The saddest woman in Ireland

This morning I walked down the road to Hoopers, the closest shop to my little house in Monasterosis, to buy a newspaper. The walk is about ten minutes or so, all on a sidewalk, which is unusual for Ireland. But the sidewalk is for the most part narrow, and since it is only on one side of the road, the way to Hoopers is fraught with the worry of traffic at your back, whizzing by at a maniacal speed. I can’t help feeling that one of the ubiquitous white vans that are on every road here could clip my shoulder if I should happen to venture too far toward the roadway.

When I got to Hooper’s a woman—I would have to say an old woman--with a wrinkled countenance and the thin face of the perpetual worrier was behind the counter. This is the first time I had encountered her; the handful of other times I had been in the shop I was waited on either by the owner, a man who appeared to be in his sixties, or someone I assumed was his daughter, an outgoing and cheerful young woman with the easy way of the Irish with strangers.

This woman was not shy, either. When I took my paper to the counter she began to speak immediately, leaning her arms on the counter as if she were ready for a good long gossip. Well, I thought, this woman is the auto-pilot shopkeeper with the long-standing obligation of that profession to chat up her customers, even if she doesn’t know them.

  Of course she began with the weather. Weather here is like traffic in Los Angeles; it is impossible to be in a room with a group of Angelinos for more than five minutes before they begin to discuss the best routes to drive from any given point to any other given point, never mind that no one wants to go there. The Irish begin with the weather—sure, it’s a lovely day today (rare) or, foul evening out there (much more common)—even though we are both standing out in it and can tell quite easily what is going on weatherwise.

As the woman spoke I was counting out change for the paper and, as is usually the case in my conversations with most Irish people I am meeting for the first time, picking up every third or fourth word. Gradually I became aware that she was talking about some of the most intimate details of her life: how she was nearly 76 and was frantic with stress and worry when she should be able to relax in her old age, how terrible business was and how she and her husband—the shop owner, it transpired, older evidently than I thought—had discussed not getting out of bed to open the shop early because, with school out, no one would be there anyway. She wasn’t well, and had pains in her shoulder. There were no jobs to be had in the whole area, and without jobs what was the point of opening the shop, since no one could buy? Her daughter was her biggest worry. She was also unwell, in fact she was very ill (I couldn’t understand the cause), and what can a mother do, even though her daughter was far past childhood? There is never a break from a mother’s worry. (On this I could agree; I also realized that the young woman I had seen behind the counter was probably a grandchild.) How, she asked, could she sleep with all this worry? What would happen to her daughter? What would happen to her if there were no business? As she continued her litany of woes, I managed to extricate myself by making sympathetic noises while slowly backing towards the door.

Later that day as I drove back up the hill toward my house, I saw her outside the shop. Her chin was resting on a cement column, and her husband was standing next to her, his arm around her shoulder. Even from the car I could feel the sadness in her; she reminded me at that moment of the Dorothea Lange photo of the gaunt woman from the depths of the Depression, the one with her thin arm bent at the elbow and the children around her, and my heart went out to the shop woman as it does for everyone who sees that brave, hopeless woman in the photo.

That evening, at nearly 11 (which in most places would be night by then) I watched a fox slink across the pasture outside my kitchen window. There is no other word to describe what this animal does in the gathering dark, with his head down and his majestic tail dragging through the grass.