Finding Motherland: Essays about Family, Food, and Migration

By Helen Thorpe

In Finding Motherland, acclaimed nonfiction author Helen Thorpe shares seven essays she has written on the related themes of family, food, and migration. She takes us to the dairy farm in Ireland where her mother grew up, and depicts how Ireland is modernizing with surprising consequences. She describes her family's decision to immigrate to the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Must Read Books
• Release date: Jul 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578707174

Helen Thorpe

Helen Thorpe was born in London and grew up in Medford, New Jersey. Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, and Slate. Her radio stories have aired on This American Life and Soundprint. She is also the author of Soldier Girls and Just Like Us. Her work has won the Colorado Book Award and the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

Book preview

One

Milking

My cousin Donal woke me up this morning. I’m running late, he said. If you hurry, you’ll make it to Mass. I pulled the sleeping bag over my head and pondered my state: not bad, considering. Our cousin Michelle got married yesterday–she’s a cousin to me and to Donal–and everyone in the family had done their best to make certain the day was memorable. My contribution had involved traveling here to Ireland from my home in Austin, Texas and then drinking a strategic amount of Jameson’s.

The last time I saw you, you were suspended somewhere between the floor and the ceiling, my uncle Brendan said, when I finally appeared downstairs. Levitating!

He was referring to the strenuous hopping I resorted to at around two in the morning, having abandoned more complicated dance moves by then. Brendan and his wife Kathleen (my mother’s sister) were turning Donal’s house upside down in search of their son Cormack’s trousers. He had no idea where he’d put them and he was in bed in the next room, giggling. Fifteen minutes later the trousers were discovered in a white plastic bag beside the front door.

I arrived in County Cavan yesterday morning, along with my cousin Caroline. We drove from Dublin to Cornaslieve, the dairy farm where Donal and Caroline and their three siblings were raised. One generation earlier, my mother was raised there, too, along with her nine brothers and sisters. When Caroline and I entered the farmhouse, we found our uncle Ollie, over visiting from his nearby pig farm, beside the coal-burning stove in the main room. Well, he said. How are ye keeping?

My aunt Anna and uncle James, who’ve run Cornaslieve since my grandparents died, came in and asked the same question. We stood around and caught up on the news. I related all the important headlines, about those of us who lived in the United States — my mother, my father, and my two siblings.

Then Caroline and I went upstairs to the bedroom that used to be my grandparents’ room to get ready for the wedding. Every time I enter that room, I remember my grandfather at the end of his life, 90 years old and bedridden. He had been a hard-working, much-respected, community-minded man, a figure who commanded deep respect among his children, but he was two decades older than my grandmother, and I only knew him at the very end of his life. Underneath an image of a wounded Jesus, I pulled on a pair of cream-colored stockings and a navy dress, as Caroline shucked off her blue jeans and slipped into her wedding gear. We put on our makeup by the window, where a chipped plaster statuette of Mary stood beside two crucifixes and several plastic bottles of holy water. I went to look at myself in the bathroom. Out the bathroom window, I could see that the concrete yard behind the house was wet with rain. And over in the hay shed, a line of washing was hanging where it would keep dry.

At the church, my cousin Hugo came striding over, visibly nervous. I helped him hand out wedding programs. Hugo is younger than I, but we are both writers and correspond intermittently by email, so I feel close to him. I thought I knew why he was rattled. His father, my uncle Francie, died in a farm accident several years ago, rending a hole in the fabric of the family. Hugo’s mother, my aunt Nuala, has had a hard time ever since. Now we were gathering to celebrate the first wedding of any of Francie and Nuala’s children. To take Hugo’s mind off things, I said something silly about an episode involving a fire extinguisher that took place after the last family wedding.

Your sister! he said. She’s lethal! She had me drink a bottle of whiskey that night.

The stone church we were standing in was built right after Catholic Emancipation, when Catholics could build churches again. My grandparents were married here, and my parents, as well as most of my many aunts and uncles. Francie and Nuala were married here, too. Now Francie’s buried in the graveyard, beside my grandparents. Michelle arrived in a silver Peugeot, driven by our uncle Ollie. This is so weird! she said as she stepped inside the church. Michelle has pale green eyes and short black hair, and she was wearing a dress of white silk that swirled around her ankles. Her sister Lisa, with pale blue eyes and long black hair, was wearing blue velvet. Ollie walked Michelle up the aisle, to where her betrothed was waiting, and the sight of our bachelor uncle filling in for his missing brother made me need to blink. Hugo, who is in the national choir, had drafted one of Ireland’s best singers to perform during the service. The singer began each song in a fine way, and then soared up into a register that was uncanny. Afterward Nuala called his singing a touch of heaven.

Later I saw her waltzing around the dance floor at Sharkey’s Hotel with a gentleman who had bushy white eyebrows and was very light on his feet. Even when a waitress spilled a jug of ice water down her back, Nuala did not get disheartened; she wouldn’t be the cause of any sadness. Sometime after midnight, magic performers hired by Michelle’s older brother Stephen did an act involving torches and disco music, in which a punked-out girl wearing black leather shorts whirled fireballs around in circles until they became a blurred, dazzling pattern. After that there was a lot of delirious stomping by the wedding guests, and that’s about when I started hopping.

