Leaky Buckets

  Cookie, Paddy and Paul and me, Ireland 2019 As we tottered out the front door of Hegarty’s Pub and Hotel well after midnight to slurp down some fresh Irish air, Sam was like an anchor on my shoulder. For the past eight hours, she had downed round after round, sacrificing her health for mine, surreptitiously swapping her empty glass for my full one so that I could keep singing country music classics to our new Irish relatives. We were both completely pickled and managed only one lap of the park before stumbling into our room above the pub.  Both of us fell asleep instantly, proud that we had lived up to the title of being from Butte, America, even though we weren’t.  We had pulled into the village of Carrick, in County Donegal, Ireland, in the late afternoon. Like everywhere else we went in Ireland that week, it was a comfortably sixty five degrees and breezy. I have never encountered such consistently pleasant weather anywhere else in the world. Sam firmly decided that it was time to