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Best moment of my day. So far.
I'm walking down a street near our house, coming home from my sludge/trudge/run. Straight ahead of me (the street ends in a T) I see something white in a window, moving slightly now and then. Is it a cat? I can't tell. As I get closer, I think it might be something hanging in the window.
Finally, I get near enough to see (I know. At this point I really have crossed over to window peeper. At least I'm across the street.) It is an older woman, in her 80s, sitting in the sunshine at her kitchen table with her profile facing me. She has a white cap on her head (a nightcap? bonnet? It looks very Vermeerish and is the mysterious bobbing white object). She has a paintbrush in her hand and a canvas on a table easel in front of her and is deep in concentration painting the winter scene spread out before her through the window view of the park behind her house.
Walking the rest of the way home, I indulge in imagining stories of her life (did she paint her children? learn it as girl?). But I know this: I want to be that kind of version of me in 50ish years.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Reader Comments (7)
You live in the most idyllic place. I am not surprised there are idyllic people there. I'm afraid I'll be the blue-haired, thick glasses, polyester-pants-wearing version of myself in 50 years. I want to be like her, too.
P.S. Loved your cowgirl self coming out in your comment. Yee-haw!
You do live in an idyllic place. Or at least you see it through idyllic eyes. I would love to end up like her as well but my guess is I'll be bobbing back and forth in front of a window at the looney bin.
Oh yeah, there's a mailman shoes and polyester pants-wearing, grumpy curmudgeon version of myself out there in the future, too. In the looney bin. Only time will tell!
Oh I can totally see you with a paintbrush in hand in your cool studio room, watching the young moms run by and admiring you. Wow, that was a run on sentence.
That was so beautiful!
I just saw a very elderly woman at the gym. She was walking the track at a snail's pace and had about 2 billion wrinkles. But I had the same thought as you, "Wow! That's who I wanna be when I grow up..."
Me, too.
Except I can't paint.
Honestly, there are few talents I want more than that one. All I can do is appreciate. (Which is why I was a Humanities/Teaching major, rather than an Art major.) Sigh.
I want to be all these beautiful old women when I grow up, too. But I think I'm already there and it didn't work out. I'm just me, stuck in a type-warp. I'm not young, but I'm not vintage yet either. I'm the equivalent of a 14-year-old who doesn't fit into any cool age group. Too old to be a kid. Too young to be cool. Just old.