a dance for mother’s day

27 Sunday Mar 2022

Posted by Editor in Act Two, Castledawson, Family, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

beach memory, Castledawson, Clearances, County Derry, folding sheets, happy mother's day, ironing, Mother's Day, Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern, Themes of childhood

Old Smoothing Iron by Seamus Heaney

Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at achor.

To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.

Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron

like a plane into linen
like the resentment of women
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass

through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

It is Mother’s Day in Ireland. I am hoping the flowers arrived and that the florist remembered to write on the card, “I’ll see you next weekend.” Next weekend. It’s been a long three years, the pandemic and its attendant restrictions keeping us apart. As my brother – only 250 odd miles away from her – reminded me, “this thing has made a mockery of distance. I’m only a few hours drive away but I might as well be on the moon.”

The water is wide, but it takes only a second to transport me to the South Derry village where she lives with my dad. In the movie that’s playing in my head, she is no longer just inches away from me on the screen of my phone struggling to remember a password. She is young again, her hair red and short. She is standing at the ironing board, smoothing out with hot steam the wrinkles in pillowcases, telling me a story I have heard before. When she returns the steaming iron to its stand, she’ll pause to deliver some bit of home-spun wisdom I’ll carry with me always, the kind of thing that only Irish mammies say: What’s for you won’t pass you by.

Meanwhile, my father is fixing something. There was always a home renovation project – always – and as the work continues in the Mexican house I now call home, I wish my dad were here – to do it right. It’s an older house, the kind that needs more care and cleaning and patience than I anticipated. I suppose home renovation is a bit like childbirth – you forget the pain – which might explain why people do it more than once – people like my parents. And, I suppose, people like me.

Before YouTube videos and apps for that, daddy taught himself how to make things – and how to fix them. Ma 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 my childhood home to create a new kitchen and dining room. Then he added a laundry room, doing all the wiring and plumbing himself. He added a glasshouse in which he grew tomatoes and other plants not native to Northern Ireland – the slips of which my mother probably ‘collected’ from plants and trees in places they visited. Exotic and far from home, 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 Seamus 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 – his parents lacking the means to buy an instrument for the boy who loved to sing, 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, sizing up the situation, and cutting no corners. If you’re going to do it, do it right. He used to obsess over such things with a sense of urgency that I now understand. 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. 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 over a decade ago when the 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?” crying 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 if I need another booster shot, to get it.

There is a clothesline in my garden, and when I brush past it, I know I am home. One day last Spring, armed with what seemed an acceptable translation on my phone – “pinzas para ropa” – I drove over the kind of cobbled streets that would not be out of place in Connemara, 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 turned my back on the dryer, because – and every Irish person will understand this – “there’s great drying out there.”

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 kitchen on the Dublin Road, but on the sandy edges of California before the fog rolled in late on an August afternoon. Facing me, a blanket stretched between us, she steps forward, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we meet, and there we pause to make the final fold.

Unbeknownst to us, her father took photographs, and he wrote our names in the sand and waited for the tide to wash them away. Forever.

And still we dance.

Happy Mother’s Day. I’ll see you next weekend.

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.

and still we dance . . . happy mother’s day

14 Sunday Mar 2021

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

beach memory, Castledawson, Clearances, County Derry, folding sheets, happy mother's day, ironing, Mother's Day, Mother's Day 2015, Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern, Themes of childhood

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.

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.”

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

Listen here as Seamus Heaney reads the poem.

still we dance – on mother’s day in america

06 Friday May 2016

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

beach memory, Castledawson, Clearances, County Derry, folding sheets, happy mother's day, ironing, Mother's Day, Mother's Day 2015, Seamus Heaney, The Haw Lantern, Themes of childhood

This weekend marks another Mother’s Day without the man who made a mother out of me, the man who loved me so well and for so long. Our girl plans to take time off work to spend the day with me, and we know – but we keep it to ourselves – that looking forward to a special Sunday together will lead to looking back to the way it used to be, to once upon a time when she, her father in tow, set out on the annual quest for a gift for me. Every antique store in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area was their stomping ground as they searched for something bijou, something that would bring whimsy to our backyard – the kind of thing I would never need but would more than make my day. There are reminders still – napping cats wrought of stone and metal, painted birdhouses, fading windsocks, and wind chimes of bamboo that would toil less were they hung from a Cypress tree on the Monterey coast. Always – because I would have been annoyed otherwise – that man of mine would commision for me a piece of original art by our daughter. We both knew my odds of acquiring such a piece were significantly better when he asked her to do it. We all knew our dance steps.

