She sits on her porch and knits in the mornings, bending at the windowsill, with those old, old waxed fingers, you can almost see those old perturbing veins from where I stand, she's just smiling away-looking up and down Cayuga Street, checking out the boys and girls, the gang: my old neighbor, and widow, at ninety-three, Mrs.
Stanley.
When noon comes around, she'll switch windows, pull back the curtain, in the kitchen, spoon in her soup; check out the birds in her birdbath, splashing water all about, she bought it after her husband passed on, perhaps from boredom.
She doesn't care if I'm looking over the fence, to see her looking back, I'm just a teenagers, wet behind the ears, a neighborhood fact, a dupe.
In the evenings, in summer, she'll pull weeds from her backyard garden, a few vegetables will grow back there; not much to speak of, carrots and cucumbers.
I think, or so it seeps up from deep within my head, "Doesn't she have anything else to do?" I'm being really kind of cruel, she knows this from my looks...
she really seems kind of homeless to me, in that big house, but she knows I don't care; and neither does she.
Now at sixty, I can kind of identify with her, I'm in my little house garden, pulling dead leaves off geraniums, picking up dead worms, looking out my bedroom curtains, trying to see what teenagers plan on robbing me, and how soon, will I be able to go to sleep.
Mrs.
Stanley, her husband died about 1960 at the age of 67, if I recall right, after retiring from the Railroad, he didn't live long after his retirement, perhaps two years.
He bought a 1959-Rambler, drove it one year, and that was it, it sat in the garage for the next five years.
Not sure why, Perhaps Mrs.
Stanley loved him more than I could conceive.
#1518 (2006)(reedited, and revised, 5-2008) If she could see me now, know me now, she'd say: "Dennis, you fooled me, you actually became somebody!"