Sunday Scribbling: I Come From....

Today's prompt at Sunday Scribblings is "I come from..." I might have offered one of my old poems from my poetry-collection here, because it exactly fits the bill. It's called "Origins" and begins with a first line of "I come from a hawk-cry, flat, plain place..." But Sunday Scribblings is a prompt for new writing, so I'll play along and see what follows....


I come from Sunday chocolate-bars,
summer days in the back-field,
bread-and-jam
in Nana's house,
in Esther's house,
in Phyllis's house.

I come from aunties and cousins,
gruff-voiced uncles,
jackie-show-light, tag;
climb a tree,
figure out how to get down yourself games.

I come from navy-blue school uniform,
sash and tie,
round-toed sensible shoes,
books covered with wallpaper in September.

I come from Saturdays in town,
Powers' small-profit stores,
doll-house furniture bargains,
paper cut-outs, colouring pencils.

I come from piano lessons,
Tuesdays and Fridays,
cocoa at the fire,
dressmaker aunts with mouthfuls
of pins, fixing outfits for special days.

I come from sisters, brothers,
from always-there parents,
evening crossword games with Dad,
garden exploration with Mam,
dinners of predictable food,
custard-covered desserts as treats.

I come from comfort
I come from home.

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[I enjoyed that! Go find other Sunday Scribblings HERE, and see where they come from!]

Sunday Scribblings: Phantoms and Shadows

The prompt at Sunday Scribblings This week: things and people, times, places, events and how your memory has treated them. Are there people you try to remember more clearly, phantoms you'd like to reach back into the past and take a firm hold of? What do you remember of your early school years? College years? Your grandparents? First pets, first houses, first friends? Do you have a good or poor memory? If you could go back to any particular time/place to recall more vividly what it was like, what would that be?
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I don't live in my hometown. It's a 5+ hour journey, so I get home every few weeks for a long weekend. Sometimes it's a couple of months, and when I am there, my time's spent with family. I've lost touch with almost everyone I went to school with. Sometimes, word reaches me of an old schoolfriend, and most recently it was the death of a girl I hadn't thought of in years. We weren't particularly good friends, but she lived nearby, and we sometimes sat on the bus together. We'd lost touch long before our schooldays ended, in fact. I changed schools, then my family moved house, so I've no idea when was the last time we exchanged a hello. I don't know what career-path she followed. I've heard she was married, but I think it didn't work out. I'm not sure whether she had children. Back in the schooldays, her best friend was a strange little girl, and I remember that I admired her loyalty. That friend died young - in her thirties, or even late twenties. It seems a long time ago. So maybe they're reunited now... I can picture the exchange... "What kept you? I've been waiting AGES at that bus-stop. Have you done your homework? Want to see mine?..."

Because I'm not about my hometown too much, the scraps and bits of news that circulate about marriages, births, illnesses, deaths, don't reach my ears as a matter of course. Sometimes one of my sisters will hear something, and will make a mental calculation as to likely age of the person, and enquire if they went to the schools I went to. Later, I'll be asked whether so-and-so was in my class at school. And more and more often, I find myself not sure. Sometimes I'm saying Yes, the name's familiar. Had she a sister? Pauline? Patricia? Was that the girl whose father had a butcher-shop? Did her cousin die in that car-crash that time?

When I was small, I remember being in town with my mother, and the sense of dread I'd feel if she was stopped by some old friend from the past. A "girl" she'd worked with, or knew from going to the dances. I knew I'd be left swinging round the bus-pole for what felt like hours, while they ran through the litany of all their old acquaintances, exclaiming at the news of who'd had another baby, and tutting and whispering at some darkly secret happening, the nature of which I never managed to grasp. In later years, my mother kept up her knowledge of her wide network of friends and acquaintances through her sisters - who lived scattered throughout the city at that stage. Long hours over pots of tea while they exchanged news of a Mary or an Annie, who'd married this man or that, (or even a fella from some other place, from Dublin, or County Roscommon, perhaps), and whose children had gone on to do this or that, to live in this place or that. An intricate and detailed catalogue that at the time felt to me to be the workings of busybodies. I couldn't understand why the doings of relative strangers was of such interest to them.

