I had a dream about snakes last night—about snakes living in our house. This herpetological state of affairs was just fine with us. A psychologist would have a field day with my dream. But for every culture and religion, and in every era, snakes have captured the imagination of humans. Beyond the obvious phallic symbol, the serpent has represented the underworld, temptation, fertility, wisdom, healing, and creation.

Tea With Snakes

In the dream, I opened our front door to a friend and said, “Come in. Oops, mind the snake.” She entered and also was unperturbed by our slithering housemates. As we sat in the living room and drank tea, pythons glided past and into the kitchen. We observed them with benevolence. In an early REM gear, my powers of reasoning were such that our dog Oscar did not figure in the dream—a terrier, he would have given chase and worry, ruining the ethereal and pleasant nature of the dream—the dreaminess, if you will.

When Irish Eyes See Snakes

Why were snakes on my mind? We celebrated St. Patrick’s Day last Sunday, and St. Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland. Is the story true? I think St. Patrick himself would tell you that it is not, but it was a good choice. There were no snakes in Ireland to begin with, so his success was guaranteed. In those days the Irish drank a fermented mash, a kind of beer, but one so strong that the imbibers hallucinated—St. Brigid was always at it—so the banishment of the non-existent snakes became legend.

Super Snakes

On March 20th we celebrated the spring equinox and the rising of a spring full moon, a worm moon and a supermoon. This is the first time the spring equinox and a full moon coincided so closely since 2000, and it will be the last time until 2030. With spring showers come the worms, out of the softening soil. That explains the worm part of the appellation. The super bit is due to the fact that the moon was making its closest pass to us on that night. It was brighter and even seemed larger. The emergence of the worms attracts robins, and indeed I saw my first robins in a field on March 20^th.

Snakes and Worms

Here in our hill town Brigadoon, we have snakes and worms. In fact, I’ve never seen earthworms as large as ours. They’re more like small snakes than worms, and use their muscular bodies to aerate our rocky soil. The snakes are plentiful, too, but I’ve only seen small ones. They cross the roads in the spring and lie in the glorious sunshine on the warm asphalt. Unfortunately, they are not speedy enough to escape traffic—the salamanders and red efts meet this fate also. It’s very sad to find them squashed on the roads, their beautiful hides split. I herd them over to the side of the road if I find them alive in the middle, a stupid exercise, according to Oscar, who strains to get a really good look, sniff and taste.

New England is home to species of large and venomous snakes, such as the copperhead and timber rattlesnake. I’ve never seen either, which is fine, although I wouldn’t mind seeing one from a safe distance.

Speedy Snakes

Coming upon a snake can be startling. Walking along our country roads, all seems still—I have the measure of the world and the sounds around me—and then there’s a burst of energy and sound as the snake hurries away into hiding. And how they move! They manage a very speedy locomotion with no limbs, gathering themselves up and propelling themselves forward, their tube of muscles designed to escape danger or attack prey with stunning speed.

Stacking fire wood in the woodshed this summer we came upon evidence of the snake life in the wood pile. We found quite a few discarded snake skins, their owners somewhere else in their new finery. I also met one live snake, curled up on a log, in a hole between two rows of stacked wood. We looked at one another for a moment before it disappeared—puff.

Snakey

Humans are funny about snakes, and while I wouldn’t want to live with them, not in reality, I tend not to mind them. My neighbor likes to weed gardens and when I happily offered our garden to her ministrations, she declined, saying that our garden looked “snakey.”

I’ve run into that description before, at a wedding in western North Carolina. Not at the wedding itself, which was a lovely, snake-free affair, but at an event for the guests the day before. We were on a boating expedition down a large, roiling and scary brown river, as only North Carolinian rivers can be. The leader of the expedition told his charges to watch out for “snakey” areas in the water. Nobody wants to be in the water with snakes—we’re at a severe disadvantage. The truth is though—and it’s true of most animals—snakes want to get away from us and our flailing limbs, our loud voices.

It is spring, but snowing as I write, covering the garden with poor man’s fertilizer. Soon it will rain though—real rain—the kind of rain that floods the burrows of the sleeping giant earthworms, bringing them out to the paths and roads. The snakes need heat and will take longer to emerge, but soon enough Oscar and I will encounter them and their salamander cousins on the roads. I look forward to these “snakey” encounters.

Do you know what the Brexit backstop is? The term came into use during the mounting Brexit panic in 2018. About the same time the British government realized they had a dead-end mess on their hands. A mess in which the UK could not go back to the EU, but leaving was catastrophic, clearly.

It’s all about borders

Nobody who voted to leave the EU (only 53.4% of English voters dragged the entire UK with them; Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales voted to remain in the EU) anticipated the effects of the UK leaving the EU. Least of all the British government. In a gush of phoney populism, they wanted their borders back (sound familiar?). Leaving will have dire effects on free trade, and the free movement of goods. The UK will pay a lot more for everything.

Will rationing follow hoarding?

Imagine the gridlock of the trucks stopped by overwhelmed customs officials. Trucks traveling from Britain to Ireland, from France to Britain, from the Republic to Northern Ireland. Do you see the problem? Of course you do. Unfortunately, British Brexiteers and the British government experienced a failure of imagination.

Leaving the EU affects the free movement of humans, too. Multi-national companies are pulling up stakes and moving to Europe proper. Or in the case of Honda, just announced this week, moving to…where?…but moving. Dutch students at the London School of Economics are nervous. Banks are leaving London and opening offices in Dublin and Frankfurt. EU and EU.

UK residents are hoarding goods like medicines. The giant UK supermarket Tesco has leased more storage to hoard. Ireland, which will remain in the EU, provides Tesco and others with meat and dairy products, which will have to cross a border, incur a tax.

