In a Pub in Clifden, Ireland

Photo by John Tecuceanu on Unsplash                                “My mother has a lot of information about your Lynch family,” the school teacher said. She would like to meet with you.”

“My mother has a lot of information about your Lynch family,” the school teacher said. She would like to meet with you.”

I’d gone to the nearby school in Claddaghduff, Ireland, to volunteer to teach poetry to the primary students. My quest for information about my family had hit one bump after another and I needed a break. I decided to take a few days off and let the children’s good spirits wash over me.

I loved teaching children, and had worked with them for years throughout my home state of Iowa as a touring poet, then as the Iowa Poet Laureate. From the Mississippi to the Missouri Rivers, I’d taught in gifted programs to barely hanging-in-there classes, from rich suburbs to poor rural districts where the school was the only viable entity in town.

The Claddaghduff school, white-washed stucco with a tall bank of windows trimmed in blue, faced the west, toward the Omey Island strand. The building held grades 1-6 with around 40 students, 2 teachers and a couple of helpers. Everyone here seemed focused and upbeat, the learning fun.

I’d mentioned my quest in passing one day in the teachers’ lounge, and when I’d brought up the Lynch name, I’d received the same nod I had had from the bingo ladies at the community center down the road.

So, I was surprised, when a few days later, the teacher handed me her mother’s contact information. I quickly called her mother who instructed me to meet her at Mannion’s Bar in Clifden the following day.

The next day, in the heart of Clifden, I passed the library, the fish shop, then Paddy Power, the gambling business advertising online bingo. I headed up the street to the square, just adjacent to E.J. King’s Bar where vendors were selling vegetables, eggs, fish, and crafts. With shopping bags slung over their arms, people were milling around, from one stand to another, comparing the prices and quality of the goods. Smiling, upbeat, the shoppers chatted with each other with an air of festivity.

This market had an old, old history that stretched back for centuries.  For years, a mere cow path connected the Cleggan Peninsula to Clifden, the only town of any size, about seven miles away. Vendors loaded their wares into currachs and rowed down the Atlantic Ocean to Clifden. Or, vendors loaded their potatoes and fish into a cart, pushing it over the rugged trail all the way to Clifden.

The city of Clifden required all vendors to wear shoes on sale days. Claddaghduff farmers would beg, borrow, or steal a pair of shoes, push their carts for 7 miles barefoot, then put on the shoes just as they reached the city limits. Once the sale was completed and the farmers were once again headed home, they removed their shoes to save them from wear.

In Mannion’s, I found a small, slight woman with a warm smile, the school teacher’s mother, sitting at the bar, her hair grey and thin, the glow from the overhead track lights shining through its strands. Bottles of whiskey, vodka and gin were neatly arranged on glass shelves behind the bar.  Guinness was on tap. Freshly washed glasses, flipped upside down, dried on the counter.

Marie introduced herself as my mother’s first cousin, then ordered us both a scone and a cup of tea. On the back of her napkin, she drew a family tree. She told me who lived where on the peninsula, who married whom, the names of all the children. She told me who immigrated when, and who remained to scratch out a living along the rocky shore.

 Those who stayed in the country loaded handmade baskets with seaweed harvested from the ocean, then hoisted them up onto their donkeys’ backs, the asses navigating their way over the rough terrain to home. There, on their tiny plots, the farmers spread the seaweed over the rocks, letting it compost. Year after year, decade after decade, the farmers built up the compost, planting their potatoes into this soil.

“Oh, but your family was rich,” Marie said.

“Rich?”

I grew up in my grandparents’ house, a large Victorian my grandmother had bought for a song during the Depression. The house always needed work and repair, the back steps sinking into the dirt. A 1941 Ford sat in the yard, a piece of baling wire holding the trunk closed.

An attitude of “make-do” pervaded the home. We still used the old ice box. The old Maytag wringer washer chugged out clean laundry on Monday mornings, the sheets drying, billowing up into the air on the clothesline outside.

I’d heard story after story of the hardships my family had suffered, from the Great Famine and the coffin ships that brought them to the States, to the Great Depression. For several years in the 1930s, my mother owned only one dress, one of my grandmother’s that had been altered down to a smaller size.

And I’d heard horror stories of poverty in Ireland, how my grandparents never wanted to go back.  Life was just too difficult there. My family had arrived in two waves, one Famine Irish who had immigrated in the mid-nineteenth century. The others came at the turn of the twentieth, escaping the rath of the Black and Tans. I couldn’t imagine that this same family had been wealthy in Ireland.

“Oh, they were,” Marie said.

“No, I don’t think so.”

I’d never heard tales of grandeur, just one rich uncle in Roundstone who had paid for my grandfather’s education. And then, when my grandfather spent more time playing around in Paris than studying in Edinburgh, the uncle cut off his funding. So it was off to America, but America had a quota, so it was off to Canada and lots of school teaching in bitterly cold Winnipeg until he could save the money and get the okay to drop down to Iowa to go back to school.

“They were rich,” Marie said.

“I’m pretty sure they weren’t,” I said.

Marie insisted they were. Marie’s family lived down the road from the Lynches. Her family only ate once a day—a potato soaked in milk with a little bit of fish-- if they were lucky.

“Your family brought ours supper every night. It saved us. They had food.”

Marie put down her scone on her saucer and turned on her barstool to look me in the eye.

“They were rich. They had food to spare. And they had shoes.”

Photo by Oziel Gómez on Unsplash

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