The small windows into other's lives

I live across the street from a nursing home and in the evenings I hear the din of the kitchen and see the residents sitting illuminated around dining room tables. There's a couple there that I see regularly strolling the neighborhood blocks. In the early evenings they walk together, always in a clockwise direction around the home. She pushes a walker with tennis balls cupped to the feet and he typically walks half a step behind her with hands clasped behind his back and head slightly bent to the sidewalk. I can never tell if they're talking or only walking together in silence. At times he'll wave at me or we'll stop and discuss the weather or the gas-mileage of my car or the price of their first house down the street back before my parents were born.

There's something so bittersweet in watching them walk together each day. In this day and age when people so frequently pose knowledge as experience and everywhere today's youth caught in the grips of a self absorbed trying-too-hard culture... it gives me hope to see the lasting tenderness and patience in their daily ritual, the natural betrayal of their aging bodies, and the evolution of an enduring love.

I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.

If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips
it is because I hear a man climb stairs
and clear his throat outside our door.

— Leonard Cohen