Time for a sports analogy

The term backstop comes from cricket, a poorly understood game in the U.S.. The backstop is the player positioned at the boundary of the playing field. His job is to keep the ball within the playing field, should the player closer to the batsman miss it. Think outfielder in American baseball. If the infielder misses, the outfielder prevents scoring by the batting team, or at least minimizes the damage.

In terms of Brexit, how should the backstop work? It’s been rolled out as an insurance policy for when the UK leaves the EU. A policy that prevents the creation of a hard border between the island-sharing Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The Republic is a sovereign nation; Northern Ireland is part of the UK.

How can the backstop work? By the UK, including Northern Ireland, remaining in a customs union with the EU, but there’s been no movement on that. Otherwise, there will have to be customs checks on the Irish island. Customs requires physical checks. Borders, hard or soft (think Trump’s wall versus the Democrats’ idea of border security), and border stops. There is no technology outside the labs at NASA that can perform these checks.

Why is Northern Ireland unlike Scotland or Wales?

A hard border was removed between Ireland and Northern Ireland in 1998. The acceptance of the Good Friday Peace Agreement between Ireland, Northern Ireland, Britain, and the EU brought peace. A patrolled border was no longer needed. Everyone was sick of barbed wire, patrolling soldiers with rifles, and the violence contained. The people of Northern Ireland and the Republic do not want a border between them again. It would be reminiscent of 1970’s sectarian violence, and might even rekindle the violence.

When the UK referendum was cast, the people of Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU. The people of the Republic have never considered leaving the EU. The best thing Ireland ever had, EU membership has provided a good economy and even improved trade with the UK.

Thousands of Irish people travel between the two parts of the one island every day—to work, to school, to shop, and to visit relatives and doctors. In addition to British Brexiteers, who don’t care, the only people who don’t mind a hard border are supporters of the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party. Thinking of themselves as British not Irish, the DUP want to stay in the UK no matter what. They are anti-EU, anti-Good Friday Peace Agreement, anti-backstop, and anti-progressive in general.

The 1998 Good Friday Peace (Belfast) Agreement is the piece of all this that makes Northern Ireland unlike Scotland or Wales. The agreement consolidated a hard-won peace in Northern Ireland. It also codified a special relationship between the Republic of Ireland, Britain, and Northern Ireland. It grants all citizens of Northern Ireland—who hold British citizenship—the right to Republic of Ireland citizenship. The Republic has been flooded with applications from Northern Irish citizens.

The agreement also describes the loophole by which Northern Ireland can vote to rejoin the Republic of Ireland, from which it was carved in 1921 (for that history, see “Borders: Ireland’s Brexit Killer” December 21, 2017https://www.constancegemmett.com/borders-irelands-brexit-killer/), and thereby rejoin the EU. Going into Brexit the UK understood that it would not be allowed to rejoin the EU.

Baby please come back

So what will happen? What else is on the table? A member of the British government’s Exiting the EU Committee asked Bertie Ahern, former Taoiseach (sort of the Irish prime minister), whether the Republic of Ireland would consider leaving the EU and…rejoining the UK. Gulp. Take a look, it’s a pretty funny moment https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/brexit/i-m-exhausted-explaining-to-british-people-the-geography-of-their-own-country-1.3797959). Ahern did a good job of summarizing 800 years of a troubled and complicated relationship between Ireland and Britain, ending with a firm no (for details of the partition of Northern Ireland, see also “Will Brexit Reunite Ireland?” June 6th, 2017, https://www.constancegemmett.com/will-brexit-reunite-ireland/).

My backstop

My personal favorite backstop is the reunification of the Republic and Northern Ireland, this time, as one sovereign and independent nation, which has left the UK. And who knows, Scotland may renew their 2016 referendum to leave the UK too. After all, 62% of Scots voted to remain in the EU—this time, their vote may swing to leaving the UK.

All of this is scheduled for a big moment, Britain’s “crash-out,” on March 29th. Will the British government negotiate more time or a deal of some sort? Prolong the agony, or find a way out? Stay tuned.

“Borders: Ireland’s Brexit Killer” December 21, 2017https://www.constancegemmett.com/borders-irelands-brexit-killer/

“Will Brexit Reunite Ireland?” June 6th, 2017, https://www.constancegemmett.com/will-brexit-reunite-ireland/

“Will Ireland Redefine Brexit?” June 14th, 2017 https://www.constancegemmett.com/will-ireland-redefine-brexit/).

Be fixed in a particular position or unable to move.

One word described our situation this weekend, as it describes my state still: stuck.

Our cars died not once, not twice, but thrice as the temperature dropped into the minus teens. Proving that the first symptom of an aged battery is a dead battery, we revived them several times while waiting for our local mechanic to open his garage doors on Monday.

Be unable to continue with a task or solve

Stuck describes a situation most writers experience. Not writer’s block—I’ve never had that—just a little…stuck. I’ve written my new novel to the point where the protagonist—an indentured laborer in 1775— and a collection of secondary characters travel together on a boat from New York Harbor. Sails full and heeled over, the sloop races up the Hudson River. The characters wait for me in that cabin, pitching and rolling, admiring the rosy hue of the Palisades, and the roiling green grey of the river. I’ve written these three migrants across the Atlantic from Bristol, England to Colonial New York. This week I can’t move them more than a few miles north of the slip in lower Manhattan. The characters are stuck: sick, hungry, cold, and scared. We’re all stuck, but I’m the only one who is real—the characters and their discomforts are imaginary.

