Page 2 of The Past

Sylvie’s face lights with excitement.She’s been voraciously devouring any information about her new family, and I feel bad that I’ve not hauled these boxes down until now.Scrambling off the couch, she rifles through one of them and pulls out a very old leather-covered book with gold stitching.I don’t need a blank placard to know what’s in that one.It’s my memories as a child that I brought over from Ireland when I moved here to Kentucky in 1978.

“This one’s huge,” Sylvie says as she sits down next to me again and balances it on her lap.She opens the cover.“And the photos are so old.”

“Thanks,” I say dryly.“Those are of me and my family in Ireland.”

She nods, flipping through photos that start back when I was a baby.My mother put it together for me before I left, tearfully making me promise to never forget my roots.In the end, she finally did something for me that showed she cared.

“Who are these people?”Sylvie asks, indicating a family photo of the Conlans.

I lean over and study the old black-and-white, pointing them out in no particular order.“That’s my mam, Brigid.And my da, Seamus.Right there in a row is my sister, Siobhan, a year and a half my younger, and the baby, Paddy, three years younger than her.”

“And who’s this?”she asks, tapping her finger on the photograph.

My eyes mist slightly, missing him as much today as I ever did.“That’s my uncle Rory.We were very close, but he died long ago.”

“Was he not married?”

“No, but he did know the love of a good woman for a while, and I guess a short period of time with the love of yer life is better than no love at all, aye?”

Sylvie nods and slowly flips through the album, asking questions and soaking in my history.I watch as I grow up with each new set of photos.

When she turns the page, I can’t help but smile at the photograph of a young lady sitting atop a chestnut thoroughbred and a handsome man holding the reins.Sylvie studies the faded colors, the printed memories having progressed with technology to move us into the age of Polaroids.It’s faded, but ye can still make out the sunlight catching in my auburn hair.There’s not enough detail to see the bluish glint to the black hair of the man I’m staring down at.

“That’s Papi,” she says with delight as she recognizes my Tommy.It’s her French name for her grandpa.“And that’s you on the horse, Mami.”

“Ah, we were so young then,” I muse with a chuckle.

“How old?”

“Let’s see… that was the summer of 1978, and I was only a few months away from turning eighteen.Yer papi was nineteen.”

I study Tommy and even after all these years, my heart patters a little faster.I remember that day so well.A beautiful summer day in Ireland.A girl on horseback, cheeks flushed after an exhilarating steeplechase ride and my future husband standing beside me, holding the reins, black-haired and broad-shouldered, his grin cocky and full of mischief.

Sylvie glances up at me.“So Papi was in Ireland when you met him?”

“Aye.He was sent to our farm because he was… how should I say it… a little wayward back here in Kentucky and his parents thought some hard work on a thoroughbred farm might calm his wild ways.”

Sylvie’s looks at me with surprise written across her face.“Tell me more,” she demands so precociously, I laugh.“I want to learn all about how you fell in love with Papi.”

While the grief in my chest is still raw, the weight of Wade’s absence crushing, the past is warm in my mind.Bright.Alive.I allow myself to slip into it, just for a moment.Just for the escape.

A memory stirs—Tommy, standing too close, hisgazedark and full of something unspoken.The scent of hay and leather, the heat of summer in the air.My heart pounding as he leaned in, lips almost touching mine—

I blink, coming back to the present.Sylvie watches me expectantly.

“Before I tell ye that,” I say, taking the album from her lap and placing it on mine, “let me tell ye about where I come from.Because that’s part of yer heritage too.Ye’ve got a lot of Irish in ye.”

I turn the pages back to older pictures we’d glossed over.We move back in time to the black-and-whites, but even with the monochromatic scheme, I can still see verdant green rolling fields, towering stone barns covered in moss and dappled in golden sunlight, horses standing regal in the morning mist.My home before Blackburn Farms.Before America.

“This is where I grew up,” I say, admiring the large manor house with pastures and barns scattered across undulating hills in the background.“It’s called Glenhaven Estates and it’s just outside a town called Fethard in County Tipperary.”

“It was a horse farm, right?”she asks because she’s not completely uninformed about the deep lines of horse blood that run through us all.

“More than just a farm… it was one of the largest breeding and training facilities for Irish thoroughbreds in our country.Still is, for that matter.It was founded in 1925 by my grandfather, Patrick Conlan.”

Sylvie leans in as I speak, her small fingers tracing the edges of the photographs, her voice soft with curiosity.“What was it like?”

The mix of feelings that hits me makes the answer a little difficult.“At times, it was magical.”

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