Margie doesn’t think of herself as old. That’s the trouble. Inside she feels like a young girl, tugging up her socks as she chases after the neighborhood boys for a chance to play ball. And then she’ll glance at her gnarled hands or pass a mirror and wonder who that friggin’ old lady is and why she’s back again to terrorize her day. But Margie’s body…well, there are changes that can’t be denied. She doesn’t bounce back as fast, be it a bout with illness or a joint that wasn’t happy with what it was asked to do. She’s slower in the morning, sometimes an ache in a place she didn’t expect but then remembered her mother complaining about the same malady. “Och,” she’d say, collapsing into her Edith Bunker armchair. The Archie version untouched since her father’s death. “Gettin’ old ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, kiddo.”

She again catches a glimpse of her own hands, as she sits on the curved wooden bench in the park. It’s a nice park, with a walkway along a calm tributary of the mighty river that cuts through their valley. In better days vendors abounded. Flowers and coffee and gelato. Not that she spent much on those. She never had much use for flowers, they died so fast. Waste of money, she’d tell Dan, although she couldn’t get him to stop. Back then. Now, maybe she’ll spring for a fancy coffee every couple of weeks, but otherwise her disposable income is stretched so thin you can see sunlight through the threads. The activity, though. That’s what she’s missing. It would be nice for atmosphere, and she could imagine being on the banks of the Seine. People walking little dogs. Children flying kites. And all the old women, with their string shopping bags and elegance. Old women aren’t so scorned in France, aren’t so invisible.

Not that she’d know; it’s just something she’d been told once upon a time.

Oh, how weary she is of all those once upon a times. She wishes she’d gone to France. Hell, she wishes she’d had the gelato. Would that small amount of change have really mattered? What had it purchased, back then? Cotton balls or magazines or some other thing that she would not have missed doing without that week?

Useless thoughts, she scolds herself. She breathes in the damp, muddy air, watches an egret sail by, pulls herself up a little taller, trying to be elegant. Thinking of string bags and cheese and long loaves of French bread.

He’d laugh at her attempts, that man who’d brought her the soon-to-be dying flowers, and she conjures up his face, and laughs right back. “Yeah, yeah,” she mutters at him, shaking her head, sinking back into her usual slouch. “I’ll get the damn gelato.”