Spears of Hope

from The Connacht Tribune, January 15, 2021

On that momentous day, March 12 2020 – as our Taoiseach Leo Varadkar invoked the attention of the Irish nation from Washington DC – my family and I were remembering our father who died on that same day, fifteen years ago.

I lived near Boulder, Colorado then, but got home in time to spend the final precious days with him. After a well-lived, almost 88 years old life, he slipped away quietly of a Saturday evening. We stayed with him for a few hours after, absorbing the finality, a lonesome, visceral process, the unwelcome reality of loss settling itself irrevocably into my core.

Afterwards we acknowledged the privilege it was to be there; to hold him to the end, to reassure him with words, touch and kisses, to thank him for how he fathered us, to hold him tight while gently letting him go.

The good men in my family took care of logistics; priest, undertaker, choosing a coffin and organising grave-diggers. I left them at it and drove to our holiday home – now our forever one in Craughwell, about twenty-five miles south.

Passing the derelict house in Ballagh, Menlough, where my father was born, I pulled into the yard gate and in the headlights of the rental car saw them; swathes of bright yellow, swaying daffodil heads, ribboning up both sides of the buxus-bordered gravel path from gate to front door, scattered around the lawn and leaning out from beneath the laurel hedges.

I found a rusty spade head in the turf shed and dug up a clump from the back garden; heavy wet soil brought comfort to my cold hands, the physical task a mythical connection, tears dropping down my face into the soil of my father's place of origin as I eased the earthy, fleshy bulbs from the earth where a century earlier my grandmother had planted them.

Back in our kitchen, I washed the dauby north Galway clay from my Ballagh bulbs and stood them in water. My father's funeral took the requisite three days, the daffodils perked up in their new environment until a week later when I was packing to leave and they were brown-frayed and wilting.

Unbeknownst to the strictly, law-abiding husband (and contravening USA import goods rules) I carefully dried my Ballagh bulbs, wrapped them in newspaper and packed them into my black – respectable enough for a father's funeral – knee-high boots.

Shannon to Chicago on Aer Lingus, United Airlines to Denver, only disclosing my secret stash to law-abiding husband about an hour out from DIA. Into confessional mode I went and was not met with absolution but penance, he went on about sniffer dogs and visiting me in the state penitentiary!

In October 2005, I planted them in full sun outside our Colorado kitchen window, where despite heavy snowfall and below freezing temperatures, just after Christmas their tiny green spears pierced the frozen ground.

By the first anniversary of my father's death in March 2006, they presented as a modest bunch, shorter and a couple of shades paler, more country butter than iridescent and not as various and frilly as the Rocky Mountain natives.

In October 2006 we made the move back to Galway, sold our house, packing all evidence of our Colorado life into a forty-foot container. I dug up my Ballagh bulbs, potted them in red Colorado earth and packed them snugly into a sturdy wooden crate.

Back home when we unpacked the container, I brushed the red earth away and planted them in more familiar soil, in a border by the front door, where every year since, in January and February I delight in their emergence, considering their journey and survival from a year in a strange place.

January 2021, they are already promising a fine March display, and just like my bulbs, communities have survived and will recover from this traumatic, social earthquake year, one that is rounding itself out with gleaming positivity; successful vaccines coming in multiples for a virus that was unheard of a year ago, societies tuned in to our planet, mother earth and nature celebrated.

Like my Ballagh bulbs, after their away year, human society might emerge a little paler but robust and resilient in so many other ways. By March 12 2021, all my daffodils will be dancing their pretty little heads off around my garden, a fitting metaphor for nature's brilliant continuance, despite, or even to spite, a pandemic.