Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Little red-headed girl

Every day I pass a little girl on the street. I am driving to work and she is walking to school. And although I am always late to work, and she is always early to school, we pass at the same point of the same street almost every morning.

Red hair, dishevelled.

Backpack - huge.

Coat - half off.

She walks on the sidewalk with careful, measured steps. Her head's always bent over a hardback book - as though the story is so great, she has to read it every chance she gets.

She wasn't there this morning and I missed her. Hope she's not sick.

4 comments:

Amy said...

oh my gosh this sounds like me as a child. We used to have a friend who drove a school bus and she always reported back to my mom, "Yep, saw Amy roller skating to school today" or "Saw Amy picking daisies this morning". We little redheads tend to stick out of the bunch.

Anonymous said...

Reminds me of me. More the red hair than the reading while walking. I was thinking of you the other day when I was telling someone about our Dictionary Project and working around the Anglo Saxon words and how someone suggested that we omit all words ending in "uck." A stroke of good....fortune. Fun times.

jessi said...

I was thinking about that project just the other day. I talked with Dr. Simons last week - he's trying to set me up with some guy who's coming up to AK.

"he's built like Paul Bunyan!" he says.

Ashley, I still think about that story you wrote about riding in the bus back from the pool.

so great.

Katrina said...

What a great post. I love it when someone breaks through our hazy daze and makes us truly notice them. But then, it seems like you notice things and people as a matter of course, and I love that, too. :)

Nose in a book--that was me, and the reason I missed my bus stop at least once a week.