MERCIER PRESS

3B Oak House, Bessboro Rd

Blackrock, Cork, Ireland.

 www.mercierpress.ie

 www.twitter.com/IrishPublisher

 www.facebook.com/mercier.press

© Maura McElhone, 2018

© Foreword: Mairead Lavery, 2018

ISBN: 978 1 78117 604 7

Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 605 4

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 606 1

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Foreword

It’s just over thirty years since I married and moved from my homeplace in County Wicklow to live on a farm in County Limerick. Soon after arriving in Shanagolden I needed to book my car into a local garage for a service. Now, the car loan was in my maiden name – Mairead Wolohan – as were the tax and insurance. So rather than book the car in under my strange new married name, I put it in for the service under my more familiar – at least to me – maiden name. So you can imagine my surprise when I got my bill all neatly enclosed in a little brown envelope and addressed to ‘Mrs Sean Lavery’.

I remember staring at that envelope and feeling that my sense of identity was gone, that Mairead Wolohan no longer existed. That now everything about me had been subsumed into a new extended family I barely knew. Even my Christian name was no longer mine. I was the missus of Sean Lavery. End of story.

When most young people marry nowadays, they set out on the journey through life together. They can forge a new identity for themselves and their own family. They are not hampered by the personality, frailties, successes or failures of the generations that went before. However, when ‘marrying into’ a farm you cannot escape this history. You are now one of them, warts and all.

Despite most women now being financially independent with their own careers, this fracturing of identity remains one of the greatest challenges facing those who ‘marry in’ to a farm. No doubt it’s easier if you come from a farming background or the next parish and you know the lay of the land. But God forbid if the heir to the farm was to set his cap at a ‘townie’. A woman who didn’t understand that weekends are a concept most farmers have never grasped. That nine-to-five doesn’t exist and work is over only when it’s all done. That there’s no weekly pay-packet and that you can be penalised a sizeable part of your income because of making a genuine mistake on the many forms that need filling in.

Of course Maura McElhone knew none of this when she started dating her farmer, Jack. And despite being a ‘townie’ she had one big advantage going for her. When living in the United States, try as she might, Maura couldn’t muster up sufficient enthusiasm to call the place home. She felt detached from her surroundings, an outsider looking in. Worse still, she found that living in the United States made her a visitor in the lives of those she cared about the most.

Maura was ready to put down roots and she knew she wanted to do this in the only place they would take root, and that was home. So at the age of thirty, with six years’ living in the United States behind her, she ‘unemigrated’ and returned to start a new life in Dublin.

Falling in love with a farmer wasn’t part of the plan but, you know, life happens when you least expect it and Maura’s description of those first dates will have you rooting for the fledgling romance. But stuff like heifers on the loose and silage season are hard to cope with, especially when you are in your glad rags and your date is hours late. It’s easy to offer the ‘silent treatment’ but, as Maura wisely acknowledges, ‘it’s a naive and foolish woman who would ask her farmer to choose between his lady and his land’.

Far from expecting Jack to fully integrate himself into her life, Maura threw herself into farm life. She was intrigued by the business end of lambing and calving and not afraid to get involved. Her account of attempting to help a ewe through a difficult lambing brings you to the heart of what farming is all about.

There’s an old saying that where there is livestock, there is deadstock and Maura’s account of an outbreak of BVD on the farm is another dose of the harsh reality that is farming life. She doesn’t just want to be there for the birth of cuddly lambs and cute calves, she also wants to be there for Jack on the hard days, the disappointing days that all farmers know only too well.

Seeing the seasons of the year on a farm through a pair of fresh eyes is part of the broad appeal of this book. Whether it’s lambing or calving, shearing or silage time, the support of neighbours or the connection to place that includes the GAA, Maura breathes it in. Her wonder at this way of life and the communities it supports re-envisages farming not just for ‘townies’ but for farmers themselves.

This is one ‘townie’ who will have no problem ‘marrying in’ and settling down to farming life – she’s made for it. Here’s wishing Maura and Jack every success and a long and happy life together.

