Kindness

The first time was saw our neighbor, we were both scared. She's an older lady, and I think that she suffered a stroke at some point. She's hunched over, and one of her hands is a useless bent claw that she hangs a walking stick from. There's a white plastic brace on her ankle. Her face is slack and looks old and young at the same time. She listens to the television so loud that sometimes, early in the morning when everything else is quiet, I can hear it from my bed. Her front door is always ajar. She's unsettling. Sometimes we see her standing in front of other houses on the street, looking into bushes.

We saw her for the first time after we'd been living here for a month or so. We drove up our driveway, and she was standing in it, hunched over, holding little containers of unfinished food in her good hand. She told us she was walking through our garden to her compost heap.

"Well, if you ever need anything," I said, and she turned around and walked off before I was finished.

And then maybe a month ago, she walked down the driveway again as we were standing by our car and asked us if her cats had been bothering us. In the next couple of minutes, as it started to rain on us, we managed to work out that she was profoundly deaf, a little weak, and very lonely. I talked steadily louder and louder until I was shouting in her face. She still answered every statement with, "What?"

We saw her again a week later and she waved. And then we saw her again as we walked Max down the street in his stroller and she stopped to admire him, stroke his cheek and say how lovely he is. A couple of days after that, she stopped me and told me she'd been ill the following day and wanted to make sure Max was okay. I shouted that I hoped she felt better and she shouted back, "What?" The next day, she brought us our recycling container and a package from the end of our driveway.

And then tonight, answering a muffled banging on the door, there she was, holding a bag she wanted to give us: chocolates, tissues, baby lotion, wipes, baby powder, and shampoo. "For the baby," she shouted. Kindness. Simple. Unexpected. Little Max has an admirer.

He isn't scared by her at all, so I suppose we shouldn't be either.