Smell of Soap and Water, Liquor, Children and Pine

Jerrine Rupert Wire remembers:

My Wild Irish Rose", the sweet haunting melody floats to my ears and memory swiftly flies back across the years. in fancy I see again the rough two-storied building built of rough-hewn logs hauled from the near by mountains. It is night and cold as all nights are in this high country. The yard around the building Is filled with saddle horses and teams hitched to light wagons and buggies. From the building pours the sound of music, gay and loud and beautiful to the ears of the listeners.

Warm yellow light from the kerosene lanterns in the "hall" cut bright slices in the darkness. Inside the families of the ranchers in the remote valley are dressed in their very prettiest and are happily dancing, awkwardly, with much stomping and scraping and whirling. Dancing to old tunes almost forgotten now. The fiddlers are neighbors who just "picked up" music and who play only a limited number of tunes they all know. The good smell of strong coffee and good cakes, of soap and water and perfume, of tobacco and liquor, and of children, and sagebrush and pine. The great stoves at each end of the hall roar merrily. Little children sleep on quilts and coats on the floor and benches back of the stoves. Older children scamper about or try to learn to dance.

Suddenly there comes the sharp sound of a man banging a stick on the floor of the dance hall. A laugh and knowing look passes quickly along the faces of the crowd. Everyone knows Mick, the lovely Irishman, the village drunk, a bachelor, a very fine smith and mechanic. His frail looking body is in reality a steel wire capable of enduring roughest, hardest labor and bitter cold. His beautiful blue eyes gaze over the crowd as his fogged wits collect themselves. Suddenly he stands proud and tall and poised and waiting. The fiddlers begin his song and from him comes the purest tenor voice singing lovingly, sweetly, "My Wild Irish Rose".

The haunting melody lifts the souls of all who hear it from the dull days, the loneliness the disappointments, the ugliness of today's chores. Their minds soar with the rising notes and trip happily to the lilt of this simple song. They share again the love expressed by the young lover of long ago. Mick's weaknesses and faults are gone and he who was never to know real love, stands strong and filled with love and beloved. No one ever broke the spell he cast upon all of us.

Smell of Soap and Water, Liquor, Children and Pine