Fifty years ago, a little boy, uncomfortable in his new shoes and unfamiliar tie, stood in a small village churchyard in West Cork and watched while his favorite uncle posed with his new bride for their wedding pictures.  From where he stood the boy could see clearly the church in which his grandfather and father had been baptized and the school house in which both had studied. The newly-married couple, both more than six feet tall with the black hair and blue eyes common in that place, looked like glamorous giants to the little boy, who blushed and fidgeted under the attention of relatives and family friends he hardly knew.

In the passing half century, the little boy grew, as little boys tend to do.  The much-loved uncle and aunt aged, as uncles and aunts tend to do, acquiring white hair along the way but keeping the clear blue eyes. The school had been extended.  The simple church, unchanged, now the setting for the latest in a long line of family weddings that have been held there since that day fifty years ago.  The bride, tall, black-haired and beautiful – just as her mother had been.  Permanence and change, side by side as they always are.

Names matter here.  Family names – surprisingly few – that root you in a place and connect you to others, the living and the long dead.  Personal names handed down from generation to generation, some – Cornelius and Florence, for instance – surprising to outsiders.  And ancient place names, individual parishes and farms, places of sad departures and longed-for returns.  Dromkeal and Corran, Farranfadda and Derrynakilla. Places marked by no signposts and separated by old stone walls, but distinct nonetheless through centuries of comings and goings, stories and memories.

Weddings here are uncommon reunions of the far-scattered and the local, of those who wouldn’t leave and those who couldn’t return, and celebrations of something more than a couple’s love.  This is clan-gathering, memory-sharing, storytelling time in a place everyone calls home.