She walked the fifteen miles to town every couple of weeks,
with a cane in her right hand
and a shopping basket in her left.
She never walked very far,
not once past the highway that I saw,
before someone picked her up.
Even my school-bus driver picked her up.
As the bus slowed,
the kids in the front seat would move back to give her space.
Nobody wanted to sit near her.
But we were all curious.
When the bus stopped,
she never spoke a word that I could hear,
just climbed the steps slowly,
sat down,
and stared out the window
while we all stared at her.
The bus driver probably could have been fired for it,
but he would never leave a frail old woman
wandering about alone in the boonies.
I often wondered about her.
Did she live alone in a cabin?
Or have a sick husband at home?
Was she a hermit?
What did she do for heat in the winter?
And for money?
Did she have a woodstove?
Who chopped her wood?
One time, my dad picked her up.
He just stopped the car beside her.
She looked in the window,
opened the door,
and climbed in.
She didn’t say a word.
And neither did my dad.
From the back seat, I observed her.
This was the closest I’d ever been to her.
I could literally reach out and touch her
if I wanted to be sure she was real.
She had brushed her long grey hair
and she had age marks at her temples.
She smelled of campfire smoke.
In town,
she just pointed and Dad pulled over
and she got out.
By my third year of high school,
I stopped seeing her hobbling along the road.
As mysteriously as she had arrived in my life,
she was gone again.
One day,
I decided to ask my dad about what happened to her.
But he just looked at my quizzically.
“What old woman are you talking about, son?”