A walk along Kelly’s Pass
I sat in beside her after mass, the frail white haired woman in the front seat of the little oratory in Nazareth House Nursing Home. I had taken refuge there for a few weeks in the days leading up to Christmas as my mother recovered in a local hospital outside of Manchester.
During mass, I spotted her sitting in quiet repose. With a hint of an English accent, she turned to me as I sat down and asked “how are you today?” not that she recognised me from Adam though I called to see her each year when she returned with the swallows to Ireland.
“I’m good Margaret, how are you?”
“Do you know me?” she asked. “Of course I know you, sure amn’t I from Killoughter too.”
The smile that enveloped her face on hearing the placename of Killoughter would do your heart good. “Isn’t that wonderful?” she said. I took her by the hand and asked her would she come a walking with me.
“Where will we go?” she asked. “Ah sure I was thinking we will start off from Kelly’s pass.”
And so we walked slowly, arm in arm, along the corridors of the nursing home, in her mind, she could see Claragh Lake in the hollow and all her neighbours’ houses along the road.
We talked on her mother who died of a dark New Year’s Eve when each of the six of them were but children and Mary, her beloved sister, took on the mantle of homemaker, still in the homeplace all these 80 and more years hence. Sure wouldn’t we soon see the smoke rising from the chimney pot, with the thought of tea and soda bread as we turned the road for Treehoo.
Margaret remembered well that February day that the Sisters called for the pennies, outside that very door that looked up from the road upon, pennies that her mother kept in the jar on the mantlepiece for their annual visit, not knowing she had in the weeks before, in childbirth, quietly passed away.
She remembered in quiet tones, as we sat in the garden fornent a bed of spent roses, the Sisters talking with her father on sending her away to school; the ensuing excitement coupled with the sadness on leaving home. She studied in England thereafter training to be a teacher, getting the cattle boat from Holyhead to spend the summers cutting turf and making hay.
It was one August day before she returned to London that she told her father, as they side by side on the hay shifter, that she was of a mind to join the Sisters in the Nazareth Order, the very sisters who used to call each springtime to their door.
She felt she was being called to bring love to little children in their orphanages and schools just as she had known in her home in the wake of her mother’s passing.
And, as the tears rolled down his face, she told him not to worry for it was what she really longed to do. For seven long years, she never got to return home until after Final Profession whereupon she had to stay in a local convent during her two weeks’ leave.
After Profession she was sent to Western Australia where she taught for 10 years in a primary school. Though content in her decision to become a Sister, her heart was breaking being exiled so far from her loved ones and, as each year borrowed another, she waited each longingly on the letters that came from home.
Finally she requested to return to the UK where, over the next months, she came to the decision to take leave of the Sisters of Nazareth. It was a most difficult decision to leave behind her vocation, her identity, and the family of Sisters that her younger sister Anne had now also joined.
Margaret never lost her deep faith in God and her calling to live out her vocation in the bits and pieces of her life. It was a prayer meeting in London where she met John Duffy from Mayo who, in the years to come, she would marry and find a life of deep contentment - both becoming teachers in Manchester primary schools.
And, as we sat there in the garden on that frosty December morn watching the sparrows feed from the bird table, she remembered their visits to Treehoo in their Austin Triumph, a little boy and girl, singing in the back as they took the ferry crossing for that reunion each and every year.
And for each of the mornings that followed during my stay in Nazareth House, I sat into the seat beside her after the 10 o’clock morning mass and, each time, she would turn and ask me “who are you, do you mind me asking?” and, when I’d tell her I was from Killoughter, the same joy of recognition would take hold of her gentle face. There, each morning, we would go walking until it came to the time for my departing, never to meet again along Kelly’s Pass.
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