From the Imaginary to the Unimaginable

I usually solve this writer’s problem—become unstuck—during walks or during the wee hours when awake—when I’m very much not asleep. During the past few days though, my tossing and turning has been fueled by thoughts of the children held in cages on our southern border. It’s not the first time that I’ve writhed with anger, frustration, and shame about those kids at 3 AM. It won’t be the last either, but I’ve taken the advice of the great @Zerlina Maxwell (zerlinamaxwell.com) in deciding to DO something, not just feel something about it. So I’ve put together a list of links (see below) to organizations that are actually doing something to help these innocent children. All of them accept donations, all offer a type of direct action, the ACLU offers to place direct calls to congressional offices so that we easily can exhort our representatives to DO something.

Be unable to get rid of or escape from

Every day the children get older and become more damaged. Every day the chances of reunion with their parents becomes more remote (but that was the plan wasn’t it?—there was no expectation by our government to reunite the families—there certainly was no plan in place).

In the years to come, this incarceration and separation will be viewed as a crime at least equal to our internment of Japanese-American citizens—and the theft of their property, never to be returned—during WWII. A few years prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, we turned away ships containing refugees fleeing the Nazi regime. The ships wandered in search of safe harbor, were rarely successful, and returned to the home port and certain death for the passengers. That stain stretches back to the beginning of the country and the use of slavery and genocide to build it; that it stretches forward is unimaginable, but here we are. And there are the caged children: living in the refrigerated detention centers, scared, sad, and angry. Stuck.

Bartlett’s Roget’s Thesaurus—Stuck: Holed (stabbed), motionless, tied, connected, adhering, troubled

We are stuck in a time and in a country where children live in cages, sleeping on gym mats with aluminum blankets. The unthinkable is in practice. In his State of the Union Address last night, the president never mentioned the children in cages. With atavistic relish, he described their parents as criminals. The desperate parents who brought them here—believing we would help—are people who came with nothing and lost everything.

https://cardenas.house.gov/ways-you-can-help-immigrant-families-and-children

https://www.aclu.org/issues/immigrants-rights/call-senators-defund-dhs?redirect=node/68167

https://www.mother.ly/news/how-to-help-immigrant-children-separated-from-parents?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1

Poet Mary Oliver died on Thursday. Aged 83, she died at her home in Hobe Sound, Florida. I knew she was sick, but leaving her nearly lifelong home on Cape Cod for Florida made no sense to me—she must have had her reasons. Hobe Sound is beautiful—on the Atlantic, it has a National Wildlife Park and another nature park besides. Mary’s kind of place.

Reading this, you might assume that I knew her. I didn’t, but her poetry made me feel that I did. And when someone I care for dies—and I did care for her, the idea of her—thoughts of an actual afterlife fill my head. For Mary Oliver, I hope that she is now in a very New England and sylvan version, one on a pond, with the ocean visible over a bluff. She is reunited with her Molly Malone Cook and her dogs, of course. All of them.

An expert archer, Mary Oliver’s poems were her arrows: set into flight, not high, but true, hitting their targets with satisfying piercings.

Stephen Dobyns (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stephen-dobyns) wrote, “Although few poets have fewer human beings in their poems than Mary Oliver, it is ironic that few poets also go so far to help us forward.”

Here is one you may know (with apologies to her estate). There are many more:

THE SUMMER DAY

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

The one who has flung herself out of the grass,

The one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=mary+oliver

The title Little Women may summon recollection of the book you read as a child and have forgotten. Not to mention the mostly terrible movie representations (although Katherine Hepburn and Douglas Montgomery were very good in the 1933 version). The novel was published as a serial 150 years ago, and deserves a revisit, as does its author. Indeed, if the name Louisa May Alcott only summons thoughts of sweetness and light, even treacle and light, an education is in order.

Her Pen For A Bridegroom

Louisa May Alcott wrote that she had “…taken her pen for a bridegroom,” and while the phallic reference would not have been lost on her, she referred to her life’s work: writing. L.M.A. wrote to publish and to earn money out of necessity, but had she a wealthy start in life, she still would have taken her pen as a bridegroom. As a rich woman, would she have written Little Women? Certainly not: she wrote it at her publisher’s behest and his intuition that little girls constituted a market. She wrote it to earn money. Think instead of a young woman who wrote obsessively and prolifically, and worked from her teen years onward. First as a domestic servant, then as a nurse during the Civil War—but always as a writer. While Little Women paints a rosier picture of her own life—although its realism and tales of hardship might shock today’s children—it contains many of her life’s truths.

Started As She Meant To Go On

Born on November 29^th, 1832 in Philadelphia, L.M.A. paddled her own canoe from the beginning. After the family moved to Boston, the child Louisa often meandered along the Boston wharves—by herself. One afternoon, having lost her way home from there, she waited for her mother to find her as it grew dark. Recognizing herself in the town crier’s announcement, “Lost! A Little Girl. Curly Brown Hair. Had on a White Frock and Green Shoes,” she turned herself in to him as the lost girl. The man scooped her up onto his shoulder and took her home to the Alcott apartment in the South End.

Once inside any of their homes, the boisterous Louisa and her sisters—Lizzie, Anna, and May—were quiet and respectful of the gentlemen in the parlor: their father, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, discussing religion and philosophy. The friends’ habit of sitting and discussing had started at The Temple on Tremont Street, where Alcott taught children for a short time (the remaining students abandoned the school after he brought an African-American student into the class).

