Liz's Ireland Journal

Cushendall, Cushendun and the Glens of Antrim

       One day a young woman came upon an old woman washing a stack of tiny white shirts in a river in the north-east corner of Ireland.  When she inquired about the shirts the old woman told her, “These are the fairy’s war shirts.  There will be a great battle in Scotland tomorrow between the Scottish fairies and the Irish fairies, and these are the shirts the Irish fairies must wear.”  The young woman asked, “How will we know the outcome of the battle?”  The old woman replied, “If the Irish fairies win, the water in this river will continue to run clean and clear.  If the Scottish fairies win, the river will run brown with the Irish fairies’ blood.”  The next day when the young woman came to the river it was running brown, and she knew the Irish fairies had lost.  That’s why the river is called Dun, or brown, and also why the fairies are gone from that part of Ireland.

        This is just one of the many stories that I heard from Liz Weir as we traveled from Athlone to her home in Cushendall on Thursday, and then around the spectacular Glens of Antrim on Friday, June 21st and 22nd. We left Athlone mid-afternoon after Liz had done three sessions for Mary Dillon at the Ballinasloe Public Library.  We got to her home, the Ballyeamon Camping Barn, about 8:00 p.m. where we were met by Eric Linsker who is back again for a second summer as barn minder.  Eric has just finished his B.A. in poetry at Harvard, and after serving as barn minder will be studying in Paris before heading of to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

       The camping barn is about five miles from the coastal village of Cushendall, which means “the foot of the Dall,” and that’s where we went for a great steak dinner at Harry’s.  Then we walked across the street to J.W. McCollam’s, better known as Johnny Joe’s, a pub famous for its traditional music and good craic. We met up there with the people who were staying at the camping barn that evening, an American and British couple who had spent the previous year teaching English in Korea.

       It was the summer solstice, the shortest night of the year, and at that latitude it is short indeed. I was sleeping in Liz’s daughter’s room and I woke up about 4:00 a.m. to an awareness of greenness filling the room.  The window in the room faces west, but somehow the dawn light was illuminating the foliage on the hill outside it, making the window and room glow like a living emerald.

       That morning Liz completed a grant proposal that had to be delivered that afternoon and I checked email and thought through what I would be telling at the festival the next day. I was scheduled for three sessions for children, plus a couple of stories in the evening concert.  Since the storytelling festival coincided this year with a donkey festival, I tracked down the Mulla Nasruddin story about the man and his son who are taking a donkey to market.  In response to suggestions and criticism from the people they pass along the way sometimes the man rides, sometimes the son, sometimes both, but ultimately they carry the donkey into the town on their backs.

        Liz had an appointment in Cushendall at 1:00 p.m. and we agreed to meet at Arthur’s for lunch at 2:15 p.m.  I shopped for music for Mark at Celtic Crafts and then walked along the cliff path above the beach.  After lunch, Liz took me to the ruins of the Layde Church, established in 1306 when it replaced an even older one, and with a stunningly picturesque view out to the sea.  One of the most interesting monuments there was what I think Liz called a trothing stone, called a “holed cross” on various websites that describe the site. It is generally considered to be much older, perhaps pre-Christian and there is a story of tragic young lovers associated with it.

        We then drove to Cushendun, “the foot of Dun”, the town associated with the story at the beginning of the post.  Liz’s friend Feargal Lynn manages a nursing home there and when we arrived he was in the entry way, right in the thick of things as attendants and residents went about their business.  Feargal brought us tea and cake as we visited with Jamie O’Rawe, born in America to Irish parents who came home to run the family farm, which Jamie then farmed himself. A musician all his life, Jamie told us that he had spent several hours the previous night listening to tapes of himself and others playing. There is a fairy hill called Tieverah in Cushendall and Liz asked Jamie if he would have ever walked on it.  “Oh, yes,” he said, “We’d walk around that hill any time.”  The confidence of his response almost diverted me from the fact that he’d said “around”, not “on.”

       Liz then took the long way home, up through Glendun, over a high place that led us to Glenballyeamon and back to the camping barn.  Along the way we saw graveyards, bridges, bog cotton, sheep, and gorgeous vistas at every turn.

       We had a little over an hour to get ready to head down to Moy, south-west of Belfast for the evening’s events.

Pictures from the top: The Cushendun River, the trothing stone, Cushendall Bay, Tieverah, and a graveyard outside of Cushendun.

