Mother's Day.
I love spring. I love its sense of
expectation and anticipation, the gleam of celandines among green leaves
and the way that primroses unfurl on the roadside ditches behind the
curling tendrils of the briars. When I was a child my favourite
season was autumn. Spring was my mother's. I asked her why once and she
told me that she loved its promise of renewal, its sense of potential, and that same gleam of expectation and anticipation it fires in me each year.
That conversation with my mother took place when she was in her seventies and the memory of it still astonishes me. Because she was one of a generation of Irishwomen whose own sense of expectation and anticipation was wounded by the tragedy of the Civil War she lived through as an adolescent, and betrayed by the post-revolutionary Ireland in which she married and lived out her adult life.
My mother's name was Mary O'Connor. She was about five years old when, as a member of Cumann na mBan, her cousin Marion Stokes was …
That conversation with my mother took place when she was in her seventies and the memory of it still astonishes me. Because she was one of a generation of Irishwomen whose own sense of expectation and anticipation was wounded by the tragedy of the Civil War she lived through as an adolescent, and betrayed by the post-revolutionary Ireland in which she married and lived out her adult life.
My mother's name was Mary O'Connor. She was about five years old when, as a member of Cumann na mBan, her cousin Marion Stokes was …
