In Memoriam

For Peggy

24 April 1920 – 8 October 2010

 Fall was just beginning to soften the air and ripen the foliage when we moved to Ireland in 2007. In those early days, as I made the adjustment to a way of living very different from that I had known, often it was my mother-in-law, Peggy, who was by my side. She was with me when I entered the grocery market on our first shopping expedition. It was the Super Valu in Clonmel’s Poppy Fields Shopping Centre, a modern supermarket not a million miles different from the supermarket chains of America. Still, on entering the door, the juxtaposition of the familiar with the foreign coalesced in a wave of emotion that struck unexpectedly, and I burst into tears.

Though she had lived independently and on her own since the illness and death of my father-in-law a few years before, Peggy did not drive. So each week one of the family drove her to Clonmel to do her shopping, stopping on the way at the post office where she collected her pension. Because we were neighbours, and because I needed to do our marketing as well, frequently it was I who drove her. In those early days, as we drove the 20 kilometres or so to Clonmel, we shared with each other our pleasure in the beauty of the fall. The berries of the cotoneasters by her entrance were bright red, and she fretted as the blackbirds ate them, striping the bush of its colour. She tapped her chest discreetly in the sign of the cross as we passed the ruin of Whitechurch with its ancient and more recent graves. The beeches lining the road in Tincurry were golden; she remarked approvingly how Michael McCarthy had, as always, so reliably cut back the thick summer’s growth of the ditches dividing his fields. (In our part of Ireland, a hedge is a ditch.) Along the ‘top road’ – the old Cork road – into Cahir, she admired the dogwoods, their stems deep burgundy. Across from Cahir Castle, large hand-shaped leaves of the horse chestnuts drooped bronze over the bog-brown River Suir. Passing the square and leaving town, we rolled along through pastureland still green and fields rich brown-black with recent ploughing. Apples hung red in the trees; sumac blazed copper-crimson along the fields. At times, the sun caught the peaks of the Galtees, revealing the lavender-tinged brown heath on their smooth summits.

We enjoyed this beauty together, but we didn’t talk a lot. Peggy had a voice so low and faint – a whisper, the breath barely exhaled – that it was difficult to make out at times what she said. I can be expansive and voluble, but at other times I find conversation a strain. But even when we passed mile after mile in silence, it was a companionable one, and there was a sense of acceptance between us, no matter what our differences. For though we came from different cultures, and were weaned on different expectations of our paths in life, there were common bonds. 

She loved reading and spent her quiet afternoon hours with good authors: D. H. Lawrence, Tolstoy, Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Iris Murdoch, John McGahern, among them. She loved the garden, and even at 89 and 90 could be found pulling raspberries from the tangled canes behind the house. She filled vases and old jars with roses and shoots of flowering vines. Each spring, the pale yellow primroses appearing in the green along the ditches delighted her, taking her back to childhood. On May Day, she filled vases with flowers and set them before the blue-and-white statue of the Virgin Mary, recalling other childhood memories. Indeed, there remained always in her enthusiasm something childlike, visible in her spontaneous smile and the light suffusing her face, full of joy.

Most of my life has been spent in standardised suburban neighbourhoods California and Salt Lake City. Though I did live for 17 years in one house, there has been a transient quality about it. Though in the mid part of her life, Peggy did live in the Irish towns of Dundalk and Clonmel, for most of her 90 years, she lived in the very countryside where she was born. She knew its roads and houses, its birds and wild things, the flowers and trees, the mountains, rivers and streams.

Most of all, she knew its people. She had an encyclopaedic knowledge of and memory for the families  with whom she had grown up, their parents and grandparents, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The eldest of a family of eight, married to a man from a family of ten, and the mother of nine, she could call up out of memory a dizzying number of aunts, uncles, first and second cousins, the names of their children and their spouses, and the parents and siblings of the spouses, each with their own web of relations, an infinite chain of connections. Moreover, she knew the people we met on the streets of Clonmel, the town where for a few years the family lived when my husband was a school boy. And there were too the customers of my father-in-law’s once extensive rose business, the people they met in markets and fairs, where, even after the time of the rose business, she sold her garden produce. I could barely get a toehold of comprehension in this vast community of friends and relations. She remembered them all.

