Even now, near 30 years since, when I turn to the south-west in Ennis from Shannon, and head out the peninsula that ends at Loop Head, and somewhere on that road get my first wind of turf smoke, I remember the first time and the sense I had then of coming home. "The name's good," the man in the customs hall had said, letting my bag pass without a look. I had a $100 in my pocket, the stub of a one-way ticket from Detroit to Shannon and the whereabouts of my cousins, much removed, committed to memory: Moveen West, Kilkee, Co Clare. It was February 1970. I was 21.
"How long are you home for?" everyone asked. My knowledge of Tommy and Nora Lynch and a home in west Clare "on the banks of the River Shannon" began over Sunday dinners at my grandparents'. To the grace he would recite before turkey and gravy, my grandfather would add, "and don't forget your cousins, Tommy and Nora Lynch on the banks of the River Shannon, don't forget". Then we would sit and pass the dishes; the people and place names familiar and mysterious like prayers we learn to say before we learn the meaning of them. He himself had never met them - Tommy and Nora, his first cousins, son and daughter of his father's brother. His father, my great-grandfather, another Tom Lynch, had left west Clare in the 1890s and come to Jackson, Michigan for steady work in the prison there and the Studebaker factory. He never returned to Ireland. Nor had my grandfather or father. I was the first back.
My mother's people, O'Haras from Sligo and Graces from Kilkenny, had lost all interest in or knowledge of their townlands. And my father's people, most of a century and 4,000 miles removed, hung by this little ritual thread of remembrance - "Bless us O Lord . . . Tommy and Nora . . . banks of the Shannon . . . don't forget." Some things change and some things don't. The thatch on that cottage in 1970 gave way to slate and the great, open hearth has been enclosed and storage heaters and back boiler installed. There are more appliances and less cooking, somehow. There's a phone now, and a toilet and TV. But the flagstones are the same - the thick walls, the deep windows, the wind off the ocean, the dark of night, the roaring of cattle in the cow-cabins. Tommy died the year after I met him and Nora lived on, a sound woman on her own there until she died - the Lord've mercy - almost 90, in 1992. She changed my life, I think I changed hers. From Nora I learned to make tea, milk cows and fish mackerel; to be wary of clergy, welcome the stranger, thankful for neighbours, content when alone. I learned the meanings of a cat with its back turned to the fire, shoes left on a table-top, to walk the coast road. I learned to watch the sods reddening, the white ash of good turf, the blessing of a warm hearth in the worst of weathers. I learned the mysterious idioms of west Clare where the power of prayer and faith and doubt and wonder. It was Nora Lynch who taught me these. I was her Yank, the one who came back, albeit generations late, and kept coming back year after, from the first, with news of Michigan and her American family. And after her brother died, I took her on her first trip to the US to see the places so many of her family and her friends had disappeared to. She made four trips in all to the States, the last one the summer before she died. She left the house, her home, to me.
It was the home my great-grandfather left a century ago and never saw again. And sometimes, sitting in the west window there, I see what Tom Lynch must have seen, looking out at Newtown and the sea coming up in Goleen and the mouth of the Shannon agape in the southwest - a geography that he looked past for his future, and the one I look on for a glimpse of the past. He left Clare with a tin footlocker, with most of his life in front of him but few choices. I return now twice a year, with most of my life lived but with more options. I bring a laptop and modem.
Back in Michigan, I get The Irish Times online and the Clare Champion in the mail. I bring tea back in my suitcase and get books mailed from Kenny's in Galway. I have e-mail and phone calls from my neighbours in west Clare. Here or there, I'm never far from home. And sometimes, sitting there, warming my hands to the fire, I think of Nora sitting, warming hers, and remember her sure faith and her long years and the sense she had that life repeats itself. " 'Twas Tom that went," she'd say, "and Tom that would come back."
Thomas Lynch is the author of two collections of poems. His book of essays, The Undertaking - Life Studies From The Dismal Trade was published by Jonathan Cape earlier this year. He lives and works in Milford, Michigan, where he is a funeral director, and in west Clare.
