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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
and still we dance . . . happy mother’s day
In Ireland, it is Mother’s Day and it is also still impossible to visit my mother and the place that made her. A phone call later will help minimize the miles between Castledawson and a village in Mexico, me falling easily back into the comforting colloquialisms of home, but it won’t be the same as surprising her the way I used to do with a bunch of fresh flowers that she will immediately arrange in a crystal vase on the hall table. Even if I were able to fly to Belfast, I would still have to stay away from her, COVID restrictions in place for the foreseeable future hoping to tame…
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Dispatches from the Diaspora, Friendship, Happy New Year, Milestones, saying goodbye, Seamus Heaney, Starting over, Ted Kooser, Time
Facing the Ice on New Year’s Eve . . .
Dangerous pavements. But I face the ice this year With my father’s stick. ~ Seamus Heaney On New Year’s Eve, a year ago, Chinese health officials confirmed an outbreak of a new virus causing pneumonia-like clusters in Wuhan city. Since then – as we all now know – the virus has spread to nearly every country, killing over 1.8 million people and decimating the world’s economies. How do we bid farewell to all of that? I’m not sure we can. Not really. Not as over 1.8 million ghosts step into 2021 with us, reminding us as we turn the calendar page, of what we have lost and the hard road…
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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
The Love Actually is All Around . . . Happy Birthday, Sophie.
As her T-shirt reminds me, “good things will come.” Soon, I hope. It is my darling girl’s birthday today, and with COVID keeping us in our respective places, we’ll have to make do with Facetime. I woke up missing her the way I knew I would and remembering that I can’t 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 Mozart CDs while you were pregnant, doing without the epidural, and breast-feeding your child until it was old enough…
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thanksgiving in the time of corona
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 thirty years. I had never been able to find the time for it, always 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 for Tom Petty to show up on my doorstep and beg me to be one of his Heartbreakers. A dear friend signed up with me, and we were…
