Loretta A. Murphy's Blog (3)

If you click on the song I just added to "MY PAGE", you will hear me singing a song I wrote in 2004 entitled "THE BALLAD OF THE O'DONNELL HOUSE". It was written about a house - demolished a year ago this November - that was the inspiration for my novel, THE PIPES ARE CALLING.

The song tells the story of a massacre that happened in the early hours of the morning on December 10, 1875 in a little coal patch called Wiggans near Mahanoy City, Schuylkill County, in the heart of anthracite…

Today is the first sunny day we've had here in Coal Cracker Country. The temperature is a little cooler and so is the humidity.

The barometric pressure must have been sky high. It pressed against the skin and made me feel like a glass of water oversaturated with sugar. The afternoons were so hot even the air molecules weren't moving.

I am fond of gray days though. They remind me of Ireland where the sun rarely shines in the morning. Such a strange and magical place. It is no…

Funny word, blog.

It's not the type of word you'd envision associating with literature or the arts.

Who'd have thunk 20 years ago, everybody would be blogging it.

Blog, as you would note from my post title, reminds me of the Irish word "bog".

A bog, admittedly a rather odd word in the same vein as blog, is a section of wet spongy ground. Ireland has its share of bogs. Bogs are a natural resource that provides Ireland with "peat". Peat sounds like the boys name…