Challenge Check #5

First- yesterday our Rector began his sermon by reading out this...you've just gotta read it!!

Dottie Angel Challenge- two items:
A Barter/Swap Scheme- for the idea see here, and for the follow up see here.
You people are so encouraging that I’m going to run with it on Wednesday this week and see what happens! Keep me posted please?!

For the Fertilizer Factory now set up in my back kitchen see here!

Creative Every Day Challenge

After some thought about February’s topic ‘Home’ this is where I’m beginning:

For me the idea of home doesn’t revolve around a house but the places where I feel at home. Until I was five we lived in the States, in Virginia, then California, returning to Ireland in 1969. Then in 1977 when I was 13 years old, my family left Ireland due to Dad’s work, and I didn’t live here again until July of the year 2000. I lived in London, Malvern, Bath, Nairobi, the Rift Valley and Thika, worked or spent time in Paris, the Pyrenees, Donegal, and other places I’ve since forgotten. I was privileged to come into contact with people of many nationalities and faiths, to become relatively fluent in French and Kiswahili, to mix with cultures I hadn’t previously encountered, and to travel all over East Africa.

But, and to me as the years progressed it became an increasingly huge ‘but’, in all those years I felt displaced, disconnected, a free radical ?! I gave the problem a lot of thought and it seemed to me that perhaps at heart I was actually Irish, and I needed to try living there to see.

As you can imagine, uprooting an African husband and three bush babies was no joke, but we did it and not one of us regrets the change. The Hub is still an African, but since the Irish in general are utter eccentrics he fits right in, and two of the bush babies turned out to be more Irish than African. The eldest bush baby revels in her dual personality and knows she can return to East Africa whenever she likes.

So to me, ‘home’ is an ordinary seaport town in the west of Ireland with river, mountains, lakes and ocean all around me:

Hazelwood.
Benbulben.
On Keelogyboy looking towards Lough Gill and the Ox Mountains.
Streedagh beach, this morning.
Streedagh beach looking towards Gleniff.

A lonely beech tree in Grange Village, this morning.

Rosses Point Village.

Hyde Bridge, Sligo town facing down stream to the sea.
Yes, here, I’m home.