I used to tell myself that it was the August heat that drew me away from that tarmacadam road and into the woods behind a corporate office plaza in Danvers, Massachusetts.
In that plaza, I worked on the second floor of one of the lookalike buildings with their rows of matching windows and their glassy foyers. Most lunchtimes, I pulled on a winter coat or stripped off a summer blazer to power-walk the service road that looped through the car parks and buildings.
Then came that Thursday, the day for our weekly boardroom meeting, when I suddenly walked across a patch of scorched, un-landscaped grass and into the woods.
My shiny summer sandals were no match for the path that ran up a gentle embankment where the trees grew closer together and blocked the sun. Halfway up that path was a stone wall.
A dry-stone wall. That’s what they call this here in New England. That’s what Robert Frost wrote about in his poem,“Mending Wall.”
After three-plus decades in America, I was used to insta-translating between two countries’ (Ireland’s and America’s) Colonial Englishes.
Some stones were patched with moss. Others were blotted and crusted with lichens. These stones were bigger and browner than our west-of-Ireland limestone walls where, just like here, there are no concrete fillers or caps. But winter or summer, our west-of-Ireland walls are more wet than dry.
I sat on a big, flat stone. It was blessedly cool, like a giant ice pack beneath my summer dress. Up here, all those commuter cars and office buildings were invisible. Above my dry-stone wall, in a swatch of sky between the treetops, I conjured or saw a different wall that sat—and still sits—3,000 miles away.
My father hoists one of the bigger stones from the top of the wall, then carries it across the grass toward the waiting wheelbarrow. He’s wearing one of his old, blue shirts. A summer Saturday, either before or after hay season, so the shirt sleeves are rolled up to the elbows. His dark, heavy trousers are held up by a pair of old, grubby braces, or suspenders.
His shirt and trousers are a down-cycled leftover from last year’s employer-issued uniform for his off-the-farm job as a lorry driver for our national freight company. When he labors in our fields or stable or meadows, my father’s combover always slips from his bald spot and flops to the collar of that blue shirt.
The wheelbarrow is just a few feet away, parked in the summer grass that runs along the limestone wall that divides our front and our conacre* fields.
Despite the field’s name, the conacre is ours. It’s part of our 30-plus acre farm in south Mayo where most of our fields and sheds are nicknamed for some long-deceased ancestor or neighbor or from those decades (pre-1925) when none of us owned the deeds to the land we worked.
This wall—the one my father is working—is the longest of the conacre’s three walls. It borders our bóithrín** that ends at our house and farm. The field’s right-hand wall divides ours and the neighbor’s land. The conacre’s bottom wall, the one that borders the village schoolyard, is the alpha wall. Those stones are sturdier, more symmetrical—a signal that, sometime in the 1800s, the long-departed and deceased English landlord may have commissioned his laborers to build it.
At the wheelbarrow, my father sets his new stone on the pile, then turns to walk back along the wall.
Later, when I find and read an old paperback version of Winnie the Pooh, the fictional bear’s plodding walk will instantly conjure my father’s gait, including the swinging arms.
In earlier generations, our walls were about clearing our rocky, west-of-Ireland land and using the detritus of cleared-away stones for free fencing. Our walls are not a trial-and-error jigsaw puzzle. Our walls are about generations of boys and men stooping, carrying and placing the perfect stone in the perfect spot.
Also, as the only house and family living up here on our cul-de-sac bóithrín, these walls are a child’s spatial coordinates, our planetary rings.
Today, our cattle must have wandered away to the next field where they graze or lie in the shade of the whitethorn bushes. Where are my two brothers? Like the cattle, have they just walked off-camera? Or will the boys in their short trousers and knee-high socks come out to help when they’ve finished their midday dinners inside the house?
Unlike Robert Frost, my father is un-building this wall. He’s removing the top layer because my mother, who grew up here, wants to see across the fields to that public, tarmacadam road that runs past the school. If she can glimpse some passing cars and tractors, she (and we) will feel less isolated, less sequestered from the rest of the world.
