The Last St. Patrick's Day Of The Nineteenth Century

On Saint Patrick's Day I always think of my grandmother packing her things on a spring morning in 1899. She's fifteen years old and she's looking at the blue skies and green meadows of County Mayo extra hard, trying to remember every detail, because she knows she'll probably never see them again. She's never been twenty miles from the spot where she was born, and now she's going to cross the Western Ocean to a place she's only read about. She has two dollars and a steamship ticket in her pocket. There's a boy on the village green, waiting to see her off. He'll kiss her cheek and wish her well, and when she's well out of sight he'll cry a little, for what might have been.