An Irish day. That’s what this Sunday has been like. Gorgeous warmth with sudden bursts of shower and (so far) one pelting rain. Just as I decide to start a fire in the wood stove, the sun appears, the breeze blows the drops off the plants, and I can again swing the front door of my little gate lodge open to let in the fresh air. The Irish call this weather unsettled; it is a word they use a lot.

This morning the rain held off long enough for me to decide to drive to church. I have given up trying to justify even to myself why I choose to spend Sunday mornings here shivering in a back pew at Carbury Church, mumbling creeds and responses that seem to come from some sort of muscle memory, singing along in a half-voiced mutter to the recorded hymns with the rest of the stalwart congregation (all two dozen of us), listening to sermons that I keep hoping will be uplifting or at least make sense. Whatever the reasons, I have now been going long enough that I am welcomed back into the fold by the regulars, some of whom seem genuinely happy to see me (but then again, how many strangers show up at the Carbury Church in any given year?). Although the vicar tends not to remember who I am, she does show some vague recognition when I shake her hand after the service.

This morning the vicar wasn’t there; she goes off on holiday after the annual church barbecue, which was on the solstice this year which means of course that I missed it. Instead there was a very British sort of minister who told a long story about marrying his wife—who was sitting in the congregation and no doubt has been through this before— in the 1960s, and about his mother declining to attend the wedding. (Although he didn’t expressly state a reason, it may have been because he chose to get married in a red velvet suit; no word on what the bride wore.) In fact the sermon, which began with weddings and I fervently hoped might move toward the need to embrace same-sex marriage, instead veered off into something vaguely to do with freedom (that suit) and ended up in a rather dispiriting validation of ‘democracy’, the entire ramble larded with the many ways his mother, long dead, had let him down throughout his life, although he of course had been a model son (I mean, he’s now a minister!), the red suit notwithstanding. At the end he shook my hand and said it was nice to see me again although of course he had never laid eyes on me before. Fair enough; this isn’t his regular parish, after all.

Tonight I’m heading to a barbecue to honor the 21st birthday of a friend’s daughter. Given the weather we will certainly be eating indoors, but this is what barbecues in Ireland are like, a spin of the wheel laced with some generally misguided but nonetheless eternal optimism that just this once it won’t rain.

Arriving here on July 3rd, I nearly missed the symbolism of the balloons hanging from the airport passageway as I headed out to catch my rental car shuttle. Ireland’s relationship with the U.S.  has been complicated ever since the first immigrants arrived on American shores in the 1840s, victims of the awful famine that set in with the failure of the potato crop. The Irish were the first wave of immigrants to arrive on American soil during industrialization, pushed into exploitive laboring in the factories and the mines until the next group came along, willing to work for even cheaper wages. But the Irish kept coming with each bout of economic downturn, seeking hope or at least a living at the Golden Door.

My maternal grandparents were part of this migration. They arrived in the 1920s, although my grandmother, an American, was returning home, with her Irish husband and two young children. They eventually settled in a very rural area of western Pennsylvania, where my grandfather, a mining engineer, headed a small limestone mine deep in coal country. They built a rather grand house (the plans indicate maid’s quarters, although the maid never materialized) at the edge of what had been a utopian community established by John Roebling, the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge. Ironically, Saxonburg, population 600, turned out to be much more isolated than had been their existence in rural Co. Kildare, but my grandfather had spent his years after Trinity College as an entrepreneurial engineer in what was then called the Klondike. He was only pulled reluctantly back home as the eldest son and therefore heir to the family farm; it took him over a year to return after being summoned by his increasingly frantic mother. He must have welcomed the wildness of the countryside and the pioneering spirit, although possibly not the utter lack of fellow countrymen in the heavily German community in which they settled. My grandmother, who outlived him by 20 years, made the best of it.

I suspect that my grandmother (I never knew my grandfather, who died before I was born) would be surprised at my annual migration back to the place she willingly left. But I have made seven trips here now, and spent many July 4ths. On this one the morning radio program announcer asked the question, What has America ever given Ireland besides the George Forman Grill? The question subsequently got lost in the welter of interviews, but the answer does seem obvious: a place at the other edge of the ocean from which to miss home.