Sweepin'

The breeze blew through her light grey hair as she moved the broom's head back and forth over the pavement. Right, left, moving pine needles and the occasional leaf out of her concrete path. She pauses a moment, looking high into the pine trees and laughs. She wonders if she would have planted them 10 feet from the path, how much sweeping she could have saved over the last thirty years. Still, the shade is a blessing during the late summer days.

She goes back to her sweeping, something she has done in the early morning, most mornings, now more out of habit than necessity. People rarely visit her anymore, but she loves to see a clean sidewalk. If you go to her tool shed, you will see three broom handles, remnants from the three other brooms she has owned over the last ten years. She had her son saw off the broom head, thinking that the handle was still useful, but in all of these years, she has used the handles but a few times. Still, to have a smooth-handled stick seems so useful.

She sighs and continues her sweeping, right, left, right left, expertly moving the pine needles out of the way. Sweeping seems to comfort her; sweeping is her medicine, her exercise, her habit.

She pauses and places a hand on the small of her back, as if she were straightening herself up, but arthritis seems to have fused her spine into place.

When she looks at the path, she sometimes remembers people in her life, people who have died. When she was a young girl, she was afraid of her parents dying. She would think about it, wondering if she could stand it, wondering what it would be like. That's when she was a little girl. She soon forgot about fearing death, that is, until her grandparents died, when they were very, very old.

Sweep the path, right, left, a rhythmic pattern that reminds her of her grandmother, sweeping a similar path years before. Her grandmother, she just remembers, loved to sweep. The old woman laughs as she finally figures out that her grandmother swept nearly every day, and when she was a little girl, she thought it was a waste of energy.

Sweep right, sweep left, but don't sweep the memories away.