At the corner of Westcombe and Longton, she sits brilliantly in the cold March sunshine. A small woman wrapped in long fuchsia cloth and wearing a small turban, she watches as my car approaches the general vicinity of her house. I wave. She turns her head slowly toward me, unmoved; unmoving.
I think about her as I run errands. I’ve seen her walking slowly along the sidewalk, barely five feet tall; age undetermined. Her face is small, brown and lined. She could be sixty. She could just as easily be one hundred. She is a recent immigrant from Nepal.
She stares out and up at the sky…at lands I don’t see, winds I don’t feel; the sun at an angle I have never experienced. Her face is stone; absorbing with a direct stare the mountains from whence she came. My face is fluid. I look around mountains, above mountains, beneath mountains.
On my way back I search again for her but she and her chair are gone. She has left the mountain, the wind, the waning spring sun and the front lawn. She has closed her door against the fishbowl which is suburbia…
690 Saint Paul 