Storytellers of Ireland

         The Storytellers of Ireland website is now live.  On it you can learn about upcoming events and find contact information for most, if not all, of the storytellers I’ve been meeting and writing about.

       On Wednesday night I had the opportunity to meet two of the Storytellers of Ireland that I’ve wanted to hear:  Nuala Hayes and Niall de Burca.  They were telling, along with Liz Weir and Eddie Lenihan, at an event called A Sense of Place sponsored by the Intercultural Relations Unit of the Dublin City Council.  The event was held at the Project Arts Centre, right in the heart of Temple Bar. Also performing were Sadoo, half of a Senegalese music and story duo working in the griot tradition, and Hazim, an Iraqi poet and performance artist.

       The six performers got ten minutes in each half, just a tantalizing bit of what they have to offer, but it was a truly enjoyable evening nonetheless.  Eddie Lenihan told a story about a woman whose death revealed that perhaps she’d made a deal with “the lads”, or “the other crowd”, for the uncanny knowledge she’d possessed in life. In talking about “the other crowd” he said that he often tells people, “If you don’t believe in fairies you certainly can’t believe in God.”  He said, “You’re cutting the ground from beneath your feet” because surely they both require a belief in some sort of “other world”. Later he told a story about a man who was balding – “losing a bit of the thatch” – and so he went to Biddy Early. According to Eddie, the healer Biddy Early was perhaps the most famous Irish woman of the 19^th century and he described her as “fierce generous”.

       Liz Weir was at her warm, natural, emotionally-present best.  When she steps on stage, the audience is instantly enveloped in the mantle of her storytelling presence, and you can almost feel them relax into her confident care.  Her first story was one that she learned from Sheila Quigley, one of Storytellers of Ireland’s Tradition Bearers.  In the second half she told the story of her mother Nell Martin’s journey from India to Ireland at the beginning of WWII, and the tiny life jacket she made that saved a baby’s life. You can read more about Nell at this BBC site.  I’ve heard both of those stories before and on this night she brought me to tears with both of them.

       Niall de Burca was a delight, and at six feet plus, large in every sense of the word.  Infectiously engaging and charming in person and on stage, I thoroughly enjoyed both of the stories he told.  His first was about the three druids who prophesy that a coming rain will cause insanity. The rain comes, and the people do go insane.  The druids, of course, stay well out of it.  Ultimately they realize that as the only ones not affected by the rain, they will be regarded as the crazy ones, and they step out into the rain. His second was a personal story about overcoming his fear of swimming in the ocean, a fear that he lays at the feet of Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws.  “Steven Spielberg” he told us “ruined my life”!  It was laugh-out-loud funny with dead on American, Belfast, and New Zealand accents.  Beyond that, it was told with great glee and with passionate intentionality.  This is a storyteller who intends with every word and gesture to relate to his listeners.

       Nuala Hayes is an Abbey Theatre trained actor who has performed all over Ireland, Canada, England and the U.S. She has traveled even more widely with her storytelling career which began over 16 years ago.  She is best known for her adaptation of Irish myth, and that was why I wanted to hear her.  Her first story was about an Irish woman who was the last woman hanged as a witch in Boston in the 1600’s.  Part of the reason she was convicted was that she refused to speak anything but Irish, even though it seems she was able to speak English.  This turns out to be the first mention of the Irish language in an American context.  Her second story was "The Curse of Macha", which I was hoping to hear her tell. I was excited to hear that she is working on a new piece called "Sightings of the Cailleach".  I’m very much looking forward to hearing more of her mythic work.  Her beautiful voice and polished presence are very well suited to such material.  She’s very involved right now, with Jack Lynch, in producing the first annual Farmleigh Festival of Story and Song, to be held in the Phoenix Park in Dublin in late July.  It’s an ambitious festival that will be featuring a full roster of tellers from Ireland and beyond.  Unfortunately for me, I’ll already be back in Arizona and won’t be able to attend.

       Sadoo and Hazim reminded us that the storytelling tradition world wide has always included music and verse. Sadoo played his guitar as he sang and told a story that a “djeli”, a traditional Senegalese storyteller would tell. It turned out to be the one about the man and woman who set a wager on who will speak first. Hazim (Al Ansary) read a poem in the first half, and opened the second half dramatically by emerging from a black suitcase placed in the middle of the stage. In this piece, called "Here and There", he told us in lines that served as a refrain that the story would mean nothing if we were not there. And it was true, I did not understand specifically what events he was relating. On the other hand, it was clear it was about the war in Iraq, and what it meant for him to be here while it was happening there.  I imagine it was also a plea to us here, to realize that we weren't there in any sense of the word - not in Iraq and not experiencing the devastation of war.

