Roots

Well

since I had not made plans for last night's accommodations, we found ourselves back in the small bay-town of Kinvara, in the hostel on the trickle of the Galway Bay.


In the past two days I have met four relatives, seen my great grandmother's home, and seen the gravesite/stone of relatives that date back to the 1700s.

Oh, I said, I DO belong here!


Imelda is a kind, gentle woman that fed us till we thought we were going to explode. Her treats fed us for the last two days after we'd left her home (mostly because she sent us with a bag of them). She flipped through photographs of relatives, cousins, aunts, uncles, my great grandmother's family. We absorbed stories of our ancestors long into the afternoon and when she finally dropped us back off at our hostel, it was with joy in our hearts that we waved her off.


Speaking of hostels: the hostel in Galway was an interesting experience. We were in a room overlooking the harbor of Galway Bay (the other side from Kinvara) where the fishing boats dock when then come into port. The street below the window was filled with the bustle of the outskirts of city life--where the sailors come and go and where the businessmen walk on their way home from work.

The hostel was filled with everything from Americans to Germans to Scandanavians ... name it, we saw it. At ten, the city exploded with noise (the sun doesn't go down till 10:30 here) and we laid in our small rectangle of a room and waited for it to die down. I went downstairs till 11, hoping everyone in the hostel would go to sleep once the common room closed down, but the hostel just got louder after that when everyone returned to their rooms with the paper-thin walls and we listened all night to the creaking and rustling of backpackers in their beds.

Once we finally did doze off, I woke at four am to the loud, creaking sound of a large fishing boat coming into the harbor outside our open window. As it approached the air filled with the sharp scent of rust and fish and the voices of the sailors filtered through the dimly lit morning air (the sun rises round 4:30/5).

The merry sailors poured into Galway and down the streets and the city life woke up again.

When I went for a walk the next morning, the streets and the harbor were littered with still-drunk sailors and foreigners.

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Here the wind blows like it knows something, and like the eyes of the locals when they listen to a story. And they LISTEN, friends: I find myself story-telling to a rapt audience whose only reaction to the words is reflected in the shifting gaze of attentive smiles.

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We move north now and I am reluctant to leave the slow south behind.