The Pattern

I park and stop the car.  At the park.  I carefully place the keys and the phone in my jean jacket pocket and instinctively look at the sky.  Serene blue with lenticular clouds, birds soaring in the wind.  The same wind playing at the park, surrounding the children, laughing, ruffling their hair, and making a little girl's pretty dress dance on a joyful song.  Unwritten yet.

I sit on a green bench, looking more average than average, the comfy stranger.  A thin, petite grandma sits next to me, and takes her knitting out of a flowery bag.  I smile, I like knitting too.  And, as she glances at me to reassure the perfect stranger-ness in me, she starts talking.  "So windy today, but Tuesday Morning has some pretty yarn on sale, you know."  "My children are far away, both lawyers, they are doing good where they are, happy, they have their life.  I bought them an expensive cooking set of pots and pans, for their wedding, oh, ten years ago, and would you believe it, I never saw them using it?  You know how it goes...  Later I found out the pots were being used at their condo on the beach.  They own it, from their in-laws.  Lawyers as well."

The wind is playing with my hair.

The little grandma's words sound like crying, like question marks popping up in the thin air, unanswered.  I smile again, but she never smiles back.  I wonder if she knows I'm still here.

The wind knows for sure.  It hesitates for a second as if listening, then starts dancing with my hair some more.

She decides the scarf she was knitting is no good, it's too wide, so she unravels it and plans to start over when she gets home.  "This yarn", she says, touching it gently "has been unravelled about ten times!  Would you believe it?" she says, looking at me for the first time.  I smile and she finally smiles back.
The wind is playing the song of the little girl's dress dancing in the sun.

"The pattern is still beautiful", I answer.