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How to Open a Book
Some years ago, science fiction writer, John Scalzi, penned a homage to the libraries of his life prompting me to do the same today, World Books Day. Not a bricks and mortar library, my childhood library was a bus full of magic that visited a housing estate on Antrim’s Dublin Road every week. Although a world away from the United States,…
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The public library: a first responder for all time.
September is National Literacy Month, an annual opportunity to draw attention to the state of literacy in the United States. In Maricopa County, Arizona, where I used to live, one in four adults cannot read these words. One in four adults cannot, therefore, cannot search the internet for news or bargains or jobs. One in four adults cannot fill out…
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Aging, Being young, Bridget Jones, Broagh, Castledawson, Diary, Family, FInal wishes, Loss, Love, Marriage, Ordinary Things, Personal Helicon, Poetry, Regrets, saying goodbye, Soundtracks of our Lives, Those Winter Sundays, Writing
the offices of love ~ what did I know?
This winter Sunday, I woke to the high-pitched scrape of steel on steel, my da sharpening my bread knife because “it wouldn’t cut butter.” I stayed in bed, allowing the long metallic strokes on each side of the blade to carry me back to the kitchen of my childhood, my father making sure the knife was sharp enough to carve…
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Birthdays, Blogging, Consignment Store Shopping, Diary, DREAM Act, Fashion, Fiftieth Birthday, Hair, Health Activist Writer's Challenge 2013, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Northern Ireland, Poetry, Social Media, Teaching, The Troubles, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood, Writing
hindsight & happy birthday
For the 12th day of the Health Activist Writer’s Challenge, I’m supposed to take a trip back in time to the person I was on the day of my cancer diagnosis. What would I say to her? Cancer. When I heard it got me, I wept as though I had just found out someone dear to me had died. Inconsolable initially,…
