St. Patrick's Day

As an Irishwoman, newly minted three weeks ago as an American too, I do find this a difficult day of the year.

It's not the green ill-fitting sweaters or the beer or the bad pictures of clover masquerading as shamrock, but mostly those misty pictures of Ireland, with sheep and quaint cottages and stone walls. I see a lot more of them at this time of the year.

The 28 years I lived in Ireland were not spent in places like those. The county of Cavan is damp and covered in small hills called drumlins, in between which are more lakes than there are days in the year. It's quite a squelchy place, and holds more pigs than people. I have quite an affection for the lingering scent of pig manure on the wind.

Then I also lived in Dublin, which is a big city. It has lots of people, cars, buses, exhaust fumes, drink, life, fun and poverty. It has good parts and bad parts, and most of the time you keep your handbag close to you. It has some lovely buildings and some horrible ones, and no thatched cottages that I ever saw.

So why do these picturesque photos of misty mountains and dramatic cliffs and shaggy sheep on roadways affect me so much?

It's like the times I'm driving into work, and I see the Washington Monument. I actually drive right by it every day. And most days I don't pay much attention, but some days I'm pierced by the thought that I actually work in Washington DC. How glorious, how lucky, how strange, how foreign, how beautiful the cherry blossoms.

And similarly those Irish pictures pierce me. They transport me to a feeling, a feeling of being Irish, of belonging to a nation welcomed all over the world, but most particularly in the US. And of having lost that. Of not really belonging there anymore. How strange, how lucky, how foreign to me now.

And how beautiful the cherry blossoms really are here, where I am, in Washington DC.