I get out to maneuver the latch, to open our farmyard gates. It’s just after 9 a.m., Irish time. Our white, two-story house looks shut up and sleepy. My 84-year-old father sleeps late, especially on frosty, late-December mornings like this one.
Two and a half hours ago, my flight touched down at Shannon Airport. My seat-neighbor nudged me awake: “We’re here.” I woke to the pitch-black day, a Boston night fast-forwarded to Irish morning.
For 22 years, I’ve lived in America. In the early years, those 1980s and ‘90s homecomings, I used to be awake and waiting for the flight attendants to serve breakfast. I was one of those passengers who pre-gathered all carry-ons and coats and then hovered at my seat, impatient for those doors to finally open.
This morning, I dozed off again. My seat-neighbor had to nudge me again. “We have to get off the plane now,” she said, visibly straining for patience.
I park the car before the row of white sheds with the red-painted doors. And here’s my father in the back doorway, in mid-breakfast chew and blinking into the frosty daylight.
“Oh, God!” He bellows across the yard. “Oh, well, well, well! If it isn’t you?”
The kitchen smells of fresh porridge and old tea. Dad offers me a hot toddy to settle my trans-Atlantic nerves and stomach. He’s a staunch believer in hot toddies – for all forms of ailments, veterinary or medical. I decline the booze, plug in the kettle for tea. He says he’ll have another cuppa, just to keep me company, and, because I’m an American – a Yank – we’ll take our tea to the living room.
We sit each side of the unlit fireplace. I inquire for his health, how Christmas was, hearing my voice switched over to auto-Irish. In this house, all traces of New England are suddenly, magically abandoned at Logan Airport.
More small talk: the flight over, how the weather was in Boston, what date I’m scheduled to return.
I ask if he has morning chores waiting in the farmyard. And if so, please don’t let me keep him; I’ll just go and catch a few hours’ sleep upstairs.
I watch the relief in his face. “Yes,” he says. As a matter of fact, he was planning on going to see a neighbor. Then, there’s his familiar step across the kitchen, the dog starts up again, the back door slaps shut.
Alone now, I take the tea back to the kitchen and the window that gives onto the rear gardens and the stretch of fields and bog between the village and the Partry Mountains. Neighbors, retirees who moved here from England, have painted their house a sherbet pink. My father has hooked a line of bird feeders to my late mother’s clothesline.
I was 10 when we moved here in 1971, the year my grandfather died. For that first year, the house smelled of its previous occupant: the village schoolteacher’s dead mother. Back then, I thought that whiff of old, desiccated furniture gave our new abode a certain aristocratic elegance. It was proof that we’d risen above our old house, a squat little cottage that sat in the middle of our farm, at the end of a dirt road and behind the village proper. My mother was born in that house, as was my grandmother, and her grandmother before that. A few months after our leaving, part of the roof caved in, and our cattle and sheep found shelter in what used to be our kitchen and parlor.
More memories rise, transmogrified on these kitchen walls. I silently narrate them to myself in my grown-up, American voice, as if I’m showing someone some old home movies.
Here’s college-hippie me. I have hitchhiked cross-country from my Dublin university. I got a lift on a logging truck, and my mother watched from the window, mortified at her 19-year-old daughter climbing down from a lumber lorry in plain sight of the whole village.
And yes, there I am on a frosty, post-Christmas morning – a morning just like this one. It’s 1986. I’m 24, walking out that kitchen door with a green knapsack on my back, terrified and tantalized by the prospect of America.
I yawn. A tear trickles down. Despite my airplane snooze, I’m tired. Dead tired.
I carry my American bag upstairs, thup-thup-thup along the landing.
I open each door to stare at the many empty rooms and the residue of my siblings’ overnight visits to see their widowed father: slippers under a bed, a book on a night-stand, a sweater on a chair.
I stay longest at my old bedroom. My younger sister and I slept here, in two twin beds with matching bedspreads. More memories: I sit in this window, schoolbooks and notebooks and daydreams as I study for exams and college admission. And there’s a dressed-up me, my hair fluffed out, in my best jeans and blouse, kneeling in that windowsill to watch for car headlights and a young man who had invited me to go dancing.
Waiting. I spent my youth waiting – reading books, kneeling and watching in a windowsill. Always daydreaming of somewhere else.
Waiting. Maybe our youth is just that. From 4 to 24, it’s a perpetual and prodigal countdown to some future date and place.
I find myself padding across the landing to my late grandmother’s room, unzipping my travel bag for a pair of American pajamas.
My grandmother is the longest departed. Her room has been redone, refurnished to make it almost anonymous. If I don’t look too closely, if I draw the curtains extra tightly, this room could belong to another house, to another family.
I wonder when my father will return. Will he need a midday farmer’s lunch, just like the old days? Are there groceries in the fridge? I never checked. My head bristles with this crisscross, transcultural dialogue of mine. Lying between the cold sheets, I’m planning my father’s lunch, listing the menu possibilities (American voice). And then, I imagine myself down there, turning from the kitchen stove, where I’m stirring a pan of hot stew or soup (Irish voice).
The bedside clock shows 11 a.m. In Newburyport, my husband is just leaving for work. Our cat is scratching at the back door, whining to be let out. Outside, the usual early bird walkers and joggers are striding and trotting through our Joppa Flats neighborhood. Back home, the winter sky is yellow-pink over Plum Island Point.
Wait. What was that word I just let slip? Home. Back home.
I drift to sleep in my father’s silent house, in my grandmother’s old, forgotten room.
