She lives along the coast where hurricanes in the night sound like a grief. Worrying wind wails and tears up tomorrow, pushing a flood of salty tears across all that was planted there. He still hasn't made it home. Maybe, with the next tide. If only she can wait out the storms brewing between them. If only she could understand the mistress that calls him away from her, that sirens' lure. The matron forfeits youthful longing as she gathers her wool and knits her brows. Foolish old man. Will he never be satisfied with his gardens and his books? Those eyes as changeable as sea water, will they never stop searching beyond his horizons? She used to blame some oversight on her part to watch her tone or the new style of her hair but intuition told her otherwise however cryptically. Even in his last embrace, SHE had been calling. A woman who lives with the tides knows she's powerless to stop them from going out or to make them come in. So she waits while the years of living too close to the tides and their flooding tears wash away her foundation.
She's been waiting to be the most important person in someone's life for all of her own. She caught fleeting glimpses of her goal in those moments of passion when she held him on the brink of release but she always knew that her talents weren't as unique or exclusive as others with better training, others more beautiful and appealing because they demand nothing from him except brief moments of acknowledgment. Like the flowers in his garden, they reward his attention with spectacular beauty but they cling only to his trellises leaving the man free to be wherever he chooses. If he never returns, they simply grow wild or die. Its never personal because it was never intended to be.
Perhaps, she has begun to understand his mistress after all.
SHE waits for no man. SHE carries him away from all that would tether him like a flag to one pole. SHE whispers and moans, caressing his soul with promises of immortality. SHE raises her fury to pound him mercilessly against the cliffs of his own guilt and despair for abandoning his hearth and garden. He will be grateful for the returning tide. His bones ache from the cold and damp of wrestling last night's stormy gale.
The old woman will draw him a welcoming bath and set his table with a meal fit for a king. The smell of freshly baked pie and biscuits will mingle with the delicious aroma of bubbling stew over the coals of a hearth fire, a hearty supper and the softness and warmth of an ample body await his return. .
The old woman kneads her dough and blows a wisp of gray that has escaped her kerchief. Her kitchen window looks out onto his garden where a scarecrow boasts two daring to sit on its stick straight right shoulder while a third raucously tattles from an inner branch of the red maple providing shade for the potato plants.