Nomads

The itinerant Alcotts moved around in the City of Boston, from the South End to Beacon Hill, to Brook Farm in West Roxbury, to towns in the corridor from Boston west to Concord, and west to Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts. They moved often—including summer visits to the Alcotts in Walpole, New Hampshire—due to their ever-worsening financial situation. Their poverty was a result of their mother’s May family money dwindling while their father earned no money to speak of—but their poverty was also intentional and according to Bronson Alcott’s principles. He and the others living at dilapidated farms like Brook and Fruitlands—like-minded in their intent on living in utopian communes—believed in a bloodless diet, one short on milk and hot meals of any sort. While their mother was unsure of these measures, she did not ask her husband to go against his principles for her girls’ sake. His principles extended to wearing linen tunics and taking cold baths. Tolerable in the warm summer months, torture in the New England winter. The girls lived on apples and bread soaked in water.

Mr. Emerson

After many negotiations and arrangements offered and discarded by Mr. and Mrs. Alcott, the family returned to Concord, to live near Mr. Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, another of Bronson’s friends. Settling into a house named The Orchard House, where later Louisa wrote and set Little Women, the family became a concern to the neighbors, who worried about the girls’ diets, and left offerings to supplement their Spartan fare (Mr. Emerson foremost among them). The Orchard House (http://www.louisamayalcott.org/) today is a preserved version of the Alcott house, rather than a reconstruction. On view is the trunk where the actual sisters and those of Little Women kept their costumes for their many theatrical presentations. The parlor where Bronson Alcott and the other Transcendentalists (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendentalism/) held their talks remains very much as it was.

Louisa grew up listening to her father and Mr. Emerson discuss religion and philosophy. When they lived in The Orchard House, the discussions included others, such as writer and feminist Margaret Fuller. The speakers would gather in the parlor, while the audience, having paid a small sum, stood in the open doorways to listen.

Mr. Thoreau

As a young woman, Louisa worked as a domestic servant, but she walked the woods with Henry David Thoreau, who could name every plant and tell her the hour a flower would bloom. Her unusual upbringing and education prepared her for the life of a woman writer in the mid-19^th century.

Concord was a magic place in L.M.A.’s time. Famous for its role in the American Revolution, Concord was home to Emerson, Thoreau, Nathanial Hawthorne, and Harriet Tubman—an abolitionist born into slavery—who smuggled enslaved people out of the Southern states to be hidden and housed by many of the town’s families. The small town was a busy stop on the Underground Railroad, as well as the scene of a lecture by John Brown shortly before the rebellion at Harper’s Ferry. John Brown’s daughters remained friends of the Alcotts.

A Professional Writer

Concord is about 20 miles from Boston—a trip that L.M.A. made on foot in order to attend the theater, a passion of hers from childhood. In womanhood, she grew stifled by the small town, and though an athlete, possibly tired of the long walk, and took to living with her relatives the Sewalls in Melrose (about 10 miles north of the theater district) or in boarding houses in Boston. While living in these places, she shopped her plays and fiction to theatrical agents and publishers, and worked sewing or helping with other domestic duties to offset her room and board.

Before writing Little Women, L.M.A. earned money writing lurid stories anonymously—stories of harems, hashish, and kidnappings, masks and rival prima donnas. She wrote that the lurid better suited her writing style, but her anonymity, like earning the money, was a necessity. Both L.M.A. and Emerson, whom she worshipped, supported the Alcott family, and she felt the urgency to earn money keenly. Although she wrote these stories under a nom de plume or anon., she scattered clues in her letters (collected by the Houghton Library at Harvard) and other writings, especially in Little Women. It wasn’t until Leona Rostenberg—in partnership with Madeleine Stern as scholars, sleuths, bibliographers, and rare book dealers (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/leona-rostenberg/old-books-rare-friends/)—cracked L.M.A.’s code that the full extent of her lurid writings was known, as detailed and recorded in Stern’s Louisa May Alcott, A Biography (University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), still regarded as the best biography of L.M.A., although any biographer’s bias must be considered.

The Civil War

The Civil War caught L.M.A. in its maw, not Bronson Alcott, the model for wounded patriarch Mr. March in Little Women. L.M.A. did go off to the war—she volunteered as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, learning to care for wounds and the thousands of men wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. She chose night duty, when she could read to the wounded men in the quiet ward—her story, A Night, from the collection Hospital Sketches, describes these nights in a surprising manner. Disease killed more of the men in that war than did the injuries of battle, and typhoid fever nearly felled L.M.A. as well. She was treated with mercury, and suffered from mercury poisoning, losing her hair and also her mind for a time. Bronson Alcott fetched her back to The Orchard House, where she recovered and a few years later, wrote Little Women.

No To Marriage

Like Little Women’s Jo, L.M.A. ran for physical exercise all of her life, although her general health was poor after the mercury poisoning (note: she may have suffered from an autoimmune disease also). Like Jo, she followed her own path, and never wished to marry. Her publisher forced L.M.A. to write Jo’s marriage into the second of the series of Little Women, but she refused to marry Jo to Laurie, despite the hue and cry of her readers. Instead, she married Jo to an older professor, a foreigner with an accent—an outsider. It was her way of satisfying both her publisher and herself, but not the little girls who read Little Women.

L.M.A. never married and revealed the heartbreak of her sisters marrying in Little Women. When Jo senses that Meg will marry John Brooke, she tells her mother, Marmee, “I just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family.” Later, with Meg’s wedding imminent, Jo tells Laurie, “It never can be the same again. I’ve lost my dearest friend.” The lines L.M.A. wrote for Jo reveal her own feelings about marriage but also about keeping the family together—meaning the four sisters together with their parents—there was no other family possible.

