Hole In The Hedgerow

I’m convinced she is magical. You can tell it just by looking at her. Like it’s some kind of “aura”, or “energy”, emitting from her. She’s the most stereotypically “witch-like” person you’ll ever meet, and if you don’t know what I mean by “witch-like”, you will having seen her. It’s uncanny, and blatantly obvious, just how “witch-like” she is.

I don’t know if she’s always looked that way. Maybe it’s just because she’s so old. She’s probably the oldest person I’ve ever met. She’s probably the oldest person anyone has ever met ever. She’s so old nobody can remember how old she is, and I doubt she can remember either. Nobody was around here before she was. For all I know she could have been here since before time itself. I do believe she is magic after all. If she was ever given a birth certificate, it’s had to have been lost, or by this point eroded away beyond recognition, left deteriorated in some rusted out filing cabinet in the basement of some long forgotten collapsed and since buried tomb of a former government building.

She’s one of those old women who have been around so long, and have seen so much, and have endured so much, and having survived so much, that now they’re just going to live forever and ever and ever. If what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, then she must be immortal. She looks like anything that could have killed her already had its chance, tried, and failed, and now she’s just impervious to everything.

When I first saw her, I thought she was blind, because of how she never seems to look at anything. Now I realize that she just looks through everything. She doesn’t look at you, she looks into you. Her vision shooting right into the bowels of your soul. Then she’ll do this signature smirk of hers that tells you that she knows things about you that you’ll never quite figure out. It makes me cross my arms over myself, as if I’ve suddenly found myself naked in a cold room surrounded by long forgotten classmates with video cameras. She always has one of those knowing smirks, and it makes me want to scream, “what do you know!” But she’ll just keep smirking, and she’ll never tell you.

She has this skin that looks like it came off a thousand-year-old Spanish leather sack. It’s so thin and weathered, and pulled so tightly across her bones I’m always afraid her bones are going to suddenly burst out of her. And she has these deep canyon wrinkles. If you dumped a cup of water over her head it would meander down her body and out through the cracks around her toes and fingers like melted glacier water flowing through the Grand Canyon.

Her face looks like one of those faces you might see in the knot of an ancient oak tree. Like if someone ripped one of those knots out and wrapped it in an old Spanish leather handbag.

But the most amazing thing about her, the thing I’ll never forget, should I live even as long as her, is her hands. If anything about her showed just how old and magical she is, it is her hands. Her hands are a collection of bones stitched and sewed together by these thick veins and wrapped up in this impossibly rough sandpaper skin. The veins are so thick and solid it’s hard to imagine blood actually still flowing through them. Her hands look like the kind of hands you’d expect to find bursting out of the ground at a graveyard to grab you.

Her hands look mangled and stiff, as if they had early onset rigor mortis. But her hands are impossibly alive, incredibly dexterous, and surprisingly strong and nimble. I’m convinced she could still crack a walnut with her fingers through sheer intimidation, by just pointing at it and smirking it’ll explode in utter terror. I’m convinced her hands, as well as her eyes, are magical.

Those hands have dragged thousands of clothes across washboards, carried millions of gallons of water from a well, and dug up metric tons of earth, clay, and stone from her garden. Her hands have shaken the hands of thousands of people long since dead and forgotten by all on earth but her. Her hands have cradled hundreds of infants, the daughters of daughters of daughters she saw born. Her hands have planted trees in her orchard that have flowered, fruited, and fallen countless times. When you see her hands, you can see all of what they’ve done. Her hands have got to be magical.

She has lived through world wars, countless presidencies, and everything from the depression to the dotcom bubble. She has lived through the dawning of the industrial revolution, to the atomic era, to the rise of the information age. She lived before the space race and the cold war. She was here before computers, the internet, social media, and cell phones.

Where was she during all of these changing times? She was here. Right here through it all. In this tiny town, this tiny forgotten corner of the world. I can’t imagine being anywhere for that long. She has lived here through countless seasons. Forests have been logged, planted, and grown. Houses have been built, turned into homes, left abandoned, dilapidated, and finally collapsed and weathered away into dust. Whole families have settled in, and passed through generations. Even language has changed, accents evolved, words and names once common passed into old English.  And through it all she has been here, casually staring through it all with her magic eyes and that uncanny smirk of hers.

I can’t even imagine really knowing a place as well as she must know this place. This tiny hole in the hedgerow town she calls, and has called for such a long time, her home.

Just about everyone- and really most things in general, including the inanimate- that were alive back when she was born have long since disappeared or changed beyond recognition. I can’t imagine how different it must have been back then. She lives in a suburban community now, but she tells me this was a farm field twenty years ago, and she claims it was a forest fifty years before that. And all of this she can remember, as she says, like “It was only yesterday.”

I wonder if she dreams of that world, of that world that doesn’t exist anymore. Does she dream of herself as a young girl playing in that forest of old growth trees that has long since been forgotten by everyone but her? No one but her has been around long enough to remember. And once she’s dead, no one will ever be able to dream of that now truly forgotten place ever again.

I often wonder if this makes her lonely. It’s like she’s an alien from another planet that she can never return to. Or a time traveler trapped in another time. She’s from a world filled with people, places, and things, that just don’t exist anymore in the world she is currently in.

But she never seems lonely, or sad, or depressed. In fact, she never seems like anything other than the most utterly content person I know.

When I first met her, I thought that it was because she was just so abstracted from the world, because she had just retired from it all. As if she already had one foot in the grave and was just willfully waiting out the remaining years of her life, ready to die in peace. In truth, now I think she feels more alive than any of us, I think because her minds so spread out through the ages.

She is abstracted, but not because she’s “given up”, or has “retired” from the world. I think it’s because so little of herself is here, as in, the present moment. I think she’s left bits and pieces of herself behind in memories, like she’s been leaving a trail of breadcrumbs through time as it passed her by. So, she’s not really fully here anymore, a little bit of her will always be “back when”, and “before” this or that. A little bit of herself is always dreaming of a world that no longer exists, a world forgotten by everyone but herself.

I think that when you see her, it is as if you are seeing the entirety of the passing of time itself, and with all its fullness and vastness of possibilities. Like you are seeing a tangible piece of history. She is the past.