"Time Laid Gently on Its Side"

At first, there is the ravishing solitude. The delight of sleeping in, enjoying a lengthy breakfast, followed by an extended reading session. But eventually, this isolation becomes acidic. It tugs at my sanity threatening a delicate balance. Time scratches its way forward these days. My instincts instruct me to escape. To evade today is to erase the present tense. Choose your weapon. Escape how? Into yet another television production more common than the virus itself? Into another book that taunts with its radiant brilliance. Up to a point, this works well. But finally, it is the past’s gentle sway that lures me away. It turns out the prescient resides somewhere behind me.

I begin with a new goal designed to fill conspicuous lumps of time. Digging up my family history should do the trick. After much ruffling of papers, I compile a skeleton of an anecdote. 1821. This date becomes the fulcrum between Ireland and Canada. That alone keeps me debating deep into the evenings. The family survives the voyage, all ten of them. No daily replenishment of fresh towels. No cocktail hour. Fair to say no appearances requested at the captain’s table.

On the Irish side of my see-saw, I see William, the fifty something year old working at a mill in a remote village in a tiny county. It sounds like the beginning of a story. But this village is not showing up on internet searches. It was so small and so quaint, it simply ceased to exist. In a place that is not… I am without a solid foundation for a story. Start again.

All because the story I am personally living today has ceased to move in a forward direction. Did I already say that? The nothing to do out there has turned into a gargantuan need to do something in here, in solitude involving paper, pen and a computer although we are not on speaking terms all that often. I need to make the effort; I hear you saying. I do realize this. I guess I should also stop rolling my eyes at people who, first, insist on excavating their family’s intriguing past and then, proceed to dump all this detritus on your doorstep. Oh, it is a sizable manifestation of aging. This I also realize. I give up. It is happening. I am part of that banal tradition with a garish gold bow on top. 

All I need to do is glue together the years. Glue together the countries, glue together the people, my people. The deeper I get, the stickier the whole process. I cannot get out now. The more detail I collect, the more parallels I find to the now, my now. My mild astonishment grows into a kind of sick satisfaction. A biological dependence.  Not unlike the junkie, I simply move forward to fulfill requirements. We are all on this planet taking our turn. When will our turn be over? That’s all. After all.

To work. So, around the finish of the 16th century, my great (x4, I think?) Grandfather William woke up thinking his time was up in some way, in some sense. The mill was running out of money. He was laid off. Possibly. He could not afford to feed his large family. Apparently, this was yet another juncture in time where the cost of food was remarkably high. The worry of feeding such a large family would have weighed heavily, a kind of wound that never healed. He opts to take a chance. A huge risk for a huge result.

William’s body ached from unending hard physical graft. A sharp edge of restlessness persisted in his heart and mind. No matter the number of times he turned away from his thoughts of change, they persisted. Another surge forward to examine increasingly outlandish hypothetical territory. Outlandish especially to his brother’s thinking. While William was born with an itch for the unusual, his brother grew conservatism by the bushel. Alexander lived in a distant Northern county with only four children. He refuses to attempt to understand William’s particular approach to life’s challenges. As a literate man in an era when the head of the household was indeed male, William had to wrestle with most family decisions under his stern and lonely conscience. Perhaps he kept a journal, long since returned to dust. A lovely thought but unlikely.

Ireland’s circumstances were assaulted with change. In 1798, there was the revolt followed closely by the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. William’s family was Protestant from the north but now living in the south. Would he have pressure from his largely Catholic neighbours. Religious rift acted like a particularly personal sandpaper always rubbing in the wrong direction. Gnawing concern reminded him how quickly his status as a successful mill worker could change. This is home and yet am I exposing this family to time release volatility. Where would be better?

Probably best to make the change before the eldest, John decided to wed. What would happen if they all left for London? A thriving city with employment options but perhaps being Irish might mean an uncomfortable, unwelcoming environment. Any savings they had would be dramatically depleted after this journey. One chance to find a new home where a family can begin again, become truly established and become part of a new world.

This is just my story of course. Because I cannot possibly know what William and his wife, and their eight children were thinking but I can guess there was some controversy. Fascinating to contemplate about real people we learn little pieces about, especially in today’s context where my big decision is whether I will have a cup of coffee or tea. Back to my minutiae.

I force the silence. It makes it harder, but it is more truthful. No radio, no vinyl, not until evening. I am alone and need to become a strict enforcer to finish another day. Accomplish something now. The pressure is unfriendly but overall fair. I have books stacked around the laptop. They are in the way. I no longer have room to write in a notebook. Two of these literary tomes have decorative ribbons drooping out of pages. They mock me. How much have you read and what are you going to do about it? Do you have any understanding? Do you even deserve these volumes? You need to earn this. Will you write something? I stare at the cursor pulsing and think of open wounds.

After a certain amount of sweating, a great deal of staring and a healthy dose of reproach, I leave William and his entire family on their own. I have made it through half of another day. Perhaps not accomplished but passed through. I turn on the news and open a bottle of wine. Please do not bother commenting on the number of empty bottles that line the kitchen floor. We all have our methods.

