I heard her before I saw her.  It was a slow, rhythmic, metallic, squeak coming up behind me.  I was stumping along with my cane last Sunday morning (same old nagging hip and knee), making my way from a street parking space to my church door.  It wasn’t far, but I’m slow.

The squeak got closer, so I thumped over to the side of the walkway, and she pulled up beside me.

The squeak was a wonky wheel on a shopping cart that had obviously seen better days.  It was being pushed along by a rather tall, perhaps middle-aged, woman – who had probably enjoyed better days herself.

After we had exchanged greetings and observations about the weather (hot and a bit more humid, we agreed), and after her obligatory request about what spare change I might have taking up space in my pockets or lying loose in my purse, and after I had found some and had pressed it into her hand as discreetly as I could, I noticed what was piled into the basket of her cart.  Plants.  A bunch of them.  All dead or dying or looking just pitiful.  

I’m not good at identifying plants – even when they’re not all wilted and crushed together.  One of them had variegated leaves.  One still sported a bright red blossom that was trying desperately to hang on and look hopeful.  The rest were pretty leggy and limp and mashed together.  Very spent … but still somewhat green-ish, perhaps.

“So … you’ve got some plants,” was about all I could think to say as I smiled over them as if they were babies in a carriage.  She responded with a great deal of joy that she had found them tossed out in a gutter.  And that she was taking them home to nurture and love them back to life.  Those were the words she used:  “nurture and love them back to life.”  That’s all they really needed, she confided to me.

Watching her face, and hearing her words, I had a rather hard time finding my voice, then.  But I was able to find a few more coins at the bottom of my purse – to help with taking care of the plants, I told her.  And then I blurted out an invitation for her to join me in church.  I reassured her that we could park the cart full of plant life in the shade, and watch over it out a window.  But she declined.  She thought she ought to go home.  To take her pills and to take care of the plants.

So I just stumped the rest of the way into my church by myself, as I listened to the slow metallic squeak getting farther and farther away behind me.  And I thought about this woman who needed spare change for herself, her own existence.  And yet she had stooped to lift an armload of dying plants out of the gutter, to take them home, to nurture and love them back to life.  How many others had simply passed them by?  Who had cast them out in the first place?  But she saw them.  She stopped.  She gathered them up to help them.

Ironically, the sermon that day talked about the “Good Samaritan.”  But I think I had already met her.  She was pushing a bunch of rescued plants home, slowly, lovingly, in a wonky old shopping cart with one squeaky wheel.