Well Traveled

These three weights look simple enough, but they tell a long story of the journey of my family. My family is from a small village in County Mayo, Ireland called Carrowkeel. The small village lives inside the town of Ballyhaunis. Both sides of my family can find their origins here, my paternal grandmother grew up in a home two farms away from my mother’s childhood home. When my mother emigrated to the United States in March of 1986, she visited my grandmothers house and was invited to a July 4^th party at my Dads, her future husbands house. The story has a few more twists and turns but eventually my parents ended up together with three kids in Northern Virginia, far from the rural life of Western Ireland.

These three weights are from my maternal grandfather’s grocery store, my grandfather was the grocer for the village, and he used these weights to measure out things like flour, salt, and sugar. In a time before things like flour and sugar came pre-packaged my grandfather would use these weights and a scale to measure out the prefect amount for the customers. What these weights mean to our family is a connection to home, my dad is first generation so almost all of our family can be found abroad. So by having these weights reminds us of our family and where we came from, a connection to our family’s past. They also represent the hard work my grandparents and parents have done over the years, they have travelled from a small Irish farm to a home in Northern Virginia, what a journey!