Reasons to Exist
Eyes down she goes back and forth, around and around, diagonally and horizontally in no particular order over the half-block sweep of still-green grass (it’s mid-November) behind the community pool.
She’s maybe in her late 30s, early 40s, dressed in mismatched baggy clothes and wearing combat boots.
In one hand she carries a red five-gallon plastic pail with an arched over-the-top metal handle, and in the other a four-foot wooden pole tapered into a spike. She impales whatever she feels shouldn’t be there on the grass, mostly candy wrappers, and then she scrapes it all into the red pail. It makes me wonder where this trash comes from, she’s out there every day.
Today, however, early on, she ran out of things to spike, and she began spiking fallen leaves, needing somehow to justify her existence.
