By Sue Mangan
“It’s sweet to feel the open road falling away under us,
knowing we will, at its end come to the sea.”
(Foster by Claire Keegan)
On our last day in Ireland, the September sky blazed blue. Pearl rays of sunshine lit the silken swathes of bladderwrack that blanketed the strand, iridescent, an indecisive shade caught between emerald and amber.
My husband and I took photos of each other absorbing the glory of that sea-swept light; the ruthless sun illuminating the creases in our foreheads and the grey at our temples. Yet, our joy shined brighter. Our wrinkles glad for the many years that brought us to this point in time.
My husband and I met on our orientation day in college. I can still hear my mother commenting, “That boy has the most beautiful hair.” I can still feel the flush in my cheeks as I shushed her, “Ma, boys in Chicago don’t look like that.”
Well, the universe decided our fate. I began to date that same boy with the black hair and skin as fair as his hair was dark.
During our first night together, we lay on the floor in his dorm room looking out the window at the December sky. It was the night before we left for our winter break. We spent the evening talking and sharing childhood stories about summer vacations. “How ironic that we both spent our growing years roaming through fields and pastures,” we thought.
The boy’s fields rolled into mountains that led to the sea and my pastures drifted into flat prairies filled with hay and melodious crickets. Cows and calves ambled amid my pastures, while sheep and lambs grazed in the boy’s fields.
Ireland and Missouri, broad skies and pure soil, seeds for growing hearts.
That winter night, we knew our fate was sealed as we listened to an array of staccato notes, a carol of bells, streaming from the tape recorder, while the snow fell from the midnight sky.
Years later, we brought our children to Ireland. On the same strand where the salt tangled our greying hair, our children dug in the warm summer sand with red shovels and seahorse pails.
My son Michael would scour the tide pools for sand crabs and dangle them in front of his shrieking playmates. Joyful terror as the children played chase with sand rising from their heels.
When the tide began to rise on the strand and the mist began to settle over the mountains, our youngest son Declan would stand close to his father’s feet, looking out onto the rolling waves where his Irish grandfather once stood, wondering about the land across the sea.
I wish that I could have explained to my son how much his father resembled his own father. How black his father’s hair looked the first time we visited Achill Island before we were married. How my heart moved to see the black of his hair in silhouette against the green of the fields, the grey of the stones, the blue of the sky.
Wrought in waves of sea and winding roads, hedges of blackberry and towering rhododendron, family and history are woven into shades of memory and present moments of precious reality.
As the wind blew cold on the rising tide, my daughter and my mother once snuggled on a lichen covered rock wrapped in a fleece blanket belonging to her Irish grandmother. At seven, my girl was so much smaller than my tiny mother. The years would pass, and my daughter would wrap that same fleece around my fragile mother one last time as they reminisced about their shared Irish holiday.
Pure air. Innocent hearts. A love story about the generations of families whose toils turned to simple treasures.
A hidden chest filled not with costly gems, but invaluable memories. Memories that rise and fall with the steady tide. Narratives of love and sacrifice. Periods of sun and rain needed for growing a family.
The years would pass as swiftly as my boys leapt over tufts of stinging nettles in the fields. Plastic pails would be exchanged for parting glasses in the pub as our children and their cousins would toast family and plan for the next Irish holiday.
This past December, Christmas a mere week away, my husband and I spent yet another last day in Ireland on a strand along the sea. Steel-colored clouds moved quickly through a noon sky of unrelenting grey. As bleak as the September sky was a welcoming blue, the wild winter winds did not deter us from what became our tradition, to visit the sea one more time before we flew home to America.
This walk along the strand was less about holding hands than it was about staying upright against the wild weather. Braced with heavy raincoats and Wellington boots, we walked into tumbling waves trying to maintain a steady posture as the wind slapped us with the force of her nature.
There were no picnics or children playing on the beach. The crabs burrowed, wisely, beneath the cold sand, though brave gulls still flew, wings stretching with the wind.
My husband and I were not the only souls on the strand that day. An old man wearing a tweed fisherman’s hat and an oilskin Mackintosh walked with his aging golden retriever.
The pair did not venture too close to the sea. Protective of one another, embracing what it meant to be alive, even as the cold rattled their bones, the man and dog walked near the stones that bordered the upper strand. Stones, oddly softened by a millennium of tides that continue to rise and fall.
Much like those stones, my husband and I have softened over the years. Comforted by the past and proud of our future, we have raised three children who are equal parts mountain and prairie, fire and rain, dry grass and wet sea.
On that last day, we tasted the salt on our lips and remembered what it felt like to be alone in our young love. We remembered how softly the snow fell from the midnight sky.
*Susan holds a Master’s Degree in English from John Carroll University and a Master’s Degree in Education from Baldwin-Wallace University. She may be contacted at suemangan@yahoo.com.