       The audience was one of the most exciting parts of the evening, without a doubt one of the most diverse in which I’ve ever sat. There were Irish, American, British, and Spanish listeners.  The people sitting behind me were Chinese and Italian, which I learned as they introduced themselves to each other. Aideen McBride, a Dublin storyteller and one of the organizers of the Yarnspinners, was there with several of her African neighbors in Ballymun with whom she is involved in a storytelling project. 

       Below are the storytellers taking their final bow including Hazim, Eddie Lenihan, Niall de Burca, Liz Weir and Nuala Hayes.

Is This Your First Time Home?

First time home. The first Wednesday I was here I walked east on the Dublin Road about a mile to the large roundabout that defines the eastern edge of AthloneTown. My destination was the Creggan Court Hotel where the Weight Watchers meetings in Athlone are held.  When I got to the desk to pay I explained that I was visiting from America.  “Grand!” said the woman stamping the books.  “Is this your first time home?"  I missed a beat or two as the question registered and then replied, “No, this is my fifth time home."

       A week and a half later in Dublin, Maura McKevitt asked me the same question in the bar at The Teacher’s Club after the Yarnspinners. It caught me off guard again, just briefly. I don’t recall being asked that question the previous times I was here.  I love the question, the casual way it is asked, and all the assumptions that support it. 

       Is this your first time home?  Wherever else you’ve been, however old you are, whatever your family history – you’ve finally figured out where home is.  No matter the reason you strayed so far, no matter what other places you’ve called home – you’ve finally arrived at the real home.

Speaking of Weight Watchers.  I went the first week and my weight was up.  Of course, they don’t let you take off your shoes here, nor do the women strip down to their tank tops. Anyway, the next week I was down a little.  The following week I was out and about with Liz Weir and couldn’t/didn’t go.  The fourth week it was raining, pretty hard, and I wimped out on walking the mile down and back for the meeting.  Today is meeting day again, but I’m on my way to Dublin for a storytelling event.  I figure I’m up a few pounds, but I’ll get back on track when I get home while I huddle beneath an air conditioning vent. 

Speaking of food.  They put corn in tuna salad here. Tuna, mayonnaise, corn and they don’t mash up the tuna all that well either.  There are usually big chunks of it unincorporated with the mayo.  Every deli and sandwich place I’ve been served it like that.

Another food connection.  One of my students this summer was Sean Covington, called Skippy.  He got the name Skippy because when he was a little boy he was devoted to peanut butter, and not just any old spread.  It had to be Skippy. Hence his nickname which, not surprisingly, stuck.

On to drink.  Did you notice my great Guinness ‘stash’ at the beginning of the post?  That was taken by Jeff Aspland during our first week here outside on the deck of The River S bar right on the River Shannon in downtown Athlone.  That was when I was still harboring illusions of counting Weight Watchers points and didn’t want to have to count a pint of Guinness in my daily allotment.  I took a sip, or two, from Jeff’s and he got this shot which ended up in the slide show on a big screen at the end of session party. Got Guinness?

Speaking of students.  One of the students who came to hear me tell at the Dublin Yarnspinners told me later that she had really enjoyed it.  “I couldn’t believe it,” she said.  “It was better than an episode of South Park.” She assured me that this was high praise, since South Park represents an entertainment benchmark for people her age. She said what made it even better was the surprise factor. “No offense, but I wasn’t really expecting much.”  None taken.

Another awkward moment, fortunately unobserved.  I was doing laundry in the communal laundry room this morning, when I noticed a familiar black lace bra perched perkily on a large pile of linens taken from the rooms of the students.  Mine.  I have no idea how it happened to be there.  Did I leave it one of the washers or dryers the last time?  Did I drop it in the car park?  Who knows, but there it was.  It appeared clean, but I washed it again just on general purposes. It's a really good bra and I'm glad I didn't lose it.  A girl likes some support on her fifth trip home.

Second Stories

       The day before Liz Weir came to class, the students in the Irish Storytelling Tradition experimented with creating simple storyboards as a technique for learning their stories by connecting to its images.  Through this exercise I learned that Allison Davis is considering storyboarding as a major once she selects which design college she will be attending.  She spent a couple of days working on hers and the finished product was three full pages.  The panel at the beginning shows the hero of the story pondering why his mother, a horrible person, got a sunny day for her funeral, while his father who was loved by all had a rainy day for his.

