Author: Claire Fullerton
Claire Fullerton is the multiple, award-winning author of four novels and one novella. She is a contributor to multiple anthologies and enjoyed her time reviewing books for the New York Journal of Books. A Shakespeare enthusiast, Claire is currently studying Shakespeare for the stage. Look into Claire on Goodreads.
Malibu, California on a Sunday Morning!
I recently discovered a new set of stairs to the beach. It’s been two years and 8 months since the Malibu fires swept through the area, and these new stairs are part of the reconstruction of an area I can walk to from my house, known as Leo Carrillo State Beach.
Straight on from the stairs is this view. I am as familiar with this area as I am with the back of my hand, and am forever amazed at the constant yet ever-evolving tide that changes the beach landscape from one day to the next.
Walking left are these massive boulders. According to the strength of the tide, there is always drama happening, and I wait for the waves to crash against the boulders as if I were waiting for fireworks to light up the sky. At certain angles, the waves collide with these timeless boulders. They erupt in a misty-white plume that paints the blue sky, and I think of time and tide and it’s ceaselessness, and the fact that the ocean’s anchoring constancy is something I can always count on.
A closer view
And closer still. At this spot, I take my shoes off and wade knee-deep in the water until my heartbeat aligns with the tide’s rhythm.
This photograph was taken from the top of the stairs not far from the lifeguard station to a cove on the south side of Leo Carrillo State Beach. The cove is a perfect arc, and during low tide, you can walk along the coastline to the stretch of beach on the other side of the lifeguard stand.
A view of the cove from the sand.
A cove view from the life guard stand above. The yellow flowers you see here are coreopsis, which look like bouquets of daisies.
The view at the end of the path that looks South: because my camera lens faced into the sun, this photograph darkened
This is the view of the Santa Monica Mountain foothills on the other side of the Pacific Coast Highway– across from Leo Carrillo State Beach. I wanted you to have an understanding of that which can be seen as you drive through Malibu along the Pacific Coast Highway. These photographs were taken in Western Malibu, and it is a quiet, rural area I feel as if I have all to myself, save for the height of summer when people come to the beach. This area is not as popular among tourists as other parts of Malibu ( such as the infamous Zuma Beach) because it is far out, almost at the Ventura County line. As part of the California coastline, the area is specific, peculiar in nature, and part and parcel to the place I call home.
And here is a video taken of the tide at Leo Carrillo State Beach in Malibu!
When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McClain
When the Stars Go Dark: A Novel
Anna Hart is a seasoned missing persons detective in San Francisco with far too much knowledge of the darkest side of human nature. When overwhelming tragedy strikes her personal life, Anna, desperate and numb, flees to the Northern California village of Mendocino to grieve. She lived there as a child with her beloved foster parents, and now she believes it might be the only place left for her. Yet the day she arrives, she learns a local teenage girl has gone missing. The crime feels frighteningly reminiscent of the most crucial time in Anna’s childhood, when the unsolved murder of a young girl touched Mendocino and changed the community forever. As past and present collide, Anna realizes that she has been led to this moment. The most difficult lessons of her life have given her insight into how victims come into contact with violent predators. As Anna becomes obsessed with the missing girl, she must accept that true courage means getting out of her own way and learning to let others in.
Weaving together actual cases of missing persons, trauma theory, and a hint of the metaphysical, this propulsive and deeply affecting novel tells a story of fate, necessary redemption, and what it takes, when the worst happens, to reclaim our lives–and our faith in one another.
Release Date: April 13, 2021Publisher/Imprint: Ballantine BooksPages: 336 Buy on Amazon Reviewed by: Claire Fullerton
“When the Stars Go Dark is an intriguing, harrowing story that suggests we should never grow comfortable in a false sense of security . . . It’s a masterfully written story of resolution and reconciliation that operates on multiple levels of time, mind, and spirit.”
Paula McClain’s When the Stars Go Dark lures you into engaging with the story lest you miss a moment of its well-wrought beats. This is a haunting, intelligent novel for the discerning reader; the thinking man’s page-turner; a riveting crime-detective story seen through the wounded soul of 35-year old narrator Anna Hart whose life comes full circle as she tries to outrun her past.
