A Small Story

For every ailment under the sun, there is a remedy or there is none.  If there be one, try to find it; if there be none, never mind it.  (Mother Goose Rhymes, 1695)

An old woman sits by her cottage door, her hand on the golden cat purring in her lap.  She looks, not at the road in front of her, but at the far distant horizon of the sea.

What does she see, I wonder.  What has been?  What will be?  Is she bitter?  Melancholy?  At peace?  Does she still long for anything?

And if she doesn’t, when did she stop, I wonder.  When did the sun, and the softness of the purring cat, and the stones warm beneath her feet, become ‘enough’?