The Woman Who Loves Plants

A middle-aged woman in faded blue pajamas keeps coming out on her balcony and squirting water into her potted plants with a used dishwashing bottle. There are only a few plants to water, but she fusses and fusses, squirting again & again, lifting the tender leaves and buds: squirt squirt-squirt. Then she goes over to the shrub, giving a squirt like a dog lifting its leg. Then she sets the jug down and bends down to assess the moisture of each plant. She picks up one pot and then another and exchanges locations. Slowly she turns around and peers into the sheer-curtained French window as if it were a neighbor's and she were snooping--but it's her own, a fact she seems suddenly to realize.

In the flat above, an elderly woman opens her window and shakes her dusting cloth over the woman peering in her own window. The Woman Who Loves Plants doesn't see the particles of dust falling like an intermittent shower. She shakes her head, picks up her watering jug again, and pauses behind the Benjamin Ficus, carefully scrutinizing some movement down the street, as if she were looking through binoculars like villagers do in hope of embroidering the local gossip. But this woman doesn't know her neighbors. She goes back inside, comes out with a pair of scissors, and snip snip-snips the begonia, pausing at the edge of the balcony to watch a young couple and child walking on the sidewalk below.

"Come on. Don't you want to go on the bus? The red bus?" the father asks his little blue-overalled boy who pauses "Oh-oh" and points to something in the street.

The Woman Who Loves Plants smiles and looks longingly, intrigued by the little boy being led along by his father to the red bus. Then she picks up her watering jug as if to leave, but she stands still, looking fondly at her plants, surveying them like old friends she won't see again for a long time. Reluctantly she leaves--but then she's back out again as if she's forgotten something. She studies the Benjamin Ficus and decides to turn the pot slightly.

The Woman Who Loves to Clean shakes her dustcloth again just the moment The Woman Who Loves Plants walks beneath the window.

In the French window next to The Woman Who Loves Plants a Woman Who Loves to Cook appears at her stove. At age seventy, she claims she's still a virgin. She wears white ankle socks, I'm told, and an old-fashioned apron, which I can see.

In the French window in the next flat I see a young dark-haired woman ironing. I wonder if she'll turn into The Woman Who Loves to Iron. I imagine her ironing and ironing, a stack of clothes on the end of the ironing board. I want to run across the street, ring her bell, warn her, tell her about the three spinsters of Bayswater. Maybe she should move.

But then I think perhaps someone is watching me watch them:

There she is again. She's always watching across the street. See how she's watching those women. She takes notes. Puts the pad down. Picks it up again. Look, she's gone and got a camera now. Look. Quick, look. She's photographing the woman watering plants on her balcony.