1983

In 1983, I was sixteen and spending a long summer in Ireland on my Granny’s farm between Clones and Newbliss in Monaghan. I wore my hair in pigtails, spent a lot of time in my favorite old flannel shirt and loose fitting jeans, feeding calves and helping where I could. I soaked up the world that surrounded me.

My Granny baking bread in her wood burning stove, my uncles at work in the milking parlor, butter that was so rich it seemed a distant cousin to the butter to which I was accustomed, fresh apple cake made with the harvest from the apple trees in the yard, the rolling hills, all of it filled my consciousness.

I missed my friends and life back home…but only a little. I wrote volumes, trying to explain the every day events that were so foreign. The beautiful blue of a cow’s eyes… killing the chicken that became dinner and plucking the feathers after dipping it in scaling hot water, the poor crippled calf that I fed by hand, the roughness of his tongue as he suckled my fingers while learning to drink from a bucket… and the laugh of being sprayed with the milk when he snorted…

Traveling to the North, the Troubles on display in the form of British border guards armed to the teeth and pillboxes embedded in the hillside. Having to leave someone in the car so it couldn’t be blown up, checkpoints anywhere- everywhere. Machine guns set in open car windows, questions to answer… it is harder than you think…

Silage time, tractors and men working, dinner in shifts, women packing the kitchen and cooking all day, picking gooseberries and black currents by Tommy’s house in the back field, making jam… Boiling the berries and making jam…

The accidental boyfriend…didn’t see that coming, “Will I see you again?”, as if I would understand, Anne Marie’s surprise and my aunts laughing till tears came. Still funny almost 30 years later. How can it be so long ago when I remember it like yesterday?

Why all the memories now? The friend request on Facebook from the accidental boyfriend brought it all back. Yes, I accepted.