But now I'm beginning to see something of what it was. Knowing where all those people, who had touched their lives at some point, had now gone, helped them to fix themselves within their own lives in some way. Those people were people they didn't want to lose from their map. I'm feeling a sadness, a loss that I let go so long ago of the threads that would have connected me to Emily, to Majella, to Frances or Betty. They are not phantoms that haunt me in any big way, but now I am beginning to notice their shadows are about. Now I am beginning to wonder...

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That was for this week's Sunday Scribblings. Go on over there to meet other Phantoms and Shadows.

Phantoms is also the prompt at the Meme Express on Monday! Who'd have thunk?

I'm participating in One World, One Heart again this year. Here's the post with my giveaway, if you'd like to take part.

Sunday Scribblings: Another time in history

This week at Sunday Scribblings, the prompt runs: If I had to live at a different time in history... Here's one of those imagination games that I find so much fun. The exercise this week is to decide what era in history you would choose to live in if you couldn't live now. Not just when, but why? While you're at it, how about where? What do you imagine life would be like?

Ah... After a conversation with my dear pal Nancy last night, I realise, if I could really choose, my heart right now says "Forget Cleapatra, forget Shakespeare. Even forget the thought of being in the Holy Land in the early years of the 2oth century, when you might have gotten to sit in the presence of Abdu'l-Baha, and hear him speak..." All my heart longs for, the time past that I would love to return to, to witness, would be to be able to sit on the steps of the Gaelic League Hall in Limerick, some December day in the mid-1960's, and wait quietly until a mother and daughter came by, just to watch and witness that morning.

It's the memory of my mother that is most present with me these days. A memory of an outing that was just her and me. Of her five children, that day, somehow, I became the one who was brought along to an art exhibition. I don't remember if she told me what to expect, or if she just allowed me to witness the art, as it was displayed and as it was made, but the lasting impression was deep and strong. The artists were mouth- and foot-painting artists, and not only was their work on show, but many were also creating beautiful, intricate pictures with paintbrushes clamped between their teeth or held between their toes. That anyone could make such wonderful pictures impressed me hugely. (I was, at that stage in my young life, probably still struggling in my after-school art classes with Mr. Clifford, producing art in which adults had major difficulty identifying whether the animal on the wall was a cat or a mouse!) That people who did not have the use of their arms or hands could do this was, to me, miraculous, and to be allowed to witness that was very special.

If I could be there now, as an adult, leaning against the wall, watching, I'd love to see the expression on that 7-or-8-year-old's face. I'd love to hear her awed whispers to her mother. I wish now that I could see that mother's face, and hear what her responses were.

I have no recollection of what was said. I have an impression of the magic of the experience. We didn't go out to see art very often. That's the only time that I recall from my childhood. I have a sense that it was a cold day. I imagine I was in a buttoned-up wool coat and a knitted hat. I'm sure I'd have been wearing thick woollen tights and round-toed shoes. I can feel what my mother's hand would have felt like holding my own mittened hand as we left the hall, with me skipping down the steps, as we headed up Thomas Street, or out to William Street, to wait in the chill wind for the bus home.

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I realise that I've gone and "cheated" on the prompt again, but there's a part of me that's not able to go big right now, that wants to stay with the little thought, the little memory. I've been staying away from the blog recently. in great part because I've nothing much that I feel I can say or write, but there are little things I can share, and I will be doing that, as the mood strikes.

Blessings to you all, my friends.



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Go travel back in time to some real historical situations with other Sunday Scribblers HERE

The Light Returns

Solstice has always fascinated me. Perhaps because my father's birthday is at the summer solstice, I've been aware since I was very young that the days get longer, and then shorter, and then longer again, and the points in the year at which the changes occur have always seemed magical and special to me.

When I was around 10 years old, I spotted a newspaper article about excavations on an ancient Irish monument which predates Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, and the discovery that it had special significance at the winter solstice. So fascinated was I that I created a special scrap-book for any information I could gather about Newgrange. Strangely, I've never been there yet, but hope to some day be present for this event. (You'll need to choose to look at the archive, and the piece is 60 minutes long, but the first 5 minutes will let you see what it's about!)

