-
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…
-
9/11, Belfast, Boston Marathon 2013, Damian Gorman, Facebook, Health Activist Writer's Challenge 2013, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney, Soundtracks of our Lives, television, The Troubles, The Troubles
boston 2013 . . . without warning
Until September 11th 2001, I had taken for granted the sense of security I felt as a woman who had traded in Northern Ireland for America. Foolishly, I had too quickly dropped my guard, almost forgetting anything can happen. I grew complacent and smug, confident that – unlike her mother – my American daughter would never have to look twice at…
-
Antrim Guardian, Being young, Belfast, British Army, Family, Funerals, IRA, Loughinisland, Memoir, News Travels by Yvonne Watterson, Northern Ireland, Punishment, Sectarianism, The Good Friday Agreement, The Troubles, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood, Themes of childhood, UVF
loughinisland lingers . . .
To forget them would be a second death. I don’t think I am responsible for their first death. But I can be responsible, if I am not careful, in the second death.” ~ ELIE WIESEL Yes. It is important. To bear witness. To say their names. I was recently contacted by Colm Smyth who survived the heartless attack on 16…
-
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…
