The Elderly Woman Down the Street

lived on the corner, across from a playground and a pocket park. The first time I saw her was a month before the shutdown. She sat in the overgrown backyard surrounded by antique furniture. She barely moved and ignored people passing. A chill rushed through me, believing her a ghost. I didn’t see her again for over a year but walked Odie by her home many times. It was a brick house with a broken attic window a neighborhood kid might have thrown a baseball through. All the plants on the front porch were dead. One sunny spring afternoon I startled to a stop on the sidewalk. The woman sat on the front porch, wearing a gown, staring down at us. She’d positioned her chair in a single slither of sun that hit the porch that time of afternoon. I smiled kindly and the smile seemed to touch her. I got the sense she’d not been smiled at in a very long time. She smiled back and the joy behind it was pure. A week later, the front door was open. A moving truck was parked on the street. A younger woman, perhaps her daughter, supervised a team of movers who tossed the home’s contents into the back of the truck. Not long after that, an “open house” sign appeared in front of the home. The furniture had been removed from the backyard and the grass was mowed. The attic window had been replaced. Fresh blooms filled flowerpots on the front porch. I stood on the corner watching as prospective buyers, mostly young couples, went inside. I started to cross the street, compelled to enter, but stepped back onto the sidewalk. It was around the same time of day I’d seen the woman sitting on her front porch, warm and smiling in that sunlight sliver. As the people came and went, the sliver crawled across the bricks and eventually pooled back into the blanket light of the waning afternoon, leaving no evidence of its distinction, save a nearly imperceptible fading of the bricks that became more pronounced when viewed from a distance.