This card arrived in my letterbox yesterday from a dear friend who has been living in Valparaiso these past twenty years.
Valparaiso is also the title of an Irish poem many Irish children learned in school.
Originally an English poem written by Oliver St John Gogarty it was subsequently translated into Irish by Pádraig de Brún.
As my friend once wrote herself :" The Gaelic version of the poem turned out to be far more evocative than its English original,
possibly because it appealed more directly to the dream of voyaging to faraway places that is latent in the heart of every Celt.
So, for many Irish people of that generation, the word Valparaíso came to stand for the goal of an improbable dream-journey."
She took on that improbable dream-journey and has enriched many lives by her words and deeds.