Ireland will always be a part of me

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Next Monday, March 17 is St. Patrick's Day. My family has always celebrated

this Wearin' of the Green day. My maiden name is O'Leary and my mother's maiden name is Callahan. My dad bragged every St. Patrick's Day that his children were full-blooded Irish. One of the first places that I wanted to

visit when I graduated from Albert Lea High School was Ireland.

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First I went to Boston, where I met my husband, Tom. We met at a natural foods cooking school. I thought that Tom looked just like a little leprechaun when I met him, and, by the way, he still does. Tom went through all the cooking levels at the school in Boston and was certified as a natural foods chef. I learned how to chop vegetables, make salads and salad dressings, the first cooking level. We both wanted to travel and we decided we would go to Ireland and open our own natural foods restaurant. We found cheap tickets through Icelandic Airlines and flew to Luxembourg. From there we went to Belgium. It was late February and as we had limited funds, we got

work in a natural food's restaurant in Gent, Belgium. I worked in the restaurant and cleaned houses. I picked up the language, Flemish, fairly quickly but Tom felt out of his element and wanted to get out of there.

After four months we had saved up enough money to head to Ireland. We took a ferry across the English Channel and spent a week in London. We then hitchhiked across England to Liverpool. Tom wanted to take the ferry from Liverpool, as he was born on an air force base in Burtonwood, a town near Liverpool. It was a long tiresome, noisy all night ride across the Irish Sea with lots of drinking and singing. But I immediately felt a surge of energy and familiarity when my feet stepped on Irish soil for the first time.

Tom and I married a month and a half after we came to Ireland. We started serving natural foods meals out of a flat we rented in Dublin. The flat was on the top floor of a Georgian house and the other tenants didn't like all the customers that showed up for lunch and supper. Our landlady kicked us out after three weeks. We moved to a basement flat and started serving meals out of there. We did well, though we were not great with the business side of the restaurant.

I became pregnant shortly after we married. A month before our baby was born, we quit serving meals and moved to the mountains of Donegal where our son Danny was born.

For the next six months we had the Irish experience of living in a 400-year-old thatched roofed cottage, cooking with turf, shearing sheep by hand and going to the top of the mountain to cut and stack turf. Turf is peat and what we used to heat our house with.

We left Ireland when I became homesick

for my family.

We lived in the cottage that was the highest and last one on the mountain. Unemployment was high in the area and we didn't have a car. It was a three-mile walk to town and the only people I had to visit with were our landlord Denny, his wife, Bridie and Denny's oldest brother Francie.

They were very kind, but I could see no future for us on that lonely mountain. It was so beautiful and it was hard to leave, but you can't eat or wear scenery.

I cried the day the hired car from the village drove us out of the mountains. I loved Donegal so much, but at the same time I was relieved to

be leaving that desolate area.

I was always called a Yank when I lived in

Ireland and now in southern Minnesota, people ask me if I am Irish. I am an American whose ancestors came from Ireland. I'm an American that is proud of my heritage and Ireland will always be a part of who I am.

Sheila Donnelly can be reached at 434-2233 or by e-mail at :mailto:newsroom@austindailyherald.com