See My Full Review in the New York Journal of Books here: a book review by Claire Fullerton: When the Stars Go Dark: A Novel (nyjournalofbooks.com)
Author’s Website: Paula McLain – New York Times bestselling author | New York Times bestselling author
Biography
Paula McLain is the author of the the New York Times bestselling novels The Paris Wife, Circling the Sun, and Love and Ruin. Now she introduces When the Stars Go Dark, an atmospheric tale of intertwined destinies and heart-wrenching suspense. McLain was born in Fresno, California in 1965. After being abandoned by both parents, she and her two sisters became wards of the California Court System, moving in and out of various foster homes for the next fourteen years. When she aged out of the system, she supported herself by working as a nurses aid in a convalescent hospital, a pizza delivery girl, an auto-plant worker, a cocktail waitress–before discovering she could (and very much wanted to) write. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 1996, and is the author of two collections of poetry, a memoir, Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses, and the debut novel, A Ticket to Ride. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, O: the Oprah Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, Huffington Post, the Guardian and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Cleveland.
The Sound Between the Notes Release Day!
Congratulations to Barbara Linn Probst on the release of her second novel! The Sound Between the Notes releases today!
Book Description:
What if you had a second chance at the very thing you
thought you’d renounced forever? How steep a price would
you be willing to pay?
Susannah’s career as a pianist has been on hold for nearly
sixteen years, ever since her son was born. An adoptee who’s
never forgiven her birth mother for not putting her first,
Susannah vowed to put her own child first, no matter what.
And she did.
But now, suddenly, she has a chance to vault into that elite tier of “chosen” musicians. There’s just one
problem: somewhere along the way, she lost the power and the magic that used to be hers at the keyboard.
She needs to get them back. Now.
Her quest―what her husband calls her obsession―turns out to have a cost Susannah couldn’t have
anticipated. Even her hand betrays her, as Susannah learns that she has a progressive hereditary disease
that’s making her fingers cramp and curl―a curse waiting in her genes, legacy of a birth family that gave
her little else. As her now-or-never concert draws near, Susannah is catapulted back to memories she’s
never been able to purge―and forward, to choices she never thought she would have to make.
Told through the unique perspective of a musician, The Sound Between the Notes draws the reader deep
Like her award-winning debut, Queen of the Owls (six awards and counting), The Sound Between the Notes is about a woman’s search for identity, authenticity, and belonging—but this time, the story is told through the unique perspective of a musician.
The Sound Between the Notes has been called powerful, riveting, gorgeously written, “a breathtaking emotional journey,” and a compulsive page-turner that’s impossible to put down. In its highly-coveted starred review, given only to books “of remarkable merit,” Kirkus has called it “a tour de force steeped in suspense … a sensitive, astute exploration of artistic passion, family, and perseverance.”
Praise for The Sound Between the Notes:
“The climax, on the night of her performance, is a tour de force steeped in suspense …
A sensitive, astute exploration of artistic passion, family, and perseverance.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“The Sound Between the Notes is so beautiful, so lyrical, so musical that it was hard to put
down…This is a wonderful story from a skillful writer, one that appeals strongly to the heart.
It features awesome characters, a twisty plot, and gorgeous writing.”
- Readers Favorite, 5-star review
“In her second novel, Barbara Linn Probst delivers yet another powerful story, balancing
lyrical language with a skillfully paced plot to build a sensory-rich world that will delight those
who loved Queen of the Owls and win countless new readers. Offering a deep exploration of the
search for identity and connection, The Sound Between Notes reminds us
to embrace everything we are—and everything that’s made us who we are.” - Julie Cantrell, New York Times and USA TODAY best-selling author of Perennials
“Beautifully told, The Sound Between the Notes, is the story of tragedy and triumph, of the push
and pull of family, of the responsibility we feel to ourselves and those we love.
Once I started the book, I couldn’t put it down until I reached the last, gorgeously written note.” - Loretta Nyhan, author of The Other Family and Amazon charts best-seller Digging In
Family ties can bind or blind us—even with relatives we’ve never met. In The Sound Between the
Notes, trails of music connect generations separated by adoption—while the same notes threaten
a family believed sewn with steel threads. In this spellbinding novel, Barbara Linn Probst
examines how the truth of love transcends genetics, even as strands of biology grip us. Once you
begin this story, suffused with the majesty of music and the reveries of creation,
the ‘gotta know’ will carry you all the way to the final note. - Randy Susan Meyers, International Bestselling Author of Waisted and
The Comfort of Lies
“As soaring as the music it so lovingly describes, poignantly human, and relatab
Barbara Linn Probst
Barbara Linn Probst is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, living on an historic dirt road in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her debut novel, Queen of the Owls, (April 2020) is the story of a woman’s search for wholeness, framed around the art and life of iconic American painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Queen of the Owls won the bronze medal for popular fiction from the Independent Publishers Association, placed first runner-up in general fiction for the Eric Hoffer Award, was short-listed for the First Horizon and the $2500 Grand Prize, and is currently a finalist for the Sarton Award for women’s fiction as well as the Somerset Award for literary and contemporary fiction. Barbara’s second novel The Sound Between the Notes, recipient of starred Kirkus Review for work “of remarkable merit,” launches in April 2021.