The wine is lovely with a polite burn spreading down into my absorbent limbs. Suddenly a wave of fatigue sweeps over me. This is not scheduled or permitted but I am well-nested on this couch. I am gone in no time.

I am running across an open field.  I recognize it only vaguely. My heavy footfall sinks into a gelatinous mud that clamps onto dead flattened grass and dried weeds of last summer. Edges of grey earth growing towards daylight. In the distance, a small coppice of trees forms a serrated silhouette against the slate backdrop of sky. Stone boundaries indicate the human need to order, to delineate. I am running hard and fast now.  Far too aged for this, my throat strongly objects with a raw slicing pain down one side of my windpipe. My breath struggles to warn me to take care of my burdened heart. My compulsion is for speed, to never give in to slowing. I sense this land has not been tainted with my own experience until this moment.

I do not understand why I find myself here. As I wonder, I fall. The punctuation of my toe slamming into the tip of a limestone slab results in my slow-motion lurch towards ground where a staccato impact steals my air supply. A rock has attacked my right knee. While I roll over to sit up and nurse my unfortunate joint, I further survey the landscape. My breath slows. With grievous knee in hand, I notice a minor sized roadway tracing the field’s edge and a passing car. An assertive wind manhandles the stray dried brush that has remained partly upright after what must have been an angry long winter. The occasional bird makes its presence known with a meek chirp and a couple of swoops. The earth under me is icy and wet and has begun to sink into my clothes. I shift my weight. My curiosity about the possible significance of this land begins to take over my actions. I find myself excavating the tightly packed earth by forcing my fingers through the tangled strands of dead plants. The tiny roots and pebbles define chill. My damp air cooled skin settles down into my bones. I can smell the soil’s musty smudge of the centuries. I pick clods of dirt from under my fingernails and ponder the insistent quality of nature. Its temperatures, its moisture levels, its cycle of ever-changing appearance. Nature is running this earth, not us, and it will decide when to take us down. That is when the time for our turn, our shift of earthly experience runs out.

At the foot of the field, I spot a ruined structure. I pull myself up and limp my way ahead. The mountains framing the landscape scrutinize my every move. I am not accustomed to their authority. I need to adapt to the scale of these monsters. I have seen them in oversized books and on the internet, but this is real. They do watch us, and they do assert in ways that go unnoticed. Another building appears, a church completely intact. An excellent discovery for filling in further details about the place and history of the people in it. Imagine the utter faith and loyalty involved in the designing and building of this structure. To understand what this building represents is crucial to understanding my past family members.

I move first toward the home that might reveal the edges of a story. Clusters of hawthorn bush gather around the fringe of the tiny building. I push through with a few light scratches. The chimney remains intact quite neatly balancing on its fireplace with one undamaged wall and part of another. No roof of course, probably thatch originally. The grass in this space is not tangled like the rest of the field. Here it is as if someone combed all the strands into a soft bed of hair. When the summer triumphs, it will be a bright green head of hair. I plant myself in the surviving corner on a nest of withered sedge. I can look straight up to the rancid sky and read the foreboding forecast. It's still a home. It has remnants, memories to draw upon.

I believe I know where I am, but I am slow to reveal it to myself. I was not born here but the earth feels the same. The plentiful stones, pebbles and rocks have similar forms. They assert themselves. The tufts of grasses, weeds and brush all could be home. They reach in the same directions, with the same familiarity. They follow the seasons’ changeable instructions year after year. The undulating hills promise to take you where you need to go. The damp earth of early spring warns to not get too close. Simultaneously, it beckons with moldy intrigue. The distant trees could be the very same ones that line my grandparents’ farm. As I had trudged across the stubbled terrain, I had found a new reassurance. This is home. This is not home.

From deep inside my childhood, I have collected all those feelings, smells, sights and sounds from what is now firmly labeled the past. And yet the fields where I ran and explored could have been here. The gashes in the mud came from heavy dangerous animals. I used to like to skip over these nooks and crannies after the animals had returned to the barns. Then the field would belong to me. All the perfect tiny wildflowers soon to be trampled or digested or die out, only to return the following spring. The tiny busy insects dutifully fulfill their assigned tasks without question. With a child’s certainty, I know I will last forever. Time is infinite. Not like those old people in the house. Children are blessed with the temporary belief that they are basically untouchable. While they can face certain fears brushing past them, they have not yet detected their mortality. Soon, that early stage of life shall be firmly lost to the past, their past, our past. Quiet evaporation.

This is what I keep returning to. Something compelled these people to go somewhere else. Something made my family go even though their lives were not in immediate danger. The why is speculative but the end of the story is filled in. All ten members of the family survived the journey and continued to work in mills and farms. In their own new fresh fields, in their self-built homes, with their own gardens, collections of trees, their own dirt and stone, their unique crop of family bones.

And now, here I sit entirely alone in a stone house in Ireland or rather a stone ruin beside a stone church. I know now that I must be in William’s home.  The church beckons me to approach but I am so very tired now. The magnificent Celtic crosses watch over me as they watch over the centuries. I close my eyes to their whispered messages knowing I can investigate them later. A soft gratification covers my sleep. All my ghosts are here. That’s all. After all.