Up and out the door extra early this morning to get my daughter to the field-trip bus. Five am provides a different group of people: students waiting for the link bus to Wenatchee, migrant workers, some on tractors, some on foot...and a homeless woman. Driving by fast on the way into town, I recognized her as the woman I had met down in town several weeks prior and as I came back up the road thirty minutes later, there she was still trudging up the road, a blanket roll jammed out the top of her pack, a staff in hand, hood up against the morning chill.
The human being in the ditch and me wondering if I could, should, would live up to the roll of the good Samaritan.
I drove past.
I've been thinking lots about aspen trees. There's a beaut of a grove when my boy and I hunt for morel mushrooms this time of year. Biologists say, they are all interconnected down under ground and, as I snooze on my back looking up at the gentle canopy of green, I imagine all those roots intertwined in a crazy pattern of give and take.
It wasn't far up the road before I pulled over and turned around.
Her name is Nina and she's from California. Thru my rolled-down window I offered her camping anywhere she'd like on my land and she accepted.
Dropping her off in a quiet grove of pine in a turn in my road, I suggested that this would be a good spot to spend some time. Her eyes didn't look away from my gaze and her hand was small but firm in mine, our clasped fingers briefly feeling like those aspen roots.
Friday, May 25, 2012
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