Native Prose – Homecoming – March / April 2009
I get out to maneuver the latch, to open our farmyard gates. It’s just after 9 a.m., Irish time. Our white, two-story house looks shut up and sleepy. My 84-year-old father sleeps late, especially on frosty, late-December mornings like this one.
Two and a half hours ago, my flight touched down at Shannon Airport. My seat-neighbor nudged me awake: “We’re here.” I woke to the pitch-black day, a Boston night fast-forwarded to Irish morning.
For 22 years, I’ve lived in America. In the early years, those 1980s and ‘90s homecomings, I used to be awake and waiting for the flight attendants to serve breakfast. I was one of those passengers who pre-gathered all carry-ons and coats and then hovered at my seat, impatient for those doors to finally open.
This morning, I dozed off again. My seat-neighbor had to nudge me again. “We have to get off the plane now,” she said, visibly straining for patience.
I park the car before the row of white sheds with the red-painted doors. And here’s my father in the back doorway, in mid-breakfast chew and blinking into the frosty daylight.
“Oh, God!” He bellows across the yard. “Oh, well, well, well! If it isn’t you?”
The kitchen smells of fresh porridge and old tea. Dad offers me a hot toddy to settle my trans-Atlantic nerves and stomach. He’s a staunch believer in hot toddies – for all forms of ailments, veterinary or medical. I decline the booze, plug in the kettle for tea. He says he’ll have another cuppa, just to keep me company, and, because I’m an American – a Yank – we’ll take our tea to the living room.
We sit each side of the unlit fireplace. I inquire for his health, how Christmas was, hearing my voice switched over to auto-Irish. In this house, all traces of New England are suddenly, magically abandoned at Logan Airport.
More small talk: the flight over, how the weather was in Boston, what date I’m scheduled to return.
I ask if he has morning chores waiting in the farmyard. And if so, please don’t let me keep him; I’ll just go and catch a few hours’ sleep upstairs.
I watch the relief in his face. “Yes,” he says. As a matter of fact, he was planning on going to see a neighbor. Then, there’s his familiar step across the kitchen, the dog starts up again, the back door slaps shut.
Alone now, I take the tea back to the kitchen and the window that gives onto the rear gardens and the stretch of fields and bog between the village and the Partry Mountains. Neighbors, retirees who moved here from England, have painted their house a sherbet pink. My father has hooked a line of bird feeders to my late mother’s clothesline.
I was 10 when we moved here in 1971, the year my grandfather died. For that first year, the house smelled of its previous occupant: the village schoolteacher’s dead mother. Back then, I thought that whiff of old, desiccated furniture gave our new abode a certain aristocratic elegance. It was proof that we’d risen above our old house, a squat little cottage that sat in the middle of our farm, at the end of a dirt road and behind the village proper. My mother was born in that house, as was my grandmother, and her grandmother before that. A few months after our leaving, part of the roof caved in, and our cattle and sheep found shelter in what used to be our kitchen and parlor.
More memories rise, transmogrified on these kitchen walls. I silently narrate them to myself in my grown-up, American voice, as if I’m showing someone some old home movies.
Here’s college-hippie me. I have hitchhiked cross-country from my Dublin university. I got a lift on a logging truck, and my mother watched from the window, mortified at her 19-year-old daughter climbing down from a lumber lorry in plain sight of the whole village.
And yes, there I am on a frosty, post-Christmas morning – a morning just like this one. It’s 1986. I’m 24, walking out that kitchen door with a green knapsack on my back, terrified and tantalized by the prospect of America.
I yawn. A tear trickles down. Despite my airplane snooze, I’m tired. Dead tired.
I carry my American bag upstairs, thup-thup-thup along the landing.
I open each door to stare at the many empty rooms and the residue of my siblings’ overnight visits to see their widowed father: slippers under a bed, a book on a night-stand, a sweater on a chair.
I stay longest at my old bedroom. My younger sister and I slept here, in two twin beds with matching bedspreads. More memories: I sit in this window, schoolbooks and notebooks and daydreams as I study for exams and college admission. And there’s a dressed-up me, my hair fluffed out, in my best jeans and blouse, kneeling in that windowsill to watch for car headlights and a young man who had invited me to go dancing.
Waiting. I spent my youth waiting – reading books, kneeling and watching in a windowsill. Always daydreaming of somewhere else.
Waiting. Maybe our youth is just that. From 4 to 24, it’s a perpetual and prodigal countdown to some future date and place.
I find myself padding across the landing to my late grandmother’s room, unzipping my travel bag for a pair of American pajamas.
My grandmother is the longest departed. Her room has been redone, refurnished to make it almost anonymous. If I don’t look too closely, if I draw the curtains extra tightly, this room could belong to another house, to another family.
I wonder when my father will return. Will he need a midday farmer’s lunch, just like the old days? Are there groceries in the fridge? I never checked. My head bristles with this crisscross, transcultural dialogue of mine. Lying between the cold sheets, I’m planning my father’s lunch, listing the menu possibilities (American voice). And then, I imagine myself down there, turning from the kitchen stove, where I’m stirring a pan of hot stew or soup (Irish voice).
The bedside clock shows 11 a.m. In Newburyport, my husband is just leaving for work. Our cat is scratching at the back door, whining to be let out. Outside, the usual early bird walkers and joggers are striding and trotting through our Joppa Flats neighborhood. Back home, the winter sky is yellow-pink over Plum Island Point.
Wait. What was that word I just let slip? Home. Back home.
I drift to sleep in my father’s silent house, in my grandmother’s old, forgotten room.