the family plot only a few yards from her parents' graves. The skies cleared, and the wind was crisp as we wandered around the church, which had been a mill until 1842. Brian was quiet, and a little tearful. The pictures will be incredibly helpful for both of us to remember this day.

The roads aren't straight, and there are no road signs. But we carried on, between the hedges, following a cousin who hadn't been back to this territory for forty years. At the end of a long lane we found an old farmer, and explored the abandoned house that Andrew's ancestors bought, built and lived in since the 1600's. There are a couple of poems about it in me, about impermanence, and the ever permanent land, but they'll have to age, like good cheese, before they're ready for writing.

This day would be the central germ of an Irish novel, but one that I can't write. I don't know the families, or the hardships, or the history. But hearing the bits and pieces of two old men catching up, I treasured the sheer grit it took to live from day to day, to raise eleven children in a three room house, to face the sure knowledge that your older brother would inherit the land, and you were going to be homeless, and landless for the first time in your life, to nurse a man whose hip was broken through a storm too horrible to travel in, then carry him to the ambulance which won't come up the lane because it would surely get stuck. And though the stories were not about women, we know they were cooking, laundering nurturing, and praying as hard as their men folk for a good crop, for strong calves and for healthy children.

We stood at the swing gate to see a very long brown patch almost over the hill. Nothing grew on it. That was the bog the family had used for centuries to heat their home. Cut it, dry it all summer, burn it. It renews itself, and it burns clean. It's still used, though corporations have bought up some, and sell it now. The time's they are achangin'.