The Grand River

At lunch sometimes I sit outside the hospital's huge spinning door and watch the people leaving.

An old man with a woman's red coat over one arm.

A woman stiffly lifting a covered basket -- a car-seat/carrier, draped in a pastel afgan -- as if it were a basket of eggs. Behind her a toddler drags a red wagon heaped with flowers in cheap vases and coffee cups, slightly wilted.

A young man in a wheelchair pauses for a smoke. The young woman with him goes down on the balls of her feet to be face to face with him, balances herself with a hand on each of his knees.

A woman carrying a hand-tied receiving quilt, red and yellow squares, but no baby. She turns her face up to the rain.

A young Mennonite woman in calico skirt and galoshes, black jacket and bonnet, shrugs on her black shawl. For a moment I think she has a cigarette clipped jauntily between her teeth, but it is only her shawl pin.