Four Sisters And A Niece

Jo’s fate reflected L.M.A.’s, for she too lost her sisters, Anna, Elizabeth, and Abigail May. L.M.A. lost Elizabeth at a young age to illness, as Beth died in Little Women; Anna to marriage and children, although excepting L.M.A.’s trips to Europe, Anna lived with or near L.M.A. in Concord and Beacon Hill all of their lives. The youngest sister May, the model for the artistic Amy in Little Women, died a few weeks after the birth of her daughter, Louisa May Alcott Nieriker in Switzerland. May’s husband Ernest Nieriker wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson with the sad news and asked him to break it to Louisa, which he did. It was May’s dying wish that L.M.A. adopt the baby Louisa, so she did, raising the little girl, called Lulu, in Concord and Beacon Hill with Anna’s help.

A Family Reunion

L.M.A.’s last completed work, Lu Sing, was written about and for Lulu. Upon Louisa’s death in 1888 at age 55—days after Bronson’s death and 11 years after his wife’s—Lulu returned to her father’s care in Switzerland. The adult Lulu married and had children, and died in Germany in 1975 at age 95. Lulu’s great-granddaughter brought the original Lu Sing, bound by L.M.A. in birch bark with blue ribbon, back to Concord to raise funds for repair of The Orchard House in 2002. She also brought illustrations by Lulu’s mother May, an accomplished artist who had studied in Boston, Paris, and London, and whose still life was chosen for exhibition over Mary Cassatt’s in Paris in 1877. The illustrations were of a vaguely oriental theme to suit Lu Sing, some described as dreamy Turner copies. The return of the great-grandniece with L.M.A.’s work, and her sister May’s art to The Orchard House, made something of a family reunion.

The Alcotts rest together, with the exception of May, who is buried in Paris, in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, near Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau, and their families. L.M.A. placed a headstone for May in the family plot. The little women are together.

Gazing at the river, my mother often opined that the look of the Hudson was never the same. The quality of change in the river—that it was never the same— enchanted her. When I was a young teen we lived in a crazy house set high in the mountain that looms over the Hudson River a mile or two south of Nyack, New York. From every window facing east, we viewed the entire expanse of the widest part of the Hudson and across to Sunnyside, Washington Irving’s manse in Sleepy Hollow, Tarrytown.

Avast Ye Sailor!

A sea captain built our house. The house had fifty-seven rattling windows, all without storm windows in their wooden casements. The boiler was enormous, of a size more suited to RMS Titanic than a two bedroom house. The cast iron radiators did their best, but they could not compete with the drafts and gales blown off the river, down the mountain, and through the seams of the windows. We froze. We never sat to read or watch TV without heaps of blankets over us. Not to mention the cat and the dog burrowing in with us. My parents wore woolen hats to bed. As a teenager I despaired of my hair most days, so wearing a hat to bed was out of the question. I burrowed down in bed and rigid, waited for my limbs to relax in the increasing warmth.

Mahicantuck

Hands around hot cups of tea, noses red, we looked down at the cold river. My mother was right that it was never the same. The water changed from green to purple, swirled by the tides and the winds, the deep channels and currents. The Lenape tribe, the original residents, called the river Mahicantuck— translated as “the river that flows two ways.” The Hudson does flow two ways, which was obvious from our observation platform, and especially obvious from the many small boats in which I plied the river during my youth. Mixing the freshwater of the river’s tributaries with the brine of the Atlantic, the two currents, constantly ebbing and flowing, mixed the changing components of the water that resulted in the ever-changing appearance. The river was truly never the same.

Change for the Worse

Nor was the river the same over long periods of time. The Lenapes gave way to the Dutch, the English, and the other Europeans who built villages and farms along the shores and in the hills. In the 19^th century, fishing began to give way to the pollution caused by increasing industrial and waste use. In the 20^th century, addition of chemicals like PCBs contributed by General Electric, just up the river from Washington Irving’s idyllic manse, finished the fishing and swimming.

Change, But More Change Coming

But things changed. The efforts led by activist environmentalists such as the late Tosi and Pete Seeger, and passage by Congress of the Clean Water Act in 1972, have begun to show reclamation of the river by wildlife. Starting in 2016, whales have been spotted swimming upriver off of the western shore of Manhattan. The river is never the same, but its flexibility is an unknown as it faces imminent climate change.

Never The Same

My neighbor told me that she finds our country views boring because they are always the same. She splits her time between our neck of the woods and New York and finds that her surroundings in the city constantly surprise her, that they are never the same. As a dogwalker, I spend time outside in our country byways and woods every day. In all seasons, in all weather, I have the opportunity to engage with the surroundings. I can tell my neighbor that they are never the same. The changes can be subtle, once a season digs its heels in, but they are there. From one day to the next, what I look at while we walk is never the same. The colors of leaves and bark change, houses and farms hidden during the summer emerge into view in the winter. The shapes of everything change from season to season, but also from day to day, as weather and light obscure or clarify. The sun, high and strong in the summer, seeks out unseen corners of the forest for me as it sinks and weakens in the winter. My countryside is never the same.

Change, Please

That things are never the same has given me hope during these trying times of a simultaneous attack on the environment and rejection of climate change preparation by our current federal government. Even while our federal administration seems hell bent on undoing environmental progress while ignoring the danger of climate change, so too does it seem to be unraveling, on becoming undone. It is my hope that we will not fall back so far that we can’t go forward again, and ahead of the coming climate change damage.

My mother missed this particular era—although she lived through others like it (McCarthy, Nixon)—but she would be pleased to see the daily change now—subtle or otherwise—the beginning of their end.

More Than A Month Shy of the Winter Solstice

In our world, it’s time to go to bed. As we prepared for bed, there was a lot to do, and some of it remains, waiting, frozen in place, and under a cover of snow. Before it climbed into bed, the garden put on its pajamas and brushed its teeth; that is, I sprinkled winter rye in the vegetable beds and added a generous blanket of mulching hay. After planting winter garlic and shallots (German and French varieties, appropriate to this November’s 100^th anniversary of the First World War armistice), they wriggled their toes under a half-foot of hay.

