She waved, but not to say hello; she was trying to get me out of her way. Uncomprehending, I stood there like a lump, jaw slack, gears turning in the skull, trying to figure out if I knew this girl. She didn’t even try to warn me again – bumped hard into my right shoulder, practically knocked me to the ground.

Perhaps I was asking for it, but I was irritated nonetheless. “Where’s the fire?” I yelled as she continued down the trail towards the setting sun.

“Pardon,” she muttered, without stopping or turning around. She disappeared into the brush as quickly as she had appeared – leaving crushed twigs and grass, and me, in her wake.

I didn’t see her again until almost a year later – although I had learned from neighbors that her name was Jill and that she lived about a mile down the road. We ran into each other – only figuratively this time – at the market. She was carrying a large basket full of potatoes; I was carrying a chicken.

“Afternoon,” I said as I approached her. She looked up at me curiously. “You probably don’t remember me, but –“

“I remember you,” she said. “You’re the fella what I almost knocked down a year ago. Sorry ’bout that.”

“Where were you going in such a hurry?” I asked.

“I was trying to make it home by curfew,” she said. “I get in a lot of trouble if I’m out too late.”

“I hope you made it.”

“I seem to remember I did.”

We shared a smile.

I formally introduced myself. She already knew who I was, in much the same way that I found out who she was. I had figured correctly that she was about five years younger than me. I looked at her face and her hair and her eyes and thought about how I’d never seen anything like her before. I asked if I could take her to dinner. Her response was that she was three months married.

Embarrassed and disappointed, I made up an excuse to leave – in the process forgetting to do the task which brought me to the market in the first place – and began the long trudge home.

I only saw her once more, seven years later – although it was a rather one-sided experience, it being her funeral. She died while birthing her fourth child. The whole town came out to the funeral, as she apparently had become very active in the community and in the church. I had moved away some years earlier, and now had a wife and child of my own, but we were in town when it happened. Her husband – who turned out to be a good man – saw that I was one of the largest men there and asked for my help as a pallbearer.

It was winter and a recent snow had just melted, and as we carried the casket through the cemetary I slipped on a dark patch of ice, falling backward but retaining my grip, thus jerking it out of the hands of my fellow pallbearers and bringing it crashing down on me. I broke my right leg and was unconscious for three days.

After I was carted off to the hospital, Jill was committed to the ground without further incident.

A couple of decades later, my oldest son wed Jill’s fourth child, a daughter. Jill’s widower and I became great friends. He never remarried.

I died a few years afterwards, just after my second grandchild was born.