In November 2019, after living in the United States for the better part of 30 years, I become a citizen of the United States. As I raised my right hand and swore to support and defend the Constitution an old dream shimmered in my memory. It once belonged to my grandmother, and I wanted to reclaim it for her. 

She died when I was six years old, but I remember her clearly. Perhaps because hers was my first experience with death; perhaps because she was the first person to love me wholly and unconditionally. Sometimes – like this morning – when the sun splashes on the walls around the garden, I can hear her voice, gentle but urgent, coaxing her daughter – my mother – to “follow the sun.” As she had done.

In the 1920s, she and my grandfather emigrated to America, where they settled in Connecticut. They loved it, eager to embrace the boundless opportunities before them, but a relentless stream of letters from home, guilt-spiced reminders of familial obligation, pulled them the long way back to rural Derry in 1932, with their American-born children – four sons and a daughter. She isn’t smiling in the picture that would be placed in the family passport and stamped as she boarded the boat to cross the Atlantic Ocean again, to return to Broagh, Castledawson, a part of the world that would one day be known to the global literati as Nobel Laureate poet Seamus Heaney’s home place. But in 1932, it was austere and as unwelcoming for my grandmother and her American children, and she had no option other than to  abandon forever the glittering possibilities on the other side of the ocean.

Defeated, with an air of resignation that hung around her always, she and my grandfather resumed the known and expected ways of the townland, and within six years, their family was complete with two more daughters, Dorothy and Elizabeth, my mother.

There was no easy money.  As a matter of economic necessity and from an early age, the family was “off the grid,” resigned to hard work – to the compulsory crafts – thatching and churning, divining and digging. There was a vague awareness of education as a way out and up, but it was not enforced beyond my grandmother’s mantra that “the pen was easier handled than the spade.” More accessible as the way up, she believed, was America – the dream of it – and she urged my parents to pursue it, knowing my father’s entrepreneurial spirit would have paid off. I know it would too. But the right time to leave eluded them.  

In the early 1960s, my mother frequently took me “up home” to visit my grandparents. We took the 110 bus from Antrim to the Hillhead, across from Barney Devlin’s forge. It always felt like a Sunday School excursion – an adventure. Walking from the bus stop to granny’s house, I remember forcing my tiny self not to fear whatever might be hiding in the dark spaces in the canopy of beech and alder that hung over us.

A silky fragrant world there, and for the first few hundred yards, you were safe enough . . . but scuffles in old leaves made you nervous.

~ Seamus Heaney.

Buoyed by little bluebells and foxgloves winking at me from the grassy edges of the road and the rustic rhythms of the turf-cutters, I kept going. There was comfort in the certainty that I would soon be in my grandmother’s arms, breathing in time to her heartsome sighs as she carried buckets of water from the pump in the yard and then, with me in tow, delivering bottles of milky tea to the men bailing hay or digging potatoes in the fields beyond. 

Over 55 years later, I can still see her, wiping her hands with one elegant motion on a flowery American apron, her hand-knit cardigan the color of buttercups, her smile big and indulgent and for me only. 

How she loved me. 

Little legacies are all around me here in Mexico – the old washstand identical to one she took back on the boat all the way from America to Ireland;  a Masons stoneware baking bowl; cut flowers in a vase;  unnecessary winter coats in my closet that remind me of the good brown coat she always wore on special outings. Others are stashed in the storehouse of my memories – the embroidered “As I lay me down to sleep” sampler that hung on the bedroom wall when I stayed at with her; ice cream sliders from McGurk’s shop, and quarter-pound white paper bags stuffed with Merry Maid caramels or dolly mixtures. Behind my mother’s back, she treated me to sugar sandwiches – great door-steps of white bread filled with creamy, country butter made crunchy with too much caster sugar.

My parents once left me with her while they took a trip to Derry with my uncle and his American wife.  I played outside while she baked lemon meringue tarts. She made the mistake of leaving three of them to cool on the windowsill.  Irresistible. There I was on my tiptoes, at first just picking gingerly at the edges of mile-high meringue, thinking nobody would notice. Invariably, temptation won, and I devoured it, rendering those tarts bald and shiny, plain yellow circles atop rings of shortcrust pastry. Granny just thought it was funny, and encouraged me to do it again the next time.

Like my grandmother, I can barely remember a time when I did not feel the lure of America – the idea of it, the promise of a sunny day –  nor was I ever afraid to take what Doris Kearns Goodwin calls that “spectacular risk,” to leave my home country, to emigrate. In the late 1980s, as Northern Ireland raged, I left. Young and wild, I packed a backpack and left. Just like that.

But I have looked back. Often.  I still do. Having spent more than half my life in Arizona and the last four years in Mexico, I still face unguarded moments of dislocation that bring a crushing loneliness and a visceral longing for “home” and the rhythm of it; sometimes for the very things that sent me away in the first place.

And then those moments pass. I find a way home again. This must be the place. 

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Home by Paula Meehan

I am the blind woman finding her way home by a map of tune.
When the song that is in me is the song I hear from the world
I’ll be home. It’s not written down and I don’t remember the words.
I know when I hear it I’ll have made it myself. I’ll be home.

A version I heard once in Leitrim was close, a wet Tuesday night
in the Sean Relig bar. I had come for the session, I stayed
for the vision and lore. The landlord called time,
the music dried up, the grace notes were pitched to the dark.
When the jukebox blared out I’d only four senses and he left me senseless,

I’d no choice but to take to the road. On Grafton Street in November
I heard a mighty sound: a travelling man with a didgeridoo
blew me clear to Botany Bay. The tune too far back to live in
but scribed on my bones. In a past life I may have been Kangaroo,
rocked in my dreamtime, convict ships coming o’er the foam.

In the Puzzle Factory one winter I was sure I was home.
The talking in tongues, the riddles, the rhymes, struck a chord
that cut through the pharmaceutical haze. My rhythm catatonic,
I lulled myself back to the womb, my mother’s heart
beating the drum of herself and her world. I was tricked
by her undersong, just close enough to my own. I took then
to dancing; I spun like a Dervish. I swear I heard the subtle
music of the spheres. It’s no place to live, but –
out there in space, on your own, hung aloft the night.
The tune was in truth a mechanical drone;
I was a pitiful monkey jigging on cue. I came back to earth
with a land, to rain on my face, to sun in my hair. And grateful too.

The wise women say you must live in your skin, call it home,
no matter how battered or broken, misused by the world, you can heal.
This morning a letter arrived on the nine o’clock post.
The Department of Historical Reparation, and who did I blame?
The Nuns? Your Mother? The State? Tick box provided,
we’ll consider your case. I’m burning my soapbox, I’m taking
the very next train. A citizen of nowhere, nothing to my name.

I’m on my last journey. Though my lines are all wonky
they spell me a map that makes sense. Where the song that is in me
is the song I hear from the world, I’ll set down my burdens
and sleep. The spot that I lie on at last the place I’ll call home.

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