Agnes closed her shop last week. It's difficult to describe what that actually means in real life, but it serves as a wake-up call for me, about what's happening to places like Manorhamilton, and the people who live here.
Her shop straddled the corner of Lower Main Street and the Enniskillen road, a significant junction in the town. It never looked like a thriving business, with two packets of Radion in one window, some Batchelors peas in the second, the bus time-table to Kiltyclougher pasted up with Sellotape, side-by-side with the signature straggling, posters of local events.
Agnes and I had a relationship based on the purchase of behind-the-counter products. That's where she kept the free-range eggs she bought from an old man living up the mountain. Actually, she kept these in her own kitchen, but if you asked for them, she'd bring them out, worrying about their size and shape.
"It's the weather," she'd say apologetically, "they don't lay so well in this kind of cold." It's the only time in my life that I've even had a vague connection with food and where it comes from. Every Saturday and Sunday, Tony cooks a fry, and we surround ourselves with dozens of newspaper supplements. The cadmium yellow of those yolks used to scream out at us from the middle of the plate. You could tell the days when they weren't Agnes's eggs.
She was also important to Leo and me, in the evolving world of independence for a child. "Go over to Agnes and get some milk," I'd say to him. I could watch him from the door like a little man, walking over with the money in his pocket, along with the 30p I'd given him to buy sweets. Inevitably, he'd buy the sweets and run back, navigating the road under my watchful eye. "I forgot what you wanted Mum" - so it was over and back again, until he was safely home to me.
I can't describe the feeling of putting my hand on the handle of her shop door last week, its unyielding lock telling me something I already knew. As much as I'd like to think of Manorhamilton as a place still tied to the old ways, the relentless march of economics is as strong here as everywhere else. It's like a tide washing over the place, which destroys not only the financial needs of people working on a shoe-string, but the social context in which they live.
People in the city can talk all they like about rural decline; it's only when you live it that you begin to understand the frustration that people feel. It induced a sense of panic in me, that I too might be swept away with this unfeeling tide. I cannot claim to be of here, and never will, but I feel that water around my feet like the indictment it is, just the same.
Noel in the Mace supermarket felt it too, even though I would have argued, when living in Dublin, that it's the supermarkets that are part of this decline. He knows you can't stop progress, but it doesn't lessen his concern for the future of the town. It's not as if the community aren't standing up to voice these concerns, they are; it's a question of who holds the power, and who is really working on their behalf.
One of the key Leitrim political figures, John Ellis, is himself embroiled in controversy, so where do a community go to make their voices heard, if those in whom they have vested the power are not looking out for their own? When I lived in Dublin and made the occasional visit here, Agnes would always say "it must be very busy in Dublin", and Tony and I used to wonder what she made of it all, not to mind our return here to live. Her only comment on that was to say "it must have been too busy in Dublin, what?" To which I could only provide a litany of how much it costs to rent a place to live, figures which were staggering to her, as they would be to any sane person. But I can come here to escape my financial realities; Agnes had to close her shop to minimise hers.
On another note, I now have in my possession a recipe for sheep's hearts, which I got from a Leitrim woman whose mother used to cook them when she was small, because they were cheap. She wrote to me from Little-island in Cork, and reads my articles because she gets homesick from time to time. It felt so odd for me, to reply to her, from Lower Main Street, because the word "impostor" kept ringing in my ears. I can't say I'll try the hearts, but I understand that's where the sentiment came from.
