At the corner of Westcombe and Longton, she sits brilliantly in the cold sunshine. She is a small woman dressed in long fuchsia cloth and wearing a small turban. She watches as I drive by. I wave.
She turns her head slowly away from 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 or one hundred. I believe she comes 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 felt. 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 and beneath mountains.
On my way back from errands, I look 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 