Any Woman - An Essay

A plump, rosy cheeked woman puts her three kids in her 2011 Dodge Caravan.  She wears the Hutterite uniform typical for a woman of her age and stature.  It is a heavy cotton two piece dress in a dark green and black floral pattern.  The skirt very appropriately falls to no more than two inches above her ankle.  Her curly hair is a golden red and plainly pinned up with a matching scarf to cover the top of her head.  She looks neither happy nor sad as I watch her load her children and groceries into her minivan.  Her skin is milky white,  typical again for red heads.  There is absolutely nothing interesting about this woman. Not even her beautiful hair and skin.  She embodies everything dull in a domesticated life.  Other than childbearing, we would have nothing in common, maybe just the common cold.

Suddenly, the simplest of gestures puts me squarely in her shoes.  It is in a subtle act of comfortable rebellion that I know this woman.  As I sit watching her from my car in the Walmart parking lot, the homogeneous  abyss for all of humanity to merely exist in, I bore witness to this woman's subtle act that in a profoundly weird way, renewed my hope for my own spirit.

 This very uninteresting woman stepped up into her minivan and left her foot to dangle for a moment as her heel lifted out and separated itself from her shoe.  It was a slow and casual moment, like she was leading a lazy day on the beach kind of life.  A feeling of "lessez-faire" in such harsh contrast to the hard, earth-bound life Hutterites are known to lead.  For that brief moment, this woman left her everyday existence and exposed her foot to freedom. In that moment, she became every woman.  Fleeting moments of independence, quiet moments of individuality and in that moment, a small act of rebellion against what it so inherently means to be a woman.