What the Wind Knows

by Amy Harmon

But don’t let the history distract you from the people who lived it.”

Everything was different enough that it took a moment to adjust but similar enough that I grew impatient with myself for the difficulty I was experiencing.

It can be very peaceful being surrounded by people you care about and who care about you. That is really what church is for. It’s a chance to just sit still and think about all the wonderful things God has made and count all the blessings we have.”

“I had a teacher who told me fiction is the future. Nonfiction is the past. One can be shaped and created. One cannot,”

“May angels linger at your door. May your troubles be less, and your blessings be more,”

You will turn on each other because you don’t love Ireland. You love the idea of Ireland. And each man has his own idea of what that is.”

I’d often wondered, absorbed in piles of research, if the magic of history would be lost if we could go back and live it. Did we varnish the past and make heroes of average men and imagine beauty and valor where there was only dirge and desperation? Or like the old man looking back on his youth, remembering only the things he’d seen, did the angle of our gaze sometimes cause us to miss the bigger picture? I didn’t think time offered clarity so much as time stripped away the emotion that colored memories. The Irish Civil War had happened eighty years before I’d traveled to Ireland. Not so far that the people had forgotten it, but enough time had passed that more—or maybe less—cynical eyes could pull the details apart and look at them for what they were. But sitting in the crowded session, seeing men and women who had lived only in pictures and in print, hearing their voices raised in argument, in protest, in passion, I was the furthest thing from objective and detached; I was overcome.

I’d been wrong about one thing. These were not average men and women. Time had not given them a gloss they had not earned. Even those I wanted to loathe, based on my own research and conclusions, conducted themselves with fervor and honest conviction. These weren’t posing politicians. They were patriots whose blood and sacrifice deserved history’s pardon and Ireland’s compassion.

I didn’t think Ireland would ever improve upon the likes of Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins, and Thomas Smith. She would never know better men, but she would know better days.

“My grandfather told me once that happiness is an expression of gratitude. And it’s never wrong to be grateful.”