She Always Took her Time About Things

She took her time about things: like reading, finishing her tea (she liked the last sip cold), like thinking carefully between her sentences when she spoke. 

She took her time about things: like trees, and talking to them, and watching out for birds, and long walks in the snow.  

 

They said she was strange and old, older even than the trees. The children regarded her as wonder. Some saw her as a timeworn crone. 

She tried to smile at them whenever she noticed them noticing her, but sometimes her thoughts got the better of her and she didn't notice them at all. 

She knew these things still, because she was a well practiced listener, even when she never talked once.

Indeed, some said she never talked at all. They said that she had lost her voice to excessive smoking (she didn't smoke), or traded it away in exchange for a husband that she had lost. 

If she had given her voice to anything it was the forest behind her house. 

It was then that she took time about her more than ever, like the blue coat she wore, wrapped close around her timeworn body. She remembered when there was forest around every side of the street on which she lived. Now the small patch in the north was all that was left, and even those trees were slowly dying. 

 

She walked there often. In fact, she walked there most days. And not just now that she was old and slow. She had walked here as a young girl once. 

She sometimes thought she recognized some of the trees from her youth, though she knew that in reality those had been lost long ago. 

But sometimes she liked to think the trees she once knew had wandered here late one night so that they could grow old near her. 

Now she could see them perfectly from her kitchen window. She could see them when they beckoned at her in the dark. She knows their shapes as she knows the veins in her wrists and the wrinkles around her eyes. She cannot remember any particular time in which she climbed them, but she feels it in her bones that she once did. Sometimes she almost convinces herself she still could.

Some well meaning folk worry about her long exertions. She knew that too. She was a very good watcher. She'd come back after hours of meandering through her small patch of forest, and she'd see the neighbor glancing anxiously from behind the curtains.

Secretly, she thought dying in that forest wouldn't be such a bad way to go. She'd lie down in the snow, and it would cover her like a blanket, and then she'd fall asleep, like a spell come to take her.

 

She had been a summer child once. Then, as a young woman, she had loved the spring. 

But now, in old age, winter was her lover. She cared little that it made her bones ache and froze her ancient joints. She knew the trees suffered the same way. She could hear it when the wind made them groan.

But she liked to think she had aged like the winter; she liked to think she had walked through this white world so long and so often that it had taken her once blonde hair and turned it the color of the snow; turned her skin to a white so fine and crystalline that you could see her veins course blue beneath, glowing like a winter evening. 

 

 

They said she was old and strange.

But that wasn't true. 

 

She was merely under an enchantment. She was convinced of it because, sometimes, in the space between wakefulness and sleeping, she was sure she was still young. She could feel it in her toes and the tips of her fingers as she wiggled them to wakefulness.

As for the strange part, she knew well that all silent things are regarded strange, and so, she tried not to blame them.

 

They also said she was lonely. She never heard them say it, but she knew that they did. She could see it in their eyes when they looked at her. 

But, that wasn't true either; not so long as the trees were older and wiser than she; not so long as she could still share the silence with them; not while there were birds to feed, and deer that knew her; so long as there were rabbits and owls that no one knew still lived there in that little patch of forest.

 

She was slow though. That much she admitted. 

But that, that was her choice.