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Bunratty Castle, Celtic Tiger, County Clare, craic, Dromoland Castle, Ennis, global partnerships, homesickness, hurling, Irish American relations, Mark Twain, Memoir, Phoenix Sister Cities, recession, Shannon Airport, The Burren, Tourism, trad, Travel
a long, long way from clare to here . . .
It’s not taking time to rain today in Phoenix – I might as well be looking out at the playing field that stretched between our house on the Dublin Road and Lough Neagh. It is – according to the 11 Levels of Irish Rain “REALLY lashing . . . hammering down.” On such a day, I can expect inexplicable pangs of homesickness, that old,…
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9/11, Anything can Happen, Billy Collins, Healing Field Tempe, Memoir, Remembering September 11th, Seamus Heaney, Terrorism, Themes of childhood
naming names on 9.11
Flanked by row upon row of flagpoles set five feet apart, we can stretch out our arms to touch two lives at a time, lest we forget what happened on September 11, 2001. The 9.11 memorial in Tempe, Arizona, is heartbreakingly beautiful, each one of its 2,996 flags signifying a life taken on that horrific autumn morning. We first visited the memorial in…
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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
a mother’s day dance
This Mother’s Day weekend in America finds me thinking about my mother back in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by…
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Being a Widow, Facebook, Friendship, Loss, Love, Memoir, Milestones, Rites of passage, Rituals, Social Media, Themes of childhood, Valentines Day, widowed
for valentine’s day ~ ronald reagan’s love medicine
Many relationships in my life I conduct almost entirely by telephone, including those with the people dearest to me. With too much ocean or freeway stretching between our houses, it is easier to carry on conversations from the comfort of our own homes. Always, there is something to talk about even when there is nothing to talk about. Before Skype,…
