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Arizona Humane Society, Chihuahuas, Dog Rescue, Dogs, Door into the Dark, Greyhound, Loss, Love, Mary Oliver, Memoir, Rites of passage, Seamus Heaney, Starting over, The Midnight Anvil
for national puppy day – an emotional rescue
A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing. ~ Mary Oliver, Dog Songs First there was Molly, a retired racer who loved me. We had rescued her in the Christmas of 2008, on the heels of a spectacular crisis in my professional life, and…
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Language of Cancer, Leontia Flynn, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Themes of childhood
poetry – the charm of it
For World Poetry Day 2016. The freedom and the lovely uselessness of poetry is its whole point. ~ Leontia Flynn My parents were raised in rural County Derry, in Heaney country, where they learned to be thrifty and resourceful, and also – when all else failed – to believe in the mystical powers of “folk healers,” those individuals uniquely gifted…
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following the sun, following my grandmother
My grandmother died when I was just six years old. I have never forgotten her – maybe because hers was my first experience with death or maybe because it was my first time to feel completely loved. To this day, the sunshine that spills into my front room every morning, reminds me of Granny urging her daughter – my mother – to “follow the…
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Coming of age, craic, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Northern Ireland Culture, St. Patrick, Sunningdale Agreement, The Troubles, United Workers Council Strike 1974
by the wayside again on st. patrick’s day
I’m a bit ambivalent about St. Patrick’s Day. What is it about March 17th that renders so many people Irish or some version of it that I do not recall from living the first twenty-seven years of my life in Northern Ireland? Everywhere I turn tomorrow, there will be Americans proclaiming their Irishness , some in T-shirts emblazoned with a command for everyone…