       Thursday, June 21^st was the day for their second in-class telling.  Below are the stories they told, a brief summary of the story or some of their thoughts on the process.

• Allison Davis told "The Queen of the Planets" which she found in Folktales of Ireland by Sean O’Sullivan:  “Storytelling, I’ve come to feel, really is a balancing act and you can only get better at it through practice. Overall, I think this was a successful telling. I even made people laugh! Something I hadn’t planned on. It just goes to show how storytelling is an “in the moment” form of entertainment. But now that I think back to my storyboard, I did put a lot of subtle humor into it that made me chuckle. I guess that just came out in my telling as well!”
• Amanda Ryder told "The White Trout", which she found on the Sacred Texts website: “The story had a great impact on me because very rarely does the bad guy repent in stories.  In this story the woman/trout makes him realize the error of his ways and as a result he becomes a man with a conscience and a good attitude.  I really liked that.” 
• Jeff Aspland told "Diarmuid’s Longing", from Laura Simms’ book The Robe of Love:  “I liked the story because it has alot going on. Dairmud has to go on a quest to save the one he loves and it just seems very exciting. The ending also made me choose this story because it isn't what you would expect. Adventure stories usually have a happy ending, but not in Irish tales.”
• Skippy Covington told "The Weakness of the Ulstermen":  "The story is from the book Over Nine Waves by Marie Heaney. I read the story from this book and from The Tain. I then spent several  days going over the story in my head. I also did the story board drawing which helped. I also spent some time thinking about how to relate it to not only myself but also the audience I would have. My favorite part of description was when I was describing the king’s horses, how they were so magnificent and fast that they would be a blur as they ran by yet you could still see every detail. I drew this description from my own life experience. When I was younger my grandfather would tell us about the horses he used to raise and a specific one he would race. One time he showed us a video of the horse that was so blurry that you could barely tell it was a horse. But I had heard the description so many times I swear I could see every detail of that horse in the video. So I used that experience to help describe the king’s horses.
• Doug Bland told the story of St.Deirbhle’s well, and how he came to learn about it: “I prepared this story by recounting the events leading up to the story and the story itself several times to friends and classmates.  The story is especially important to me because it was based in and grew out of personal experiences that I had here in Ireland as I met local people and explored the theme of “living water.”  I was deeply moved as I heard, from several people in Athlone, the story of how this well was efficacious in the restoring some sight to the eyes of Maurean Eagan. 
• Joyce Story told a story called "Taken" from Henry Glassie’s Irish Folktales.  It’s a very sad story about a woman who seems to have died, but has actually been taken by the fairies.  When she turns out to be alive and contacts her family, her husband has remarried. They decide to try to rescue her and send her to America to start a new life, but the priest forbids them.  He says that a man can only have one wife, no matter what the circumstances.  The family obeys, the woman is not rescued and returns to the fairy hill to eat their food and live with them forever.  It was an excellent fit for Joyce’s voice and she told it well.
• Ashley Dobbins told "The Changeling" by Batt Burns from More Ready to Tell Tales by David Holt and Bill Mooney. In this version, the fairy mother of the changeling comes to tell the family how to get their human child back so that she might have her own back, too.

Below are the panels from Allison’s storyboard that lay out the hero’s dilemma regarding his parent’s funeral days.

Liz Weir Comes to Athlone

       “I stand in awe of Liz Weir after watching her tell stories to four and five year old children in the Athlone Library.   When that horde of kids walked down the stairs, I thought, “Oh, man, Liz doesn’t stand a chance.  How in the world can any storyteller tell tales to this hyperactive bunch of squirming energy balls with the attention spans of a puff of wind?  With chants, personal charisma, clapping games, songs, and short, lively tales that all flowed seamlessly from one to another, Liz held their attention and engaged their imaginations in amazing ways.  By the time she was finished, I thought, “Poor kids, they didn’t stand a chance with this master storyteller casting her spell.”  I also deeply appreciated hearing a little more about Liz’s commitment to social justice, peace and reconciliation and how she is using stories to bridge the tragic dividing walls we put up between ourselves and others.” Doug Bland, reflecting on Liz's visit in his final paper.

