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Art, Awesome Women, Blogging, Breast Cancer Treatment, Chemotherapy, Family, Fathers and sons, Friendships, Happy Father's Day, Loss, Love, Memoir, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Social Media, Writing
a promise kept for father’s day
On June 15th, 2013, I wrote the following as a promise to Karen Sutherland. I am profoundly saddened to learn of her passing exactly four years later. Karen was witty and wise and much loved by her ‘sisters’ in the online breast cancer community. She always offered a soft place to fall and an encouraging word even as she dealt with…
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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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Aging, Arizona, Birthdays, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Death and dying, Diagnosis, Family, Fireworks, Irish culture, Irish mammies, John Hiatt, Loss, Love, Memoir, Memory, Mother Daughter Relationship, Muriel Rukeyser, New Year, Newgrange, No Country for Old Men, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, saying goodbye, Soundtracks of our Lives, Starting over, Ted Kooser, Themes of Childhood, Time
Ready to Turn ~ Winter Solstice 2015
Again, the sun will pause for its moment of solstice before changing direction to move northward. From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point, something I look forward to each year. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, outside Dublin, Ireland, they hold a lottery to decide who…
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Act Two, After death of a spouse, Aging, Being a Widow, Birthdays, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Father Daughter Relationships, Fatherless daughters, Fourth of July, Loss, Memoir, Milestones, Rites of passage, Second Birthday Without Him, Soundtracks of our Lives, Ted Kooser
Marking your Birthday – “Slow Learning but You Learn to Sway”
It is your birthday, and for the second time since we met, you are not with me on your day. How should we mark the occasion? Without any fuss, I can hear you say, and maybe you can hear me ignore you as I plan a fuss of some kind, the way I did for each of the 23 birthdays you celebrated with…
