-
Children of The Troubles, Damian Gorman, Devices of Detachment, For too many Palestinian and Israeli Parents, Gaza, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Poetry, Tony Parker
Gaza in Context ~ How Long Must We Sing this Song?
As I write, Gaza is being bombed. Again. On Monday, Israeli forces shot and killed 58 Palestinians and wounded at least 1,200 during a protest against the opening of the United States embassy in Jerusalem. Children lie among the dead. Again. Babies, one of whom was in her grandmother’s arms when she inhaled the tear gas that would kill her a few hours later. One of the Far away, I begin the mental mathematics. Adding it up, I know for sure only this about Gaza – children are still dying. The news comes fast and furious, the way it always does. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. Mainstream media. Social media. Mixed-up…
-
airing laundry for mother’s day
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…
-
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 Children’s Book Day: Where’s the Love, Actually?
I stayed home with my daughter for a year after she was born. It was the best year of my life. With her attached to me in one of those Baby Bjorn carriers without which I would have been completely unprepared for motherhood, as one of those hovering salespeople in Babies R Us had warned me before she was born. Business was slow that first year. Just the way I like it. Some days I made it out of my pajamas, but that was only if I felt like walking out to the mailbox, unlike Dolly Parton, who apparently checks the mail in full makeup and heels. Fair play to…
-
and What I Wore, Art, Awesome Women, Carly Simon, Cat Stevens, Culture of breast cancer, Facebook, Feminism, Memoir, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Nora Ephron, Soundtracks of our Lives, Theater, Writers
In Control – Remembering Nora Ephron on International Women’s Day.
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…