Mairead Lavery

Part I

–

In Transit

1

14 February 2014. It was the morning of Valentine’s Day – a day for, depending on your relationship status, red roses, chocolates and gratuitous romance, or wallowing in self-pity. It was not traditionally a day for making permanent moves from one continent to another. It was not a day for ‘unemigrating’. And yet, here I was, doing just that. As the plane touched down at Belfast International, I pictured most of my family waiting for me in the arrivals area, ready with bear hugs and the mandatory, ‘How was the flight?’ Further up the road, Mammy would be busy in the kitchen, filling the kettle and setting the table for the greatly anticipated fry. It was a routine we’d gone through many times over the six years I’d been away. This time, though, would be different. This time, there would be no return journey to dread, no imminent partings casting a shadow over my precious time at home. Single, jobless and set to move back in with my parents at thirty years of age, I’d taken, at best, a huge risk in saying goodbye to my life in California. At worst, I’d made a huge mistake.

For as long as I could remember, I’d dreamed of living the American life. As a child I was a sucker for Disney movies and The Muppet Show. To me, the American accent was synonymous with fun, excitement and love. My teenage self was seduced by the scenery and exciting, if angst-laden, lives of characters in shows like Dawson’s Creek. Family holidays in Florida and Massachusetts only bolstered the notion that this was where I was meant to be. The older I got, the more I was dazzled by American sunshine and charmed by its beautiful people with their perfect teeth, suntans and go-get-’em attitude. At that time in my life, America and its people represented everything I was not. I suppose, on some level, I imagined that if I were to live there, I might, through sheer immersion, take on some of that confidence, that beauty, that glamour.

I got an opportunity to study in sun-drenched San Diego during my second year at university. I arrived in 2004, a twenty-year-old from Portstewart – a small seaside town on County Derry’s north coast – and as I watched my first Pacific sunset from the cliffs of La Jolla, silhouetted palm trees lining the gardens of the surrounding mansions, I was smitten. Reluctantly, I returned to Stirling, Scotland, in 2005, to finish my degree. Then there was a stint in 2008–09 in Galway, Ireland, where I completed my Masters. Those few years aside, I spent all of my twenties in California. I snowshoed in the Rockies, partied in Las Vegas, snorkelled off Hawaii, met movie stars in Los Angeles and kissed a cowboy in Kansas on the fourth of July.

Back in Ireland, life went on. One of my closest friends gave birth to her first baby, my godson. Another got married. My father turned sixty. My younger sister broke up with her first boyfriend and my younger brother found a new girlfriend. I followed the developments as best I could from 8,000 kilometres away. Although I made it home for a few important events, every visit involved a thirty-hour round trip and more dollars than I care to calculate. Living in the United States meant I was now a visitor in the lives of the people I cared about most.

I went to work, enjoyed weekend trips with my then-boyfriend and happy hours with the girls, bought groceries and got my US driving licence. I tried to imagine a future here: the all-American house with the minivan parked out front that I’d use to ferry my kids to after-school activities. But what about their cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents all living in Ireland? We’ll be starting a new family, my then-boyfriend would say. Maybe, I thought, but was that something I would even want to do without the support of my existing family?

I spent my final two years in America in the city of Novato, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge and about thirty minutes outside San Francisco. I worked for a magazine publishing company and lived in a beautiful apartment nestled into the Marin County hillside. I’d made a life for myself in America, but it never felt permanent. As clichéd as it might sound, the only time America felt remotely close to being ‘home’ was when I was in the company of other Irish people. I sought out the familiar in an effort to prove to myself that all those years dreaming about living in America, and all that money I’d spent on travel and visas to make it a reality, hadn’t been a waste. When I’d relocated from San Diego to the San Francisco Bay Area, it was a move largely motivated by the fact that the northern California city had a more prominent and active Irish community – something I’d hoped would help settle me. But try as I might, there was a part of me that simply could not accept America as ‘home’. Even after six years there, and as much as I enjoyed the lifestyle perks that only California can offer – San Diego’s close to perfect climate, the celebrity-spotting and excitement of LA, indulgent Saturdays spent sampling the wineries of Sonoma County – still, I felt detached from the place, an outsider looking in. I hoped that would change. There was a lot hinging on my ability to envision a future in California, not least the relationship I was in at the time.

I remember vividly, one Sunday afternoon, standing in the kitchen in the apartment in Novato. I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed and saw that a friend from home had gotten engaged. Along with the requisite beaming couple and close-up-of-the-ring photos, she had posted a status that proclaimed her to be ‘the happiest girl in the world’. It’s something that every newly engaged person says, and hopefully truly feels too, but while I was delighted for my friend, I also felt a sudden, heavy sadness. I realised at that moment that if my then-boyfriend were to propose, I would be unable to mirror my friend’s happiness – complete and unburdened as it was. In fact, the idea of a proposal filled me with dread. Not because of anything to do with him; I know he will be a wonderful husband to the right person. No, the idea of it lodged in my gut because I knew that if a proposal were to happen, I could not in good conscience say yes. While any talk about our future had, so far, been in a mostly hypothetical context, when the topic was broached it was assumed that ‘home’ would be America. Moving to Ireland as a couple was never mentioned. Nor did I bring it up. Perhaps I knew, deep down, that the futures we envisioned were more than incompatible; they were in conflict.

