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.