Barbara has a PhD in clinical social work and blogs for several award-winning sites for writers. To learn more about Barbara and her work, visit barbaralinnprobst.com. You can also find her on Facebook and Instagram.
To order The Sound Between the Notes, please go to Amazon or the links on her website
Author Website here:
Available Now:
I’m with Barbara Linn Probst at The Pulpwood Queens Girlfriend Weekend in Jefferson, Texas! The biggest book club convention in the world!
Spring in Malibu, California
Welcome to my neck of the woods! It’s springtime, and the weather is in the low 70’s. This is the south end of Leo Carrillo State Beach in Malibu, California, which is also known as North Beach in Western Malibu, almost at the Ventura County line.
It was low tide when I took these photographs, and what I photographed here is typically under water.
Photograph taken from a cove!
The stairs from the cliffside walk to the cove
The Jetty. Photograph taken from the cliffs above.
Beach Boulders
Inbound!
Photograph taken from the beach, with the camera aimed high to the top of this boulder formation!
This same formation as in the photograph above.
If you walk across this field, you’ll find the view below, which scans Nicholas Beach and flows into Leo Carrillo State Beach, where all the preceding photographs were taken.
Since you made it all the way to the end of this post, here is a video I shot from the cove at Leo Carrillo!
There are many more ocean wave videos on my YouTube channel, which I update regularly at :
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6QbvYwbKM71znGk5zZBb-Q
Happy spring, everyone!
Three O’Clock in the Morning by Gianrico Carofiglio
A fascinating novel, expertly written with an extraordinary premise, and a narrator you’d follow anywhere!
“Gianrico Carofiglio’s Three O’Clock in the Morning is profound in its simple delivery.”
A compelling, compact story whose focus transpires in forty-eight hours, Gianrico Carofiglio’s Three O’ Clock in the Morning explores a father and son relationship as the pair explore the coastal town of Marseilles. Seventeen-year-old Antonio is the only son of divorced, Italian parents. In high school and living with his mother, his rapport with his 51-year-old father is distant and strained until fate inexplicably intervenes in a manner that throws father and son together.
My Full Review is in the New York Journal of Books a book review by Claire Fullerton: Three O’Clock in the Morning: A Novel (nyjournalofbooks.com)
Award-winning, best-selling novelist Gianrico Carofiglio was born in Bari in 1961 and worked for many years as a prosecutor specializing in organized crime. He was appointed advisor of the anti-Mafia committee in the Italian parliament in 2007 and served as a senator from 2008 to 2013. Carofiglio is best known for the Guido Guerrieri crime series: Involuntary Witness, A Walk in the Dark, Reasonable Doubts, Temporary Perfections and now, A Fine Line, all published by Bitter Lemon Press. His other novels include The Silence of the Wave. Carofiglio’s books have sold more than four million copies in Italy and have been translated into twenty-four languages worldwide.
Other Books by the acclaimed Gianrico Carofiglio!
GIANRICO CAROFIGLIO BOOKS IN ORDER
Publication Order of Guido Guerrieri Books
| Involuntary Witness | (2002) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
| A Walk in the Dark | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
| Reasonable Doubts | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
| Temporary Perfections | (2010) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
| A Fine Line | (2014) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
| The Measure of Time | (2019) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Pietro Fenoglio Books
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Past is a Foreign Country | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
| The Silence of the Wave | (2011) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
| Three O’Clock in the Morning | (2017) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
More on the author!
Since 2002 Gianrico Carofiglio has been writing crime novels, at first in his spare time, starring a recurring main character, a widely-read, jazz-loving philosophical prosecutor who thinks deeply about good and evil (he has retired this character now). In total he has sold more than 4m copies. He had wanted to write since he was a child, but didn’t until he was in his 40s: “I was so scared of trying I thought I had better really try and understand this problem.” It took nine months to write Involuntary Witness; he had already lived the material. “And then I had my answer, it sold over a million copies all over the world.”
