I am walking through our farm and come upon a visitor in one of our barns: the farrier. A farrier is essentially a blacksmith who specializes in customizing shoes for horses, as well as caring for and grooming their hooves. He’s kind of a blacksmith with beauty school training. Farrier day is a big day at Winterwood Farm; the horses get their hooves trimmed, buffed and polished and perhaps shoed or un-shoed. Watching the farrier at work (from a safe distance) is a humbling example of me marveling at yet another thing about which I didn’t know much. This attentive gentleman, clad in a dark t-shirt, jeans with leather chaps to protect his legs, and solid, worn-in work boots, works his trade with strong, muscular arms. Normally frisky horses stand quiet and mostly compliant for him, resisting their urge to be antsy and run away. They settle in to enjoy a few moments of pampering under the capable, steady hand of the farrier.

I watch him toil away, blithely whittling at the hoof in his hand, busily shaving off the excess with precision. He is as meticulous and efficient as a mechanic, an artist, or a carpenter. Observing him, it occurs to me that my mom’s father was a blacksmith. I don’t remember him, as I was only three when he passed. But my mother always claimed that she had her father’s hands, “peasant hands,” because they were broad and strong like his. My mother built a life with those hands, changed thousands of diapers, nursed nine babies, set tables, and washed and folded more clothes and bedding than a hotel laundry room. Her broad, strong father, Johnny Colleran, made a life from his hands, too, built a family, tried to make his way as the son of Irish immigrants. They say he was “black Irish” with his shock of dark hair and dark brown eyes. He wasn’t a tall man, reportedly swarthy, short and stocky.

I begin musing. Where did Johnny do this blacksmithing? Surely in a dark alley somewhere, hot and sweaty. He was reportedly a restless, creative soul, so he was probably making connections, networking, looking for a way up and out of those hot, arduous conditions. I think of him, toiling away in frustration of the then-prejudice against the Irish immigrants, who “need not apply” for the meager jobs that were available in those stark days.

As the family story goes, Johnny used his skills to forge the first ever bumper for the newfangled invention, the automobile. Perhaps he saw horseless carriages puttering down the streets of Cleveland and saw one ram into another. Perhaps both were damaged and he thought, “well that could be prevented,” and went back to his blacksmith shop to work on a solution.

Family lore says his invention was stolen from his locker at work and whoever stole it went on to make lots of money on his idea. Was this story true? Did Johnny Colleran really toil away with those sizeable mitts, banging on metal for weeks or months and actually invent the first bumper? Who knows …

The way I hear it, Johnny was full of stories, like the time as a young man he was working as a longshoreman on The Great Lakes. When the ship came to port in Cleveland, he was nowhere to be found, so everyone assumed he was swept away in the storm that kicked up while they were on the water. All his friends and family were bereft at his passing, stricken with grief as they had a proper Irish wake and funeral for poor Johnny, tragically lost out on the water. But it turned out he wasn’t lost at all; he had just fallen asleep down in the bowels of the boat and, upon waking and seeing the crew had left, went on his merry way. He said that he was as startled as everyone else when he happened upon his own funeral. This story sounds suspiciously like Mark Twain’s story of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn’s disappearance and subsequent attendance of their own funerals. But you know what they say: “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

One story that has never been fully explained to me is why and when Johnny Colleran changed his name to Johnny Collins. Was it an homage to Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary hero? Some say he was running for a union office and that Johnny Collins was just easier to remember. Maybe. Or perhaps he just wanted to glow up his image, but changing “Colleran” to “Collins” certainly didn’t do a good job camouflaging his Irish identity.

Johnny also played the fiddle. That story says that he met and wooed his wife, an Irish immigrant named Catherine Joan O’Malley, playing that fiddle with his meat hook hands. “Kitty” was whisked off her feet by his music one night. It all sounds like a scene from the movie, Brooklyn. I imagine their meeting ...

