Promise of Yesteryear
One December morning last year I woke to this and snapped a picture which I posted on Facebook with a short comment, “Sunrise! New day. New hope. New promise.”
On this morning’s gray, rainy morning I looked back with some yearning for such a day.
The year in between has had its ups and downs. I took a wonderful trip to Ireland and Hallstatt, Austria, to check on scenes for my latest book–Ireland because it’s the center of the story, Hallstatt because that’s where the Celts were at the time of this dip into the ancient world of the setting. Another highlight came when my daughter Christiane got a job in Portland, Oregon, and she and Aspen moved back west after ten years in Kansas. One more highlight was an excellent writers conference in Seattle where I pitched that latest book, and those pitches went well.
I’ve always been a glass-half-full kind of person. And I need to move forward embracing hope. Without a new novel in the works right now I’m working on a companion book for the series which is related to my newest Irish story. I had already drafted parts of this companion book, but it shifts as my focus shifts. In the last few days I’ve been going back through old travel journals of my first trip to Ireland, reliving some experiences there.
The beauty of the land in its cloak of many greens. The wonder of great stone monuments with their intriguing mysteries, like the passage tomb of Newgrange, below. [The photos below are all from my 2024 trip; I didn’t have a digital camera on the first Irish visit.]
The magic of an exquisite woodland where wind spoke between great oaks. My traipses across green fields with my ready umbrella as boiling clouds opened and let streams of sunshine through to create one of those many Irish rainbows. Stunning cliffs descending into surging waters at the Cliffs of Moher.
And the birds. Oh, the birds! Were they ravens? Or rooks? Or jackdaws? All cousins of the common crow. The latter two weren’t familiar to me. We don’t have those where I live. But whatever the bird we saw great flocks of them sweeping across the historic Hill of Tara and others hovering around the haunting Rock of Cashel where they nested in those stone niches. My daughters joined me on part of that trip and marveled with me. [This morning I spent hours online trying to determine what birds we saw, and my guess is that the bird shown below outside the Rock of Cashel tower is a jackdaw. And I’m guessing the birds at Tara were rooks.]
In this companion book I want to share the journey, the joys, and the challenges of my research to offer background for the novels.
So in these gray days some streams of sun shine through and I find purpose. May the promise of yesteryear sustain me. I wish such hope and promise for you, my good readers.