In early weeks of my life in Ireland, during those first two and a half months until our shipment arrived, we had enough furniture to live in the house – a dining room table and a bed, a working kitchen with borrowed pans and a cheap set of dishes bought in Dunnes – but little else. There was no reliable phone service, no internet connection, and my computer and books steamed in a hold somewhere on the Atlantic. Many days I drove the five kilometres to Cahir and wandered or sat in the square watching people, and checked email at the internet café or in the library. But the hours after dinner I found hard. Evening after evening I remained at the bedroom window, drink in hand, staring into the descending darkness. Himself, away at work all day, worried aloud to his mother about my inability to settle.

He tells me she asked, quite sensibly, ‘Does she have a comfortable place to sit?’

She shared with me her home-made soups, mysterious, thick, dark soups, carefully carried through the always-open gate and across the rough patch of ground between our houses. Smiling half apologetically, she entered the house and our kitchen through the back door, holding out the cling-film-covered Pyrex pint measuring jug.

‘I made some soup. I hope you don’t mind.’

It was always delicious soup, welcomed for its warmth, its ingredients drawn from frugality borne of desperately hard times in her youth, rich with flavour discovered over the course of a long life of diverse experience, dense with vegetables, meats and spices I would not have thought to combine. Her adventurous approach taught me to disregard the recipes I had sought and plunge ahead with whatever was at hand or in the cupboard. Before long, I was carrying my soup offerings into her kitchen, proud of my efforts and conscious of just a soupçon of competitiveness.

She bore with equanimity my driving as I discovered how to negotiate the narrow roads, drivers impatient to overtake my cautiousness or, myself impatient, my own overtaking of tractors with their loads of straw and jeeps towing horse boxes. She complimented me on my bravado as I timidly steered through the narrow streets of Clonmel’s Irishtown, looking for a place to park in the crowded streets near the post office so she could collect her pension. Earning my Irish driving license was a long, difficult process, yet she never flinched as the habits acquired on California’s wide even streets and freeways gave way to the requisites of driving through roundabouts and medieval town centres. Instead, she recalled her own driving lessons of years ago, suspended abruptly after a mishap, and praised me for my courage.

As with all in-laws, of course, the relationship had its complexities. The gulf between our values and expectations was sometimes laid bare. Too frequently, I tried with incomplete success to hold my tongue over the handling of her lively but undisciplined border collie, Sally. She said nothing about my infrequent attendance at mass, my irreverence and my too-often profane tongue. I writhed at the necessity of returning home before midnight on New Year’s Eve so she could receive phone calls at the stroke of twelve from her sister and daughters abroad; she politely ignored my rude irritability on the occasion. But more often, we found within ourselves the capacity to reach across the divide and welcome our shared experience. Most especially, that included our joy in the beauty of nature.

So on this fall day in Salzburg, surrounded by trees glowing gold and crimson, I watch as leaves drift down in flurries thick as snow, and I recall those first weeks in Ireland three years ago. I think of driving through another gold-and-crimson burnished landscape with her beside me in the passenger seat remarking on the line of colour against the grey horizon. In my imagination we speed along the Clonmel bypass and delight in the yellow birch trees that line its gentle curves. Or we admire the amber beech leaves as we approach the Western road, bright against the old grey limestone school. It is still an adventure to me, strange and wonderful after California, and she is in those days my companion and guide. Tears cloud my vision again as I realise that for the first time in three years, I am homesick. And it is Ireland in the fall, and Peggy, the fulcrum of the family’s life, the centre of gravity for our experience of home, that I miss.

The Fourth, Abroad

In Salzburg, of course, there is no Fourth of July. There’s simply 04.07.10 or 4 Juli. Accepting this is an adjustment a native-born and -reared American must make each year she finds herself far from barbecues and parades, fireworks and Sousa marches, awaking on the morning of a day which date has for a lifetime held specific and particular significance to discover it’s simply another day for everyone around her.

It’s not that I’m a particularly patriotic American. I left the country without regret and suffer no longings for it, save my sadness at leaving behind dear friends and family. I’ve settled, as well as is possible for me, where we have lived since and am not eager to return.

I learned, however, my first summer in Europe that I can’t simply ignore traditions that have been part of my life since childhood. That first year in Ireland, I was sent a notice by the HSE – the national health service – asking me  to ‘attend’ the outpatient radiology unit at the regional hospital in Waterford for a mammogram on 4 July.

