PADDY RYAN recalls the love and care with which his neighbours dispatched a box of shamrock to the US each year

 

It was an annual ritual for my neighbours to purchase at least two small boxes with shiny, emerald green lids, about a month before Saint Patrick’s Day. These were to be filled with the best shamrock they could unearth in their garden or the hillside beyond.

From the age of five or six, I looked forward to this ritual as it marked something special in the cold and dreary aftermath of a distant Christmas.

As they had no grandchildren, Johnny and Min effectively became my surrogate grandparents. I usually visited them after school and got more attention than at home. And in those pre-television days, their American photograph albums were often produced on wet afternoons.

I loved the stories about his brothers and sisters who had emigrated, mainly to New York. However, by the time I came into their lives, only his younger brother, Phil, was still living. And most of their conversation on the photos centred on Phil whose Irish wife had died some years earlier.

Johnny seemed to have a special bond with his younger brother, while Min, was affectionately known as ‘Aunt Min’ to his daughters who corresponded frequently. Therefore, selecting and sending the shamrock from home was very important to both and Johnny, like a judge in the Chelsea Flower Show, carefully selected the sprigs that he already saw his brother and nieces proudly sporting in New York.

Talking of the siblings who had emigrated to the US, he recalled the lonely journey to the rail connection for Cobh. He had accompanied each departure where the same ritual took place. Halting near a bridge, a few miles from the station, they broke the seal on the bottle of whiskey. I now understand it was their anaesthetic to dull the parting.
Bottle drained, they buried it beneath a beech tree where it would be joined by another when the next sibling was taking the same route. “And,” he concluded, ‘there were no more bottles after our Phil.”

He brightened considerably showing the photograph of Phil’s home in Long Island. And Min would always add ‘by the sea.’ They discussed how, with his gratuity from the railway company for which he’d worked for many years, Phil had purchased the house, delighted to move out of the city.

Seventy years later, I can still see that brown-sepia photograph of the two-storey house with striped awnings protruding from the upper windows. On either side of the path to the front door, a tall cordyline tree stood waving gently in the summer sun. Deck chairs were strewn on the lawn.

Exotic is an understatement as I imagined our shamrock being delivered there.

A doubt that Phil and his daughters would not be participating in the Grand Saint Patrick’s Day parade in New York was never entertained. They explained how Irish emigrants all proudly marched behind their own county banner. Which gave added importance to sporting shamrock from the place where they had first seen the light of day.

It always seemed to be a bright February day that we went to pick the shamrock. God bless their souls for waiting until I came from school. As I now recall the best shamrock was invariably found around the mossy ruins of a house above theirs on the hillside. According to Johnny, a family, named Kelly, had lived there before emigrating to America.

Back in the house, Min washed and dried the selected shamrock before carefully packing it in the special boxes with the shining green lids. I recall her carefully writing the New York address on the plain side of the box before neatly securing it with cord. I do not remember Sellotape ever being used. When old enough, I was despatched to the Post Office with the precious shamrock on the first leg of its journey to the house with the striped awnings ‘by the sea.’

And I’ll never know if it got there or whether US regulations prohibited plants entering the country?
Despite political ramifications, the journey of those shiny, emerald green boxes was far more important than the Taoiseach handing a bowl of fresh shamrock to the US President. It maintained that special bond with home.

Read Just A Memory every week in Ireland’s Own