Apples in Eden

Sonraigh is the Irish word for, particularize, specify, define, perceive, distinguish

I wonder if moving to Ireland has made me foreign to myself. It's 4:02 AM and I've been awake for the past two hours. Not anxious or fretful. Awake. This foreignness seems to originate in my being away from nearly all of the people and geography that has helped to shape me for the past (dare I say it?) 50 years. Do I notice my aging here more because it's out of context--something that was gradual and daily in America; but, in relocating, sudden and pronounced after a day of digging new beds and moving sods. Does my body forget that it has gardened much of it's life because it is gripping a different soil, or is it still in a kind of transplant shock? I have friends here--kind and interesting people; but, our history is via their history with Frank. I'm grafted into lives here as opposed to being rooted in America. Still, this is the first place I've lived since I was a girl, where I have enough land to put down roots and the land that I look out upon in every direction is breathtaking--Ben Bulben to the East and Knock na Rae to the West. Ireland still has a 100,000 welcomes. Caed Mille Failte. Today my apple trees arrived. One Irish Pitcher and two White Croftons from Irish Seed Savers. They are all native to Sligo. I may not be native; but, I am home.

"John Chapman"

He wore a tin pot for a hat in which

he cooked his supper

toward evening

In the Ohio forests. He wore

a sackcloth shirt and walked

barefoot on feet crooked as roots. And everywhere he went

The apple trees sprang up behind him lovely

as young girls.

No Indian or settler or wild beast

ever harmed him, and he for his part honored

everything, All God'screatures! thought little

on a rainy night,

of sharing the shelter of a hollow log touching

flesh with any creatures there; snakes,

raccoon possibly, or some great slab of bear.

Mrs. Price, late of Richland County,

at whose parent's house he sometimes lingered,

recalled: he spoke

only once of women and his gray eyes

brittled into ice. "Some

are deceivers," he whispered, and she felt

the pain of it, remembered it

into her old age.

Well, the trees he planted or gave away

prospered, and he became

the good legend, you do

what you can if you can; whatever

the secret, and the pain,

there's a decision: to die,

or to live, to go on

caring about something. In spring, in Ohio,

in the forests that are left you can still find

sign of him: Patches

of cold white fire.

From American Primitive Poems by Mary Oliver

Tags: Siol: Irish for seed