It was Cemetery Sunday down home last week.
We took a notion and we went.
We took the same notion as my parents used to take, to drive off to Donegal for the day.
There’s a young fella close to our hearts about these parts who likes to visit granny in the graveyard followed by the local cafe for the best fish supper ever.
It is served by a young Polish woman with the most beautiful smile. We get tea too – free if you’re, ahem, a certain vintage.
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And so we rattled down the road to do Cemetery Sunday.
For most of my life, I have driven that same road.
I know it in all seasons and all weathers… I’ve driven down home on the night before my wedding; on the night my father died.
There have been times when I couldn’t wait to get there; times when I’d have kept on driving the roads of Ireland and never gone home because I couldn’t face what was waiting.
I’ve driven in the days before Applegreen, in the days when Byrne’s was a pub and a small garage, in the days when there were no Seven Towers on the Seven Towers roundabout and in the days when there was no roundabout.
The corners whisper stories – how a fella ran up the back of me one time and wrote off my first ever blue jalopy. She went to the scrapyard and I cried because the insurance wouldn’t have covered two furry dice to dangle from the mirror.
There’s the turn-off on the motorway where the exhaust pipe fell off my second little car and I rattled and roared up the road like I was on a tractor.
Those were the days before the Ecos Centre was even there and when Victor our beloved tramp lived under the bridge and had his own mug kept for him by the Bureau, the brew or the dole.
Once he chased me and my little brother up the road waving his hands just for the laugh.
Rewind even farther and home was safe and warm, eight of us there, potatoes, cabbage and bacon set out on the blue formica table – the bacon gravy from the pan poured over.
The rosary was every night; if our friends called they got to kneel down and join in. There were devotions on Fridays and a trip to the sweet shop for a quarter of midget gems afterwards. 10am Mass on a Sunday.
I have kept my parents’ old missals – big volumes with black leather covers – packed with black-edged memorial cards bearing photos of solemn-eyed strangers.
Da’s big black rosary beads go with me in the car; ma’s walking stick is in the boot.
We’re not seasoned grave visitors.
“I’ll be lying up there on the Cushendall Road and none of you will come to see me,” my father used to joke.
This Cemetery Sunday was a first.
When we walked into the old chapel last week – my sister, my nephew and I – the years fell away.
It seemed smaller somehow – but just as it always was. Looking down, I saw my child’s hands joined in prayer on the same polished wooden pew.
I was seven years old and making my First Communion. My mother sat up half the night making my dress.
She indulged me a little, bought me that sparkly tiara… in the photos I’ve a big cut on my knee. I was an accident waiting to happen.
It felt warm and safe back in the old chapel, saying the prayers that we’d said so often. They came without bidding, buried deep within us.
The cemetery ceremony was a do-it-yourself – they gave you holy water and a prayer sheet and sent you forth.
We walked the road greeting ghosts on every corner; stood at the grave and remembered what we’d lost.
Home is in my heart now – the family house is sold and none of us live in the old home town.
There is no reason to drive in my new fancy car with the perfect exhaust down the motorway, stopping for milk and buns in Byrne’s garage.
For that was long ago and there is no-one there waiting with the kettle on and the fire lit; no-one to chat and laugh and argue with.
No-one, when I get up to leave, to walk me to our gate and stand waving under the cherry tree as I drive off.