Book Release: Dust by Eva Marie Everson!
Congratulations to Eva Marie Everson on the launch of her novel, Dust!
Dust
Can an ordinary life leave an extraordinary legacy?
In 1977, when nineteen-year-old Allison Middleton receives a proposal of marriage from Westley Houser, she eagerly accepts, having no idea the secret Westley carries—a secret that will change Allison’s life forever. But Allison rises to the challenge of raising Westley’s toddling daughter as though she were her own.
Over the course of their lifetime together, Allison, Westley, and Michelle form the strong bond of family. As Allison struggles with infertility and finding her way during a time of great change for women, others—some she knows and others whom she never meets—brush and weave against the fabric of her life, leaving her with more questions than answers.
From teen bride to grandmother, Allison’s life chronicles the ups and downs of an ordinary woman’s life to examine the value of what we all leave behind.
~~~~~~~
From the first word to the last I was enthralled with this story. Everson’s love-story-through-time will appeal to every reader who cheers when love triumphs. This is Everson at her best.
–Rachel Hauck, New York Times bestselling author of The Wedding Dress
Order Here:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
ChristianBook.com
Iron Stream Media
I had the great pleasure of reading the advance review copy of Dust and highly recommend it! Beautiful, lyrical writing, a woman’s story and then some including life and love and marriage and the choices we make in pursuit of a meaningful, fulfilling future. It’s all here, in this lovely saga. Fans of women’s fiction, contemporary fiction, and literary fiction will relish this story! |
Eva Marie Everson is a multiple-award winning author and speaker who hails from the picturesque Southern town of Sylvania, Georgia. She is president of Word Weavers International, director of Florida Christian Writers Conference, Managing Editor at Firefly Southern Fiction, and enjoys coaching new authors through her company, Pen in Hand. She is an avid photographer who enjoys turning her photos into inspiring memes for you to share (with proper attribution). Eva Marie and her husband make their home in Central Florida. They are the parents of three fabulous children who have blessed them with the world’s greatest grandchildren.
Readers say of Dust:
Allison meets Westley as a callow girl and enters their marriage on the wings of starry-eyed optimism. It is the 1970s, and Westley has kept a secret that impacts the years to come. In a web of memorable characters who intersect profoundly, Dust is a novel of exquisite breadth and width, a soulful story of a woman coming into her own that shows us it is the seemingly ordinary life that is, in fact, extraordinary.–Claire Fullerton, award-winning author of Little Tea
Author Eva Marie Everson’s characters in Dust are flawed, their choices, both good and bad, intersecting and influencing each other’s lives. Everson’s layered Southern family drama reveals the complexities of relationships and the unexpected and sometimes painful consequences of our choices. While we might regret how what we say and do affects others, with every turn of the page Everson reminds readers of a vital truth: life doesn’t have to be perfect to be good.
–Beth K. Vogt, Christy Award-winning author of the Thatcher Sisters series
Eva Marie Everson’s novel Dust is a poignant story about family, not simply family defined by DNA but the struggles, joys, and disappointments that bond us. These characters face challenges that ultimately determine who we really are and how we love one another.–Christa Allen, award-winning author of Since You’ve Been Gone
Everson, at her page-turning, keep-you-reading-all-night best brings Dust to the world. She has penned a novel that intrigues, shell shocks, and keeps you guessing. She peels back and exposes the beauty and tragedy of everyday life. She draws in-depth psychological characters that pop in and out, leaving you reading until wee hours seeking them.
–Merilyn Howton Marriott, MS, LPC, award-winning author of The Children of Main Street
“Fans of Eva Marie Everson will rush to purchase her latest novel, Dust. A complex story line moves the story at a rapid pace, which makes readers fall headlong into this page-turner. The characters remain with you long after the ending and you will find yourself thinking about them long after the final page. In Dust, Everson secures her place at the top of women’s fiction.
–Renea Winchester, award-winning author of Outbound Train
Stolen Truth by Henya Drescher
Congratulations to Henya Drescher on the release of Stolen Truth!
An edge of your seat, twisting, turning, unpredictable story that will have you turning its pages as you try to discern what REALLY happened! A sure pleasure for thriller readers!
