-
airing laundry for my mother’s birthday
Old Smoothing Iron by Seamus Heaney Often I watched her lift it from where its compact wedge rode the back of the stove like a tug at achor. To test its heat by ear she spat in its iron face or held it up next her cheek to divine the stored danger. Soft thumps on the ironing board. Her dimpled angled elbow and intent stoop as she aimed the smoothing iron like a plane into linen like the resentment of women To work, her dumb lunge says, is to move a certain mass through a certain distance, is to pull your weight and feel exact and equal to it. Feel…
-
Antrim, Belfast, bombing, British Army, Castledawson, Claudy, IRA, La Mon House Hotel Bombing, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Omagh, Sectarianism, The Miami Showband, The Troubles, Themes of childhood, UVF
How Long Must we Sing This Song? For the Miami Showband . . .
Any atrocity reported in isolation can be used to beat the other “side,” but together with stories from both communities, it is clear that no “side” has a monopoly on suffering or loss. ~Stephen Travers, July 30, 2018 On July 30, 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday, the final details were being planned for what would happen the next day in Claudy, a sleepy little village in County Derry. Three car bombs would be strategically placed in a town center bustling with Monday morning shoppers. Carefully choreographed, the plan would include telephone warnings and code words to alert authorities before the bombs detonated. The warnings never came.…
-
Breast Cancer Awareness, Damian Gorman, Dispatches from the Diaspora, Jonathan Klein, Let Them Come, Photos That Changed the World, Refugees, Sarah Lewis, Syria
the only home you know ~ agus ta fáilte romhaibh
In his 2010 TED talk, Photos That Changed the World, co-founder of Getty, Jonathan Klein, maintains that a picture can make the world a better place. With clear-eyed compassion, he proves his point, presenting a series of images many of us know well, images from which we can neither look away nor back. In her book, The Rise, Sarah Lewis refers to this power, this “aesthetic force” as the thing that will force us into action, perhaps even to justice: . . . it leaves us changed — stunned, dazzled, knocked out. It can quicken the pulse, make us gape, even gasp with astonishment. Its importance is its animating trait — not what it is,…
-
and What I Wore, Art, Awesome Women, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens, Culture of breast cancer, Facebook, Memoir, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Nora Ephron, Soundtracks of our Lives, Theater, Writers
In Control. Remembering Nora Ephron.
It was leukemia that took Nora Ephron from us, a cancer she had kept private in a world that already knew many of the intimate details of her aging neck, her dry skin, the contents of her purse, her small breasts about which she wrote A Few Words, and her weapon of choice against not only the gray hair that grows back with a vengeance every four weeks, but the youth culture in general – hair color. With a quick and daring wit, she regaled us with stories of the indignities visited upon her as she grew older, but she did not tell us about the cancer. Cancer was not up for…
