#14 Old Noona
#14 Old Noona
Old Noona is as nutty as a fruitcake. She’s one of those round little old ladies, gray hair sticking out all crazy, walking in little shuffling steps everywhere she goes.
If she can help it, she won’t walk on anything other than dirt. Even if it means trampling through the spruce hedges in front of the bank or shuffling like a tightrope walker on the little line of dirt that collects in the crack between the curb’s edge and the sidewalk. Grass is okay, and any other plant matter is fair game, but she hates having to walk on concrete and asphalt. She grumbles to herself, shuffling along at her top speed every time she has to cross the street.
And she won’t set foot indoors, not even to sleep away the winter chill. She’ll sleep next to a heating vent when it gets below freezing, and townsfolk dread the morning they might find her, not having made it through a night that got a little too cold for her old bones. But she doesn’t seem to mind. And lots of people look out for her.
She has the cackle of a cartoon witch, and a vocabulary as florid as it is frank, and she’ll gladly talk to anyone who’s looking interested. Funny thing, she never talks about things you’d think the crazy street lady might talk about. Instead, she always talks about things that the other person might find interesting, if a little unexpected. She has this skill. She calls herself a people person.
But a very few who stop to talk to her know a deeper truth. When you stop, really stop to look into her eyes, you’ll see they glow with the bright passion of a child’s. If you bring a hot cup of something with you and sit with her a minute, you might just find her talking about things you never really had the guts to say out loud but carry in your heart. There’s only a few who could tell you why that is, why any of it is, why she is the way she is.
She made a deal, you see, once, very long ago. She gave up houses, she gave up the world of built things, in exchange for which she got two things, the skill to sleep outdoors in any sort of weather, and the skill to grant any who would cross her path, not the wishes they would make out loud, but the quiet ones, the ones they didn’t even know they had, but needed more than any others.
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