Also, the way Catherine writes in the aftermath of this contemporary event, her particular slant on it as it were, reveals much about her leadership, her concern for her Sisters, and her acknowledgement of their care for one another. I begin with this particular event because it seems emblematic of so much of Catherine’s times and of our own: tumultuous, unpredictable, unsettling. On the west coast, fish and seaweed were blown miles inward, and the smell of salt lingered for weeks in houses far from the sea. Thousands of trees were destroyed, thousands of birds killed, buildings both grand and humble damaged, significant historical ruins badly breached, and many fishing vessels loosed from their moorings. This storm, the Great Wind of 1839 as it became known, killed an unknown number, but probably hundreds of people across the country, including many children. Between these catastrophic natural events, in 1841, in November, a woman named Catherine would die in an upstairs room in a house on a corner in Baggot St, Dublin. A few years later, the Great Famine would blight many of the same areas of the country and change irrevocably the face, the language and culture of Ireland. To contemporary witnesses it was a night of inexplicably bizarre natural phenomena, the combination of which wrought devastation across the tiny island. The night of Saturday January 5 th 1839 is etched in the Irish collective psyche even today as one of the most destructive and frightening ever experienced. (This article was first published in the ISMA Journal Listen, Vol.
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