She is a dark-haired Irish immigrant, a beauty with a fine nose and sparkly blue eyes. She is excited to be in America, but lonely, having left her family of 10 siblings and her beloved mother behind in the extreme poverty of Ireland at the time. He is a fiddler, playing his weekly gig at the Irish American Club, a dimly lit, loud, smokey place. His big, blacksmith hands, grimy with the work of the day, fly over the fiddle, tucked under his chin as he looks out over the dance floor and spots young Kitty. She is dressed in blue, doing reels with her newfound friends, made while working at the hotel downtown. They were eager to hire Irish women there because they were pretty, spoke English, and were eager to work.

Johnny watches her fix her hair that had fallen down a bit in the back from dancing. “Look how delicate her hands are,” he thinks. “Not rough and grimy like mine, but gentle, refined ... yet strong. Who is she?”

The band takes a break and he dashes into the bathroom backstage to splash water on his face. He looks at himself in the dusky, poorly-lit mirror. “Don’t screw this up, Johnny Boy,” he whispers to himself, drying his face with a dirty towel nearby. He walks out of the bathroom and heads straight for the bar for a pint. And there she is, just nearby, laughing and talking with other young women. Her face is creamy white and he notices her eyes are the lightest blue he’s ever seen. Grabbing his pint and swallowing hard, he approaches her. “You’re quite a dancer,” he says, his brown eyes grinning over his pint. “You’re quite a fiddler, aren’t ya?” she shoots right back. Not as demure as he had expected her to be. “I’m Johnny,” he says, wiping the sweat from his right hand onto his shabby pant leg and then extending it out to her.

“You’re American,” she says with surprise. “I am,” he replies. “My parents are from Sligo. Mayo.” “I’m from Mayo ... me and the rest of the gang in here,” she laughs. “Curran. I just arrived here a month ago.” “And?” Johnny says, tipping his pint to wet his now-dry mouth. She is speaking to him and he is both thrilled and terrified. “And, sure it’s grand here. I miss me ma terrible, but it’s good. Making some good money at the hotel down the way. Working in the kitchen, don’t ya know,” she says with a flourish, taming a few wild strands of her smooth, inky hair.

“So, you can cook, eh?” he laughed. “Beautiful. Smart. And she can cook. Jackpot,” he thinks. “Well, I’m learning, to be sure. Never seen a pineapple in me life, and now I’m making something called pineapple upside down cake,” she laughs. “Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

In cinematic fashion, Johnny and Kitty married. As the years went by, they slogged through The Great Depression. Eventually, as work dried up for Johnny, Kitty took in boarders to support their four children. The story fades ...

The man in front of me, the farrier, has no idea I have left on this imaginary trip back in time, musing on my grandparents. In the hazy, sepia light of the barn, he continues grinding, then buffing, then polishing each hoof as the stallion stands, waiting it out. Finishing up his equine spa day on our farm, the farrier gives a hoof one last rub of polishing, then packs up his hoof pick, shoe puller, rasp (essentially a honking huge nail file), hammers, and nails like a refrigerator repairman packing up his things after a house call. He’s had a long day of doing this and the fruits of his labor show. As he leaves, the barns are filled with huge horses with twinkly toes. They all seem to stand a little bit taller, more confident as he puts his tools into his truck.

That farrier is a rare breed these days, not the dime-a-dozen horse farrier or blacksmith from the early 1900’s. It must have been scary for blacksmiths of yore, seeing those horseless carriages increasingly populate the urban streets of America, making their jobs obsolete. And yet, here we are today with this skill still in demand, in a niche way.

Walking away from the barn, I continue to ponder Johnny Collins the Depression-era blacksmith and his beefy arms, his jet-black hair, his charismatic personality, his fiddle. I enter my comfortable farm house to wash my hands before preparing dinner, the sweet, earthy aroma of hay, manure, and horse still clinging to me. The water washes over my small, barely-calloused, sunscreen-covered hands and I stand there at the sink, thinking, “These are not my mother’s hands, nor her father’s.”

My Apple watch buzzes me, congratulating me for taking 10,000 steps.