There are, in fact, visitors and outings. At least once a week, John, our village postman, pedals up here on his bicycle. On Thursdays, Mattie, one of the grocers in the town three miles away, comes in his grey van, his traveling shop. At the end of each school term, a different van drives up the bóithrín to deliver my older sister from her boarding school. Some afternoons, after our days in that village school, one of us kids is dispatched down and across the front field. We climb and slip through the stone stile into our neighbor’s field and up the sheep track to the village post office to mail my grandmother’s airmailed, American-bound letters. Or we’re sent to buy sliced bread or cheese or cans of beans from one of our village shops.
Every Sunday, we take that same shortcut up to the village church for Catholic Mass. In winter, we stop at a second stone stile (behind the church) to change our muddy wellingtons, or gum boots, for clean Sunday shoes stashed in a bag. Sometimes, if my father is home from work, he drives his black Morris Minor car out through our blue farmyard gate and down the bóithrín and onto the bigger road toward our market town.
From our front fields we can see the slate roofs and the rear windows of three of our village neighbors’ houses. We can also see the stained-glass windows set into the rear wall of Saint John the Baptist Church. By the road or the fields, it’s a short walk up to that village. But in any country or place, the bottom-up journey always takes longer.
In America, I’ve worked in pubs, diners, restaurants and on a college campus. I’ve also worked in six office parks like this one. In one building, where I worked on the eighth floor, I kept duplicate sets of coats, hats and sneakers—one set hung in my grey cubicle, and one on a railing by the rear loading dock—all so I could sneak out to tramp the roads around and beyond that building.
Now, on this hot afternoon in August, it was time to leave this dry-stone wall to start my walk down that woodland path. It was time to return to my therma-sealed building where my daily tasks were driven, not by the seasons or weather or an animal’s birth or death or hunger, but by a typed job description sitting somewhere in the Human Resources Department.
On the path, my sandals skidded. More than once, I had to grab a tree branch to steady myself. Back on that service road, I wondered if, instead of the summer heat, I had been drawn into those shady woods and toward that dry-stone wall by an ancestor or a truth whisper, or by some old muscle memory.
Back in the air-conditioned office foyer, here was my late father again, plod-plodding away from me as he cradled his latest, excavated stone and carried toward that wheel barrow.
I wanted to stop and ask him: Was your 1960s wall un-building project an act of marital love? Or appeasement? Or contrition?
***
*Conacre is a tract of rented land.
** “Bothair” is the Irish for a road. “Bóithrín” is an unpaved, small road.
I’m From
Aged fields and mossy stones
limestone walls and
whitethorn bushes
along our bóithrín road.
Drip-drip trees by
that blue farm gate
A 1700s house with a thatched roof
that leaked through winter days.
A cart house
a stable
an open path
a cattle track
past that long, narrow rock
where we lined up old, rusted pea tins
for our afternoon games of “village shop.”
The morning after I wandered into the woods, I sat inside my attic window to write in my journal. Just gone six o’clock, but already broiling hot outside. All night, that tarmacadam road and the trees and that stone wall had dandled across my night dreams. By morning, they were ripening into words, stacking and settling one upon the other, trying for the right fit.
August 10, 2017
Yesterday, I found a stone wall behind the office. It’s been so long now that I had forgotten the smell of yellow lichens on stone. It has been just as long since I felt naked stone under my legs, my buttocks. I am grateful to remember, to have known these things.
But I must still explore the space between the personal and the public, between reality and nostalgia. None of these people I sit with in work meetings has anything to do with me.
Grow still. Stay quiet. Listen to the change coming.
***
“I’m From” was originally published in The Mid Atlantic Review, 2023 and in Bourgeon, 2023.
*
Learn more about Áine on the Contributors’ page.
Áine’s latest book, Trespassers and Other Stories was published in 2025 and is available here.
Submissions for the Best in Rural Writing Contest are already open. Find more details here.
(Photo: David Brossard/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
Sunday, April 13th, 2025 1pm EST/ 6pm GMT
The first online writing seminar of the year, “The Ol’ He Said, She Said: Writing Stronger Dialogue” will look at how to create more natural-sounding dialogue, as well as improve the mechanics around speech. The seminar is free for WRITER or SUPPORTER subscribers, or $15 for everyone else. More information can be found here.
- These Stone Walls by Áine Greaney - March 20, 2025