As always happens to me in the spring, I am feeling a powerful longing for something I've never known.  For as long as I have memory, I've felt an undeniable connection to Ireland.  I don't know for sure if this is because being Irish is the only thing I really know about myself or if it's really the strength of generations coursing through my veins.  It doesn't really matter.  Either way, when the skies are grey, the clouds thick and heavy, pewter and periwinkle, when the hills turn emerald green and I wake up to the sound of wind and rain, something inside me awakens.  

Of course the approach of St Patty's day accelerates this longing to manic purportions. 

At lunch today I watched Anthony Bourdain in Ireland, Belfast and Dublin.  County Cork.  I learned the amusing tidbit that Irish people, surrounded on all sides by the Atlantic Ocean, don't like seafood.  Neither do I.  But you'd think they would.  Oh no, not my people.  They'd rather starve to death.  And did.  I love Anthony because he always gives you a touch of history and culture and he didn't gloss over the eternal struggle that has been Ireland's history.  I wonder if I'd been born there if I'd have been Catholic or Protestant.  I can't see me as a Catholic but you never know.  I can see me as a revolutionary.  I've always been a rebel without a cause...

Anyway, there is my rumination on my heritage.  I want to go there, home.  I want to take my children and introduce them to their Motherland.  Instill in them the deep sense of history and belonging and struggle that is part of who they are.  I have every intention of making that happen, next year.  Tax money.  I'm going to Ireland...just wait and see if I don't