Tuesday 29 May 2012

BIRD LADY:



I leave my shadowy place today & take a gentle walk in the park. The sun is shining, dappled shade playing with the autumn leaves. I see an old lady sitting on a bench & her smile invites me to sit next to her. She is feeding the birds with bread crumbs & they seem to understand her as if she were one of them. She talks about life & ages gone by, not with bitterness but with nostalgia. I ask where she is from & she tells me she is from nowhere & everywhere. She asks me what it is that is troubling me. I ask her how she knows I have troubles, & she takes my hand in her gnarled brown fingers, looks deep into my eyes & says, “just follow the birds & you will never go wrong". I tell her I am going to the cafe behind us in the park to get us a cup of tea, & she just smiles. I get two cups of tea & return to the bench, but she has gone, just disappeared into thin air. To get out of the park she would have had to pass the cafe where I was getting our tea, but I never saw her pass. I asked  the people who sat on the bench next to ours if they had seen the old lady who had been sitting on the bench with me, but they said they had just seen me sitting on my own, & they had seen me get up & go to the cafe, but there had been no old lady. Surely they could not have missed her, as she had been dressed in a myriad of colours, with an old straw hat on her head, & people would have stared at her. I sat down on the bench again & sipped my steaming tea out of the polystyrene cup, perplexed. Was I losing my mind? Then my eye caught sight of a beautiful white feather lying at my feet & when I picked it up, underneath it, in the sand, was written, “Always follow the birds & you will never go wrong”.

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