Find a Christian store

<< Go Back

Irish Encounter

By Hope Toler Dougherty

Order Now!

Ellen Shepherd’s fingers trembled as she fiddled with the zipper on her small backpack. “I can’t wait to see Galway again. It’s been so long since we were here.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, an image of her husband, dead now for three years, smiling and popping a piece of brown bread into his mouth, wavered in her mind.

Was she crazy? She didn’t want to see Galway without Steve.

“Mom, are you sure you’re up to going into town? I should be finished with my exam around noon. Relax this morning, and then I’ll come back here for lunch.” Olivia, a college junior, sipped coffee out of a mug depicting the Cliffs of Moher. Natural light from the cathedral windows behind her brightened the kitchen despite this morning’s low-hanging clouds.

Ellen smiled at her daughter and banished the bittersweet memories that wanted to join forces with the dark clouds overhead. “I appreciate your concern for your poor ol’ mom, but I’m not ready for a rocking chair and a warm blanket yet. At least allow me to celebrate my forty-fourth birthday before you cart me away to a retirement center.” She drank the last of her orange juice.

Olivia rolled her hazel eyes, the exact color of Ellen’s, and bit her toast shimmering with blackberry jam. “Mmm. You should plant some blackberry bushes when you get back home. Then next year make some delicious jam like this.” She wiggled the remaining half of the triangle at her mom.

“Thanks for adding not one but two items to my to-do list. They’ll have to roost at the bottom for now, though.” A pall crept into her chest as she thought about her yarn shop, holding its own but barely and her farm, the fields lying fallow this year because of her uncle’s stroke in March.

What would next year bring?

Order Now!

<< Go Back


Developed by Camna, LLC

This is a service provided by ACFW, but does not in any way endorse any publisher, author, or work herein.