In Ireland, it is Mother’s Day and it is also still impossible to visit my mother and the place that made her. A phone call later will help minimize the miles between Castledawson and a village in Mexico, me falling easily back into the comforting colloquialisms of home, but it won’t be the same as surprising her the way I used to do with a bunch of fresh flowers that she will immediately arrange in a crystal vase on the hall table. Even if I were able to fly to Belfast, I would still have to stay away from her,  COVID restrictions in place for the foreseeable future hoping to tame the pandemic that has changed everything for all of us over the past twelve months.  As my brother reminded me yesterday “this thing makes a mockery of distance. I’m only a few hours drive away but I might as well be on the moon.”

She has been on my mind lately, especially when I am cleaning up after the well-meaning and hard-working Mexican men who show up every day around 8am to work on the house I recently bought.  It’s an older house, the kind that needs more care and cleaning and patience than I anticipated. Home renovation is a bit like childbirth – you forget the pain  – which is probably why people do it more than once – people like my parents. And, I suppose, people like me.

Before YouTube videos and apps for that, my father taught himself how to make things – and how to fix them. And, my mother was always close by, ready to hand him whatever tool he needed and to clean up after him. I remember one particular spate of home improvement when he single-handedly gutted the ground floor of our house in Antrim to create a new kitchen and dining room and then he added a laundry room outside, doing all the wiring and plumbing himself. He added a glasshouse in which he grew tomatoes and other exotic plants that didn’t really belong in Northern Ireland but they were right at home with him. He painstakingly decorated the outside of the glasshouse with dozens of scallop shells that he and my mother collected from a beach in County Donegal.

I’ve said it before and I mean it. Daddy belongs in a Heaney poem – he has the “Midas touch” of the poet’s thatcher and the grasp of the diviner. Frugal and a fixer, his is the artisanal handiwork that imbues the Derry townlands he crossed on his motorbike as a young man in the early 1960s. Ever the pragmatist, he reminds me that this began as a matter of economic necessity – the potato-digging, the turf-cutting and roof-thatching, his craft and carpentry all shaped by and shaping the place that produced him. His first project was a guitar for my uncle. The family lacked the means to buy an instrument for the boy who loved to sing, so my father – at 10 – figured out how to make it.

A man who can make things and find magic in the making of them, he is always doing the mental arithmetic, forever sizing up the situation, and cutting no corners. If you’re going to do it, do it right. He obsesses about such things, and I understand now his sense of urgency over them.  understand now because the truth – I think – is that we want to fix the unfixable, to live forever so our children will never experience the pain of loss. We want to stop time, close distance, and find the right words right when we need them. But sometimes we are no match for the things that cannot be fixed.

My mother knows this, having lost too much sleep since that November evening a decade ago when her phone rang too late to bring anything good.  I imagine her telling my dad to turn down “The Late Late,” on the telly,  so she can hear me deliver the blow. “What? What’s this? What’s this anyway?” she cries into the phone, “My wee girl has cancer! My wee girl has cancer!” And again, another November night and in her Castledawson kitchen, undone once more, unable to fix my broken heart when the man who loved me died so far away from us.

Just when she thought she no longer needed to watch over me, she is right back to where she started in 1963, hoping for only the very best for her wee girl – hoping I will stay safe and healthy, that I will wash my hands and wear my mask and get vaccinated and  stay home.

And, I’m home again.

There is a  clothesline in my garden, and every time I look at it, I am  immediately transported to my childhood home on the Dublin Road in Antrim. One day, shortly after I bought the house, armed with what seemed an acceptable translation on my phone – “pinzas para ropa” – I drove over cobbled streets that would not be out of place in County Clare, to a little shop in the village. “Si amiga,” and she handed me a bag of pastel colored plastic clothes pegs. Victorious, I returned to my sunny kitchen and while the workers took their siesta, the cumbia no longer at full blast, I did a load of whites and then I turned my back on the dryer, because – and every Irish person will understand this – “there’s great drying out there today.”

Standing back to watch my blouses flutter in the warm breeze, my mother is with me.  She is rescuing a great armful of sheets and towels and daddy’s shirts from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Soon there will be the folding, a precise ritual, and my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.

My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s remodeled kitchen, but on the sandy edges of California before the fog rolled in late on an August afternoon.

Facing each other, a blanket stretched between us, she stepped towards me, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we met to make the final fold, while unbeknownst to us, her father took our pictures and wrote our names in the sand, knowing the tide would wash them away. Forever.

And still we dance.

From Clearances V by Seamus Heaney

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984I

“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line 
Made me think the damp must still be in them 
But when I took my corners of the linen 
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem 
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook 
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, 
They made a dried-out undulating thwack. 
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand 
For a split second as if nothing had happened 
For nothing had that had not always happened 
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, 
Coming close again by holding back 
In moves where I was x and she was o 
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.“

Listen here as Seamus Heaney reads the poem.

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