A Wee Taste of Ireland

On any given March 17^th, one thing in the Murphy household was certain.

Kathleen Vokes would sneak by, leaving a warm loaf of Irish soda bread on the front doorstep. My brother and two sisters and I would fight for the chance to be the one to find it there, but in truth…she was a cagey one! You just never knew when she’d come. There were often warm, sweet treats on our doorstep throughout the year, but St. Paddy’s Day was a sure bet.

Mrs. Vokes was the quiet white-haired matriarch in the neighborhood, with a watchful eye for us kids and a kind spirit to match. My family was a bit of an oddity in our neighborhood; having lost both parents by the time I’d turned eleven. My brother, ten years older than I, was the breadwinner, as was my sister Carol.  Mrs. Vokes had always played a quiet role in our family, tending to my mom when she was sick…for she herself was a nurse. She’d come up with one of the two daily pain injections, and sometimes Carol would run down to her before the time was up, because Mom was desperate and unable to wait. It hurts me to think of that even now.

But I was oblivious to most of that. Mom died when I was just three, and then Dad eight years later. Both Irish immigrants, my dad a war hero, I can only imagine all they went through. Theirs was a love story. That I did know.

But Mrs. Vokes, to me, was a mystical character. She had wild white hair and pinky toes that stuck out at the ends of her cloth sneakers. She always wore an apron or held a trowel in her hand. She, like my dad, tended that small plot of land as if it were a farm in Ireland. I’d skip down the hill and knock on her door and find her in the garden or behind the stove in the kitchen. I’d be enlisted to roll out the pie dough or dig up some lost bulbs, hidden deep in the soil. But my favorite, by far, was the making of the Irish soda bread.

I hadn’t seen Mrs. Vokes in many years, having left to go off to college, to begin my first teaching job and to buy a home of my own and have my first baby. But, to my delight, on a trip to my brother’s, I discovered her there once more. Matt, my little son, was just six months old. I propped him up on the table, while she pulled an apple pie out of the oven. The kettle went on and we talked for a while, like always. I asked her if she’d give me her Irish soda bread recipe. There was no recipe, really…it was a ‘bit of this and a bit of that’, but I managed to scribble it all down on an old envelope she’d handed me.

When I got in my car to leave that day, we were both teary.I realized just how much she meant to me as that bitty girl so long ago. But also as an adult mom seeing life with so much more clarity. Kindness, that was her trademark, and generosity too.

As fate would have it, though, my car wouldn’t start. We went back in amidst the fitful cries of my little guy, Matthew. He was starving. So, as only she would, she slipped him onto that generous hip of hers and got him smiling and laughing again. It was then that I realized the secret incredient of my visits with Mrs. Vokes. She switched him then from her hip to a seat atop the table, dug into that sugar bowl and shoveled a heaping

spoonful of the white stuff right into his mouth! I was horrified, but hysterical at the same time. Matt’s crying, of course, had ‘miraculously’ stopped. And then, good old Tommy Sullivan, another one of the big Irish clan, came and rescued us, jumpstarting my car and we were off on our way.

Sadly, that was the last time I saw her, but I have a lifetime of memories from that kitchen, many of which I’ve stored up in my journals, told to my kids about at school and incorporated into many of my works in progress. My brother visited her years ago, at the end of her life, she’d lost most of her memories…but thankfully, we can be her memory keeper now. And those memories, to me, will always be sweet!

Tomorrow’s entry: Mrs. Vokes’s Irish Soda Bread Recipe (a bit re-engineered by me!). Stay tuned! (Both posts revised and reposted from my Gael Lynch site on Blogger from 2009! I think they still hold up, but you be the judge!)