The woman is old and walks in measured steps. There is a grace to her movements; her neck is long and straight. She still dyes her hair, a solid reddish-brown, not quite copper. She wears it parted in the middle and twisted neatly in the back. Lovely. She takes care of herself; her skin is beautiful, barely lined but for the laugh wrinkles around her blue eyes.

I do not know her although she is a guest of mine. Once a year, my husband and I host a local garden club, and the ladies (mostly ladies) come and peer at what we call our garden, but which to most would seem a wet meadow awash in black-eyed Susans, clover, timothy, bromegrass, sedges; in other words, weeds. Behind the house hides a more recognizable vegetable garden and some annual flowers which, for this occasion and this occasion only, I have weeded unto death and thickly mulched with yellow straw.

The woman came with her two friends, also stiff with age and wearing warm smiles and pretty summer outfits, sensible shoes.  They manage the pond walk, holding on to one another, and then come up to the deck and join the other guests for a cold can of seltzer and some cake. The chatter is about garlic, the hot, wet summer, how much zucchini is in the cake. They get up to leave, slowly leaving their chairs, but then the woman with the lovely almost-copper hair notices a used plate on the step. She moves toward this plate left by a man who placed it behind a planter so he could retrieve it, “in case I want more,” he said.  I knew he wouldn’t come back for more cake because I saw the look his wife gave him which said, “No more cake for you!” They left an hour before, forgetting his green plastic plate smeared with strawberry juice and cake crumbs. He will never think about that plate again.

The woman is going to try and pick it up, and I cannot stop her. I know she will fall face-first into the bolder on the edge of the deck, that there will be broken bones and blood.

The woman is bending, her arm outstretched, and with a practiced, almost balletic move, she picks up the plate and heavy-handled fork and brings both to the table where I am sitting.  I am so relieved I could cry, but instead I say what women always say: “You didn’t have to do that,” and she replies, “Yes, I do.”  She pauses as I take in what she said, that she has to pick up dirty plates, and I begin to feel sad that she feels so driven. I think I know her and that she is like so many other women who must always “pick up” because that is what women of a certain age were brought up to do. But before the feeling has any time to take root, she adds, “It is my calling.” Her eyes are full of sly humor, and I laugh.

And now I think of her picking up the plate a man left behind and think of that plate calling to her to pick it up, and how she listened,  despite the ache in her knees and back, summoning the balance needed to lean over a step, to keep the fork and her body from flipping onto a boulder. Or perhaps she was called to show off her dancer’s body memory, slowed, but still there. What else has called this lovely woman over her years? What else?