I married an Irish man—an American whose ancestors came from Ireland. We even have the ship records when his ancestors arrived, but with a last name that’s not so rare, no telling if we have the right records, and nobody really cares. He is Irish, red cheeks and all.
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I wish you all could have seen my face and my smile when I opened your cards. The days before Christmas, when the mail arrived, were extra special, and I can’t thank you all enough.
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My husband passed his stress test and got the cardio clearance for his DOT card, the permission to drive commercial trucks, which he sometimes needs to do when a driver calls off in the morning.
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That’s the only principle I live by, to be unapologetic myself. To be me and to allow myself to be me, even if it makes me feel uncomfortable at times.
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Looking at me, with his white ‘paint mark’ that turned out to be a scar. He was not even three months old when he was left behind in a sink in a maintenance room at an apartment complex.
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“There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is. It is the sadness of understanding that life is not a grand adventure, but a series of small, insignificant moments, that love is not a fairy tale, but a fragile, fleeting emotion, that happiness is not a permanent state, but a rare, fleeting glimpse of something we can never hold onto. And in that understanding, there is a profound loneliness, a sense of being cut off from the world, from other people, from oneself.”
Virginia Woolf
Whenever it rained, I walked funny. I wore my rubber boots with pride. I liked to play in the ditch behind our farm where I caught tadpoles in spring. But when it rained, I clenched my toes inside my boots, in case a worm would accidentally find its way into my shoe. The logic of a child. My grandma let me walk funny, she knew I would grow out of it.
A little clip, just made for me, so I knew where to find the thank-you cards the seniors had crafted for us.
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Growing up in a small village in the mountains of Austria, I was raised Roman Catholic. We went to church on Sunday, because everyone else went to church. My grandma carved a cross on the back of every freshly baked bread loaf before she cut into it, and we bent our heads down before we ate, to either quietly say grace or give others the time to do so.