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Language of Cancer, Leontia Flynn, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Themes of childhood
the lovely uselessness of poetry
For World Poetry Day 2015. The freedom and the lovely uselessness of poetry is its whole point. ~ Leontia Flynn My parents were raised in rural County Derry, 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 with…
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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
my mother’s day dance
In Ireland, it is Mother’s Day. In Arizona, it is just another Sunday that finds me thinking about my mother – ma – 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, and my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.…
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Awesome Women, Edna O'Brien, International Women's Day, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Rural Ireland, Women Writers
Thank you to a scandalous woman . . .
“Make It Happen” is the 2015 theme for International Women’s Day. Edna O’Brien has been making it happen for me since I first encountered her Country Girls, many years ago. I wrote this for her last year, and it still applies . . .
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Act Two, Aging, Being a Widow, Birthdays, Breast Cancer Advocacy, Breast Cancer Treatment, Castledawson, Coming of age, Death and dying, Dying, Family, Fatherless daughters, FInal wishes, First birthday without him, Funerals, Great Advice, Grieving, Loss, Love, Marriage, Memoir, Mourning, Northern Ireland, Poetry, Robin Williams, saying goodbye, Thanksgiving, Themes of Childhood, Tommy Edwards, W.H. Auden, Wedding Anniversary
Remembering Ken on our 25th ‘Anniversary’
Twelve days after Ken died, I wrote this post. I haven’t read it since, and I’m not going to read it tonight. Somewhere in the middle of the grief-stricken ramblings, I remember is a pure – and good – memory of this day twenty five years ago – January 13, 1990 – the day when Ken and I embarked on what we both knew…
