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Monday motherhood: the old sod, Happy St. Patrick’s Day

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the girls moher

The earthquake this morning made me feel spry.  Getting out of bed is generally a slow process but today, I was up and running to the girls’ rooms like I was twenty-four.  Combined with coloring my hair just awhile ago, back to its former red, I feel almost like a leprechaun if leprechauns were women, living in the open, not making shoes or hording gold coins.  If I’m captured today while dancing a jig, I will certainly grant three wishes upon my release. We traveled to Ireland, the five of … [Read more...]

Ireland: leaving home, coming home

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A part of me realizes that writing about the end of our Ireland trip means that it’s over, so I’ve dragged my feet sitting down and putting thoughts into words.  But I’m fifty now, a grown up.  Time to get serious.  Time to get back to our lives.  (What’s that?  You got serious at thirty?  Good for you.) Last we spoke, it was in Galway.  On first blush, Galway had more charm than Dublin, most likely because of its smaller size and location right on the bay.  Also, we were slightly lost on the … [Read more...]

Saturday café: Blarney, Kenmare, and the Ring of Kerry

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When I think of Ireland, I think of green, and castles.  Outside of Dublin, on the way to Blarney, the green is everywhere.  But the castles?  It’s like heading to Maine and expecting to see lobsters by the side of the road.  It doesn’t quite happen that way.  You have to go off the beaten path just a bit to find towers and turrets made of stone. On our way to Kenmare, we stopped off in Cork just to say we did.  Fortunately, they don’t know about Black Friday (probably ‘cause Thursday was … [Read more...]

An Irish Thanksgiving

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What’s an Irish Thanksgiving, you ask?  It’s when you’re forty-nine years old and the husband asks what you want to do for your fiftieth and you casually say something like, “We should go to Ireland.”  Then you forget about it because you have three children to attend to, among other obligations, and approaching the half-century of your life doesn’t seem like an actual event because you’re still seventeen, immature and oblivious to the process known as aging, even though it may explain the … [Read more...]