Fallen Leaves Return to Their Roots: Written by Damien Fox

By Damien Fox

I’d imagine most adults look back on childhood with a sentimental longing, but only a fraction have the good fortune to reflect on a childhood spent caught between two worlds: juxtaposed between the American cities that Ireland’s youth flocked to in the eighties and the idyllic country homes they left behind.

And that’s where a crowd like my siblings and I come in.

We were the anchor babies — the real cowboys — lassoing different lives across continents. One life as quasi-pioneers on the proverbial American frontier, not a blood relation beyond our parents and each other in sight, and the second where for three or four weeks a year, we lived carefree against a West Clare backdrop, that was to us, as magical as Camelot or Tír na nÓg.

Life would have been simpler had we kept heads down in America and never looked back. Or, similarly so, had my parents built lives in quiet Irish country bungalows with us kids kitted out in jumpers adorning the local school crests. But what fun would that have been? Instead, in Chicago, we drew up homemade calendars that counted us down to our transatlantic journey through twilight into Shannon, beckoning us to experience the sheer excitement of our second lives that was equal parts utterly foreign, and yet so inherently familiar.

Words almost can’t do these trips home to Ireland justice, so we’re left with the humorous anecdotes from days gone by to bring us back in our mind’s eye to the innocence of the time. These stories warm and comfort us as much as the hot water bottle left in under the duvet on a cold winter’s night — always a novelty to us, the weary traveler.

Stories like when at 3 or 4 years old, I, the little Yank, tugged on my mother's blouse to inquire as to why Granda was putting dirt (turf) into the oven (the range). Or, when during a visit to a neighbor, how my parents sat in anxiety for fear one of their three American children would comment on the smell of slurry protruding into the house as we feasted on our Kit-Kats. Spoiler: we didn’t.

In the nineties and early aughts, nothing beat the unparalleled freedom of being let run the village after mass on a Sunday. Off quick to the shop with pocket money for sweets, checking in to the pub so often for a bottle of orange and a pack of Taytos. It was something so simple, yet so exhilarating. 

You’d never get away with that in America.

Coming home to Ireland in those days came with a degree of lawlessness that all holidays have, the kind of simple and innocent rule breaking of the time. The perfect opportunity for Nana to arrange with Dad that if I went out for a day to save hay, he’d take me for a driving lesson. We both kept up our side of the bargain, and I stopped short of begging for a medically-induced coma to recover from my first (and probably last) day working on the land.

When not with cousins for sleepovers, playing Blind Man’s Buff and near overdosing on sugar, we as children sat quietly year over year in the tidy parlors of older neighbors and relations. Flanked on one end of the room, the dresser and all its willow-patterned finery, on the other, the range. Looking over all, was The Sacred Heart — the nucleus of the home. As an adult, I think of the simple and quiet lives these folks lived, with near-constant hard work and faith as their North Star, and how happy and appreciative they’d be to see us call in each time. It was an early lesson on life and living and the kind of legacy we can, and should want to, leave behind. 

It’s many years later, and the visits to the parlors in these country houses have been swapped with solemn walks between headstones in the local parish graveyards. There are no more Kit-Kats and bottles of orange, but rather a sprinkle of holy water and a quiet moment with prayer and memory, the two often looking so alike.

In present-day Chicago, on a Thanksgiving or Christmas night, we’ll sit as a family around the table with a drink as tunes from Big Tom or Margo or PJ Murrihy fill the room. Alongside the music, our stories of bygone years and these trips home. We’ll laugh and we’ll cry and we’ll hold space for these memories we shared together.  For decades, we’ve bridged two worlds (and still do) and have been blessed beyond words for the opportunity, and the invitation, to do so.