I considered requesting another date but thought, ultimately, what would be the difference? It would be simply another Friday in Ireland, with people going to work and doing the shopping as usual. There was no reason to re-schedule the appointment, although Himself and I briefly discussed planning a party. Why bother anyway?

I remember driving, for the first time on my own, the 50 or so miles to Waterford that July morning. The middle part of the journey, between Clonmel and Carrick-on-Suir, passes through particularly beautiful countryside. The tree-lined River Suir and the gentle Comeragh Mountains, rising stately and green, lie on one side of the road; on the other side, rich pasture land, dotted with fine houses, rolls off toward the horizon. I negotiated the confusing road works as I approached Waterford city, found the correct lane to cross the intimidating bridge across the mouth of the Suir, wound through the ancient streets and found the hospital without getting lost. At that stage, before I had passed the Irish driving test, to have done it alone felt like my own declaration of independence.

I had the car radio tuned to RTÉ’s Lyric FM, which features an eclectic mix of classical, light classical and standards, thinking that, given the connections between America and Ireland, and the affection the Irish generally have for Americans, they would play something to mark the occasion. I was hoping for my Fourth of July favourite, ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’. Perhaps even ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. Something spirited. It wasn’t until my return trip, though, during the lunchtime request programme, that the presenter dedicated songs to mark the occasion. But instead of a rousing march or triumphant anthem, she chose the poignant path, selecting the plaintive ‘Hard Times Come Again No More’ and Jay Ungar’s achingly tender ‘Ashokan Farewell’. (Which choices may reflect something of the complicated relationship between Europe and America.)

Flooded with emotion, I took a chance and stopped in Clonmel to seek out an American friend who lives there. But when I went to the shop where she works, she and her boss were involved in a time-sensitive project, too busy to talk. The connection I sought would have to wait.

'Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,' indeed.

I learned the lesson that July, and the following year Himself and I, along with my American friend from Clonmel, planned a barbecue for a few friends. As it happened, my brother the airline captain had a layover in Limerick that day, so he was able to join us. I located a collection of Sousa marches online, and, blessed with a fine warm day, we had, in our small way, a Fourth of July party. Sans fireworks, of course.

So as July approached this year, we considered, then rejected, the idea of hosting a barbecue. Life is too complicated right now. We decided instead simply to go into the Altstadt and enjoy a Sunday afternoon together in Salzburg. Before leaving, I listened to the United States Marine Band playing ‘The Stars and Stripe Forever’ – one small concession to sentimentality. Then, I having furtively wiped my eyes, we set off for the city centre.

The Salzburg Festival opens in just a few weeks, and there are even more visitors on its streets. Crossing the bridge over the Salzach and entering a platz in the Neue Stadt, we were passed by a group of young Americans, enjoying the heat of the day in shorts, tank tops and flip flops. There was no red, white and blue to be seen.

We continued on lazily, admiring Beaux Arts buildings and peering into shop windows, finding breads in the shape of elephants, stainless steel cookware, men’s watches priced far beyond our budget, tempting handmade shoes, and tracht, Austrian traditional dress. At a photographer’s window, we stop to gape at the large, arresting image of a nude woman playing the saxophone, long platinum-blonde hair and white skin against a white ground, with just a patch of black. Another group of Sunday ramblers, a man and two women with a child in stroller, stopped beside us, also staring at the photograph. From his stroller, though, the child was impressed by a second photograph in the window, that of an infant lying on the palm of an adult.

‘Die Baby, die Baby!’, he called out, over and over.

‘Ja, ja, die Baby’, his parent replied. With some relief, I assumed.

In the Mirabellgarten – the formal gardens beside the schloss built by a 17^th century prince-archbishop for his mistress – the gold tulips of Easter time had been replaced by yellow pansies, marigolds, red begonias and salvia. We wandered its paths, staying in under the shady arbours where possible. The garden is where the ‘Do-Re-Mi’ scenes from The Sound of Music were filmed, and it’s popular with visitors, many of whom can be found having their pictures taken in front of the Pegasus foundation featured in the film. But it’s popular as well with ordinary Salzburgers, who sat on benches in the shade, dozing, talking or simply, I suppose, thinking, a small study of humanity.