Eventually, the daily uncertainty about my future came to a head. We had the conversation, he and I, and it played out just as I knew it would. With me unable to commit to ‘forever’ in the US, and him unwilling to give Ireland a shot, the relationship ended.

Not long after the break-up, I turned thirty. It’s a milestone age for any woman, one which causes you to pause and take stock. I spent that birthday weekend with friends in San Diego, one of them a Galway man living in the US for the better part of twenty years. We played music, we sang and we drank. Inevitably, the conversation turned to Ireland and the enormity of a possible move back home. Yes, there was plenty I would be giving up, and I was under no illusion as to how hard it might be to get back on my feet in a country with an unemployment rate still above twelve per cent. But what I stood to gain outweighed all of that: I would no longer be a visitor in the lives of my family and friends; I could rekindle those relationships that I had come to realise were integral to my sense of belonging – the very thing I’d been missing in California all those years. I was ready to put down roots and I wanted to do that in the only place I knew they would take.

Another couple of months passed before I really set the wheels in motion, handing in my notice at work, moving out of my rented accommodation and selling my beloved ‘blueberry’ – my little blue VW Beetle that failed to start more times than not, but, as my first significant purchase in the US, was still an immense source of pride and for me, a symbol of accomplishment. Two months later I boarded my Belfast-bound flight, filled with a fierce resolve to make my ‘unemigration’ a positive move.

As the plane thundered to a stop on the tarmac, I peered out through that little circular window at the grey building of Belfast International Airport with the grey sky above it. A nervousness gripped me. This was it, the thing for which I’d longed for so long. No longer wishful thinking, or existent only in the form of an impassioned conversation had with other Irish emigrants over drinks in a pub that looked, smelled and sounded just like those that are so synonymous with the country we’d moved away from. This was real. I was home. Ready to rediscover and fall back in love with the country I’d left behind the better part of a decade ago.

2

When an emigrant makes the decision to return home, they’re warned to brace for change. The famous Yeats quote, ‘all changed, changed utterly’, comes to mind. And there is truth to it. Places change and so do people. Siblings grow up, friends marry and have children, some move away. People die. Whether you were gone one year or ten makes little difference: home will no longer be the place it was when you left. The life you leave behind doesn’t go on pause when you board that plane. It charges on without you. And at no point does that reality become more stark than in those first few weeks back, once the novelty of your return has worn off.

For me, the honeymoon period lasted about three weeks and it was glorious while it did. Long lie-ins, free food from an always-stocked fridge, regular runs on the beautiful Portstewart Strand and lots of quality time with our beloved family dog, Dustin. Weekends were spent catching up with relatives and friends, and my parents enjoyed a full house once again come Friday evening, all five of us around the kitchen table. But with my younger siblings gainfully employed and living it up in Belfast, and all my closest friends from home similarly occupied with careers or rearing children – all things they’d achieved while I was away – this ‘life of Reilly’ soon became a somewhat lonely affair. Indeed, it wasn’t long before I began to dread Sunday nights. Because with Sunday evening came the reminder that I was different. My siblings would head off in their cars, back to their respective flats in Belfast to prepare for a new week of work and socialising, of cooking in their own kitchens and paying their own bills. They would go back to their independent, adult lives, while I, the prodigal daughter, stayed at home with Mammy, Daddy and the dog. Don’t get me wrong. I was fortunate, of course, to have parents who welcomed me home with open arms. They indulged my every whim and they asked no questions when I made the decision to return. Nor did they put a deadline on their hospitality or pressure me to find work. They understood that to press the reset button on one’s life at thirty years of age took faith and courage in equal measure and they were respectful of the fact that there was time needed after the leap to regroup and strategise before I could start laying the foundations for a new life.

But there’s a limit to everyone’s patience – my parents’ and mine included. After a few weeks, I realised I couldn’t ignore the reality of my situation any longer. The fact of the matter was this: I was thirty years old, single, unemployed and living at home. Something needed to happen and soon. And it was about more than just getting out of my parents’ house and back on my own two feet. Though I didn’t acknowledge it openly, I needed to prove to myself that coming home hadn’t been a mistake. And so the job search began in earnest.

