Planetary Stories Project

"To Act Globally, Think Locally – Through Stories"

Black Earth Institute

Place: Moneen, County Leitrim, Ireland

Homeplace and the Naked Nomad
By Bee Smith

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A couple miles up the mountain from us, in the townland of Moneen, is the Gaffney homeplace. The stone flag floor remains, as does the hearth and chimney and what was once the parents’ bedroom.  On the steps leading up to the house John Joe, now 72 years of age, inscribed his initials and the date he emigrated to England when he was sixteen.  His initials are beside his own uncle who emigrated to America, never to return to Moneen.

In these parts, West County Cavan and County Leitrim in Ireland, there are still memories of ‘the Emigrant’s Wake.’ Imagine a wake – but with a living person in attendance who would be leaving for the boat in the morning. The party would go on all night long, but at dawn the farewells would be made and the emigrant would leave the house. Inside they barred the door and no matter what pleading or keening, either inside or out, the door remained shut. The emigrant was off, out into another world, and if not the Next World, a new one at any rate.

For our friend John Joe, he was able to return to the family homeplace after nearly sixty years away. The county engineer advised that the house was a ruined write-off but they would provide a ‘demountable,’ a prefab one and half bedroom house that could be put on the family land and then a small rent paid for the use of the house.

John Joe duly laid out sticks and string in the place they reckoned would be the best situation for the prefab. If the sticks and string were undisturbed then the layout did not cross a faerie track. If they were disturbed, he needed to scout a different site.

Homeplace is not just ancestral land in terms of genetic family only.

After a peripatetic adulthood spent in two countries, I moved country a third time at age forty-five. We arrived at this border country that straddles two counties as well as the older Irish divisions between Ulster and Connaught.  There is a remnant of the Black Pig’s Dyke in our village – an earthwork fortification to keep the Ulsterman from marauding into Maeve’s territory. And vice versa. The border with Northern Ireland is three and a half miles as the crow flies. It is one of those places where the skin between worlds is thin. We brush shoulders with each other. It is a naturally liminal place where Ireland’s great river, the Shannon, finds its’ source a few miles from our cottage.

I tend to think that the world divides into settlers and nomads. Having found myself living in this sacred landscape I find I admire, perhaps too envy, that heartfelt sense attachment and sense of homeplace in my neighbours.  It is a tangible belonging to a particular location. I have discovered that it is my Earth, but not necessarily my homeplace.

My own ancestors got up and went to the New World in 1620 or thereabouts.  They then dispersed throughout the Mid-Atlantic States and at the beginning of the 20^th century there was a diffusion of kin southwards.  .  I feel as if I am the spawn of a hardy perennial ‘blow in’ stock. ‘Blow ins’ being the term the Irish have for the non-indigenous incomer.  I have long ‘blow in’ lineage.

I have no sense of homeplace. The town where I grew up doesn’t hold that sacred sense. My passport notes that I am a native New Yorker, but we moved when I was three months old. ‘Itchy feet’, that nomadic trait, presented early with me.

But in this lushly biodiverse borderland I have come to feel a sense of rootedness that has taken me by surprise. After living in urban centres for twenty-five years my partner and I made a choice for the country, this wildish landscape that still exhales the spirit of Maeve and Danu and Brigid.

England always held a resonance for me that is probably partly genetic. But when I first clapped eyes on the Irish shore from the Stranraer Ferry in 1980 I felt the land reach out and grab my soul. This was completely unexpected. I had inoculated myself to a lot of Irish republican romancing while at college. But the Land of Eireann – well that became the real romance of my life.

The Belfast boyfriend who took me home eventually fell by the wayside. Then an Armagh man became my lover, partner and soul mate. And he took me home and I was completely entranced by the palpable wildish energy of this country yet again.

Wildish is a particularly Irish term that is used to describe Her women. It is not that they are feral. But then neither are they completely domesticated either.

Let me offer an example of a sentient being who embodies the wildish spirit of homeplace because she was born in this amazing place and the surrounding landscape is her second skin.

We have a little she cat, one of the tribe of faerie cats that were spawned near our local holy well. Her father was a wild cat, black and white with a wholly ginger tail. Neighbours who live beside the holy well found her mother, a fluffy tortoiseshell; we adopted her and she made the transition to domesticated lap cat. Their daughter Zymina, as an absolute principle in her being, must assert her independence. She must be able to roam. She is no fireside pussycat. She hunts. Occasionally, she must stay out all night long. She accepts scratches on her head and will purr in approval. When she deigns to settle in a lap for more than five seconds we feel truly blessed. She will curl up at the bottom of my bed for a snooze. We chat amicably across the duvet; we respect each other’s need for space. I admire Zymina’s spirit.

This is wildish spirit in form. Cat form, but a good metaphor for that wildish feminine streak that runs like a ley line through this land and in many of its womenfolk.

And so too is this landscape where we live. As my neighbour once said, “ you’d not need to plant anything” because nature is busy doing it’s own thing very well, thank you very much.

Our acre hums with bees. Dragonflies swoop into our polytunnel. Moths and butterflies swarm. When our cat is on the hunt we have been brought not only mice and rats, but also pygmy shrews, frogs, toads and horseshoe bats. (You should hear my mantra to Zymina: “ Mice and rats, good cat! Shrews, frogs and bats, bad cat!”) I can watch the indigenous (and endangered) red squirrel from our front window.

And, yes, we do share the acre with faeries, too. It’s taken awhile to get the communication lines clear but we are working much better together these days.  And if you lived here for a few years you would know that their presence is genuine and not just a bit of myth or legend to entertain the children.

We have built a relationship with this acre and planted apple trees and hoaked out ash saplings that could undermine the house foundations. Every spring I haul out more blackberry whips and painstakingly chop them in one-inch snippets to make compost. It is not for nothing that our townland, Cordressogagh, translates as ‘the briary place.’

But we have no interest in imposing a suburban garden plan onto this plot. A quarter of it is cultivated and is enough for two fifty-somethings to be getting on with. The rest is as natural, albeit better drained, as it was when we arrived. We are always being enjoined by other gardeners  ‘to do more with it.’  But it is fine as it is. Frowsy as windswept hair and just as sexy and attractive for it. Wildish style. Just a bit domesticated. But not lost to the pulse of what it truly is.  

Not a homeplace, but a small piece of this great good earth for a nomad to steward.

© Bee Smith 2009

Send her email: bee.smith.dowra@gmail.com