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This is my greeting to all of my BlogLand friends for the Holiday season - whatever way you may celebrate.

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Let the return of the light bring blessings and joy to you and to yours. Let it bring ease and comfort. Let it be a reminder that we are living amidst cycles within cycles, and that the shadow comes with the light, the light with the shadow. Let your heart be peaceful, and your soul joyful.

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I will be away for a week, visiting my family, but I look forward to meeting you all again as 2008 approaches.

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Namaste, my friends.

Sunday Scribbling: Hospital

This week, the Sunday Scribblings prompt is Hospital.

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Nana told us to go collect Mary from her friend's house. I was 7. It was my First Communion year. My sister wasn't long past her 6th birthday. We did what we were told... held hands crossing the road. But unfortunately, we didn't look carefully enough, or walk swiftly enough once we had looked - left, right, left again - to check for oncoming traffic, so when the car came round the bend, the driver kept coming, and then we were on the road. Lying on the road.

I have no memory of any of it. Later, I felt very deprived, that I'd missed out on the excitement, on the frantic emergence of Nana with a bottle of holy water; of the call that went out for Mrs. O'Brien's priest son to come quick, the children had been knocked down. I have no memory of the ambulance, and my sister has. The next thing I remember was a few days later, when a little boy on the other side of the ward kept crying that his bottom was sore. I remember a cage over my legs to keep the blankets from putting pressure on me. I could crawl right inside the cage. My sister slipped from her bed and came in there with me. We had no broken bones! We had bruises and some small cuts, but not a single broken bone. Yet, our hospital stay stretched to two weeks. Those were the days when no-one had heard of cutbacks, and humanity dictated that both sisters be allowed to stay together until the frailest was ready to return home.

There were gifts of books. Paper dolls. Neighbours came to see us. And my mother or father cycled to the town to visit every evening. It's vague. My memories. I remember a white smell, and stew that wasn't brown. I remember serious faces considering the question of "home" and wishing, wishing, wishing... and then, home came. The day of going home from hospital.

The house was full of well-wishers. There were treats and sweets on the kitchen table, but we were put to bed, for fear the excitement would be too much for us. I remember the voices in the house, and the feeling that something special was happening about us, but not for us.

And next day, the American circus which was set up on the fairgreen played its last show. My older sister went, to see the clowns and highwire act. We convalescents were protected again from excitement, only allowed to go visit the animals for a brief few minutes.

The summer was long, and there were constant reminders that we were "not long home". Hospital became a word that reminded us to slow down, to stop, to look, to watch, to not run, to not set foot outside the door without a prayer to St. Anthony, and a dousing of holy water. My memories of the actual events are few. My memories of everything it meant in my life are legion.

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go visit some more people with Hospital Memories HERE

Sunday Scribblings: Writing

This week, Laini and Megg offer a wide-open prompt at Sunday Scribblings - Writing. They might as well have said "write about Life". In fact, in many ways, they have. Writing is where life gets lived, really lived for some people, and there are times when that's how it feels for me.

When did I first hold a pen? My father's fountain-pen was an object of fascination. Maybe he let me hold it and gum it as I sat on his knee, in times before my memory. I remember being allowed to hold it later, but not to remove the cap, because the nib is delicate. It was wine-coloured, marbled, sleek. He carried it in his breast-pocket and it (along with his brain) was the tool of his trade. No, he was not a writer. His work was clerical. He dealt in numbers, wrote them into ledgers and books all day long. Wrote them in his looping, beautiful hand. A letter written by my father was a work of art. He and all his siblings had been taught the same graceful script in the two-teacher school they went to, and a way with words that no-one but Shakespearean actors or high-brow academics use today. His letters were elegant. We all wish that more of them were still around. The few we have found have taken our breath away, in the spare simplicity and beauty of his turn of phrase.