I set my sights on Dublin. When my brother, sister and I were younger, our parents would treat us to a weekend in Dublin in November or December. We’d all pile into the car on a Friday evening and head south, staying in a hotel out in Drumcondra, or, as was the case once or twice, right in the city centre, close to St Stephen’s Green. Everything tasted, looked and sounded different there, from the sausages at breakfast that were fatter, shinier and, therefore, we convinced ourselves, tastier than those we got up home, and the Cadbury’s chocolate that was sweeter and creamier, to the wide, bustling streets and brightly coloured front doors of the Georgian buildings in Dublin’s south city centre and the softer accents of the ‘Southerners’ we encountered in the hotels, shops and cafés. Everything was a novelty.

We would spend most of our Saturday on and around Grafton Street, dipping in and out of the music shops the likes of which we didn’t have back in Portstewart. If we were lucky, sometimes we might even catch a live performance in HMV by an artist or group we recognised from the television or magazines. A trip to Captain America’s was always on the itinerary too, the Mexican burger and music memorabilia-lined walls taking Daddy back to the late 1970s and early 1980s when he would make the six-hour round trip most weekends to visit Mammy, who was working in RTÉ at the time. On Saturday evening we’d take in a pantomime at the Gaiety, Mammy picking up the Sunday newspapers from the kiosk on the corner after the show let out.

Dublin was a magical, glamorous place where celebrities were spotted, football matches played, where everything seemed possible. As a youngster, I always thought I might like to live there, in a Georgian house with a red door and brass knocker. Somewhere down the line I lost sight of that vision – but it didn’t lose me. And now, it had me square in its sights once again.

As I embarked on the search for gainful employment, my parents sensed my antsiness. My mother, in particular, was keen to get me out the door, clearly worried about the propensity for me to become a part of the furniture, or, worse still, slip into a vegetative state brought on by too many hours spent watching reality television. After all, the human brain is only capable of so much vicarious house-hunting and wedding-dress shopping. And so, on a Tuesday evening in February, it was Mammy who sent me the link to a job she’d found – ‘Social Media and Community Manager’ with a new tech startup in Dublin. As we women are wont to do, I immediately thought of all the reasons why I wasn’t qualified for the job. I mean, I could use Facebook and Twitter as well as the next person; I’d created content for the magazines my previous employer in the States had produced and shared it to the social sites, but was that really enough? I felt I’d be chancing my arm at best. That being said … Dublin! The big smoke. A new city to call home, filled with new people and new adventures.

All of a sudden, getting this job became the most important thing in the world. I shushed the voice that whispered self-doubt and I wouldn’t be dissuaded by the fact that a trendy job in Ireland’s burgeoning tech-sector was sure to get hundreds of applications. I refused to dwell on these things. Instead, I let my imagination run riot, picturing my new life in Dublin: a bright and airy one-bedroom in trendy D4, a cool job right in the heart of the city, lunch breaks spent browsing the shops on Grafton Street, Friday night drinks with the girls and lazy Saturday mornings spent drinking coffee, eating scones and leafing through the papers. And someday, maybe, a boy.

I sent off my application and that evening, over the fajitas I’d made for dinner – a weekly thing at this point, and the least I could do in exchange for free food and accommodation – I chatted excitedly about my imminent move to Dublin. My parents took no offence at my eagerness to leave. Quite the opposite.

‘We love you, and we love having you home,’ they said, ‘but we hope to God you get this job.’

And I did.

So just over a month after my return to Ireland I headed south to start my new job with a tech startup and a new chapter in my life.

3

I moved to Dublin in March, heading down two weeks before starting my new job to sort out housing. As an avid follower of The Irish Times online during my years abroad, I knew that finding somewhere to live in the capital would be tricky, to say the least. I’d read the horror stories of overpriced accommodation, of demand outstripping supply, but I remained confident that something would come my way. It had to. After all, I had made that promise to myself that my ‘unemigration’ would only be positive; giving up on Dublin and heading home to my parents with my tail between my legs because I couldn’t find accommodation was simply not an option. That being said, I wasn’t exactly making life easy for myself by not wanting to share with anyone. At thirty years of age and starting over, I felt it was important that I had a place to call my own. I had pressed ‘reset’ on my life and I wanted to create a little corner for myself in this new city, a base from which I could build my life back up again. But, as Mammy would often warn us during our younger years, ‘I want doesn’t get’ and it soon became clear that I was not going to find what I was looking for any time soon. I was going to have to compromise.

