passing an old woman

There was an old woman with shoulder-length black hair, white at the roots, on her hands and knees on the footpath. As I approached I considered stepping over her, but ended up politely veering onto the road and around instead. The woman was, at first glance, using a dustpan and brush to get rid of the rotten pine needles stuck in the cracks between the pavers, presumably because those particular pavers were in front of her house and she’d assumed some sort of ownership over them. She was very old – at least eighty-five – and had the leathery and slightly sour Mediterranean face of an Italian nonna. Maybe she was Lebanese. Her eyes met mine for a second; I smiled but it wasn’t reciprocated. Her bottom, in those inexplicably lurid see-through white pants that modest old women wore, was high in the damp air.

The woman returned to the pine needles, and I kept walking, and as I neared the distance at which it would have been rude to look back, I paid her one last glance, I didn’t know why. She was too preoccupied to notice me. It was then that I realised her dustpan was empty. She was brushing the pine needles, there was no question about her brushing them, but none of those needles ever made it to the dustpan. None of them made it anywhere, actually. All the woman was doing, I realised in that rushed assessment, was caressing the pine needles with her brush as if each were the strand of a different baby’s hair. I had no choice but to notch her down as crazy, as one of the many obviously out-of-their-mind people I’d passed or who had passed me without incident in life. What other explanation was there? Before turning back I shot a glance at the woman’s house: her front fence was higher than the ones either side of it and was made of green corrugated iron, like a seabed, and was overhung by a fruiting lemon tree and a loquat tree that looked ready to die. Someone had left a half-full bottle of pineapple Fanta on top of the fence, which the woman mustn’t have seen yet.