       Liz Weir came to Athlone for several days during our third week.  We first got to hear her on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 19^th when she told at the Athlone Public Library as part of the weekly series that librarian Mae McLynn and I set up for the month.  The other tellings were earlier in the afternoon and attended by local school children.  This one was scheduled later, at 3:30 p.m. so that my students could attend after their classes.  We weren’t sure who would attend, since it was after normal school hours. 

       The audience turned out to be 25 students from a local crèche, or pre-school, their teachers, several mothers, plus my students and a few of their friends, and several librarians.  We witnessed, as Doug described above, a highly skilled storyteller working joyfully and compassionately with a notoriously challenging audience.  As the children came in she began asking their names, and for the next several minutes as they got settled in she continued until she’d spoken directly to every child.  Then for the next 45 minutes she told between 15 and 20 (I lost count) different stories, songs, and interactive pieces.  The children were integrated into the stories, and one even came up to sing a song herself.  Liz does not like to be called a master, but when the session was over and the children went gleefully up the stairs, I felt as if I had just attended a master-class in how to tell stories to pre-schoolers. 

       The next morning we had the pleasure of hearing her tell stories and talk about storytelling during my class.  As she always does, she covered a lot of ground.  Any given hour spent with Liz is filled with two hours worth of information and enjoyment. She started with her journey to storytelling.  It started with her appointment as the Children’s Librarian for the City of Belfast at the age of 25, meeting her first American storyteller in 1977, founding the Yarnspinners in 1984, and then leaving the library in 1990 to pursue storytelling full time. Although she didn’t tell us this, she is widely regarded as the most influential and popular storyteller in Ireland.  In America too, she is frequently featured at the largest and most prestigious storytelling festivals.

       But the large venues are not what interest her most.  “The most interesting part is not platform telling.  The most interesting telling is the kind that goes on in Johnny Joe’s pub in Cushendall.  Those men know more than most professional tellers.  It was never lost.”  She told us that in those contexts stories never stand by themselves. Stories, music, songs, poems, and local history are all part of an evening of great “crac”.  The storytellers are part of a community, and they and their stories are woven into it.  She is concerned, as are many American storytellers, that storytelling festivals in America more and more frequently feature entertainers rather than storytellers. 

       When I asked her about how the role of the storyteller today compared to that of the seanachie, or fireside teller of previous generations she said, “The job of the “professional” storyteller in Ireland is a new one.  It’s a new role in society as the contexts for the old role are less available.”  Liz pioneered the new role while embodying a bridge to the older one.  She has a vast repertoire which she utilizes deftly to connect with her audience.  In modern Ireland that audience is an increasingly multi-cultural one.  She was once told by an arts officer, “What you’re doing is artificial. You’re taking it out of its proper context.”  But as the “proper” contexts fade away, storytellers like Liz must find new ones so that stories, and the role of storyteller, continue to thrive.

In no particular order, here are some of the other insights Liz wrapped around the stories she told us:

• She told us that Americans seem very direct to the Irish.  If you ask an Irish person if she’d like a cup of tea she will say, “Och, well. . .”  Then, maybe on the third inquiry, and if you say you are having one, she would assent to drink one with you.  When you ask an American if she wants a cup of tea, she says, “Sure”!  Liz thinks this is, in part, due to the subtle etiquette that develops in hard times.  A hostess would always offer, but a good guest would know when there wasn’t enough to spare and wouldn’t accept upon the first offer.

• She reinforced the importance of place to Irish story.  She told us a story set in Dungiven Priory, and ended it with, “If you’re on the way from Belfast to Derry you can see the place yourself.”

• By way of helping us to appreciate that the old ways live on, she told us that she hears stories about fairies, and the consequences of damaging fairy trees from children all the time.

• When we complimented her on the previous day’s telling she told us that singing really helps in situations involving the very young and the very old.

• She said there were two key points that new and experienced tellers alike should always remember: choose material that suits you and choose material that suits your audience.

• She said that it is important to her to pay homage to the people in whose footsteps she is following. The first two she mentioned were both librarians and storytellers, and she reminded us that it was librarians who kept storytelling alive, especially in cities, during the 20^th century as the old contexts for storytelling vanished. The first was the pioneering British children’s librarian and storyteller Eileen Colwell, and her book The Magic Umbrella and Other Stories for Telling.  Second was Alice Kane, the Ulster born Canadian storyteller and librarian, known for her understated style and great depth. She told us about Sheila Quigley, a fine traditional storyteller from Donegal, and the impact Sheila’s stories and style have had on her.

