We present an extract from Finding My Wild: How a Move to the Edge Brought Me Home, the new memoir by Kathy Donaghy.
After moving back to her homeplace on the Inishowen Peninsula in Donegal with her young family, journalist Kathy Donaghy's life changed in ways she never saw coming. In her debut book, she looks back at a decade of love and loss, of mothering, identity and acceptance of your good-enough self.
What was it about this place that wouldn’t let me go? I’d feel its tug when the wind blew in from the sea; the compass settings of my heart pulling me true north to a place where the gulls’ cries were as familiar as the voices of old friends, and the evening light on Lough Foyle looked like underwater stars.
I’m not in my youth anymore but standing on this shore, so familiar to me, I often think I haven’t moved too far from that girl I once was. So many years have passed since I first played here among the bladderwrack, terns and abandoned boats. So much has changed and yet when I think of my changes – my own metamorphosis from girl to woman – I think they happened right here in this place, on this small stretch of beach beside my home.
I’ve thought about home a lot, about what it is and what it means these past few years. Place and people, community, a physical structure where you close the door behind you and exhale. But it’s also in yourself; you carry it in the chambers of your heart and sometimes you forget that the home you offer yourself is the most important place of all. I forgot that and I got lost and it took me a while to come back because home is ultimately yourself.
Of course home is also a place of comfort and knowing in the deepest folds of yourself that you belong somewhere. Maybe it’s about family – the one you were born into or the one you choose. For me it’s all those things too but it’s also about rootedness in place. My place is Donegal, the outer reaches of it – on the Inishowen Peninsula.
Surrounded by water, it’s almost an island. Standing atop Sliabh Sneacht, its tallest mountain, you can see why it’s called Ireland in miniature, with Lough Swilly on one side, Lough Foyle on the other and the big blue Atlantic Ocean swirling at its headlands. I drank deeply of it as a child. A wild place like this never leaves your soul – it informs how you see the world no matter how far you travel. The blue spaces in my life created room for my imagination to grow. The green spaces allowed me freedom to roam and explore.
The place we’re from never really leaves us. It’s carved in our souls. Donegal left an indelible mark on mine. I compared other places to it. A lot of times they fell short. Over the course of the many years I didn’t live in Donegal, I would dream about it. In the dreams I’d visit my favourite childhood haunts: abandoned cottages, glens with rushing streams or the shores of Lough Foyle, where I spent much of my time growing up.
Often I would wake from a dream, confused that I was in my bed a long way from Donegal. I had, only seconds earlier, been standing on my shore, playing in the sand or climbing into my father’s cot, the little boat he’d row out to his larger fishing boat moored in deeper water.
This shore felt like my kingdom. I ruled this little stretch of rough sand with my bucket and spade. It never ceased to amaze me. I dug for sand eels, looked for buried treasure, gathered sea glass and watched the comings and goings of the gulls, the herons and the cormorants. I walked barefoot in
the spirulina and across the muddy sediment at the water’s edge we called the glar. So much of my dreaming and changes were here on this beach, right beside where I live once again. Even when I was far away, the constant ebb and flow of Lough Foyle in my life was always there. It felt like the rhythm of my heart.
My little shore is not the most beautiful stretch of coastline in the world. Very few people walk along it, preferring to go for the more dramatic swathes of the Atlantic Ocean. But the shore at Redcastle, which was right across the road from my primary school and a stone’s throw from my father’s family homestead, has always been a place of quiet beauty for me. It’s home to terns and sanderlings, who move as a tight pack when you get too close, their tiny legs working frantically in unison away from you before launching into flight as one. There are always herons proudly and quietly standing guard, looking out to the horizon. In the winter, the Brent geese come to us from the north-east of Canada, walking the tideline, picking up vegetation and seaweed. If you stray too close, the one nearest to shore will emit a short, gruff warning to its family members and off they’ll all swim.
All around my parents’ house were big open fields that I loved to explore. Climbing walls and ditches, I’d walk for miles, straying to the outer limits of my childhood. In some of these fields, the walls of old stone houses stood and I’d play here for a while, making up new worlds of my own. When I got my first bike, I’d explore a bit further, often dragging my younger sister Anne-Marie with me to find a new place to play and convert into our own kingdom. There was a large rock in the field behind my parents’ house where I loved to sit and dream. It was the perfect place to watch the sun go down over Lough Foyle. I imagined people in distant places living busy lives far from mine in this quiet spot and even though I loved it here, there was always a pull, a curiosity about other places.
Finding My Wild - How a Move to the Edge Brought Me Home is published by The O’Brien Press