Book Description:
Bree Michaelson wakes up one day feeling drugged and confused, to find her boyfriend, Todd Armstrong, and her infant son, Noah, missing. But why does no one believe her? Lacking witnesses to her pregnancy, a birth certificate to prove a child was born, or a marriage license to prove her invisible husband ever existed, Bree will find it impossible to get the help she so desperately needs to find her baby.
Nevertheless, despite suspicious friends, family, and authorities, Bree sets out to find Todd and Noah. Only when her sister commits her to a hospital psych ward that Bree begins to doubt her own story. In the past, she suffered from a false pregnancy. Is this an imagined recurrence? She must fight to find the truth of what has happened to her—or admit that is all in her own mind.
About the Author:
Henya Drescher is often found reading a book, and that book will most likely be a psychological thriller, which she writes. Writing novels was always her wish, and now, with STOLEN TRUTH, it has become a reality. When not absorbed in writing her third novel and spending too much time on the computer, Henya’s passions include lifting weights, spinning, and cultivating her large garden. She and her husband live in New York City.
From author, Walter Cummins:
“Henya Drescher possesses a gift for creating the best kind of mystery, going far beyond the simple question of who did it to ask what was done and why and who can be trusted and believed. The novel captures the fraught frustrations of Bree, who may or may not have been the mother of a kidnapped newborn, as she plunges into her quest, facing many internal and external uncertainties. Bree bears the history of being a troubled woman, yet she is passionately determined. The complexities of her character drive the story through accumulating dead ends and detours. Her desperation pulsates through the pages of Stolen Truth as both she and the reader crave answers.”
From the Author:
I write suspense thrillers in which my heroines respond fearlessly to testing circumstances, satisfying a universal appeal by allowing readers a peek into their challenged lives
I would describe my psychological thrillers as tense with the twists and turns that keep the adrenaline flowing and activate a part of the brain that are typically not stimulated. My heroes are individuals who make difficult choices and sacrifice and others’ good. Like the characters, we struggle to figure out what is going on. And with a final shocking twist, the tension gives away exhilaration.
Reader Comments;
Talia Carner5.0 out of 5 stars In the tradition of “Gone Girl” and “The Girl on The Train”
It is hard enough to pen a thriller that grabs you from the start and compels you to get on the journey with the protagonist. It is much harder when she is an “unreliable narrator,” one whose perceptions you doubt—just as do all the people she’s trying to convince that she’s been married, pregnant, and had a baby who has disappeared along with his father. Yet, in her sure, lyrical prose, Henya Drescher does a magnificent job of building a compelling, suspenseful story that unfurls in the wooded settings of the Berkshires (NY). The more you are swept into the story, the more you question who and what to believe. Has Bree been a victim of a manipulative man who isolated her from her family and her environment only so she can produce a child for him, or is Bree, a young, bright woman with a disturbing past of psychological delusions is just imagining this convoluted plot?
In the tradition of “Gone Girl” and “The Girl on The Train,” STOLEN TRUTH will keep the readers’ attention in a can’t-put-it down, unforgettable story, that culminates with a brilliant, totally believable ending.
A wild ride from start to finish…
This was a fast read with a few surprises to keep it interesting. The character Bree wakes from a drug induced nap to discover her family missing and the house freshly scrubbed and painted. She tries to get help but not everyone believes her wild story.
Did it really happen? Was she imagining that she ever had a husband and a child? Where was the woman hired to help with childcare?
Bree must piece it all together with few clues to go on.
Here is Henya Drescher’s Website: https://henyadrescher.com/
Stolen Truth is available in print and ebook, where books are sold!
Surviving Savannah by Patti Callahan
“Surviving Savannah is an epic novel that explores the metal of human spirit in crisis. It is an expertly told, fascinating story that runs fathoms deep on multiple levels.”
Fate, chance, choices, and destiny are mere concepts until an inspired author comes along and depicts the essence of each through the power of story. Patti Callahan has done just that in her widely anticipated Surviving Savannah. The New York Times bestselling author sets historical fiction’s stage in a mahogany paneled library before a roaring fire, where six- and eight-year-old sisters, Everly and Allyn Winthrop, sit at their pipe-smoking grandfather’s knee, while he spins yet another fantastic version of the ill-fated, steamship, Pulaski. Haunting imagery of the Pulaski looms in the family’s multi-generational, Georgian style house on Savannah’s historic Jones Street: “Above the fireplace hung an oil painting of a lustrous steamship with its sails spread wide and its wheels churning the water into whipped foam, the sky clear and bluer than the sea as human figures on the deck regarded the vast sea.”
