Old Women

How did you spend all the hours while you had Covid? I asked Sue.

“Mostly sleeping, but I did make these three crocheted hats.”

Of course I had to photograph them, and then she looked at my photo and added, “Those are an old woman's hands. I have arrived at being an old woman. I was headed this way all along, but Covid has finished me off. Now I know I’m old.” We laughed together. Old. In our wildest imaginations as young radical Queer women, we never imagined this.

After lunch, we walked to a little book and yarn store about ten blocks from her house. There she got some more yarn, and I found a treasure for $20. Eudora Welty Photographs, published in 1989, though most of the photos were made in the 1930s when Welty worked for the Works Progress Administration, the same government job-making program that gave my grandmother a job as a school lunchroom supervisor. Since high school I have loved Welty’s novels and short stories, and I even memorized and performed “Why I Live at the P.O,” which is brilliant and hilarious and depicts the whole Southern Gothic vibe I grew up in. However till today I hadn’t known Welty was a photographer as well.

Welty writes (on the back cover blurb), "A camera could catch that fleeting moment, which is what a short story, in all its depth, tries to do. If it's sensitive enough, it catches the transient moment."

After we made our little purchases, we wandered over to our favorite Mexican restaurant for an afternoon horchata and perused my new book, about which you will probably hear more in due time. It was a great day for a couple of old women recovering from Covid.