Back on the other side of the river we sat under an umbrella in a large platz, drinking beer and watching people passing, among them a woman pushing a stroller in which sat a small terrier, its ears pricked with excitement.

‘Now I’ve seen everything,’ said Himself.

Our beers finished, we wandered in the direction of the Festival Halls, which, as it turned out, were open on the very afternoon for a free preview of the coming programme. Why not?, we asked each other, and went inside the larger of the two, the Grosses Festspielhaus. And, again through simple good luck, we found ourselves just in time to attend an hour-long free concert, a kind of sampler of coming concerts. Markus Hinterhäuser, pianist and Festival music director, played duet with another pianist, then discussed the upcoming Festival. But the real crowd pleaser was the percussion ensemble that followed, directed by Martin Grubinger and featuring a fascinating array of metal, wooden and skinned-covered surfaces –  in every shape, size and colour – designed to be beaten, hammered and otherwise struck. I’ve been wondering if my procrastination and hesitation would rob us of the chance to get a taste of the Festival. Now it seems more accessible.

Outside once again in the late-day summer heat, I looked up at the skyline of domes and steeples against the pale horizon. Salzburg is a beautiful city, and I felt alive, joyous, and very glad to be there, just one among many on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, simply taking it in, walking aimlessly and leisurely, pausing to look at art in the windows of galleries or admiring bright coloured beads in jeweller’s. We passed through the platz in front of the Dom, now nearly entirely filled with the stage and a huge bank of bleachers for the traditional Everyman performances that open the Festival. From there we passed by the giant chessboard where a game was in progress. And then on to the gem-like St Peter’s cemetery – another The Sound of Music location – with its bright flower-covered graves and painted iron grave markers.

The caretaker motioned to us as we turned toward the back of the cemetery, saying something in German. A woman standing nearby, an American, said ‘I think he means don’t go back there.’ It was true; it was nearly 7 and the gates of the cemetery were about to close. We moved toward the other gate, the woman and her companion walking near us, stopping to admire the flowers as we did.

'They’re so beautiful,’ said the other woman, also American. ‘I’ll have to keep coming back.’

I agreed. ‘It’s one of my favourite places in Salzburg. I come here every chance I get. You should see it at Easter, when the graves are all golden with daffodils.’

She looked at me, a little surprised, perhaps questioning. I said, simply, ‘We live here.’

As we parted, I again felt my good fortune

Shortly afterward, home at last, and having barbecued wurstl and opened a bottle of wine, Himself treated me to another concert, one for the Fourth of July. He whistled, in its entirety, ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’. It was a virtuoso display of just one of his many talents.

I am lucky indeed.

Leaving Tipperary, Ctd.

The night before I left Tipperary, just before the light faded, I left our by-now nearly empty house and walked along our road to Whitechurch, the long-derelict church – since before the dissolution of the monasteries – near the big tree. You can just make out the shape of the church under its covering of dense ivy, three high windows piercing the narrow eastern wall. The ivy is so thick that, unless you are looking, you might not see the church itself.

A battered iron gate, tied shut with a fraying blue nylon cord, slumps at the entrance to the churchyard. Just beyond the gate stands a tall iron crucifix peeling black paint, the corpus painted white. The ground rises and falls sharply, cluttered with abundant growth and tottering monuments, slabs falling forward and back at acute angles. Some of the oldest that can be read date from the 18th century; undoubtedly there are far older ones, their inscriptions now illegible. Others are recent, including one memorialising our dear friend Fr Tommy O’Connell, who died in 1999 and is buried in California, where he had been a parish priest for over 50 years. He grew up next to my father-in-law’s home place and had known both my husband’s parents for a lifetime.

There is one grave, though, that captures my imagination more than the others. Off in a corner, near the boundary with Murphy’s field and at the foot of a huge tree, is a tiny grave site, about a metre long and half metre wide, edged with kerbstones filled in with pebbles. The carved silhouette of an infant angel with praying hands sits above the inscription:

Brian Anthony Williams
sadly missed by
Mam Dad and Family

The grave was there when I first visited Whitechurch in 1988, the initial capitals of the inscription gaudily painted, the tiny grave covered with faded plastic flowers, a holy-water vial shaped like the Virgin, and a plastic globe containing an angel. When I visited it last week, it was still covered with offerings, many new, including a straw reindeer-shaped planter holding a small shrub, still green, apparently put there at Christmas.

