Beloved Origins
“You are not your roots, but you are shaped by the soil in which they grew.”– Amanda Gorman
I love this monthly prompt, as the older I become, the more I embrace all of my heritage, both the good and the challenging.
I have the remarkable good luck to have known three great-grandparents and both sets of grandparents. On my Dad’s side was Great Grandma Georgianna McBrien (from whom I took my last name when I divorced my first husband). She arrived in New York as a young adolescent from Ireland due to poverty in the country. Grandma Georgie taught me to sing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” and gave me the habit of drinking tea. I loved visiting her as a child, so much that I wanted to have her Irish name when I divorced. I had her company until I was 10 or 11.
In 1980, I had a Rotary Graduate Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin that also allowed me to travel throughout Ireland to speak at Rotary clubs. I knew that great grandma came from Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, so I requested to speak at a club there and planned to discover her routes. A rather aristocratic couple offered to house me for my stay, and they indulged me in my work to find Grandma Georgie’s routes. I took a bus there, which was boarded by military men with assault weapons checking for terrorists (this was still the time of “the…
