She curls up in the reading nook with the windows all around as traffic streams by outside in the Philadelphia snow.
Falling into Peter Pan’s Neverland, then dropping into Elizabeth Bennet’s bedroom, then stepping into Hansel and Gretel’s cottage, it’s all a whirl to her, one adventure after another, tumbling through all these worlds. She takes little breaks every two hours to look out at the cars stuck in traffic rolling by her window. She has time to imagine the lives of the people in each of the cars. Storybook characters are the product of real people who draw inspiration from other very real people, so there must be essences of Wendy Darling, Dr. Jekyll, Sherlock Holmes, and Britt-Marie within all of us.
She imagines that the mom driving the soccer van with six girls in their uniforms chattering loudly feels herself to be Circe stuck in an enchanted car with birds trapped inside of daughters. The young man in the Volvo reminds her of a Romeo, on his way to “what light through yonder window” another girl, maybe not a Juliet this time though. The older man in the white Cadillac could very well be Captain Ahab, instead of chasing that accursed whale at sea, chasing accursed wealth.
There’s something so grounding about people watching like this. We’re so many lives continuing to pass one another all the time and we’ll never be able to get to know every single stranger that we see, but she can imagine great and interesting lives for all the people who commute past her window.
