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a red letter day
I’m sure he exists, but I have never seen the mailman where I live in Mexico. Regardless, I still peek into the letterbox every day, the way I used to all those years I lived in Arizona when there was likely to be an envelope marked By Air Mail, Par Avion waiting for me in the mailbox in front of our house. My Mexican mail amounts to an electricity bill (without an envelope let alone a stamp) delivered once every two months by someone I have never seen. There’s the occasional business card from someone who wants to wash my car, sell my house, or extend my eyelashes. And once a…
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When the sun stops …
Dawn light began stealingThrough the cold universe to County Meath, Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling,Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stonesMillennia deep in their own unmoving And unmoved alignment. (from A Dream of Solstice by Seamus Heaney) Winter Solstice is the turning point I look forward to each year. The day after my daughter’s birthday, it is a lovely mid-winter reassurance that the light is coming. Solstice is derived from the Latin, sōlstitium, loosely translated as the apparent standing still of the sun. To ancient civilizations, it looked like the sun stood still at that moment when its rays shine directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, 23…
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a time to give thanks …
The pandemic forced us to reconsider and replace known ways with new routines and rituals; it inspired new reasons - reminders - to be thankful - for all we had previously taken for granted - hugs and handshakes, hanging out and happy hour, multiple trips to the grocery store on the same day and meetings without masks; hair appointments and pedicures and parties and graduations and weddings and funerals - and our kids going off to school every day. We promised ourselves, didn't we, that we'd never take those things for granted again. I wonder if we've maybe forgotten some of that ...
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Enniskillen lingers
It never occurred to me that I was a child of The Troubles until I stumbled upon a scholarly dissertation about Northern Ireland. As a child, I was usually at a safe distance from “The Troubles,” I saw at 6 o’clock every evening when we turned on the news or the odd time our kitchen window rattled when a bomb had exploded somewhere close. There was the time the car-bomb exploded outside Halls Hotel, and then the time my brother, a freshly minted journalist, had to interview the grandmother of three little boys murdered, burned to death on July 12, 1998. Richard, Mark and Jason, just eleven, nine, and seven…