At the same time, every year on Mother’s Day in America, I am drawn back to another world, another time with my mother. The miles between us fall away, and there she is standing in our garden; in her arms a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line just before another rain. Next, there is the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.

Our daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen on the Dublin Road, but on the sandy edges of California, late on an August evening before fog rolled in. Facing me, a blanket stretched between us, she stepped forward, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers.

In the middle we met, and there we paused to make the final fold, while unbeknownst to us, her father took photographs of us and wrote our names in the sand, and waited for the tide to wash them away. Forever.

And still we dance.

From Clearances V by Seamus Heaney

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

Listen here as Seamus Heaney reads the poem.

A Moment of Silence for Barney Devlin

18 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by Editor in Barney Devlin RIP, Death and dying, Dispatch from the Diaspora, FInal wishes, Funeral, Grieving, Northern Ireland Culture, Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney, The Forge

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Barney Devlin RIP, Castledawson, Obituary, Seamus Heaney, The Forge, The MIdnight Anvil, Themes of childhood

“The Forge” by Seamus Heaney (1969)

All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square,
Set there immoveable: an altar
Where he expends himself in shape and music.
Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,
He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter
Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;
Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick
To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

The day before our 22nd wedding anniversary was the day my husband died, and I was on the other side of the world in Barney Devlin’s Forge – in the heart of Heaney country. Barney’s son was there too, regaling us with all the craic behind Heaney’s “The Midnight Anvil,” how his da had struck it twelve times to ring in the millennium, while someone held up a phone so the sweet sound could travel all the way to a brother in Canada.

11241219_10207067317702487_8837593762024440852_n

Barney and my father sharing a memory.

This past Father’s Day morning, I walked to the forge again in the rain and under a foreboding grey sky. I was with my oldest, dearest friend. By the time we reached Hillhead, the rain had stopped, and the sky had turned bright and blue. As if someone had ordered it, the cars stopped whizzing by, and save for the birds, all fell silent.

Inexplicably, I was compelled to reach for my phone to begin recording the silence. And too sharply, I told my friend to be quiet, not knowing why. Within seconds, it made sense, as the church bell began ringing out from the village below. Twelve times.

I could barely breathe, aware once again of the sharp stone of grief that I could have sworn had finally been dislodged from my chest.

A private man, my husband had insisted that death was a private business. When the time came, he wanted to die alone, just to sleep on. There was to be no fuss, no funeral, no flurry of condolences, not even a goodbye if he could help it. And only because he expected me to accept and respect his wishes – and because I had promised – I complied. Against my will, I privatized my mourning and got lost in the distance between the desert southwest of these United States and a blacksmith’s forge on the side of the road in rural South Derry.

I wanted what I couldn’t have. I wanted to visit a grave and bring flowers, perhaps freesias because he loved their scent. I wanted the bits and pieces of a public goodbye. I wanted to fill the air with his favorite music. I knew he wanted none of it. No ceremony. No punctuation mark. Just an empty space.

That morning, at Barney Devlin’s forge, I got what I wanted.

Now you may say it was just a coincidence, but I like to think the earth paused to let Heaney’s Midnight Anvil – “the one with the sweeter sound” – ring out twelve more times for my best friend, for me, and for our dead husbands, the men who loved us so well and for so long.

So today, when I found out that Barney Devlin had died, I was immediately transported back to that forge, to the other side of a Door Into The Dark, to a lovely conversation with him on a rainy afternoon last June.

11391353_10207067316782464_1729232537493912487_n

Barney Devlin’s Guestbook

Barney lived for almost a century, with heart and craft and good humor, bringing into his tiny forge thousands of visitors from all over the world. He loved the craic. He loved it when people would stop and give him the time of day.

Tonight, I think only Heaney would know what to say about Barney’s passing. He would have the right words.

Back on that November evening, I recall before leaving the forge, I stopped to sign the visitor’s book. Leafing through it, wondering what I could write that would possibly do it justice, I spotted at the bottom of a page full of positive impressions of Barney and his forge, this note from Seamus Heaney – a tribute that is as fitting an obituary as any.