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9/11, Awesome Women, cancer, Children's Books, Education, Emmylou Harris, Family, favorite teacher, Love Actually, Memoir, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Ordinary Things, Pre-school, Soundtracks of our Lives, summer camp, Teaching, Themes of Childhood, Van Morrison, Van Morrison, Women and careers
For my daughter on her birthday . . . the love, actually, is all around.
It’s one of my favorite pictures – her T-shirt reminding me the way she always does, “good things will come.” It is my darling girl’s birthday, and with COVID keeping us in our respective places once again this year, we’ll have to make do with text messages and embarrassing photos on Facebook instead of a celebration here in Mexico. I’m going to wake up missing her and remembering that it’s really hard to remember life before her. Suddenly, one day, there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce. Parenting was solemn. Parenting was a participle, like going and doing and crusading and worrying; it was active, it was energetic, it was unrelenting. Parenting meant playing…
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Aging, An Ulster Twilight, Castledawson, Christmas, Dispatch from the Diaspora, Father Daughter Relationships, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Seamus Heaney, Themes of childhood
My Father’s Ulster Twilight
The bare bulb, a scatter of nails, Shelved timber, glinting chisels: In a shed of corrugated iron Eric Dawson stoops to his plane At five o’clock on a Christmas Eve. Carpenter’s pencil next, the spoke-shave, Fretsaw, auger, rasp and awl, A rub with a rag of linseed oil … It is Christmas morning, 1967, in a modest house on Antrim’s Dublin Road. With a satin bow in her hair, the little girl in the faded photograph is joyous, wrapped up in an outfit her mother knit for the occasion. Santa has left a new bicycle. It is her first, equipped with stabilizers. Stabilizers.’ Her first big word. Even now, I…
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at the still point – happy thanksgiving
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is… T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” Almost a decade ago, I enrolled in a college photography class. Not a bucket list kind of thing by most standards, but it was something I had been meaning to do for over thirty years, but had never been able to make time for it, too busy being busy and bemoaning the pace of life as a woman trying to play equally well the roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, best friend, teacher. At the same time, I had also been waiting…
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When all that’s left is love: the healing has begun
Epitaph By Merrit Malloy When I dieGive what’s left of me awayTo childrenAnd old men that wait to die. And if you need to cry,Cry for your brotherWalking the street beside you.And when you need me,Put your armsAround anyoneAnd give themWhat you need to give to me. I want to leave you something,Something betterThan wordsOr sounds. Look for meIn the people I’ve knownOr loved,And if you cannot give me away,At least let me live on in your eyesAnd not your mind. You can love me mostBy lettingHands touch hands,By letting bodies touch bodies,And by letting goOf childrenThat need to be free. Love doesn’t die,People do.So, when all that’s left of…
