First, "Genealogy."  I have a branch of the National Archives near where I live and finally made it over there one day to begin checking up on my MOTHER's family because I had a good idea of when her parents entered the port of Boston. In looking up info on that side of my family, I decided to check on my Dad's side while I was in some of the microfiche since the Linehans also settled in the greater Boston area, though I was less sure of when.

In reading census data for the years noted in my poem, what was "news" to me was that my great grandparents on my Dad's side had taken Irish immigrants into the house which I had visited and slept in as a child.  I started imagining my grandmother growing up in that setting, with so many young men so far from home, the sort of stories she must have heard and so on.  That sort of dreaming triggered the poem.

RE: "Praise Him in  . . . the Present." I had begun sitting on the sofa in my bedroom around 4:00 p.m. in the winter months of the year I stopped working (a few years ago now) and knitting.  Really what I was doing was watching the way the light changed at that time of day over the pond outside my window.  (When I was working, of course, I was seldom at home at that hour.) I began to believe that that must have been why the pond I live on is called "Winter Pond."  Also at work in the poem, of course, is the word play on SLIP to get at the larger issue of time and its slippage, its passing.

Moira Linehan
August 1, 2003