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BC Action, Breast Cancer Advocacy, Breast Cancer Awareness, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Breast cancer walks, Carcinogens, Culture of breast cancer, Early Detection, Environmental Issues, Fracking, Mammograms, Pink Ribbons, Pinkwashing, Profiting from breast cancer, Susan G Komen Foundation
What – no cure? Maybe next October.
Time to remove the pink ribbons from our lapels and gorge ourselves with Halloween candy. As November comes around, our grocery store shelves will turn from pink to the amber hues of Thanksgiving, and before we know it, we’ll be decorating Christmas trees and drinking egg-nog. After an interminable month of pink ribbons and races, I will still have breast cancer. I haven’t made the five-year mark yet so we can’t say it’s in remission, and in spite of all the stories we hear about women who have been “cured,” the fact is that breast cancer may recur at any time. Long term remission is just not the same as being cured. If…
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van morrison & ghosts of a Hallowe’en past
Sharing a Hallowe’en story that haunts me still . . .
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hand ballet: magic & loss & lou reed remembered
Graceful and elegant, my daughter’s fingers catch the sun spilling through the window. For a minute, everything stops. My little girl’s hands are those of a young woman. Strong and steady. Earnest. She is the real warrior in our house. Just a twinkling ago, she first discovered her beautiful hands. For me, her besotted mother, it was a magical milestone in her development. She was surely the first child to ever make such a discovery, her little fingers in constant motion. We called it “hand ballet.” Transfixed, as though under a spell, she paid rapt attention, staring intently, unblinking, at the dancing fingers that would soon cooperate to clap hands, tie laces, make…
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A Call, Aging, Being young, Birthdays, Castledawson, Family, Father Daughter Relationships, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Rites of passage, Seamus Heaney, The Harvest Bow, Themes of childhood
happy birthday da
It is my father’s birthday today. Unimaginably, he is 76 years old, but like the rest of us, I’m sure there are times when he feels not one iota different from the handsome young man with a shock of black hair, smiling that smile at his beautiful girlfriend ~ I will send his birthday greetings via my mother’s Facebook page. He won’t want to admit that he likes the “new-fangled” social media – but secretly he loves it. After all, he can read his favorite passages from the Bible on my mother’s iPad or Google the answers to questions about the Japanese Maple trees he tends in his garden. Without question, he is one…
