I brought the set of charms to my family’s farmhouse in Ontario at Christmas, when itwas finished. I gave it to my mother, who had been captivated by the miniature chair anddresser. Thus the only extant set of Home Charms returned to my family home, in fullcircle that felt intuitive, though it seems to contradict the purpose of the thing itself.

Traveling in the mind, in small vestiges and scraps the non-human inhabitants of theIrish domestic space might find themselves transposed onto or synthesized with thematerials and spaces available in an American context. In my aligned (or rather,entangled) research on material culture and immigration I turned to the work of scholarssuch as Adam Drazin, whose fieldwork with Romanian immigrants in Ireland has shownhow material objects continue to play an important role in making (or choosing not tomake) migrant homes

I shortened thechain for no other reason than that it felt right. Later, I realized this shortened chainrecalls the smaller, easily concealed single decade rosaries used by Catholics in Irelandduring a time of religious persecution.13 How might this new consideration challengemy initial framing of jewelry and charms as visible and readable symbols of identity?

Glassie describes the joy that the woman of the house takes in the estheticquality of her dresser, which is then reflected back on her and those who cross herthreshold: “the dresser’s beauty is a gift to the visitor” (364). However, the dresser isalso an active part of the household. Its rows of gleaming china, or “delph”, plates andornaments glimmer with associations to friends and family who have been marriedconfirmed, visited, been born or died, occasioning the gifting or passing on of the dresser’scontents. It’s possible that when Margaret thinks of her sister “sitting triumphant there inpossession of all the old bits of ornaments,” she is in fact imagining the contents of thefamily’s dresser (Brennan 19).

Sian Supski uses interviewswith women who immigrated to Australia in the 40’s and 50’s to demonstrate how thekitchen became their “home” in a new country, actively designing and maintainingcontrol of the space. They used the kitchen and its tools to express agency and create aspace that to one woman felt like “another skin”

omething to rememberor understand how it shape(s/d) our movement or experience. The Irish poet MacdaraWoods writes about the experience of seeing farm tools, familiar from his childhood, ina museum in France; the objects are so embedded in his “cosmology” of home that“[his] hands automatically closed on the phantom forms of them; [he] knew themaking of them, their function and purpose” (Richman Kenneally “‘I Am Off-whiteWalls’” 23)

The object causesthe body to move in a certain way, which then prompts the remembrance of taught infor-mation and spiritual posturing.

However, Stewart also links our fascination with the miniature to nostalgia, whichshe describes as an “inauthentic” longing for a past that never existed (Stewart 23). Thischaracterization of the miniature echoes the slippage between the role of romanticizedexile – often thrust upon immigrants regardless of circumstance – and the actuality of a(dreaded or dreamed of) departure from a very real space and way of life

Maeve Brennan herself had a complicated relation-ship with the notion of “home,” and recent work by scholars such as Angela Bourke, EllenMcWilliams, and Elke D’hoker has engaged with themes of exile and loss in her writing,with her persona as a “self-conscious transatlantic” (McWilliams 96), who immigrated toAmerica along with her family but was fiercely independent and spent passages of later lifehomeless.

Margaret, seems less concerned with the physical objects of household furniture that shehas not been able to bring to America, and more concerned with what they signify, howthey manipulate and determine proper social behavior. Living in a house, but not “womanof the house,” Margaret is ashamed to receive her fiancé at the back, serviceman’s door ofher employer’s home when he arrives to pick her up for a date

They had to adjust not only to a new culture, but to newconfigurations of domestic space and household “tools,” leaving behind the spaces andthings that had shaped their own education and experience in homemaking.