~copyrighted material~
from "Fables Foibles & Follies"

I was born 10 April 1817, christened Aine and raised in County Wexford, on the east shore of Ireland, fully forty miles south of Dublin. My father, Liam was one of a dozen tenant farmers gnawing out a meager living on the one-hundred-acre Estate Gleann O’Carre. I never had the luck, invitation or opportunity to meet him, but the absentee English landlord and property owner was the Right Honorable Albert John Crosley, second Earl of Bartwicke, Lancashire. I do not know if he ever lived on or leastwise visited Gleann O’Carre. Now that I ponder upon it, I doubt anyone in my family ever met him. His social standing alone likely would have prevented me or any member of my family from meeting him. His name and title tell everything there is to know about him. He was far and away part of a higher social order than any soul in the family Faergahl.
Seven days a week, each week of the year save for Christmas and Easter, my father and my older brothers Donagh, Braedan and Finbar worked the two rocky acres of brown earth on the north side of Ballyhale village that were allotted to my father. I remember our cottage as if I were there just yesterday. It was a one-room, thatched-roof timber and stone house built long before I came to the world. The floor was hand-hewn chestnut boards laid on top of the dirt beneath. My brother Finbar would sometimes jump up and down and make the dust fly up between the cracks. I think he did that just to hear my mother scold him.
We all slept together in a short, narrow loft on three mattresses. I remember I was the only family member who was able to stand up. At night, my three brothers were on one bed, my sister Caitlín and I occupied the smallest mattress and my father and mother Máire squeezed into the other. Daily, at first light my father and brothers worked the fields bordered by dry-stack stone fence and hedgerows, while mother kept house, prepared the family meals, carried water from and washed clothes a quarter-mile away in Balyrue Creek. Mother also milked the goats, tended to the Scots Grey chickens, and slopped the pig when we had one. I remember one little fellow we called Georgie, an autumn piglet my father named after King George IV of England. My mother was able to do all of these things and more while my sister Caitlín and I distracted her and ran underfoot or alongside pulling on her apron strings and getting in the way. I remember my mother as a loving angel with the patience of a saint.
© 2018 Edward R. Hackemer
Fables Foibles & Follies