Read My Full Review Here: a book review by Claire Fullerton: Surviving Savannah (nyjournalofbooks.com)
It was called “The Titanic of the South.” The luxury steamship sank in 1838 with Savannah’s elite on board; through time, their fates were forgotten—until the wreck was found, and now their story is finally being told in this breathtaking novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Becoming Mrs. Lewis.
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Patti Callahan Henry is a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of sixteen novels and podcast host. She is the recipient of The Christy Award — A 2019 Winner “Book of the Year”; The Harper Lee Distinguished Writer of the Year for 2020 and the Alabama Library Association Book of the Year for 2019. She is the co-host and co-creator of the popular weekly online Friends and Fiction live web show and podcast. A full-time author and mother of three children, she now resides in both Mountain Brook, Alabama, and Bluffton, South Carolina with her husband.
Home | Patti Callahan Henry l New York Times Bestselling Author
New Podcast Series: The Untold Story Behind Surviving Savannah (patticallahanhenry.com)
Happy St. Patrick’s Day
You’ll see in this photographs that I’m standing against a gray stone wall on a windswept day in the middle of an Irish field, with what are obviously the ruins of a monastery behind me.
Observant people might ask why the monastery is behind me, and I am holding a set of keys in my hand as if it were the bigger focal point. Here’s the story.
We kind of knew where we were heading, my friend Tama and I, and by this I mean we had a loose plan with regard to how we were going to spend the afternoon in Gort, Ireland. We’d been freewheeling across the countryside in a rented car the size of a match box, with its steering wheel on the right side, while we drove on the left of the two-lane road as if trying to best a test for dyslexia. Tama is a devout Catholic, who has a thing about historic churches, which is why we couldn’t have adhered to a plan had we had one. “Stop,” Tama would shout every time we spied one of the dim, ominous structures off in the distance. We’d scratch the gravel driveway and wander inside, our solitary footsteps crossing the marble floor in a tread- ye- lightly and humble yourself echo off the cavernous vaulted ceiling. We did this so many times that after yet another sweep inside a church, I’d take to wandering the halcyon graveyards to read the Irish tombstone inscriptions, while Tama would light a red votive candle and fall to her pious knees.
I thought I was alone in the yard when a voice came sailing from behind me. “Have you found your way to Kilmacduagh monastery?” it queried. I turned to find a young woman taking in my outlander attire of three quarter down jacket and rubber soled shoes. “It’s just up the road there,” she continued, pointing. “Just knock on the door of the middle house across the road and ask Lily for the keys.”
I was standing behind Tama when she knocked on the front door of a low slung house on a sparsely populated lane. Across the lane, placid fields of damp clover shimmered in the afternoon mist as far as the eye could see. On one verdant field, a series of interspersed ruins jutted in damp metal-gray; some without roofs, some with wrought-iron gates, and one in particular beside an impressively tall stone spire, which had two windows cut in vertical slashes above a narrow door raised high from the ground.
Immediately the front door opened, and a pair of blue water eyes gave us the once over with an inquisitive, “Yes?””Are you Lily? We’re here for the keys,” Tama said.”The keys, is it? Just a moment there,” the woman said, and after closing the door, she opened it seconds later and handed us a set of long metal keys. “Just slip them through the door slot when you’re through,” she said, closing the door with a quick nod.I can’t say there was any indication of which key went to what, among the cluster of gates and doors throughout the 7th century monastery called Kilmacduagh, but we figured it out. I was so tickled over the keys that I couldn’t get over it. “Is this weird?” I said to Tama. “We could be anybody. It’s not that there’s anything anybody could steal, but that’s not the point.” I could wax rhapsody over the hours we spent unlocking gates and pushing through doors in the eerie, hallowed grounds, but that’s not my point either. My point is that’s Ireland for you: a stranger offering directions without being asked, Lily handing over the keys like an afterthought, and Tama and I trolling the grounds of sacred space when nobody else was around. But suddenly a German couple appeared as we were on our way back up the lane. They looked at us wide eyed and queried, “What is this place?”
“It’s a 7th century monastery,” I said, “here, take the keys and slip them through Lily’s door when you’re through.”
Claire Fullerton Author 