My new job started on the Monday and on the Saturday before I moved into an apartment in Ballsbridge with two lovely girls from Cork. I’d seen the ad online: their housemate had extended her travel abroad and they were looking for someone to cover the last six weeks of her lease. It was a win-win situation: they no longer had to worry about making rent, and I had bought myself an additional month and a half to find a more permanent solution. I held tight to the dream of living alone, but as time marched on, I became more and more disheartened. My new bosses were understanding of my predicament, allowing me to start late and leave early when I had an appointment to view a flat. As I visited one dingy bedsit after another, the many brown and beige interiors that hadn’t seen an update since the 1980s blending into one, I soon realised that my vision of a spacious, bright and airy apartment in trendy D4 was little more than a pipe dream.

At a viewing of a ‘one-bed’ in Ranelagh, the landlord welcomed the crowd that had gathered – each person with their deposit and first month’s rent in hand – and went inside to open the flat. Seconds later, he reappeared looking rather sheepish and asked if we’d mind waiting. It seemed that ‘the last tenants hadn’t really cleaned the place’ before they moved out. But these were desperate times, and so, telling myself that a little bit of bleach goes a long way, I waited. After a moment or two, the landlord invited us in. I followed the group up the stairs and into the ‘flat’, noting the mildewed windowpanes and carpets which, though mostly threadbare, still managed to boast some truly spectacular stains – neither the source nor substance of which were immediately identifiable. It was only when the landlord declared the tour complete that someone asked him where the bathroom was. He’d ‘forgotten’ to point out that the bathroom was located outside the flat. On examining the space, it became clear that calling it a ‘bathroom’ was generous, to say the least. The reality was that a toilet and shower stall had been shoved into what could well have been a meat-locker in a former life. What this meant was that each and every bathroom visit would require you to leave the ‘cosy’ confines of your flat and close the front door behind you before traipsing across the landing into this cold, dark cubicle that I couldn’t guarantee had not previously been used to refrigerate and store a dead body. All this for just €800 per month; sure, it was a steal! Needless to say, I passed on the Ranelagh space.

Eventually, in May, I found it. Flat 1, 144 Rathgar Road, was on the top floor of an old Georgian in Dublin’s southside. I walked up the wide concrete steps that led to the front door, its purple paint cracked and peeling off around the heavy brass knocker. The door opened into a narrow hallway with a red-brown carpet that had seen better days. Yellowed paper with a faded floral pattern climbed the walls to reach the high ceiling, where a dusty chandelier made a half-hearted go of casting light into the space below. A wide gilded mirror hung on the wall above an antique dresser in a similar dark wood to the banisters that lined and curled around the staircase. Everything whispered of a past opulence, now long forgotten.

The flat itself was located at the far end of a long, narrow corridor, the light for which worked on a timer, plunging many an unsuspecting visitor and new tenant into blinding darkness. It was in those instances, brief though they were – a light-restoring switch was never far away – that I was sure the place was haunted.

Smaller than my parents’ sitting room, but with a kitchenette, a separate bathroom and a living area-cum-bedroom with wooden floors that reflected the light that poured through the tall window, the flat had everything I needed. On my first evening there, I broke in the stove by cooking up a batch of chilli and hung up the wall-ornament given to me by a good friend from home – three little plaques that together bore the timely reminder that, ‘You are stronger, wiser and smarter than you think.’ I laid a rug on the floor, installed high-speed internet and was soon on first-name terms with the local Thai takeaway. I paid my rent on time each month and paid my bills – dreading those that came at the end of winter when even a storage heater on full blast and an electric blanket were no match for the cold that seeped in through the flat’s large, single-glazed window. It was no palace, that’s for sure, but it was my own little corner of Dublin and I was grateful for it. It was there that I sought refuge after a tough day at work, there that I would spend every other night on the phone to home, giving and receiving good news and bad, all the while thankful for the convenience and feeling of closeness that comes from a shared time zone.

It was in that flat that I launched my blog, wrote my newspaper column, nursed hangovers, played cheesy pop music loud and sang along, and watched the news, filled with pride as Ireland became the first country to legalise gay marriage by popular vote. It was there that I would go just three months later and draw the curtains on my broken world when the reprieve I’d enjoyed during my years abroad was lifted and death returned to cast its shadow on my family.

It was in that flat that I would open the door to someone new and give love another go.