Fitzgerald Granduncles — County Limerick, Ireland, c. 1930
Somewhere around 1930, four men are bringing in the hay on a farm in Caherlevoy, County Limerick. I know they are my Fitzgerald granduncles — the family, the county, the approximate decade are clear enough — but the photograph is not sharp enough to say which face belongs to which name. My grandfather is not among them. He had arrived in the United States in 1924.
One stands with his back to the camera, both hands on the wheel of a loaded hay cart. The others are beside the stacked load, hats shading their faces, shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. They are pausing in the way people pause mid-labor when a camera appears: long enough to be recorded, not long enough to be at rest.
Bringing in the hay was the season's central work — the cart, the load, the rolling fields stretching behind them into the Limerick distance. These men were part of its machinery, year after year. They did not know they were being preserved.
