Mweenish Island Beach — County Galway, Ireland, Summer 2023

We were in County Galway in the summer of 2023 to bury my father.

Mweenish Island is off the coast of Carna, in Connemara — the part of Ireland where his mother's family came from, a coastline he knew through her long before he ever stood on it himself. We drove out while we were there, on a day that happened to be clear and bright, and I took photographs of the beach.

The rocks in the foreground are weathered and lichen-covered, the sand pale where it catches the light, the water that turquoise-green of shallow Atlantic water on a good summer day. Whitewashed cottages sit in the background, small against the sky. It is a beautiful place. His people were from there.

When I came home from that trip, I had the photograph printed on canvas — forty by sixty inches — and fitted it into the antique frame from my grandmother's bedroom set. The set is from her second marriage to my step grandfather, Pop Pop (James Connolly of Armagh) from their marriage in 1944. I had the complete set moved from Long Island to Washington state the summer of 2009, after the death of my Uncle Tim. In 2022, I had the furniture professionally repaired and restored to its original glory. The frame that had held a mirror for years, a mirror too heavy to hang, so I never had. However, the canvas is not heavy. It went up in the mirror's place, over the other pieces of the set, and it has been there since.

His mother's coastline, in her frame.