ireland

Our place is here, our time is now!" Killian firmly declared.

I've no plans to couple with anyone other than my new bride for the next century or so, and it feels as though it's takin' a century to get to it!

In truth, I doubt I'd notice if a herd of giant Irish elk stomped through the entire chamber when I'm in the act of lovin' you, Lainna!

Alainn, it is no herb that has made me so entirely insatiable, 'tis just being with you.

I was born Katie O__eilly,_ she began. __oor Irish, but proud of it. I boarded the Titanic at Queenstown as a third class passenger with nothing more than the clothes on my back. And the law at my heels._ Titanic Rhapsody

Where does it lead, this rockrose path?

It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wife iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.

It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wide iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees.

The tune was sad, as the best of Ireland was, melancholy and lovely as a lover's tears.

Up and down' is Irish for anything at all--from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.

Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.