“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
You Can Listen Here The royal O’Donnell’s sank roots in the far north of Ireland, but not us. Our uprooted family traveled here in 1857 on a packet ship#, poor, refugees, the Potato Famine* keening at their backs, and when they finally arrived in Lebanon, PA, they stayed put. One historian of the Famine concluded “that before [it struck] … the Catholic and Gaelic-speaking Irish were … exceptionally reluctant to emigrate” because of “their profound […]
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You Can Listen Here Coopers*must not recognize automobiles as part of a human agency for he audaciously dropped for the kill just a few feet away from where I had parked. I had just pulled into the driveway of our home and shut off the engine. Dozens of birds filled the ground and feeders. My eye caught his oval shape high up in the cedar tree among the azaleas. I watched him. They did […]
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You Can Listen Here History comes most alive in the small details, these windows that suddenly open and let us look into brightly lit rooms where sharp-cut moments transfix us: When she was young, Queen Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII, hunted deer with a crossbow and “could tell the age of a stag from its droppings (225).” * This is what happens when royalty intermarries: “Ferdinand I of Austria, whose mother was also his […]
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You Can Listen Here January 21: Most are the size of the first joint of my thumb. On this snowy morning their hardened foam fissures catch enough of the burnished light to stand out to the eye. The egg case of a praying mantis opens in mid to late spring, and for about two hours hundreds of tiny, fully formed mantids descend in a living chain below the nest. They dry out quickly and […]
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