 
ADRIENNE FISHER
I have to look twice to see if she's real.
What a classic face. Lean and brown, with only a swatch of gray at the top of her wrinkled brow that sticks out from under the old faded brown scarf. The scarf is tied in the style of an old-fashioned babushka, tightly under her chin.
She sits rocking every so gently on her wrap-around porch that really belongs to another era. But then, that's where she's comfortable. Her frail body is wrapped in an old brown sweater, the kind my grandfather always wore, with the buttons beginning about half way down the chest. It covers most of her blue flowered house dress.
Looking at her creased face, I would guess her to have about ninety years of worry behind her. Her pale, watery eyes watch the cars whiz by. Does she see the cars, I wonder?
Her elbow is propped up against the arm of the creaking rocker as she moves her hand back and forth, left and right, waving to all who pass. Her hands are thin and brown, her long fingers spread slightly apart. Her waving hand looks as though it were the model for those yellow plastic hands that people put in the rear-view windows of their cars. "Have a nice day," they say.
She sits, waving to all who pass, as if waving all trouble out of her life ... she waves the hours away, waves the years away, perhaps she's even waving her future away.
Back and forth, back and forth....
Have a nice day.
Home | Fiction Menu | Poetry Menu
Copyright © 1996 Adrienne Fisher/Log Cabin Chronicles/05.96 |