There has been widespread sadness expressed throughout the community following the death of Mrs. Susan McAfee who went to her eternal rest on July 29, aged 94 years.

Susan lost her own mother early and came to Boho, aged 13, to keep house for her bereaved grandfather.

With no role model, she took the role, the heart and soul, of the Irish mammy into her own hands.

There was work for those hands in the house, on the farm, in the garden and in the field.

After she married Jim McAfee, in 1954, there was work with a succession of babies: Margaret, Mary, Kay, Sue, Anne, Teresa, Paul and Damian.

Susan’s hands mixed soda bread and scones every morning, cracked eggs for pancakes, grated spuds for boxty (made to a secret recipe), worked a Singer sewing machine, a hand whisk, a churn dash, a strong poker to stir the ash, a quiverful of knitting needles.

Her fingers, adorned with one plain gold ring, milked cows, raked hay, lifted turf, pressed strong safety pins into countless white nappies, scattered feed for hens, and made holes in soil for a myriad of seedlings.

Her fingertips rubbed shortening into flour for apple tarts in winter and rhubarb tarts in summer, with no mess and no waste.

Susan used a hard thumbnail to nip a cutting from a friend’s garden (or even a park!) or to end the hopeful trawl of slug or greenfly, but had gentle fingers to detach a daughter’s hair from a sticky fly trap, to remove a mote from an eye, or to stroke a chick’s trembling head.

At night, she read aloud; her hand stretched forward to turn a page and her voice paused, while her small audience waited with breath suspended ... and then resumed breathing down her neck, entranced.

At bedtime, her hands turned her beads as she led the Rosary with a sleep-slurred voice.

In later years, electricity and technology eased her load. Her children married and left home; her hands stretched forward in welcome as we came into the house, waved goodbye from the window and wiped a tear from her eye as we drove away down the lane.

Susan’s hands held the happiness of a household, of eight households, in their palm. Those hands are still now.