---

Milking starts at 8 most mornings. Today I was up at 6:30, in time to have tea with Donal. We drove over to Cornaslieve in his blue van. It’s a long, hard commute, said Donal, as we traveled the scant distance to the big grey farmhouse that belongs to his parents. He lives almost next door.

We met James and Anna in the courtyard behind the main building. How are ye getting on? asked James. I related an account of our evening at Sharkey’s Hotel, the night before. We had all been there for the wedding reception, but then Donal and I had returned to have dinner with Michelle and her husband, Sean, as well as Sean’s sister Una, my cousin Fergal, my cousin Geraldine, and her husband, Andre. I have dozens of cousins — it’s hard to keep track of them all, even if you are part of the clan.

We had talked for so long that the doors of the nearby pubs were locked by the time we went out for a drink, so we trooped back to Sharkey’s again, sat down beside a fire in the lounge, and talked for another couple of hours. Sean and Michelle will soon leave for Barcelona, where they are going to spend their honeymoon, while Geraldine and Andre will shortly head off to Brussels, where they live.

James and Anna appreciated the update. Living at Cornaslieve, they keep up with all the news, so they can pass it along to every other family member who phones in from wherever they may happen to be. The old-fashioned black dial telephone in the hallway by the front door rings any time something important happens to any member of the clan, and from there, everyone else will soon hear the latest dispatch. It has been this way all my life, though previously my grandmother manned the phone, and now it is her daughter-in-law Anna who does so. James had on his daily farming attire: a tweed cap, an old sweater, a frayed shirt, and a pair of well-worn blue wool trousers tucked into green rubber Wellington boots. Everything he wore had been nice once, but had gotten patchy enough to serve as farm work attire. In the yard, Donal pulled on a medium-blue coverall over his jeans and T-shirt, then tied a brown plastic apron around his waist, to keep himself clean as he milked.

I’d already put on an old rain jacket, knowing I’d soon be covered in splatters of cow shit. I borrowed a pair of black Wellingtons from Anna, and she gave me plastic shopping bags to protect my socks, as one of the boots had a small hole.

The cows were waiting for us inside the milking shed. There are presently forty-eight cows in the herd, twice as many as there were when my mother was growing up here. Most of them are black-and-white Friesians. The bull is a Charolais, however, a big white fellow, with tight curls covering his massive head, and a thick gold ring through his nose. We surveyed each other warily. Donal had a hard time getting a few of the cows into their stalls, as they could smell a stranger in the shed, and kept rearing their heads up to eye me. He milked the cows six at a time, with another six lined up waiting in a parallel row. My grandparents had milked by hand, but Donal used machinery.

The size of the animals has always impressed me, ever since I was a small child, when I used to walk right through the middle of the herd to sit on the ledge of a window on the far side of the shed, a vantage point from which it was possible to survey the milking while looking down onto the backs of the cows. I’m even more aware of just how big the animals are these days; ever since my uncle Francie was killed by a Charolais cow (she had become overly protective of the calf she’d just given birth to). Not long ago, I was driving with my aunt Kathleen down a narrow country lane, when we came upon a herd of cattle being prodded along by a farmer with a stick. The herd engulfed our car. Kate stared at the cows as they slowly lumbered past our windshield. It’s strange to look at animals that you’ve worked with all your life, she said, and to be afraid of them now.

What I feel when I watch the cows being milked at Cornaslieve is an echo of Kate’s sentiment, alongside a sense of gratitude to Donal for undertaking the job of keeping the farm going. All his siblings have left this rural area, covered in a patchwork of fields, for careers in one city or another — Dublin, Brussels, Chicago — but Donal has stayed behind, guaranteeing that the land, the farmhouse, and the telephone number that we all carry in our address books no matter how far away we go, can still function as the heart of our family.

I was no help to Donal that particular morning, but I kept him company as he milked. We talked over the noise of the transistor radio strung from the ceiling, which played fuzzy pop music, and the noise of the milking machinery, which made a perpetual shuck-shuck-shuck sound. Donal told me that he’d been to Scotland with some friends recently, and to Belgium to see his sister Geraldine before that; aside from those two weekends away, he has worked every day of this entire summer. He’s looking forward to taking a trip to Germany in the fall, when the workload at the farm will finally lighten a little, as all the hay will be cut by then.

Once, a few years ago, Donal came to see me in Texas. I showed him around my hometown of Austin, taking him out for barbecue and live music, and then we drove down to the border, where I plied him with tequila in the Mexican town of Nuevo Laredo, and then hired a very large mariachi band in matching turquoise suits to sing Volver for him. We did not seek out a ride in a bicycle taxi, but the taxi driver was so persistent that eventually we climbed in. Donal looked faintly horrified at being put in the position of reclining while another man bent over the handlebars and peddled furiously to ferry us around. Afterward, he said the social position of poor Mexican people relative to their wealthier white American neighbors reminded him of the position of the Irish vis a vis the British. The typical British person functioned with the same sense of mistaken superiority, the same obliviousness.

After he finished milking, Donal punched the last of the recalcitrant cows in their bellies to make them move on out of the shed and then walked the herd up the road to a field. I stayed behind to talk to Con, one of the