A Fine Day on the Bayou

The old woman came across the pond in a pirogue, paddling in smooth, graceful, hand over hand motions and picking up debris. She wore gold spectacles and a flowered sun bonnet.

Good morning! she called to me, scooping up a discarded water bottle and a Walmart plastic bag from the surface of the water. Protesting ducks quacked their annoyance with her and a startled turtle on a floating branch dived for cover with a soft splash. Fine morning, don't you think? It was just after eight in the morning, already in the high 90's and personally I thought the heat and humidity were god awful unbearable but it was too early and would've taken too much energy to argue so I nodded. She smiled at me, snatched a styrofoam cup off a clump of weeds and captured a mangled soda can with one quick flip of her wrist. The pirogue came dangerously close to shore as she reached for a scrap of newspaper wrapped around a fast food wrapper but at the last moment she deftly reversed her course and continued her way downstream, calling good naturedly over her shoulder, Don't litter, will you, dear! The last I saw of her she was retrieving a rusty tin can from the weeds - she rinsed it out several times before adding it to a green mesh bag of trash balanced in her lap and paddling on her way, sun in her face, ducks ahead and in her wake, no piece of offending trash too small to be ignored. The pirogue disappeared around a bend silently and smoothly, leaving the barest of ripples behind and the small environmental activist cheefully gathering up the trails of indifferent and uncaring humans too lazy to walk the dozen steps to a trash barrel.

I walked further down the bayou, passing strutting geese leading parades of ducks and other geese to the water,
passing old fishermen with tin cans of worms and cane poles, sitting on overturned plastic buckets and squinting against the sun. Children carrying cellophane bags of stale bread skittered on the banks under the watchful and amused eyes of parents, a young couple holding hands and pushing a stroller walked by and early morning joggers, undetered by the heat or humidity, panted past. The geese on the sidewalk, heads tucked beneath their wings in slumber, slept on.