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In county Mayo June 23rd is celebrated with bonfires dotting the hills all around the county. June 23 is St John's eve and is held after the summer solstice which takes place two days earlier on June 21.   This is another example of the early church putting Christian devotions next to the Celtic fire festivals of Druid times.

At the Glore Mill we built a large bonfire and burned the collections of the year gone by.   For weeks Ray has been digging out the Mill wheel pit and has gone through years of collected trash and old implements, a clock rusted with time and, perhaps the most poignant of all, many pairs of shoes discarded after years of well used walking, dancing , working. One red sandal from the fifties brought back to me a vibrant picture of another one just like it .

Once bright red and new with shiny brass buckles they signalled the start of a summer in Wisconsin for me playing hopscotch and jump-rope. Some little girl in Ireland also enjoyed these shoes and I felt connected to her in a way that only little girls with new shoes can understand.  The worn strap had given way just as mine would after a summer of buckling and unbuckling. For the bonfire we threw in all the old shoes with a prayer for their long gone owners. Bless their paths walked, their bogs cut, their field's tilled , their toes open to the wet grass, and their dances danced and their hearth fires tended.

There is a song that bids the listener to "throw all your problems into the bonfire" and those concerns plus memories of the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001 went into the fire last night.  Today Ray uncovered the top of the gear shaft of the 100 year old Mill wheel turbine buried six feet deep in the Mill wheel pit. By himself, he lifted out 560 cubic feet of bottles, cans, dressed stones and stone rubble from the fallen Mill gables, all manner of trash and very good soil and sand for planters. We hope it will uncover a start of another 100 years of life for the Mill.