Pansies

Monsieur Ferdenez walked up the street and I saw he carried his oxygen and the tube was in his nose. We stopped to greet each other.

"My wife isn't good. She's been in the hospital five days."

His wife has been undergoing dialysis for more years than she should have survived. She's a little thing, a Catalan mamie, who is shorter than I am and that's saying a lot.

They've been through pain in their lives with their son killing himself in their living room. It was several years before a smile reappeared on her face. Then despite her illnesses the smiles returned.

She was a good neighbor, watering my plants when I wasn't there, which was more than I was. I came down from Geneva once to find my blue ceramic pot filled with daisies.

Sometimes she and her husband were even at the street dances.

She and the other mamies would gather on the various benches around time, but not the one reserved for the old men, Les Senators. There are less and less each year, a way of village life for the women dying out as they do.

Maybe she will pull through once again.