Summer's End Galore

Plenty, and good enough, my grannie would always say. I grew up tin-eared to so many of her odd turns of phrase. I was too easily tortured by schoolmates because my English was lilted. Pure Bantry Bay it was, and I fought my tongue's inclination.  I ruthlessly stripped those phrases from my speech the way a gardener tackles spring weeds in a no-nonsense sort of way while I became mute, lacking for words, between languages, I was. English to English. The ancestral tongue structuring a bearla and nearly a half a century later, I can still hear the Irish word go leor (galore), that meant plenty and enough.  My grannie was keeping the old tongue alive in a transplanted language. How many centuries were those words passed down, an unconscious act, a weed in the garden. English flourishing, despite England's best effort to strip Ireland of its Gaelic. She always said that the Irish beat the English at their own game when they took to writing. Revenge is the best sword. Drop the s and the word becomes the last word. there was nothing left for me to do but pick up the pen, a gauntlet thrown down in the grass. Ten paces at dawn. Summer's end, the end of innocence. Galore. Good enough, she'd say.

8/26/05 This was from my Writers' Group. I wrote little poetry but the prose went deep enough.