It was a bit of a mystery to me how the old ladies in my town could sit in their windows for hours, leaning out into the street barely, watching everybody and everything.
Some of them had cushions placed under their big busts and wrinkly elbows. A dog was with some. Some had their hair covered. Now and then there would be one who would not even open the window. We just knew she was there. Behind the curtains she lurked. I went through the dark streets to get some milk. It would be poured into a metal container. I am not quite sure where it was coming from. It probably came from the back room. Some mysterious place in the little shop that had not much else to offer. I would then walk back, passing the windows with the many old large ladies again. Go home.
There the milk would be used for something. Maybe drinking, maybe baking, maybe some other special activity, like polishing some metal surface. I wondered how the ladies got anything done, staring at the street like that. They spoke with some of the people passing by, but mostly they would just stare. It was not like the street ever changed in the many years. The same lack of trees, the same dusty days, the same smells, the same sounds.
What was it?
The picture just came into my mind as I was scrolling down some stream on some site somewhere, little windows of pictures of families happily celebrating something, and that one guy who gets upset about everything, then there were the pumpkins, what will follow will be the turkeys, then the trees and the minoras and the new year’s celebrations. And I wonder if I should perhaps get a cushion made for my table. Or a little something to protect the phone. I am a bit like one of those ladies now, waiting for someone to come by and go get some milk. And I will never see it, and I will never taste it. And all I will have done at the end of the day is going to be a waste of that very thing I was looking to discover.
But what is there to do?
What should one do if not observe and smile and wave the virtual hand at all those passing by? Should one perhaps go back into the house, open an empty book and then scratch into its pages the misery of time passed? Or would it make more sense to just write and write and write and write and all that to just find out what could possible be at the end of that very last line that will be coming out of the very last word? And what is hidden behind every comma and every full stop?
That might be the way to go. And pictures. Real pictures. They should probably be as tangible as possible. And tea.
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