Green grow memories of Ireland past

Long ago I came to think of this pleasant seasonal disorder as a welcomed greening of the spirit.

It always begins deep in the subconscious, just as the days grow longer, the wind finally loses its midwinter bite, and the snow melts enough for the bare earth to yield to the warm embrace of the sun.

By this time each year, without fail, the old feeling wells up until it spills over into fleeting daydreams and easy conversation that, provided the company is good and there’s beer on hand, can stretch long into the night.

This annual greening is not just about the quickly advancing spring, although it is the season of rebirth that sets it off – spring, that is, and baseball and shamrocks in the store windows and the talk of St. Patrick’s Day on the streets.

This greening of the spirit is about Ireland, in other words, about having visited a magical place only once in your life and then carrying its memory forever in your heart.

Of all the places I’ve seen, and all the people I’ve met, Ireland stands apart in its power to linger lovingly in the imagination. Two decades of springtimes have passed since I set foot there, yet I have never forgotten what it looked like or smelled like or, most of all, what it felt like.

Over the years I’ve learned that I’m not alone in this regard. Everyone I know who has ever visited Ireland, even once, has returned with a similar impression of the place. Ireland attaches a string to your heart as you leave and tugs at you across the miles until you go back.

I’ve been feeling the tug lately, as St. Patrick’s Day nears, and as always it evokes the old images that are as vivid to me now as they were when I was lucky enough to roam that misty green landscape for the first time.

I wonder, for instance, whether the apple-cheeked woman is still living in that rambling old house in the harbor town of Cobh, where we spent a couple of days. If so, is she still whistling those mournful tunes in the mornings as she irons the bedsheets for her guests? Does the postman still come around for tea, and to chat about the neighbors as his leather mail pouch droops at his feet?

I don’t think I’ve ever slept in a bed so comfortable as the one in that house, the one with the hot-water bottle beneath the blankets that dispelled the damp chill of those rainy nights.

A few sips of Guinness and I’m reminded, too, of the windswept hills of Connemara where the ponies roamed, and the hilarious night spent carousing with a few young Dubliners who desperately wanted to introduce us to their beloved city, the real one that the tourists never get to see.

I can close my eyes and in an instant be back in Kerry, to the pub where the dairy farmers smelled faintly of cream and cows and where a bunch of us talked the night away about our common ancestors while an oily peat fire burned blue in the corner.

Before I know it, I’m sitting again in that shadowy pub in the west of Ireland, the one with the comical outdoor urinal set under the trees, when the old man walks in from the rain. I can see him stroll silently to the bar up front, turn to the rest of us, clear his throat and begin to sing. I can hear another voice behind me join in the refrain, and then another and another, until the sad song is done and the old man drinks his half-pint, smiles, tips his cap and is gone.

Another Guinness and I can almost dream myself back to that village butcher shop, too, where the kindly owner and his family opened the doors to us long after closing time and made us guests at their dinner table. And where the teenage son later followed us home on his decrepit bicycle and rambled on about his wish to go to America.

These many years later, I can still recall the family near Ennis who, with a penny whistle, accordion, guitar and four voices, bestowed on us the beautiful ancient gift that is Irish music played straight from the soul.

And somewhere on that enchanted island is the most unusual road I have ever traveled on. It began as a busy two-lane road through a village, narrowed to one as it snaked through the countryside, and then kept right on narrowing until it disappeared altogether beneath our wheels, without warning or apology, somewhere on a high ridge overlooking castle ruins ringed with sheep.

I can’t be sure that the mysterious Irish road to nowhere still exists, but I plan to get back one day and find out. Perhaps in the springtime.