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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
a mother’s day dance
This Mother’s Day weekend in America finds me thinking about my mother back in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by…
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Being a Widow, Facebook, Friendship, Loss, Love, Memoir, Milestones, Rites of passage, Rituals, Social Media, Themes of childhood, Valentines Day, widowed
for valentine’s day ~ ronald reagan’s love medicine
Many relationships in my life I conduct almost entirely by telephone, including those with the people dearest to me. With too much ocean or freeway stretching between our houses, it is easier to carry on conversations from the comfort of our own homes. Always, there is something to talk about even when there is nothing to talk about. Before Skype,…
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A Poem for Michael and Christopher, Blackberry Picking, Clearances, Family, Feminism, nikki giovanni, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Poetry, removing training wheels, Rites of passage, Rituals, Soundtracks of our Lives, Starting over, Themes of Childhood, Time, Wheels within Wheels
getting a grip on things ~ noli timere
Had someone told me this was going to happen, I wonder what we would have done differently or better or both with our remaining days together. Would an expiration date on our family have changed the way we lived those thirty days? Would we have crammed in the kinds of things typically found on bucket-lists or would we have made…
