Time of Our Lives

It started with a unexpected invitation to Ireland, and a seventeen year old letter. My brother-in-law was renting a cottage in Adare, and asked Maureen and I to come and spend a week. We had been to Ireland back in 2000 on a tour. My mother’s cousin Joe and his wife Mary were living in Moyvane, County Kerry. My parents had visited them back in 1974. My mother gave me a letter Mary had written to her with Mary’s phone number. I called back then and spoke to Joe while we were on a tour stop. But we weren’t able to get away to visit them. Fortunately, I saved the letter.

A couple of days before we left for Ireland this time I called the number. I was a little apprehensive. Joe and Mary would now be in their mid-eighties. I wasn’t sure who would answer the phone, and if they would understand who I was. After several rings, a woman answered. It was an older voice with a brogue that sounded just like my grandmother. I said who I was, and asked if this was Mary. She said it was, and I asked if she knew who I was. She knew immediately. It was a great relief and surprise. I told her we would be coming to Ireland, and we’d love to see her. I said we were staying at a hotel in Listowel for one night because I knew it was close to her house. She told me her husband Joe had passed away two years ago. But she said her daughter Bridget, who lived right behind her, would drive her the eight miles to meet us. A window to my family history was opening.

Mary called me the day before we were to meet. We arranged to meet at two o’clock at the hotel, and then go out to her house for a visit. She said it was a narrow country road with a possible detour, and it would be easier if they brought us out to the house. It was a very narrow road, as many are in Ireland, boarded by high hedgerows. We pulled into the driveway of a classic pale yellow Irish cottage with a red rail fence and flower beds surrounding the neatly cut small front lawn. There was a green and yellow flag supporting the local Gaelic football team on a pole in the lawn. It was a house like no other.

The house was built for my great grandparents, and it’s where my grandmother grew up. We walked into a small kitchen that Joe, who was a master handyman, put in years ago. We then walked into a small sitting room. I could imagine my grandmother there as a child. Mary showed me a picture of my great grandfather and grandmother. He was handsome man with white hair and mustache wearing a suit and tie. She was plain and little matronly looking. Mary gave me my grandparents wedding picture. My grandfather stood erect and stern next to my grandmother who looked so young and pretty in a very 1920s wedding dress with a flapper style hat. There were pictures of Joe, with his shock of white hair, who reminded me of my mother’s brothers.

Bridget drew our attention to a clock on the wall. It was an old fashion clock that was wound by pulling a chain, and raising weights to keep the pendulum swinging. It was given to my great grandparents as a wedding gift from the family for whom my great grandmother worked as a domestic. It was over 150 years old and kept perfect time. It struck me that it was keeping time for the generations of my family as we moved through life.

Mary told the story of my grandmother’s only visit back to her childhood home in 1973. My grandmother said she wanted to do two things before she left. There was a path across the road from her house that lead down to the river that she used to walk as a child. Despite the fog, she walked down to stand and watch the river go by. It was over 40 years since she stood there the last time. She also wanted to visit a nearby house. Mary said the house had been deserted for a long time. There was even a tree growing inside the house. My grandmother picked up a small branch, and poked it through a window. She pushed aside the tree branches, and said she used to come here and dance on that cement floor in there. Maybe we can go home again, even for a few precious moments.

We sat in Mary’s kitchen and she served tea and homemade bread and soda bread. We talked as I watched the wind driven rain blow by the window. There was a picture of a good looking young man among the family pictures on the kitchen wall. I asked who he was. Bridget said it was her son David who died ten years ago in a motorcycle accident. He was barely in this twenties. You could tell she was proud of him.

As we left, I gave Mary a hug. She held me tightly for a few seconds. We both knew this was our first and only time together. I told her to take care of herself, and I would stay in touch. As Bridget drove us back to our hotel, we stopped at the cemetery a short distance from the house to see Joe’s and David’s graves. They were black granite and well maintained and sat just behind the wall in a curve in the road. David’s grave was just a few feet from Joe’s. His headstone was in the shape of a car. Bridget said he was a real car guy. As we started to walk away, she said, “We carry on.”

It was two hours in an afternoon that I will never forget. I felt as if I knew Mary and Bridget all my life. There was a bond that couldn’t be broken by time and distance. I took a picture with them, and I also took a picture of that clock on the wall that will always remind me of the time of our lives.