The Woman with the Flowers

I've lived in my home for 13 years.

And since my time in the neighborhood, I make a near daily ritual of walking or running to three adjacent parks.  On my path, I regularly see the "Flower Lady."

She fashions long gardening gloves, a thick, wide-brimmed hat and a chocolate colored coat that resembles a cloak wrapped tightly around what appears to be an 80-90 year old body.

In oppressive temperatures with no skin exposed, she tends her gorgeous flock of flowers.  Sunflowers, dahlias, hydrangeas, hollyhocks, peonies, lilacs, daisies...are all watered, pruned, plucked, weeded and loved.

And because she has a corner home on a busy street that I cross to make my way down a boulevard, I invariably bump into her and always smile.  She never speaks, rarely gives eye contact and almost always appears as if she's in her own world.  This has been going on for years.

Until one day, I saw a sign in her yard touting a book that she'd written and it stopped me in my tracks.

She's a novelist?

I vowed that the next time she was out, I would introduce myself, compliment her on her colorful flowers and ask about her writing endeavors.

That was a few days ago.

I tried, but no go.  She was knee-deep in the thick of her gardening practice, not interested in engaging a passerby.

And so, I started making up stories about her.  Maybe she lost her husband?  Maybe she isolates herself and tends her flowers to take away the pain?  Maybe she's a world renowned horticulturist?
Maybe she's dealt with people her whole life and just wants to be left alone?  Maybe this will happen to me after my children are grown and gone...I too will tend my plants outside and bang books away inside?

It's funny the stories that we invent about the people we see all the time but have never spoken to...the ones that we think we know...the people who make our coffee, hand us our dry cleaning, give our change at the toll, sit next to us on the subway.  Are they like us?  Could we be friends?

I imagine that if I pressed, she would talk to me.  And maybe she will the next time that I come running by, but until then, I'll admire her flowers and the spirit of writing into old age and the prerogative to share and not to share as life marches on.