Twenty-two years on – and how long before my first visit? – and Baby Brian Anthony Williams is still remembered in the tiny churchyard, surrounded by ancient graves and towering trees in the deep, quiet peace of Whitechurch.

I walked back along the quiet road, passed by only one or two cars, between hedges not yet showing the green of spring. They had recently been cut back hard, and broken spears of white ash branches littered the ground. Ash, even freshly cut, burns well, and I gathered an armload, carrying as much as I could manage, for one last fire in the house.

It had been a day even more chaotic and unpredictable than it might have been. The removal men – Michael, Pat, John and Paul – four gentle Cork men, with accents as impenetrable as the men themselves were charming, funny and sweet, had packed most of our belongings the day before, leaving out only those items as necessary for the final carton, specifically the teapot, five mugs and the kettle. Late that day, with most of the rooms dismantled, came word that the container would arrive around 11 am. It would take a couple of hours to load it, so I had planned to have the afternoon to run errands, including a trip to Clonmel, about 30 km. away, to drop off the recyclables and rubbish and, I hoped, to for a quick farewell to a friend, if we could arrange that.

But on the day itself, the container didn’t arrive at 11. It was delayed at the port. The three Cork men – the fourth having been sent on another assignment – began moving cartons outside, so they lined the yard inside our entrance on each side, two walls of cartons lining a non-existent drive. We stopped for lunch, and after lunch we waited still. I let my friend in Clonmel know I wouldn’t be able to give a definite time I could get away.

From the tiny station I’d established in the kitchen, I continued to try to organise what was left to be done – insurance to be cancelled, another policy to be put into place, banking, holding the mail, arranging to have it forwarded, looking for potential buyers of the car, all the while keeping the paperwork organised and sequestered from the movers. At last, rumbling outside let us know the container had arrived. But it was the wrong size. The foreman of the packing crew made phone calls; another one would have to be sent. That meant more waiting, putting into doubt when I could get away to Clonmel. After texting back and forth, my friend and I gave up the idea of meeting. The men, having moved as many cartons as could be moved, sat in the sun, reading their papers. We all agreed that with the cartons stacked in the yard and them having to wait with little to do, we were lucky in the fine, sunny day.

Then an email arrived from Agnes, the relocation specialist in Salzburg. If I wanted the flats painted in colours of my choosing, I would have to select the colours by midmorning the next day.

‘I told you about this before’, she wrote, impatience creeping through. Yes, I thought, but you only told us yesterday we had secured the flat. Can’t it wait until I get there in three days? I had colours in mind, but how was I to communicate them by email in the next 24 hours? Pale greenish taupe, not-quite-olive, not too yellow, not too bright? Creamy yellow, soft and warm?

Or we could leave it white, said Agnes.

White? With all those lovely crown mouldings and carved walnut panels? With our off-white couch? Leave it white?

Confusion mounted as visitors arrived to say goodbye. My mother-in-law’s dog ran in and out of the house. Young grandnieces and a grandnephew explored the empty house, full of wonder. My own anxiety about meeting the schedule, seeing things loaded, getting to Clonmel and back, expanded. Frustration at the thought of white walls, the compression of the day, everything that remained to be done, the interrupting phone calls and texts, squeezed like too-tight bandages round my gut.

At last, having loaded the bags of recycling and rubbish into the back of the car, I made a quick run into Clonmel, getting the most important things done. Stopping at a DIY centre for bird seed to leave with my mother-in-law, I snatched some paint chips for reference. Back home in just over an hour, I found the container had arrived and was nearly loaded. Even the kettle, teapot and five mugs had been packed and loaded. And now, having had soup and a sandwich fixed for me by my sister-in-law, and the light not entirely gone, I was able to relax in the walk, the last one for a while, up our quiet, familiar road.

Back at home, the sitting room empty save for borrowed pillows and my notebook computer, I build the last fire and poured a glass of wine into a borrowed glass. My few scraps of foraged ash burned soft and sweetly, adding to the calm. The sky deepened; late I watched the burnished deep blue-black rise above the blacker silhouette of the hedge.