Solitude

She spots him from the window of the coffee shop and looks at him with great interest. His visual inspires a million thoughts in her and they bring along with them some deeply buried memories of school days. Her mind conjures up poems she had committed to memory. Sometimes she wonders if those many things that she'd heard and read in the past come back to her by themselves, haunting her present or if she has this psychic ability to connect dots and make profound sense out of random and utterly ordinary sights that cross her mind.

Behold her, single in the field, 

Yon solitary Highland Lass! 

Reaping and singing by herself; 

Stop here, or gently pass! 

Alone she cuts and binds the grain, 

And sings a melancholy strain; 

O listen! for the Vale profound 

Is overflowing with the sound. 

Bits and pieces of 'The solitary reaper' seem to fit into the sight before her - the old man, with his wares and words, sitting by the sidewalk and lost in his crossword puzzle, firmly there, but oblivious in his thought, immersed in the mundane task of making a living, but living his life all the same. She makes up stories  around him - he probably has very supportive kids that are begging him to give up his toil and retire, or he has no kids at all and is supporting himself? - The many tales that she weaves around him entertain her while she gets lost in the intensity of the man’s concentration on the task ahead of him.  This Dusty little pavement doesn’t hold a candle to the Scottish highlands nor does the task of selling inexpensive hoisery parallel  with reaping a harvest amid soul stirring nature, but she somehow sees the visual in poetic perfection. The eyes of the beholder, they say - and she senses a strange pride in the way her eyes present to her angles to the soul of her universe.

Picture courtesy - Dhiren Shah.