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Potato patch inspires thoughts of home

By Noreen Bowden | July 23, 2007

Kevin Connolly, a US-based Irish emigrant, wrote in Saturday’s Irishman’s Diary in the Irish Times of his experiences growing potatoes in his home in Indiana. While the topic may seem prosaic, the writer creates a particularly  moving snapshot of a simple link with home.

He notes that he grows Kerr’s Pinks, and adds, “Inspired by a nostalgia for seed types that I grew up with and which were developed in Scotland or Ireland, I sought out a variety that might even remind me of home. Watching them grow through their various stages is like looking at the garden in Sligo where I grew them for years.”

Mr Connolly elevates the humble spud to iconic status, admitting that he sends digital photos of them over to his father in Ireland, while the tubers themselves allow him to feel a sense of continuity.  He also gives bemused house guests tours of his tiny patch.

He concludes the article:

“Here in the Indiana night air with the sound of the locusts and katydids cranking up the volume of their nocturnal cacophony, and amid the flickering lights of the fireflies, I think of a poem by Rupert Brooke, with slightly altered words and greatly altered sense: “That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever Ireland”.

Read the entire article at the Irish Times website (subscription required).

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