What the Wind Knows by Amy Harmon EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Amy Harmon
- Genre: Time Travel Science Fiction, Time Travel Fiction, Historical Romance
- Publish Date: 1 March 2019
- Size: 2 MB
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Avail for Download
- Price: Free
EPHEMERA
“Ah, do not mourn,” he said,
“That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.”
—W. B. Yeats
June 2001
They say that Ireland is built on her stories. Fairies and folklore inhabited
Ireland much longer than the English or even Patrick and the priests. My
grandfather, Eoin Gallagher (pronounced galla–HER not galla–GUR), valued
the story above all else, and he taught me to do the same, for it is in the
legends and tales that we keep our ancestors, our culture, and our history
alive. We turn memories into stories, and if we don’t, we lose them. If the
stories are gone, then the people are gone too.
Even as a child, I found myself entranced by the past, wishing I knew
the stories of the people who had come before me. Maybe it was due to an
early acquaintance with death and loss, but I knew someday I would be gone
too, and no one would remember that I had ever lived. The world would
forget. It would go on, shaking itself free of those who had been, sloughing
off the old for the new. The tragedy of it all was more than I could bear, the
tragedy of lives beginning and ending with no one remembering.
Eoin was born in County Leitrim in 1915, nine months before the famed
Easter Rising that changed Ireland forever. His parents—my great-
grandparents—died in that rebellion, and Eoin was orphaned without
knowing either of them. We were alike in that way, my grandfather and I—
both orphaned young—his loss cycling into mine, my loss becoming his.
I
was only six years old when I lost my parents. I was a little girl with a tied
tongue and an overly active imagination, and Eoin stepped in, rescued me,
and raised me.
When I struggled to get the words out, my grandfather would hand me a
pen and paper. “If you can’t say them, write them. They last longer that way.
Write all your words, Annie. Write them and give them somewhere to go.”
And so I have.
But this story is like no other tale I have ever told, no story I have ever
written. It is the history of my family, woven into the fabric of my past,
etched in my DNA, and seared into my memory. It all began—if there is a
beginning—when my grandfather was dying.
“There is a locked drawer in my desk,” my grandfather said.
“Yes, I know,” I teased, as if the locked drawer had been something I’d
been trying to break into. I’d actually had no idea. I hadn’t lived in Eoin’s
Brooklyn brownstone for a long time and hadn’t called him “Grandfather” for
even longer. He was just “Eoin” now, and his locked drawers were of no
concern to me.
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