How to say Goodbye

First of all, let me apologize for posting out of order. There are a number of draft posts about Dublin, Germany, etc. waiting for me to finish them. And I'm sure you are wondering what I have been up to for the last two months. But this post is done, so it's going up.

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When I first arrived in Ireland there were times when I thought to myself, "Dear Lord, what was I thinking? What am I doing here on my own?" And make no mistake; there were points throughout the semester when I felt depressed and lonely. But as the last month rolled by, we all agonized over the fact that we had precious little time left in Ireland and with each other. Goodbye dinners, luncheons, and pub trips happened with increasing frequency. The flood meant we had an extra week of classes, but many of them were cancelled and some folks had already booked flights home for that week.

On December 7, the last Taizé Prayer meeting was held and our reluctance to admit that we would not be seeing Honan Chapel or hearing Anna, Andrew, and Lukasz leading us in song and prayer perhaps ever again brought us to the New Bar for a last drink and chat. We know that even if we come back, things will not be the same, but still when we say goodbye we say it is not forever. As Elodie said in the note she left me, "You never know!"

The following Sunday was the last mass and Father Joe turned to the pew of Americans at the end of service and thanked us for bringing our American- what did he call it? - energy? spunk? to Iona and Chaplaincy events. After mass, there was tea and coffee as always, but we had to say goodbye again as many of them packed into Richard and Father Joe's cars to go to the airport for their week in Rome. It was so hard to say goodbye to friends I cherished and yet still wished to know better. It was just as difficult to say goodbye to my American friends as they trickled out of Leeside in small bunches, but it was easier to say we'd see each other again as most of us go to school somewhere between Wisconsin, New York, and Maryland. I got up early to say goodbye to Elodie as she headed out for an early flight to home to France and stayed up late after a pub trip to say goodbye to Laura as she packed with her sister for a few days of travel before they went home. We watched P.S. I Love You and cried out whenever they said something like, "Ah, sure, you're grand," and wondered why we hadn't met the love of our lives walking along the streets of Cork or the Lakes of Killarney, chatting us up in an Irish brogue.

My Mom came for the last week I was in Ireland and as we went to Dublin and Newgrange for a couple of days, almost everyone left. I had said my goodbyes, but on the bus to and from Dublin, I turned my head to the window and let the tears flow. I was depressed when we got back. The apartment was empty. Leeside felt empty. I knew Amanda was upstairs still, probably packing, but two did not seem much more cheerful than one. Perhaps it was a little wrong of me to be happy when I learned that Kelsey and Keavy's flight was cancelled. They were supposed to be headed to the south of France to spend Christmas with a family there before their spring semester in Paris for Kelsey and Galway for Keavy. But as Mom pointed out, I wasn't glad their flight was cancelled, I was glad they were still in Leeside. So Kelsey and Amanda came over to help use up some of the pancake mix Nora had left and though I was still sad to be leaving, I was cheered by the knowledge that there were still friends in the building.

Tuesday night came too quickly. I finished packing. We cleaned the fridge. We vacuumed the hall and my room. I cleaned the bathroom. We weighed the bags; the one I came with and the one mom brought almost empty were both stuffed to bursting, but just made the weight limit. Mom went to bed, I sat in the living room in the comfy chair with my computer, looking up American Wake songs on youtube and listening to Mary Black's rendition of "Song for Ireland" over and over. I drifted off for a few hours and woke with my alarm at quarter of 5 (ceathrú chun a cuig). The taxi came an hour later. He drove us to the airport in the dark and we chatted about the cold weather and my time in Ireland. We got on the plane, delayed almost an hour due to freezing fog in London. We navigated Heathrow and got on another plane. We flew across the Atlantic and I did not cry. In Boston's baggage claim, Amanda's flight from Shannon was also arriving, but somehow we missed each other. We passed through customs and re-checked our bags at the desk on the other side. They did not get transfered to our next airline. The flight attendant as we left Boston made the standard announcements. He pronounced "ask" "axe." That's when I realized I was in America, over 3,000 miles from Ireland. Over 3,000 miles from the English Market. An ocean away from the stone arches and mosaic floor of Honan Chapel. No bus could take me to Galway or Killarney anymore. Europe was not a cheap Aer Lingus flight away. I curled up as much as one can in an airplane seat and cried myself to sleep for the hour and a half flight. We filled out a form for lost baggage in Baltimore. As I write this three days later, they are in Baltimore having been sent on the 8:15 flight. Mom is on the phone with the airline, explaining where our house is and hopefully they will be delivered before we go to Parkton for Christmas with the Knuth side of the family.

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Everyone has been asking if I had a good time. Of course I did. I didn't want to come home, I tell them. At church they are shocked when I say I wish I had stayed. My family says, "Doesn't she look older?" I feel older. I feel stretched out. It is as if I have three homes now; my home in the suburbs of Baltimore, a city for which I must feel pride even if the Orioles never win and our crime rate is among the worst in the nation; Chestertown, the tiny town I have come to love with its artists and writers, its restaurants, its bookshops and boutiques, its familiar faces, and its river life flowing alongside the college life; Cork, the city with everything I need not more than a 15-minute walk away, with buses that take me to the most beautiful places in the world, with an European crowd I will miss tremendously, with friendly pubs and gorgeous churches. I don't know which place is home. The place I grew up, that never really changes even as Dad slowly finishes the addition, or the comfortable little town on the Eastern Shore where I first tasted life on my own, or the city in Ireland where I made a life for myself and learned to be truly independent. All I know now is that I must live near water. The bay or the river that flows to the sea and the sea that spreads across the globe, touching every shore and reaching inland through other rivers and bays, unconsciously connecting me to every place I will ever call home.