I just took my wife of 27 years to Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport and sent her on her way.
Carolann Conley is going home for the first time.
I’ve always called her Feisty One. Her Irish roots are strong and obvious. She dances with joyous abandon, lives in the moment, loves ferociously, laughs like a free angel and cries only for puppies and children, never for herself.
Her emerald eyes sparkle one minute and then cloud over the next, with the dangerous darkness of a storm borne of the cold Irish Sea.
She’s a handful, for sure, but not this week. She’s on her own now, to find her ancestral roots in the green hills of her old country.
I expect Carolann to return to me with breathless stories of her Ireland and a heart filled with discovery.
This is how we grow into ourselves and learn to appreciate the thousands of lives before ours that loved us into existence.
Katie and I visited Ireland what seems like a lifetime ago. It truly is a magical place and we learned an awful lot about why we are as we are. Our plan was to spend a week in Ireland after a week in England , then finish the trip with four days in Paris. We fell so deeply in love with Ireland we stayed as long as we could..and would have stayed forever had we been able to figure out how to sell our American possessions and have our dogs shipped to us. Paris ended up being a 24 hour pass-through on the way to the airport and we have never regretted it a bit.
I’d be willing to bet Carolann felt much the same.