2. Lotta
The next morning, early, I am walking to my truck, cursing the snow and carrying a shovel over my shoulder when I see her. Lotta. She’s muttering to herself and pushing her shopping cart with great difficulty through the snow. A few cans and bottles roll around the cart.
Everyone in East Mercy knows who Lotta is. Some of the older folks remember going to school with her, but nobody seems to remember when she began collecting empty beverage containers around town and returning them for deposit. She’s not a bag-lady, even though she kinda looks like one. She has a home. Probably no car. The college students call her Lotta The Can Lady. Her real name is Lotta Merchant.
Probably because of this whole Christmas present thing, I feel a sudden affinity with Lotta. I, too, must struggle through the snow. I, too, stand close to the dark pit of poverty. I just bet Lotta isn’t getting any presents for Christmas either.
As we pass each other beneath the garlanded street lamps, Lotta skewers me with sharp, blue eyes blazing from a weathered face. She is mumbling to herself, but I cannot catch a word in her never-ending monologue.
I turn to watch her for a minute as she continues pulling the cart. She must have stolen it from the supermarket sometime ago, or maybe they gave her one of their old squeaky-wheel carts. You see those sometimes rusting out behind the building where the dumpsters sit. The wheels of Lotta’s cart carve thin paths through the snow and through the dark wells of her footprints.
She is a lone object in a blank, white wilderness.
That image haunts me all day as I load and unload furniture at the store. Once, I drop the end of a brocade loveseat and my father swears and asks me where my mind’s at. I imagine telling him, letting him see, for once, the nature of my inner life. . .
I don’t. Instead I mutter “sorry” and hike the loveseat up into the truck.
Though I drive through town a number of times that day, I don’t see Lotta with her cart. I find myself hoping it’s a good day for cans, that her cart fills quickly, that the bag-boy at the supermarket is kind.
