Editor’s note: A familiar saying is “Everyone is Irish on St. Paddy’s Day,” and in that spirit, members of the WhipCity Wordsmiths are sharing their favorite memories and impressions of a beloved holiday, Saint Patrick’s Day, as part of an ongoing writers’ series in the Westfield News. Today’s submission is by Heidi Parker Colonna of Westfield.
WESTFIELD-Westfield resident Heidi Parker Colonna enjoys writing about family, faith, and animals. She is a consulting writer and editor for the children’s magazine, Kind News, and has written for All Animals Magazine, Pregnancy & Newborn Magazine’s blog, and the Red Lion Inn’s Lion’s Tales: A Collection of Shorts. She coauthored a chapter on animals in children’s literature in the book, The State of the Animals II and is working on publication of a middle grade novel based on the dogs of her childhood. Colonna is a teacher at St. Mary’s and lives with her husband, Al, sons Kevin and AJ and their dog CeeCee.
Here, she shares from memories and journal entries from a trip to Ireland in 2019. She hopes the famed Irish storytelling and upbeat, honest way of speaking is in her blood and if not, rubs off from time with Irish relatives and the books she picked up in Dingle’s bookstores.
Her submission is titled “This Was Us: Reflections from An Irish Farmhouse.”
This Was Us: Reflections from An Irish Farmhouse
Dublin, June, 2019 – We had five days to see southern Ireland, my mom, son Kevin, nephew Johnny (both age 13) and me. The highlight would be the home of our ancestors on my Mom’s side: the gorgeous Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry.
Mom could never have fully prepared me for the unreal seaside landscapes where scenes from two Star Wars movies were filmed and the narrow roads and BOOM – there went the rental car’s side-mirror. We walked countless burial grounds where our ancestors were somewhere, and the church where my great-grandfather William Walsh (“Pa”) was baptized. But it was our last two nights in his childhood farmhouse in the village of BallyDavid that gave me the greatest thing you can hope to find in an “old country”; a connection to buried roots.
Heidi Parker Colonna is seen in the farmhouse door of her ancestors. (PATRICIA HARMON PHOTO)
I recognized the simple white stone house from a slow drive by in 1988 when I was Kevin’s age, on a trip with my Papa and Nana, William’s daughter. Now, the house is an AirBnB rental cottage. We’re greeted by the new owners’ son, Daragh, and his grandfather Jim Griffin who still ran the neighboring farm which now included most of our ancestors’ 45 acres. After a tour of the house and adjoining milking parlor/barn, Mom pulls out old family photos from this land. Jim helps us position them against the current backdrop: my great-great-grandmother against the front stone wall. Men stacking hay out back when there was no modern kitchen addition. They say the farm sink is original, though; one my great-great-grandmother used.
Kevin and Johnny ran with their tin whistles from town and climbed the front half-wall as Mom deposited soil from the Springfield graves of Pa and his wife, Nellie (my Nana’s mother), who grew up less than ¾ mile away from here, past the tiny, thousand-year-old stone church called the Gallarus Oratory and across a thin dirt road from Gallarus Castle.
Patricia Harmon is seen with Kevin O’Brien and John Parker in front of the Gallarus Castle. (HEIDI PARKER COLONNA PHOTO)
Mom and I start to get used to our nighttime Irish coffee in front of the big stone hearth as the boys practice their whistles and eat Irish candy in their bedroom. I ascend to my loft-like space and turn the lights off. No one had electricity here til the 50s. The rosary beads Nana gave me when I was a kid glow on the nightstand.
The next day, Nana’s cousin Cathy Corduff, a Kerry native, came to visit. (Her son, Michael, is chef and co-owner of Delaney House and Delaney’s Market and the namesake of The Mick pub.) I scramble to write down everything from her mouth: Where Pa went to school, how everyone is related, the last Walshes to live in this house (Johnny and wife Mary with their huge rosary beads on the wall) and all the ones who are “across” now, living a faster-paced life in the U.S. “Wait a while now,” she says, thinking, when my mom issues too many questions.
On our last morning, I’m awoken at 5 a.m. by an articulate bird who sounds like last night’s accordion player at the pub; a good wake-up call for farm work. I throw the luggage in the car happy for our time here, happy that this house still stands. It helps, knowing the hard life Pa had – farming and political rebellion and Fisk tire factory work “across” before his beloved Nellie passed from childbirth. It helps to see his views of childhood, to see in my son and nephew the fun he must have had running these fields, hills, and beaches near his school. It does help, to have the boys’ picture with his daughter’s daughter in front of his love’s childhood castle.
Heidi Parker Colonna compares an old family photo to the current stone house in Ireland. ((HEIDI PARKER COLONNA PHOTO)