I have been writing since I first learnt the joining of letters into words. When school holidays would come around, and there was no need to write, I would find reason to write anyway. Something, anything. Even down to transcribing favourite passages from books. The physical meeting of pen and page was a place where I came to feel real myself. I wrote poems, a newspaper in collaboration with my siblings. As a teenager, a purloined hardback ledger was covered with ugly green plastic, inscribed on its first page with dire warnings for anyone who should chance upon it and start reading it, and filled with the very important happenings of my days. Who was on the school bus. Who wasn't on the school bus. Who glanced/smiled at me. Why they might have done so. Who didn't. Why they didn't. Its back pages began to fill with poems of the "Why did he leave me? How can I go on?" variety. The "he" was a moveable feast. The pen and page remained constant.

I found God. (or God found me). My pen tried, but couldn't find words. Still can't. Silenced in the face of the un-nameable, ineffable, unsayable.

I reverted to writing of small things. To life as it is lived day to day. I wrote essays, essays, essays. I finished school, friends moved away. I moved away. I wrote letters: packets thick with musings, letters that took 3 days or more to write, written in my garden flat overlooking Lough Gill, when I had no television for distraction, and computers were huge machines filling entire rooms in the factory where I worked at accounts - filling ledgers and books with numbers, just as my father had done.

I married. I became a mother. A blue notebook was intended to be a record of my son's birth and early growing months and years. Finding myself at home, isolated, without company most of the time, the notebook took the role of friend, confidant. It was where, writing, writing of the isolation, the longing for contact, for a sense that I was still alive in the world, I devised my 3-pronged "sanity plan". - Learn to drive; take daily walks with my baby in his buggy, saying hello to everyone I met; invite anyone who responded at least 3 times to come over for coffee. My blue notebook saved my life.

I made friends. I found writers. I started to write poems. My heart found its voice. I felt my feet on the earth and my lungs filling with air. I wrote through heartbreak. I wrote through loss. When I didn't know what else to do, when I felt bereft, robbed, forsaken in discovering that I would have no more children, I wrote. I wrote what a friend said I should write:

I am sad.
I am as sad as...
I am as sad as...

until I had nothing more to write.

I saw that the world has seasons. I saw that this sadness was a season in my life. I wrote through it. I wrote my losses, and found new joys.

I am still writing. Most mornings, I write what I expect to find in the day; what I dreamt, or what fragments of dreams are with me still; what questions I have; what I cannot leave out of my mind. I write Morning pages and they ground me in my life. Most nights, before I sleep, I write ten things for which I am grateful. Sometimes it is breathing and my son, salad, a roof. Other times it is that C's surgery went well, that M isn't mad at me, that I spoke up, that I had an idea. I fill shiny-covered notebooks with ideas and jottings, starts and middles for poems, questions for a story, "what if?"s, quotes and lines, words and memories.

My pen is my companion. The page is where she and I lay down, kick up our legs and muse about life. Writing is life.

Yes. They might as well have asked us to write about Life this week. Writing is life.
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For more Sunday Scribblings go HERE

Sunday Scribblings. Town and Country

‘Town’ is a relative term, it seems. I’ve always thought of myself as not just a townie, but a “city-girl”, being reared in Limerick, at the mouth of the Shannon (see last Poetry Thursday’s entry). And yet, and yet, I’ve never lived anywhere that wasn’t within a 5-minute walk of countryside. Sounds pretty country to me. What it probably is, is my suburban self showing herself. So, on the edge of the town, with streetlights and proper footpaths, a convenience store within a short walk, but within a short walk in the other direction, there have always been the treasures of the countryside.

Confession: Not since childhood have I taken regular advantage of this. It’s a rare day that I come out on foot from my house, with my hands swinging, and turn right when I leave the estate, up the Thorn Road, rather than left on the walk to the shop or the town. If I did head away from town, I’d be skirting past the next housing estate, ignoring the bungalows built at one side of the road, and letting my attention be drawn instead into the hedgerows, where right now the May-blossom is giving the last of this years heady scent, falling among the brambles, allowing the trees to ready themselves for the autumn abundance of haws. If I kept walking, up, up the hill, past the curious cows and the rutted and pitted paths, I’d come to where, at the hill’s crest, I can look over the river. Depending on the timing, it will either be an expanse of mud with a single silver trickle running through its centre, or a wide and calm stretch of dove-grey silk, rippled with the breezes that continually blow along its shores. I could keep going, follow the loop of the road, that will eventually bring me onto the main road, with more and more houses crowding around, until I come back to where I live, back to the street-lights and the children playing on the small patch of green not far from my own front-door.

