Retirement in the Mix: Resisting "Gone": Forty shades

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My partner and I just returned from a two-week Road Scholars trip to Ireland, a much-needed break after a wild few months for us both. More to the point, it was a long-awaited opportunity to spend some time on this gorgeous, complicated island. I’d heard for years about how beautiful Ireland is, and I’d seen plenty of pictures that proved the point. I’d also heard about “the troubles” that dominated Ireland’s political story in the late 1900s and about the potato famine that decimated the land in the mid-1800s. But, to be honest, I didn’t know much about either of those things, only the rather simplistic interpretations I'd gleaned from reading US-centric textbooks and news reports. It turns out I had much to learn on all counts, and the experience inspired me to re-ignite my enjoyment of blogging with photos and tales from the “Emerald Isle.”

To that end, I want to launch what may be a (short) series of blogs with something simple and overview-ish.

At the end of our time in Ireland, the group we were traveling with, which included 24 tourists and a native guide, had a farewell dinner where folks were invited to share a thought, a song, a poem dedicated to the trip. I usually avoid these things, but at my partner’s suggestion, I wrote a limerick—a fitting form for Ireland—that wrapped up some of the trip’s highlights. I share it here not as a thorough travelogue but as an introduction to some thoughts I’d like to explore over another blog or two. It’s also a chance to stick in a few pictures to illustrate the verses.

So here it is, my untitled ode to two weeks spent in Ireland in the company of other “Road Scholars”:

There once was a gang from the states

Whose journeys were joined by fate

To Ireland they came

Road Scholar their name

And Béibhinn their chosen first mate.

Blue sheep and milk cattle they spotted

Large rocks all the countryside dotted

The castles of yore

The steep Cliffs of Mohr

They traveled the west coast besotted (with love for the scenery, that is)

They learned about boats made of logs

And bodies left dead in the bogs

Of peat that was burned

And Orange who yearned

To rule all of Ireland, that dog!

Potatoes were often a theme

They came mashed, sliced & diced, cooked by steam

But they stand as a marker

For years so much darker

When their absence meant times deadly lean

These folks shared “short walks” lasting hours

‘long cliff sides and pathways and bowers

They viewed museums and homes

Explored churches and tombs

And found feminism somewhere still flowers

They ate creamed soups until they were bloated

And drank “one more pint” ‘til they floated

Most had hoods for their heads

Stopped when signals were red

And “whisperers” faithfully toted.

On and on this long limerick wends

A long story my poetry sends

It goes on not because

Of poetry’s laws

But because I can’t think of an end .

(Closed by on over-sized 'full stop' in honor of James Joyce, who closed his book Ulysses with just such a period.)

Despite the fun of writing that limerick, though, my poetic sense was actually much more happily awakened when one of our local guides, describing the scenery along the coast of the Dingle peninsula, recited the lines of a Johnny Cash song, "Forty Shades of Green."

I close my eyes and picture the emerald of the sea

from the fishing boats at Dingle to the shores of Donadea

I miss the River Shannon and the folks at Skibbereen

the moorlands and the meadows with their forty shades of green

(You can listen to Johnny’s version here)

I found myself repeating the last line over and over as we wound along the coast of western Ireland. Everywhere, we saw green—not, as these lines reminded me, a single color, but countless shades of green. Most of western Ireland is very rocky, and the local farmers (mostly peasants in the old days, often tenant farmers) had to clear the fields of rocks in order to plant crops (almost entirely potatoes) or raise livestock. So they built rock walls, which served many purposes: they provided a place to pile the rocks and they marked off each farmer’s plot(s).

Many of these plots are tiny, both because there were so many rocks and because peasants often had only small holdings—they got smaller and smaller as fathers divided land among sons. Since any land is precious, the plots are sometimes in improbable places, running up and down steep slopes as well as across meadows. Those old walls and the small plots they delineate remain today, so many farmers now own multiple plots, often scattered among others’ plots over an area of acres or miles. The impulse to demarcate one’s land, whether owned or farmed as a tenant, seems so strong that all across Ireland, people fence off, wall off, and hedge off their property. Where the land is less rocky, as it is farther inland, fields are often separated by hedgerows.

A few examples of scenes in forty shades: