I’ve been looking up flights to Ireland, to go home one last time before I begin the process of applying for my Green Card, after which point I won’t be able to leave the country – or, rather, re-enter the country – until it’s been granted.
Flights are too expensive, though; post-Covid staffing issues, among other things, have cut down on flights going to and from Fort Wayne, and the cheapest I could find was just under $1,000, with two stops. I’d be flying with Atlas, who is about to turn one and getting more and more active by the day – more than one flight transfer and I fear he’d turn feral.
In any case, engaging a lawyer to handle my Green Card application is costing more than $7,000 – another $1,000 for a last-minute flight home to cuddle my dog seems like an unnecessary expense.
It’s weird, though; the longer I spend in this place I now call “home”, the further away the place I once called home seems to be.
When I first moved, I told myself I’d fly back to Ireland once, twice, three times a year. I told myself the move was temporary. I told myself I’d do a year or two, “give it a go”. I told myself whatever I needed to hear to pack that case and get on that plane and make it to where I was going.
I tried not to look back.
The true difficulty of all of this is that I have become what I once derided.
I have never had much patience for emigrants who spend their lives talking about the “old country”, reminiscing about what life used to be like before they left their home, as though they had no choice but to stay gone.
Why don’t they just go back if they miss it that much? I thought, rather uncharitably, not really taking into account the myriad factors that might affect such a decision.
It never occurred to me that they might have a family in the new country: stepsons, a partner, a regular coffee order at their local cafe, a familiar repartee with the cashier at their closest supermarket, a family, quite separate from the family they’d left behind. All of the small things that make somewhere home.
I think about – and talk about – Ireland all the time. I tell our boys what we say in Ireland instead of “sidewalk”; about how we take our whipped cream (unsweetened); I regale them with thrilling tales of being able to park up the road from the primary school and walk down the road, hand in hand; they are forced to hear about the farm I grew up next to and the way it can rain and shine and sleet and snow, all in one day and what a ‘99 is and how kids can go into pubs in Ireland and eat toasted cheese sandwiches and crisps (“chips”, of course) while their parents have a drink and watch some variety of sports.
I feel sorry for them, having to listen to all of this, but I feel sorry for myself, too, having to think about all of this, all of the time.
Everything in Indiana reminds me of Ireland, both the familiar and the unfamiliar. The green fields make me heartsick for the views from my parents’ house; the earnestness with which my every statement is met makes me yearn for the Irish wit and sarcasm I had taken for granted.
It is not getting any easier.
The Four Winds, by Kristin Hannah
I read The Four Winds this past weekend, a novel about heartbreak and hardship and love and rejection set in the Texas Panhandle at the beginning of the Great Depression.
Among other things, it speaks to the forming of workers’ unions in the US, when migrants to the West Coast were discriminated against and underpaid for their labour. A strong underlying current in the book is the very essence of being American, something that is so closely tied up with the rejection of “handouts”, a horror of welfare.
“We want to work for a living,” the characters say, over and over, although eventually they stand in line for food, just like everyone else.
This is the greatest cultural difference I have noticed, between Irish people and Americans, or rather between Europeans and Americans (although, of course, #notallEuropeans, and #notallAmericans, to boot).
In the rejection of any and all help from the state, it is assumed that we all have the same opportunities, that life is a zero-sum game, after all. If you work hard enough; if you play your cards right; if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps… You can win at this great Game of Life.
I have more thoughts about this, but they are garbled, a kind of word stew at the back of my homesick brain. I’ll get there eventually.
In the meantime, The Four Winds is very good. Highly recommend.
The Green, Green Grass of Home