Go n-éirí an bóthar leat is do chosán cóngair.

May your journey, long or short, be a success.

After a lovely visit with my cousin Gary at the University of Limerick, John and I headed north through the Burren in Clare and into Galway, stopping at Moycullen to see the Reilly family home. My grandfather left that home in 1900 when he booked passage from Cóbh to New York, and on to Pittsburgh.

Although still in the family, the house hasn’t been lived in for twenty years or more. A thick stone wall still sits before it, and the iron gate is rusted shut. John gave me a leg up to climb over the wall; then he climbed over, and I jumped into his arms on the other side, landing in a bed of nettles. The house with its faded red door sits not far from the stone wall. The windows are covered in thick wooden planking. To the west of the house is a smaller structure made of stone, maybe a cool place for storing potatoes and other vegetables.

We walked between the house and the small stone structure in a deeply rutted path that ended in a large meadow overlooking the expanse of land that stretches for miles between Moycullen and the sea. The sky that afternoon was unusually blue, with bright white cumulus clouds, and across the field five horses grazed. As we walked into the field, each one in turn looked up. They walked across the field and stood in a perfect phalanx about twenty feet in front of us, waiting patiently. I would have given almost anything at that moment for a bag of apples.

After a bit the horses decided we bore no gifts, and they went back to grazing in the field. John and I walked to the edge of the field and back, climbing back up over the stone wall and into our black rental car. We headed toward the sea like my grandfather had done on foot, more than a century ago.

For weeks I’ve been studying Irish, the first language of my paternal grandparents. My studies haven’t been simply in Ireland, but in a village within walking distance—albeit a long walk—from both of their birthplaces. Every day I’ve had more questions for them and for my father. Did they speak to him in Irish when he was a boy? Did my father have any Irish? My grandparents were cradle Irish; they must have spoken it to each other at home.

Decades ago my father talked about having to be very quiet on Tuesday evenings when my grandfather entertained other “Gaelic scholars” in the parlor of their home in Pittsburgh. He remembered sitting on the stairs listening to them speak in Irish, most probably about literature and politics, which at that moment in history would have included the Gaelic Revival, the Easter Uprising, and the First World War. What I wouldn’t give, not only for a bag of apples, but to sit in that parlor listening to that conversation in Irish. I would have kept very still.