New to the Parish

I sent the following to the Irish Times, and they ran our story in the Feb 14 issue. 

People often want to know why my wife and I moved to Ireland from Santa Cruz, California.

Sometimes I say we moved for the dairy products, sometimes for the weather. Usually I say we’re here because of the people.

We came to Ireland planning to stay three months, maybe a year if permitted.

That was eight winters ago.

We first rented a friend’s house in Kerry, and when she sold it, we considered staying nearby in the familiar culture of Cork City and Midleton. As much as I love The Oval and Ballycotton fish and chips, because we could live anywhere on the island, we thought we’d try somewhere different. We ended up between Dunfanaghy and Creeslough. We soon met another lesbian woman with a dog that looked just like ours. One evening, she sang “Homes of Donegal” to us at our fireside. We’d found the place where the people’s hearts are like mountains.

We hope we can stay here forever. Maybe it’s their hearts, or maybe the mountains, but Donegal welcomes strangers and the strange. No one we’ve met cares we’re lesbians or don’t go to church. We like the music at The Shamrock, Glenveagh’s flowers, swimming at Portnablagh in all weathers. We’ve made a small circle of friends, watched the neighbor kids grow up, and appreciate what Letterkenny offers besides Aldi.

Then there was the disaster at the petrol station. If you’ve lived through a tragedy like that, you already know what I’m going to say: you learn who your neighbors are. You know the lengths neighbors you didn’t know you had will go to repair, to console, to reflect.

I didn’t think I could love this place more, and I wanted to give something back.

I fell in with a small group of people in Ireland and California who are raising the profile of Irish poet and mystic Ella Young. Young was active in the Celtic Revival; she preserved and retold stories from Irish folklore. After the revolutionary period, she left Ireland forever. She was 58 years old. She taught Irish Mythology at Berkeley and published three books of Irish stories. She brought to America the Irish concept of cóir, sometimes translated as “natural balance.” It’s a common theme in Irish mythology, just in time to influence the counter-cultural movements California is known for.

Like many emigrants, Ella Young is not well remembered in Ireland. Her memoir, Flowering Dusk, has long been out of print, but contains delightful anecdotes of Pearse, Yeats, Gonne, and Russell that you’ve never heard before. I helped sort out the book’s copyright and it’s going to be republished this year. I’m also working on making her other books more available.

Ella Young left Ireland for California about the same age as I was when I moved here. I won’t inspire a cultural phenomenon like The Hippies, but I’m happy to be returning Ella Young to the people of Ireland.