• She gave us this snippet from G.K. Chesterton:

            The Irish, the Irish

            The race that God made mad

            Where all the battles are happy

            And all the songs are sad.

• She described her most recent work which includes writing the script for a short film, authoring a beautifully illustrated five book series using story to teach problem solving skills that every child in Northern Ireland will have as part of their curriculum, and a new comic book called The Super Six published by the government to teach safety. 

• Some of her most compelling work is with the Travelers, who in former times might have been called tinkers, a name that is offensive to them now.  She has been hired to write the script for a television commercial aimed to decrease discrimination and prejudice aimed at Traveler children.  She told us how Traveler children are frequently segregated and assumed to be less able than other children. A few days earlier she had been telling to a group of children that included a large number of Travelers.  One boy told her a poem he’d written.  When she asked his name, it turned out to be the family name of the bards of the high kings in ancient times.  He beamed with pride when Liz told him the connection and that it was natural that he would be a poet. 

My students, as Doug mentioned at the beginning of the post, were very moved by her commitment to social justice and the use of story to achieve it. And, of course, they were delighted by the stories they heard, too.

From left: Mary Dillon from the Ballinasloe Library, Skippy Covington, Danielle Allison, Jeff Aspland, Amanda Ryder, Allison Davis, Ashley Dobbins, Joyce Story, Liz Weir, and Doug Bland

Be Here Now

        I got up early this morning to witness the departure of my colleague Mary Aldridge and most of the students.  Mary is on her way to Heathrow, with its heightened terrorist alert status, and then on to Nottingham for her Study Abroad in Britain program.  This is the first time for the program, so she is excited and anxious for all to go well.  She was worried that her Study Abroad Britain students or their parents would be panicking in the wake of the terror attacks, but as of last night she hadn’t heard a peep from any of them.

       I was sad to see everyone go. There were a few tears, but I think most of them were ready to go home.  As I watched the bus pull away with its load of youthful occupants I thought, “Well, there goes the energy.”  I was especially sorry to see Mary go.  She and I have had such a good time this summer laughing like fools over everything and nothing. 

       But once they were gone I felt fine and there was still plenty of energy around for me to draw on. I am looking forward to the solitude and quiet time I’ll have this week to catch up on my blog entries.  Only Barry Vaughan, Bob Farwell and a few of the students who are staying for the second session will be here.  This quieter week will begin the transition back to my so called “normal” life.  On my return from my previous two trips, I spent the first week or so with my head still in Ireland, reflecting and writing about my experience.  This time I seem to be having that week here.

       It won’t be complete down time in any case.  I’m going to Dublin over Wednesday night July 4^th to see Liz Weir and some other storytellers perform at an Intercultural Storytelling Evening at the Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar.  In addition to Liz, I’ll get to see Eddie Lenihan, plus two that I’ve never heard before – Niall de Burca and Nuala Hayes. Then on Saturday morning I’ll go back to Dublin with Barry.  Barry will drop me at an airport hotel and then go on to meet the second group of students.  I’ll then spend Saturday and Sunday night at the airport to make my return on Monday morning easy.  Most likely, I’ll get to see Miceál Ross again over the weekend.  My one regret is that I won’t get to see my colleague Shereen Lerner who will be arriving in the second wave. She’ll be supervising our students on an archaeological dig at Tulsk led Dr. Niall Brady of Discovery Programme Ireland.

       So, here I am writing away.  It’s overcast, breezy, and 57 degrees.  Picture it: on July 2^nd, I am wearing long pants, knee high socks, closed in shoes, a long sleeved tee and a jacket in the house to sit at my computer.  Later I’ll go out for a walk even if it is raining.  I’m finding it hard to ignore the looming reality of 116 degrees, air conditioning, and no more time outdoors – probably only as I run from the car to the grocery store and back.  Plus, my return means that my sabbatical is really, really over and it will be time to prepare for full-time teaching in August.  So much for “be here now”, but knowing what is coming actually serves to focus my attention on how truly marvelous it is to be here – now.

       The picture at the beginning of the post is the little fuchsia that I bought at Tesco the second day I was here.  It's been sitting in my window blooming profusely for the past four weeks.  Shereen will get the benefit of it and a bright pink geranium that lives in the kitchen. Both are sitting in fuchsia plastic bowls that Carol Kearney left in our apartment last year along with a nice topaz plastic fruit bowl all of which were still here and in good shape this summer when we returned.