My friend, Erin, sent me a Christmas gift from Cork. The package contained two bags of coffee from Cork Coffee Roasters and a small, square book. On the cover is a picture of a woman in black and white with an elaborate hat and a tiny waist cinched with a wide belt. When I opened the package, I cried. I was so glad to have a little piece of Cork with me. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got photos and maps and evidence of all the work we did, but it isn’t the same to carry a place with you in paraphernalia.
I’ve been learning how to settle into San Francisco. It’s a large enough city with different burrows and districts and quarters all smushed together with intermittent swathes of green. It’s warm in winter and warmer still in summer. The people are lovely and the Mission is cozy and feels like home.
I thought that I’d become a master at starting over, but I know I’m far from claiming that title. I’m slipping into writers’ groups here and book clubs there, but it still doesn’t feel the same.
I love Ireland for its land and its drizzle. I miss its myth and history. I know it’s been romanticized, that it’s experienced an eternity of hardship and has been coming into itself for the last century, defining itself as its own nation since long before the 1916 Rising. I know the stories from Cork and the accent, thick and unyielding, ending each sentence in “like” and “so.”
Above all I miss the community I had in Cork. I miss the pubs where we would sit and chat in the warmth with cold pints in our hands. I miss Jackie Lennox and eating chips on stools almost too tall. I miss our weekend away in Beara when we visited Drumbeg Stone Circle and the Cailleach, when we were practically dared to touch the Sheela na Gig for luck and child-baring. (I skipped that experience. I only got a picture of her. I’m okay with that.) I miss roadtrips to Killarney and our trek through half the Gap of Dunloe. I miss Muckross Castle with my girls, how we eventually got a picture with the waterfall and tore through the trail’s dips and bends, how we got a taxi back to town for dinner at a chipper and the bus home.
Everyone asks me how I like San Francisco. Right now I’ve only been able to say how much I miss Ireland. I hope that soon I will learn all the lore and legend of this new landscape and that I will grow to love it just as I love another.
I want to take what I know of Ireland, its writers and readers, leaders and activists, present and past, into everything I learn. I’ll share a few quotes from The Irish Women’s Quotation Book now.
“At 69, I dyed my hair purple and acquired a tattoo. You have to keep doing new things and different things for as long as you live.” -Mary Kenny
“We have to get rid of the last vestige of the harem before woman is free as our dream of the future would have her.” -Countess Markievicz
“I think being a woman is a bit like being Irish. Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second best all the same.” -Irish Murdoch
“There’s no disagreement that can’t be solved with a good cup of tea, in the face.” -The Nualas
“I was drawn to feminism as a young woman because it was then called ‘Women’s Liberation.’ It was about freedom. Freedom means differences always emerge: equality means freedom will be curtailed.” -Mary Kenny
“People say, ‘Aren’t the Irish wonderful. So many marvellous writers. Such a beautiful place.’ Blah, blah, blah. No one bothers to talk about how poverty just wears you out. How poverty is a really stressful, shaming tradition.” -Anne Enright
Word Witch 