Rose

This morning I was sitting out on my little side porch reading poetry. It's a gorgeous day, except for the pollen that is viciously attacking my vulnerable sinuses. Anyway, I saw the woman walking across the street. I've seen her many times, always walking to the store and back. Or sometimes just walking. Her hair looks like she just got out of bed, just wild, going in all directions. She walks a little humped over, and she always wears mismatched clothes. Today she wore a black and red sweater with bright purple pants. Her breasts swing freely under her clothes, clearly unbridled. Her face is very wrinkled, her chin jutting out as if taking the lead. She always walks alone. I saw her at the 4th of July parade, just walking on the outer edges of the crowd, as if invisible, unseen by the people lining the road.

Today she saw me on the porch and crossed over to my side of the street. And kept coming. "Hey!" she said with bunched lips, behind which were few if any teeth.

We got to talking.

Her name is Rose. She has seven children, and none of them talk to her, though they all live in Nebraska. Her husband died a long time ago, but if he'd lived, they'd have been married for 40 years. He "beat on her alot," so it was a good thing he was dead. She lived in the white house with the green trim, just a few doors down from the corner, I could see it from where I sat. Pays $400 a month.

Larry walked by, in the midst of hauling garden remains to the dump. She nodded. "I bet he gives you a lot of grief, huh?"

I laughed. "Maybe a little, not much," I said, "he's a good guy." She looked at me as if she didn't believe me. I suspect she figured all men "beat on" their wives.

She asked me where I was from, and I told her, New Jersey. "Hmmm..." she said. "Jersey." She said, "yeah, New Jersey really just is a continued state off of New York, that if you look at the New Jersey shoreline at night, it runs right into New York, and it all looks just like one place."

"You've been to New Jersey?" I said, just a little bit -- ok, a LOT-- surprised.

"Oh sure, I went there a lot when I was truckin'..." she said, matter of factly.

"You were a trucker..." I said, chuckling.

She proceeded to tell me that she was a trucker for many years, kept a Colt 45 in the glove compartment of her rig but never had to use it. She told me about the time a "cowboy" tried to treat her "like a whore," so she "beat the crap out of him." It was in a bar where he approached her and she kicked him "between the legs, hit him in the stomach, and got him in the face" a few times.

"I said to him, I said, 'you ain't gonna treat me like no whore, you
mother-f@#%*r!' and I let him have it, the whole bar was laughing," she said, chuckling herself.

She asked me what I was reading, which happened to be a book of poems by Garrison Keillor, and she said, "oh, I like that Lake Wobegon, that's good." I agreed.

I kept looking at her. She had a hooked nose and a pointed chin that had a few stray gray hairs sticking out from it randomly. Her eyes were a cloudy blue, set back amidst a complicated design of wrinkles. She said she walked a lot, especially when it was so nice out. She sneezed, always turning away, because she said, "I don't wanna sneeze on you, that would be very rude." I appreciated it.

"Well, I gotta go do some housework, I 'spose," she said and started walking away, still talking without looking back, "I'll talk to you later!"

I watched her hunched-over back and her eye-catching purple pants as she limped away across my overgrown grass. Her name is Rose. Now she has a face and a name. And a story. She was about 5'5", but I could imagine her "beating on" that cowboy in a bar. She wasn't someone to be messed with. And she was living now about three doors down from my porch.

What a wild world.