The country of childhood, I’ve described before. The back-field that was our summer territory, the place of sanctuary and magic; the enfoldment of aunties and my grandmother. There was another place in my childhood – a field that I found, on my own. I considered it to be my own private territory, and there, there was treasure. There, I found riches. I have no recollection of why I’d headed Singland direction rather than to the back-field that day, but I think I’d caught a glimpse on a group foray into this new area, and decided to return alone to check it out a day or two later. How old was I? 8? 10? Perhaps somewhere between the two. Life was as free then as we could not imagine now. I didn’t have to report to anyone what my movements were. It didn’t occur to me to let anyone know where I was going, but off I went, up through Parke’s estate and the new building sites, through the railway gates, and over to the other side, down almost to the stream we used to fish for pinkies in, and then through the gap in the hedge to my goal. I’d seen something pink there. Something pink and orange and peachy. Something high in the hedge between this field and the next. Through the long grass I waded, towards my goal.

It was there. Just as I’d thought. I was Sir Joseph Banks. I was Fuchs. I was the intrepid explorer that discovered exotic species and brought them back to civilization. I reached and stretched, finally managing to pull a long vine towards me, finally securing a bunch of the blossoms, finally succeeding in pushing my face in among those blooms and inhaling a sweetness I’d never before encountered. I grabbed and gathered, and returned home happy, happy, happy, with my armload of honeysuckle. I had gone to the country and found something to rival cowslips, to rival briar-rose. I had found the most beautiful flower ever to grace a hedge. I had discovered beauty. I was queen of the entire country.

Find more wanderings in Town and Country at Sunday Scribblings HERE

Sunday Scribbling - Yummy!

This week, Sunday Scribbling offers a delicious theme - Yummy!

I stood at Blogger's door, begging to be let in, for hours, a waif, with my little basket of goodies in my hand, and finally, it looks like I may be able to post while it is still Sunday!

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YUMMY!!!!
These things – today’s yummies – anything with pineapple or coconut, or both. Ice-cream or curries, scones or dips. Gimme pineapple or coconut. Gimme smoothies. More of the same, but with mango and raspberries too. Give me raspberries a-plenty. Let me have them with ice-cream, with yogurt, with custard. In jam – real jam, oozing fruit.

Childhood yummies – Mammy’s bread, Mammy’s apple-tart – no-nonsense, thick-crust, full-of-a-roasting-tin tart. Rice with custard, vanilla-scented scones. Fish-in-sauce with mashed potato.

Sensible yummies – things I feel virtuous eating – aduki bean stew, black lentils, all things beany and lentilly, warm and filling. Sweet potato soup, mulligatawny, lemon sorbet, no-meat chilli, pomegranates, spinach and orange salad.

Yummy outside the tummy – flowers, hyacinth-scent, jasmine, Trixie’s silken head, all the good things in Jacqui’s new shop – crystals, incense, fabrics, goddesses. Woodsmoke, open fire, warm mohair blanket.

This week’s number one yummy beyond all the others – three-week old baby Charlie – the touch of his cheek, his little fingers, his little toes, his sweet breath, his delicate tiny, perfect mouth, yawning, his eyes drooping into sleep, his trust in my arms, and later, the sight of him turning to his Mummy, the perfection of them together. Feeling blessed to witness. ….. Yummy.

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Find more Yummy Things HERE

Poetry Thursday. Streets.

This week, Poetry Thursday invite us to take the theme of Streets I Have Known. I had a street poem. It's locked into a computer I can't get into. That's a problem for tomorrow, so I wrote the streets of my childhood/early teens instead.