Sleeping Bulbs

The newly planted trees, shrubs and roses received a covering of mulched cedar. The evergreen shrubs—immature rhododendrons and mountain laurel—will need more: desiccant or burlap (I’m still not sure which, but I know who to ask). The bulbs are buried and covered. It never ceases to amaze when the daffodils come up first in April, then the lilies, peonies and poppies (another nod to the end of the Great War and remembrance).

The Switch

We dragged all of the houseplants from their summer vacation spots into the house in October. Slowly but steadily, Suzy added the deck furniture to the shed, and when she wasn’t doing that, she carried firewood from the woodshed to the three racks handy to the wood stove. She moved the summer equipment back and the snow shovels forward. We carried sweaters, coats, blankets and boots down from the attic and replaced them with containers of light clothing and sandals. The seed starting kit (a special light and a warming pad) has gone to bed in the attic, too.

Let Sleeping Bears Sleep

Have the bears gone to bed? I hope so because our bird feeder is up, filled, and well-attended. The chickadees were the pioneers, followed by nuthatches, blue jays, titmice, a Downey or Hairy Woodpecker (can’t tell the difference), a Red Bellied Woodpecker, and underneath for the fallen seed, a male Cardinal.

Surprise!

Thanks to the new windows and the new front door, the house is easy to put to bed. Everything closes easily and tightly. So, what is left to do? What is left to put to bed? The outdoor pots with herbs were not emptied in time, and the surprise plunge in temperature—even for New England, temperatures in the teens are a surprise in mid-November—froze them in place, turned the soil to iron. Once the temperature rises and the snow melts, I will hurry to empty them and save the ones not cracked open by the cold. There are bags of planting soil travelling in the back of my old Subaru. Destined to fill the cold frame in preparation for early spring planting, they reside in the car, still. A situation easily remedied. And I should have planted more bulbs, but the next possible planting time is the spring.

Time To Go To Bed?

Will we go to bed? Not more than usual. Suzy and I prefer the winter, although snow, ice, and the salted roads are hard on Oscar’s four feet. Although we have help shoveling and plowing, we are seen with shovels in our hands, often. We’ll enjoy the birds and the other wildlife—I spotted a Canadian Lynx in October and a bobcat yesterday—the deer, the elusive fox, and any other wily creatures we’re lucky to see (right time, right place). The house is cozy and the larder is stocked. There will be just the one hint of spring left to maintain: a small collection of cooking herbs in clay pots. Will I treat them well enough so that they live until it’s safe to go outdoors? Time will tell. For now, they’ve gone to bed.

Go To Bed

In her mystery novel The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers named the gravedigger Harry Gotobed. There is that type of going to bed, for once and all, certainly. Harry helped the villagers with their final sleeping arrangements.

Our cemetery (https://www.constancegemmett.com/every-every-minute/) closed yesterday to interments until mid-April. Covered in snow last night and the quietest place imaginable, it is the essence of going to bed. Gone to bed, asleep. All of our winter preparation, especially the bulb planting, reminds us that we are here temporarily, and with all the hope in the world, will see the sprouting daffodils in April.

 

 

 

 

Previously: My Grandmother, Part I—Belfast https://www.constancegemmett.com/grandmother-part-belfast/

My Grandmother, Part II—Belfast Still https://www.constancegemmett.com/grandmother-part-ii-belfast-still/

My grandmother sat on one end of a couch in her youngest son’s family room. Little kids ran through and around the room, adults stood in the other rooms, drinking, eating, and chatting. It was the collation after my grandfather’s funeral. Pale in her black dress, tears ran down her cheeks. I’d like to write that I comforted her, but I can’t be sure. The sixteen-year-old me was more apt to leave the room.

Miles and Years Away

My grandfather’s life ended, as my grandmother’s would, in Maryland—miles and years from Belfast. Miles from Brooklyn, where they lived for more than 30 years. My grandfather died suddenly at home one evening after dinner. My grandmother told us that they’d had a nice evening, reminiscing about Belfast, telling the old stories, laughing together—not sniping and barking as they often did.

A few months later, my grandmother was diagnosed with leukemia. She died within eighteen months of him. They are buried in Maryland, where they’d moved to be close to their youngest son and his wife, and children. My parents and I lived just south of Nyack on the Hudson River, little more than an hour from my grandparents’s longtime Bay Ridge, Brooklyn home. I was a teenager and on another planet, one where there was less time for my grandparents—still, when they moved to Maryland, I felt abandoned—I was bereft.

The 1920s

My grandmother enjoyed living in her new house at 34 St. Ives Gardens, Belfast, given to the newlyweds by her mother-in-law, after the eldest son John—the former occupant—died. Her married sister Lizzie lived close by on Great Northern Avenue. Her other sisters, Peg and Jinny, probably still lived on Moore’s Place, also not far—but then Belfast is an easily walked city. In 1926 my grandmother gave birth to their first child in that house, and although the birth was breech and the doctor drunk, all was well for mother and child—my mother, named Elizabeth after her maternal grandmother.

From their convenient address, my grandmother had all the shops in the world a few blocks away in one direction (and the money to shop), and the Botanic Gardens and the Lagan River in the other. Her husband’s business—a turf accountancy— was still successful, even though he’d lost his brother and business partner John to consumption in 1922.

