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A Sense of Wonder, Aging, Barmbrack, Belfast, Best friends, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Good Vibrations, Hyndford Street, In the Days Before Rock n' Roll, Irish culture, Little Feat, Madame George, Memoir, Milestones, Music, Norn Iron Soul Food, Northern Ireland, Paris Buns, pop culture, Pop Music, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Snowball, Soundtracks of our Lives, Terri Hooley, Themes of childhood, Van Morrison, Vinyl Records, WagonWheel, When the Healing Has Begun
Caught up One More Time . . . on Cyprus Avenue
From Cyprus Avenue on Van Morrison's 70th birthday - when the familiar refrain streamed across a continent into my kitchen in the desert, and the appreciative whistles from the Belfast crowd, my whole world stopped for a second. Back street jelly roll . . .
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Aging, Awesome Women, Castledawson, Coming of age, Family, grandmother, Irish culture, Irish mammies, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Seamus Heaney, Soundtracks of our Lives, Themes of Childhood
for my mother on her birthday
Another long-distance phone call and the miles between my mother and me fall away. With the phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear, she is rescuing sheets from the clothes-line just before another downpour. Next will come a bit of ironing and then the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.…
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Act Two, Castledawson, Family, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Rites of passage, Rituals, Seamus Heaney
still we dance – on mother’s day in america
This weekend marks another Mother’s Day without the man who made a mother out of me, the man who loved me so well and for so long. Our girl plans to take time off work to spend the day with me, and we know – but we keep it to ourselves – that looking forward to a special Sunday together will lead to looking back to the…
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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…