The Journey Home

William Street,
smell of chips and vinegar
from the Golden Grill:
Boyds’ window full of
what I want, what I want next;
the Woollen Company, with a mirror-door,
for a Harry Worth trick –
became a ritual, don’t pass without
kicking up one leg,
looking in the mirror
at my marionette reflection.

Pass the bank corner,
and the Pavilion (scene of first dances,
maybe first kisses),
where William Street
yields to Mulgrave Street,
Horse and Hound,
the Mart, bacon-factory with its
squeals and smells.

The jail’s high walls, and the school of music,
where I happened to see the President of Zambia,
on my way home from school one day.

Asylum – walk on that side of the road,
kicking leaves in autumn, watch out for Berry Moss,
or the Shouting Man, or the Blue Boy.

Walk on, where Mulgrave Street becomes
the Tipperary Road, the road home,
past the Fairgreen, past the balconied houses,
turn the corner, across from the butcher’s shop.
St. Anthony’s. I am home.

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Find more street-journeys HERE

And for anyone who would like to catch my radio-poetry debut, it's HERE - you have to click on "Listen to the Latest Show", and the whole programme is good, but it's not all poetry. It has music and memoir also. There's a poem by Paul Perry to start (about the 12th minute, and mine comes in around the 54th minute!)

Sunday Scribblings --- Heroes

They are everywhere in my life, and always have been – people going about their lives in a heroic fashion. No, they were not slaying dragons or climbing the highest mountains, but in their own ways, I have seen so many people do what would seem impossible to me. In the face of grief, pain or hopeless situations, they would pick themselves up, and find a path through the hopelessness, a way of putting one foot in front of the other as they got on with the business of living. Beyond that, the true heroism has always been for me in being able to find beauty and art along the hopeless and hard path, finding a way to make of this life a better place for those around them. Who are the heroes? My grandmother, who would make clothes from flour-sacks when there was no money for fabric, who made of the water in which vegetables were cooked a delicacy for which her children would vie. This woman still maintained a parlour, she still painted her garden railings white every year, and there were still sweet-peas and aquilegias to be seen inside those railings. My Auntie Imelda, her spine bent from a childhood accident – tiny and deformed to many eyes, I saw her as beautiful, and wanted to be like her when I grew up – book-loving and musical, with perfect eyebrows and a shine to her skin; knitting for nieces, not the practical, keep-you-warm jumpers that mothers would knit, but cardigans with a touch of glitter or fluff, in a shade not designed to hide the dirt, with pearly buttons. I saw all my aunts carry on through illness, grief and set-back, find laughter and joy still in life. These were the heroic ones. Between them, they took paralysis, abuse, widowhood, cancer, loss of a child, childlessness, and went on. They, each and every one, lived until they died. There was Esther, making a decision against more surgery, more “treatments” and choosing to relish her last trip to the sea, choosing to plant bulbs for the spring she would not see, choosing to make sure that next year, the wisteria she had pruned in her pain would bloom ever more abundantly and beautifully.

My mother, my father. These are two more heroes in my life, though I choose not to say more of their heroism here right now. I am blessed in the lives my parents have lived.

There are friends, there have been friends, who have offered me a model of heroism I hope I would be able to follow should I be faced with the same paths. Those who have come to tell their stories in their last days. There was Maureen, delighting in my successes, offering her wisdom. There was Peggy, who vowed to swim with the dolphins. I see her now, perpetually floating in the waters she loved, smilingly playing and calling out to us “Come on in! The water’s fine!” There have been heroes who went suddenly, without warning. After Jamshid’s death, so many people told me of how their lives had been changed by the practical wisdom he offered along with his healing herbs. He was a quiet hero.

No. The ‘heroes’ conjured for me by the word are not those who slay dragons, but those who battle the nipping rats of daily struggles, and keep on; not those who climb mountains, but those who stay hour by hour, day by day, on a stony path, with blisters on their heels and toes, and who still have a spirit that delights in a stream’s babble and the breeze’s fingers playing with the golden leaves of a birch. God bless the heroes.

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Find more Sunday Scribblings on the topic of Heroes HERE