Their lives progressed peacefully—Eddie and Aggie had good fortune. The Troubles were quelled, although sectarian violence flared. It flared in a personal direction in early 1930. My grandfather’s business was burned to the ground. Whether it was a business rival or an act of sectarian violence, my grandfather was finished with Belfast. He nearly had been murdered during The Troubles by members of the vicious quasi-police force known as The Black and Tans. Backed up against a wall, rifles in his face, he’d been saved by a passing Protestant minister, who’d lied for him and told the drunken thugs that Eddie was his own parishioner—not a Catholic. After that, he hadn’t much stomach left for any of the violence. After losing the business, he’d had none. He wanted to emigrate.

1930

Talked out of going to Australia by some pal of his at the ticket office, he chose New York (or possibly, the pal did) as their destination. Why he didn’t consider the Free State of Ireland, England or Scotland is unknown. He wanted to go far away—was he threatened by someone, some group? The SS Caledonia  manifest lists the family as passengers on the April 19, 1930 sailing. The ship called at Londonderry before making for the open water of the North Atlantic and the long crossing to New York. Eddie was 37, Agnes 30, and Elizabeth—wee Betty—3. He’d purchased their tickets on the 3rd of February. Peg, still working at the Harland and Wolff shipyard (builder of RMS Titanic) as the manageress of the executive dining room, and her older sister Jinny, moved into 34 St. Ives Gardens.

Agnes must have cried as the tender cut across the lough to the anchored Caledonia. The sight of the beautiful hills burned into her memory as the city disappeared into the mist. She took her last gulps of Belfast air, or so she thought.

Not Quite The End Of Belfast

Settled in an apartment in the Bay Ridge, Eddie managed to get a job with Consolidated Edison in Manhattan—a feat for a foreigner during the Great Depression. My grandmother became pregnant again and planned a return to Belfast for the birth. Whether she hatched this plan on her own or they both agreed at the start is unknown. Eddie still had the money for the passage, and after a difficult birth the first time, she may have been nervous about American hospitals. It is true that she had nobody in America to help her with an infant and a toddler, and three sisters in Belfast. However it was argued, negotiated or agreed, it happened. Less than a year after their arrival in New York, my grandmother and my mother sailed back to Belfast. Eddie stayed in Brooklyn and worked.

Back to 34 St. Ives Gardens

My grandmother and my 4 year old mother moved back into their house, one occupied by her sisters. Close to her due date, my grandmother checked into a maternity nursing home for the birth of her son, Denis, in June 1931.

The trio returned to New York Harbor on May 29, 1932, nearly a year after his birth. What went on during those 11 months? My mother went to the St. Bride’s Primary and Nursery School a few blocks from the house. The school was attached to the church—St. Brigid’s—where both she and Denis were baptized (versions of both exist today). Was Agnes so fearful of an ocean voyage with a baby under 11 months? Or was she writing Eddie and begging him to come home instead? Playing a waiting game? It didn’t work. She brought his children back to him and stayed with him for the rest of her life, in a country she didn’t like. Never to see her sisters or her brothers again.

Settled In Brooklyn

Bay Ridge is a little like Belfast: some high ridges, lots of shops and parks (one the length of the place), and right on the water, The Narrows, where the Hudson River meets the Atlantic. A heavily Norwegian, Italian, and Irish neighborhood, my grandmother never befriended the Irish people, since they tended to be from the south, and so foreign to her. Agnes loved the Scots she met—the family socialized with them, and celebrated Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve) with them.

Whatever her feelings about being in America, her life took up its own rhythm. Both my grandmother and grandfather worked in order to support their three children (the youngest, Michael, was born in Brooklyn in 1933). Eddie worked at night, but he and she also worked as their apartment building’s superintendents—he shovelled coal into the giant furnace and made repairs, while she collected the rents and dealt with the complaints of the tenants. Agnes also took a job as housekeeper to a couple who had their own very popular radio show, broadcast from their Manhattan apartment, Tex and Jinx.

Meanwhile, my grandmother was an expert housekeeper for her own family. She cleaned—scoured—cooked, baked, knit and sewed for them. Decorating and regularly redecorating their apartment, she had good taste imitating a formal, British style: striped wallpaper, black and white tiles in the foyer, large framed mirrors, and heavy, old-fashioned furniture.

As the children grew older, Agnes also settled into keeping secret the fact that she’d converted to Catholicism from her native Protestantism in order to marry their father (he kept the secret too). A secret she kept to the end of her life. The boys served as altar boys, all three attended Catholic schools, and all three attended Mass on Sunday. Agnes never set foot in a church for an ordinary Mass. The occasion had to be special—a wedding, funeral or christening—such as the day the two of us went on a shopping trip in Manhattan and she had me secretly christened in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. I kept that secret from my atheist parents until her funeral.

Butter and Tea

My grandmother complained about American butter, called it “tacky,” and thought the quality of the tea here poor. I never understood until I went to Ireland and enjoyed their butter. To the end of her life, her days were punctuated with the firing up of the tea kettle (my job when I visited). Toward the end of her life, the knitting and redecorating fell by the wayside. Agnes even found that she liked foods like pizza.

Aside from this litany of facts, what was this woman like? Complicated. Agnes had a wicked sense of humor and enjoyed a wheezing, breathless laugh. Bad-tempered and shy, she’d become very heavy in early adulthood and remained so, which increased her self-consciousness. She ate little in front of anyone and suffered the torture of heavy corsets. Her hair was beautiful, as was her skin, even in her late 60s. She liked the sappy TV shows of the day, like The Lawrence Welk Show, and The Andy Griffith Show. My grandmother could be very mean, but also kind, and always generous.

