I saw her
this morning tucked into a corner by the doors of the 4th carriage just in
behind a lanky school boy. A tiny woman with her eyes closed and a perpetual
half smile that suggested she knew something we didn't.
Her skin is
smooth, so incredibly smooth. None of those fine lines most women of a
certain age contend with. I reckon she moisturises every day, maybe
twice a day, maybe her whole body twice a day, and has done for
years. Her hair is soft; its blond disguising the grey is swept up
into a loose arrangement in various shades of honey and fair baby, secured with
pale pins at the back of her head. You know she's thought about this,
practiced this.
She has that
look about her which says she's not originally from here, her face looks like
it came from Holland, or Sweden, but not from Melbourne, here amid a vast
genealogical melting pot where skin is brown and gold and porcelain, where
faces come in round and wide or flat, pointy, puffy, thin or angular, hers
looks Dutch.
She wears a
winter coat with a soft black lining, black at the cuffs and pockets all
outlining the green, turquoise and gold of its hound’s-tooth check. It
has been living with her 40 winters and it knows where to go and how fit around
her, how to be her coat. Around her throat with the softest skin she
wears a knitted scarf in peach pink that matches exactly the lipstick she has
carefully applied to her ever smiling lips. Her tiny hands tucked
into the best quality black leather gloves and her feet in stylish leather boots.
She's a
student of philosophy and she loves it. She loves this end of her life
with its room to explore who she is, to indulge her own passions. The
years of responsibility for the lives and doings of everybody else are
done. Now it's her time to be who she really is, who she has been all
along.
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