Excerpts

From The Snow Path to Dingle:

By the songs of the first bird the following morning, everyone in the village was gathered, nearly three score of us, and I pulled my mother’s blue shawl around me to march toward the Ilen. Bronze in repose and veiled in a pearly mist, she lay before us, nourishing every fox and sparrow from above Bantry and all the way out to sea at Baltimore. At Skebreen she was sometimes shallow and peaceful, a meandering ribbon of sweet dark nectar yielding trout in the spring and salmon in summer. With the rains, she swelled at her seams like the breasts of a new mother; and, yea, wasn’t the earth at her flanks the most fertile?

At her narrow waist, the limestone bridge was skirted in ivy to entice prosperous travelers. It had always been our open door to the world, bringing trade, supplies, news, and letters from our kin and country. But now it was the gaping hole that exposed the village to dangers we’d heard of but did not wish to know. It was the same open door that had brought the Barrys years ago, who took my father to his dying battle. With the bridge away, the Ilen would be our protector, our moat against a siege. I stood on the river bank, and Mr. Fitzgibbon handed me an ax.

 

From Irish Pennant:

Tears streamed from the corners of her eyes, cutting thin white paths through the pink powder blush on her cheeks. “How can I be a doctor, consoling my patients’ families at times of loss, when I am so unwilling to accept such a loss of my own?”

“Because pain is much more palatable when it belongs to someone else, dear one,” Aunt T offered gently. “And because when your parent dies, you slam heart-first into that solid brick wall that says you can never be a child again. You have to be the adult. You have to handle everything and move through it, take care of business and shed your tears in private. There’s no one to run home to anymore.”

But Stevie looked at Beth and saw a child’s face, the same little girl who played secret agent games with her in the tree house, who trembled alongside her whenever their father bellowed down the hall and they knew they were in trouble for something. What had they done now?

A glance passed between them – a flicker of recognition, a re-ignited connection between two lost children. And then it passed. Beth looked away. They sipped the tepid tea and returned to their silence, each using it in her own way.