inferion

I told my mother I wanted to retire to Ireland because it seemed that white-haired people there didnt just curl up and expire. They danced. They laughed at bad jokes. They smiled, no matter that their smiles looked like they had divvied up a single set of teeth. Old men flirted with young women, old ladies sipped whiskey and giggled over the days gossip. Farmers who looked like skeletons in their boots, people we'd put in a home, or maybe a box, spent their days working cattle. I walked the roads with them as they slowly made their way from field to field, herding dogs at their heels.
Their secret? Fresh air and fewer worries were my guess, maybe not fewer worries, necessarily, but the Irish didnt seem to possess the same sense of entitlement I was used to back home, the one that gave us the right to sit around all day and fret about our plight. Where I was from, the line between life and death seemed a negotiable one, so many of us spending most our living hours trying to put off our dying ones. The Irish, they just got on with it, too busy to try to reorder the inevitable. You lived, worked, died, and laughed as much as possible along the way...

'An Irish Outlook'