been tall and elegant with slender hands and silver hair and a finely carved face of angular perfection. Instead, she is a plump dove of a woman, round faced and rosy cheeked, her eyes bright pools of blue among crinkles of pink skin. Her hair is cropped short, often tucked behind her ears, as if she does not want anything to get in the way when she looks life in the eye.
And that, I think, is where my love for her is born. I have never met anyone quite like her, not in life and not in death. She is content to be exactly where she is. She feels every moment of her day with a willingness that takes my breath away. Life glints off her in bright flecks; she is sunlight sparkling from a spinning pinwheel. She sprinkles diamonds in her wake as she moves through her house and sits in her garden. She is always alone, and yet she is always content.
I have searched the hidden corners of her life and seen the photos of younger times. I have followed her, unseen, through her tidy house, certain I would spot signs of regret. But though she lives alone—the man in the photographs has obviously passed over, and I see no evidence of children to comfort her in advancing age—I do not feel sadness in her, not even at those times when she slows to examine the images of her past life. Happiness flows from her like silver ribbons and entwines her memories. She pauses, she feels, she moves on. I envy her certainty.
This morning, she was sitting on a small metal bench in a corner of her garden. Her tranquility was so great that rabbits hopped along the garden path without fear and chewed clover at her feet. Birds bathed in their concrete bath inches from where she sat. A sparrow lit on the arm of the bench, inches from her, rustling itself back into order. The old lady saw it all with bright eyes, soaking in the life surrounding her.
I could not tear myself away from her. I had followed her for days now, absorbed in learning the secrets of her serenity. To be near her was to live life in infinitesimal glory. She was the opposite of what I had been.
A breeze blew past, ruffling her hair. She closed her eyes to enjoy the sensation. I was so lost in watching her that I failed to notice I was not her only observer.
“Excuse me,” a timid voice said.
The old woman opened her eyes.
A man stood on the edge of her garden, waiting permission to speak. He was a weighed-down man in both body and spirit. His flesh sagged with years of bad food, though he could not have been older than his early forties. He reeked of cigarettes. His face, though perhaps once almost delicate, had become doughy and lackluster. His spirit, too, was heavy. I could feel it clearly. All the things he had not said in his life—love left unspoken, anger swallowed, regrets not voiced, apologies that stuck in his throat—they all encumbered him. His body slumped under the weight of these unvoiced emotions and I knew he would grow old before his time.
“Please, come into my garden,” my white-haired muse said calmly, unsurprised to see him at her gate. “I believe we are neighbors, are we not?”
“We are,” the man said, shuffling into her tiny paradise with an awkward politeness. He stood near the birdbath and did not seem to notice the flash of wings or the frantic thumping as creatures fled from his presence.
He smelled of stale beer and fried food, an odor I had lived with perpetually while alive but had since come to think of as the stench of self-neglect and disappointment.
“I live six doors down,” he explained. “With my mother. Or, I did live with my mother. She died last fall.”
“I see.” The woman’s voice was kind. She recognized the loneliness in him and, though she did not feel it herself, she understood how it could cripple others. “I’m so sorry to hear that. I had not seen her for a long time. I wondered where she had gone.”
“She was bedridden for several years before she passed,” the man explained.
“And you?” the woman asked. “What are you doing with your life now that she’s gone? Here, please—sit.” She waved her hand at a metal chair by a flower bed blooming in a riot of blues and purples around a