It’s true.
Her hair is black
and her eyes are blue.
The Galway girl is as charming
as charming can be.
Alas, she’s getting married in four days,
for the first time,
and her mom is ninety,
though W is the youngest of thirteen children.
Mom complains that she has to travel
more than two hours to get to the wedding.
“Why can’t you get married in Galway?”
Mom’s asked a hundred times.
We’re at a pub a few blocks from
the famous Temple Bar street,
where food is half the price,
and I’m eating Irish stew
and drinking a Guinness.
The Galway girl is drinking white wine.
We talk for an hour and only then
get to the topic of the weather,
which has not been favourable in Dublin
since I arrived.
The Galway girl says
the weather in Dublin is awful and that
people shouldn’t have to pay to live here.
Though she works here herself,
she lives in a village well out of town.
Where the sun shines, she says.
She receives a text and looks at it.
“From the fiancé?” I ask.
“No, it’s my mother.
She wants to know why
I don’t want to get married in Galway.”
We both laugh.