Once in a Green Summer by Thomas F Walsh

Once in a green summer in the west of Ireland there was a large family that grew up in a small house surrounded by fields. There was fresh water in the well, food to be harvested from the earth and not a plastic bag to be seen. There was love of the land and fear of the Lord, and there was a priest in the family.

There was a father who cared for the straightness of his drills and the shape of his corn stacks, whose sons all left and who saw the old world crumble around him. There was a mother who left a well-to-do family to raise ten children in a small cottage and who gave them love beyond measure. It was a world where ghosts were real, where stories were as old as time, where imagination was more powerful than fact. It was a world we once lived in, now vanished forever.

The author has put together a delightful collection of memories of that vanished world, seen through the eyes of a child who grew up in the shelter and certainty of its unchanging ways.







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