Pádraig Barry (PJ)

Anyway I credit much of my recovery to the prayers of friends. Many people prayed for me and one dear lady I was friends with back in the 80s prayed through the night. I am lucky.

I had a major hiccup in November 2024, triple bypass surgery.I virtually walked into the ER and onto the operating table. Two lucky things my heart had no damage from the heart attack and I never felt any pain where they split my chest. Anyway I have made a great recovery with all vitals good.

Yeppers!

Us too. Especially for biking.

Thank you Argent.

Thank you Brenda! The good news is that warmer days are in the forecast. Better news is that Eílis and I are off to Hilton ahead soon. It’s been a long winter!

Thank you Argent. It sounds like I should not be in a rush to track one down, but if I stumble upon one I’ll try it.

I’ve never tasted dragonfruit so this will be interesting. Thank you Jaye!

Happy Wednesday Brenda and crew from the interminably snowing Upstate New York! 😀

With him.

Providence walked beside him in the forest, a pale‑green shimmer in the ferns, nudging his steps toward a truth he would only understand years later. Only when the world had taken him far from that woodland path, did he realize how gently he had been kept him from losing himself entirely
#vssfantasy

Lethargy clung to him like the smell of peat smoke, familiar and unshakable, a companion from the days when hope had been a louder thing. The Germans had come in and automated all the good construction jobs and the idea of retraining at 52 held no water for him.
#vss365

The buffer between them and the British exit was no more than two blocks, lined with barbed wire that whispered the name of freedom. He wired the detonator with trembling hands, the copper thread singing faintly, as if it too remembered the songs of the centuries old rebellion.
#2WordPrompts

Her mother’s coat, old and faded, had been passed down through the generations. Eileen did not have the heart to throw it out. It now hung by the hearth, caught firelight in such a way that it seemed to breathe, its shadows gathering into the shape of every woman who had ever worn it.
#vssmagic

An anonymous kindness paid for his supper that winter night, and eventually his luck changed. Even when he was living comfortably, he carried the warmth of that supper like a secret lantern through all the years that followed.
#bravewrite

The do nothing Congress is something to run on.

Her smile was a gambit, soft and strange, like the shimmer of a spell half-cast, and he felt the ground shift beneath his boots. The earth gave a sigh, and the stones rearranged themselves in patterns he could not read. He should have stepped back. Instead, he asked her name.
#vssfantasy

My father and brother had ferocious arguments. I remember that last afternoon. It was as if a cataract of light had fallen over the fields, blinding me to everything except the faint figure of my brother walking away for the last time.
#vss365

He wondered if the years would ever forgive him. However, the road to perdition lay ahead, straight as steel, shining mercilessly. He needed a course change. Unfortunately he had always been a man without a compass.
#2WordPrompt

He followed the thread of his own shadow across the road, surprised to find it tugging him toward the river at evening. A faint shiver ran through the reeds as he approached, as though the river itself were drawing a long breath in anticipation of whatever truth he was about to surrender.
#vssmagic

Here’s a riddle:

She carried her grief lightly, but the evening carried her more heavily, casting her second self across the road, thin as a promise and twice as loyal.

What is a second self that needs no breath?

#bravewrite

Good!!!

Well you had the hood sense not to change it. 😀

Great name!

Dawn rose with a quiet splendor, brushing gold across her cheek as if the morning itself had chosen her first. There’s a light beyond these woods it seemed to say. Mary Margaret had never thought much about the outside world but now she was feeling a pull.
#vss365

By serendipity alone she met him on the road to town, her shawl lifting in the wind like a signal from some older, kinder world. Mary Margaret had been looking for answers and here was one right under her nose.
#vssfantasy

A warm breeze curled around the tower, brushing her hair across her cheek, and he felt a sweet ache—an old wound healing simply because she smiled at him. He knew then and there he would never love another.
#2WordPrompt

His smile carried a vicious enchantment, sweet as honey until it snapped shut like a trap made of moonlit thorns. He wielded it the way others might wield a blade—lightly, elegantly, with the confidence of someone who had never once missed his mark.
#vssmagic

In the half‑light of morning, he felt the dog nuzzle his hand, a small insistence that the world, for all its sorrows, still wished to keep him company, and for a moment he forgot his nightmares and let himself lean into that warmth as though it were a language he had once known well.
#bravewrite

a painting of a woman in a blue and white dress with a choker around her neck ALT: a painting of a woman in a blue and white dress with a choker around her neck

Why let them eat liver!