Agnes was a wonderful grandmother to me. Very loving and kind, very generous—she purchased my clothes at Best and Co. Little leather slippers, woolen bathrobes, tartan skirt suits for school—I was a regular Little Lady Fauntleroy. After shopping, we’d stop for lunch at Schrafft’s. Sliced chicken sandwiches, a pot of tea for her and a malted for me—served by waitresses right off the boat from Ireland. Those women had lovely, lilting accents. Not iron hard Belfast accents like she and Eddie had.

As a child, I circled around her as though she were the sun. I loved all the Irish stories, the laughs at the expense of the looney tenants, counting the rents at the kitchen table, watching her cook and bake. Basking in her exorbitant praise. “Mother of God!” she’d say, when I said something with the least bit of intelligence behind it.

It’s difficult to believe that I haven’t seen her in 50 years. I last spoke to her on the phone. Calling from her hospital bed, she told me that she was afraid. “Don’t be afraid, Grandma,” I said. I didn’t say it, so I hope that she knew how much I loved her.

 

 

Previously: My Grandmother, Part I—Belfast https://www.constancegemmett.com/grandmother-part-belfast/

Belfast is a beautiful city. High and unpopulated hills cup the city on the western side. The land tumbles down to the city on the shores of a large and deep lough (lake). The North Channel, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Irish Sea, is just beyond the lough. To the northwest are the shores of Scotland, to the south, the Mourne Mountains. Beautiful views abound from high above the city at Cave Hill, or the Belfast Castle below it, or from the shores of the Lagan River bisecting the city. While walking on the city streets, the hills draw the traveler’s gaze.

A Beautiful City

Belfast is more beautiful now than it was when my grandmother was born in 1899 (the air is clean), but in her youth she had free access to many beautiful sights within walking distance of her house. These included the massive examples of Victorian architecture housing the City Hall, banks, the grand stores of the day, Queen’s University, and the ornate Botanic Gardens. But my grandmother’s life in Belfast was far from grand. It’s certain there was constant scrubbing in her household to stay ahead of the general grime, spewed from the chimneys of the many industries of the early 20^th century.

Defining Moments

Until age ten, my grandmother may have been the cosseted youngest child of eight—certainly her mother, older sisters, and brothers seemed loving in the stories she told. At age ten, two defining events changed her life, turning some promise of a happy childhood into a Dickensian existence.

First, her mother died in 1910. My grandmother remembered leaving her bed at night to visit her mother’s coffin in their parlor, taking her mother’s hand in hers, and sobbing over it. She told me how cold her mother’s hand was—cold, so cold.

Soon after her mother’s death, she was sent to live with an aunt and uncle who mistreated her. The reason she was sent there—she had three older sisters, four older brothers and her father in the house—is lost. What went on exactly is unknown too, never revealed to me—not to her daughter either—but her face became very grave when mentioning the aunt and uncle.

School Days

My grandmother hadn’t much schooling. Her spoken and written English were not always correct, but her handwriting was almost like copperplate and her spelling was good. She counted on her fingers, but held them hidden behind her back because she’d been hit for counting on her fingers. As a young girl, she worked in a tea factory, so her years of education may have ended with that job.

She sang hymns as part of her everyday life—while cleaning, cooking, or sewing—so she must have gone to Sunday school and church, listed on the family records variously as Presbyterian or Church of Ireland (Anglican). Her grandparents, farming in places to the north like Ballyreagh and Bracknamuckley, were listed as Presbyterians on both sides.

Mastering the domestic arts, Agnes was a fine knitter, seamstress, and baker, one with a light touch. Only one of her crocheted garments remains, and the stitching is absolutely perfect.

Youth

Due to the Irish War of Independence there was no census  in 1921 Ireland, so it has not been possible to chase down exactly who lived in the house when my grandmother turned 22. She and her unmarried sisters—at least three of the four sisters— most likely lived with their father and possibly, their brothers. Off the Sandy Row, down the street from the Orange Hall (which is still there), the neighborhood a Protestant, Royal Loyalist/British Unionist stronghold—one in which no Catholic would have ventured willingly during the 1920s Troubles.

Agnes and Edward

Agnes married my grandfather Eddie in July 1924. Before that though, she’d had to meet him—a Catholic man—and how did the two of them accomplish that? However they met, they decided to marry. After instruction in the Catholic faith and her baptism, they married in St. Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church in Belfast. Eddie’s mother, Mary Jane Wright, a very religious Catholic woman, and a powerful one, gave them her blessing.

How did Agnes manage all of that and what steps in these momentous events did she hide from her family? Which of them did she tell first, and when? My mother told me that her father Eddie knew all of her mother’s family, and they all knew him—but was that a rapprochement that occurred after the marriage? Did any of them attend her wedding in a Catholic Church? The witnesses on the marriage certificate are not close family members.

Or was Agnes’s family highly unusual—for the time and certainly the place— in their lack of sectarian prejudice? It seems doubtful, unfortunately, however much they ultimately accepted my grandfather.

The violence of the time must have affected her, but at the same time, it did not affect her. Some of it down to luck, she survived; she learned how to do many things well, and got on with her life. Somehow she met this man, a relatively wealthy man, and reached across the sectarian divide. She converted to his religion, thereby potentially alienating her family, and married him. Throwing her lot in with people against whom there was so much discrimination and violence. However much of that she hid along the path she took, she was brave enough to chance it. She took her chance with him.

Happy Families

Eddie and Agnes settled into his house—a much nicer house than she’d ever known. The house was off the Stranmillis Road, a fairly non-sectarian neighborhood near Queen’s University and the Botanic Gardens. His business was successful and their life was comfortable. It seemed as though Agnes’s bravery was successful, too…until the end of the 1920s.

Dear Readers, this series has been extended—next: My Grandmother, Part III—Belfast to Brooklyn