I don't want to shake your hand.

At a corner bakery, Ellen McCann rushes up beside me within a envelope of outside cold around her. She smells fresh and clean like a child just in from sledding. Her cheeks are two red fists with a smile dancing in between. She is speaking for the young boys outside when she asks me several questions about my journey. She is not doing them a favor though. It is very clear that my new red headed friend wants to unwrap my mystery as fast as possible for herself. I tell her a spin on the usual, because I have to place my order soon, and I still haven't looked in the glass cases that are pregnant with a thousand surgary treats, breads, and cakes beautifully lit in a sheen of chocolate oil. I'm distracted.
"Right now, I really want to order a coffee," I smile urgently.
"I'm going to buy you your coffee, I'm going to buy you whatever you'd like,"Ellen chirps joyfully as she moves us around people, to the head of the line and orders.Ellen is shorter than my six feet by close to a full foot. She leans on the tall glass case that reduces her to a happy girl, even though she is several years my senior. Ellen is beautiful the way beautiful is supposed to look outside in the real world. Her curves are not sharp, but soft and motherly. She is so brilliantly alive I stare at her without my eyes getting up to look around the room. Her hair is a gentle mop of carefree curls that move in the plastic light as she moves excitedly with each word she says. She has already been back outside to give the boys her report, and returned. Ellen is moving when she is still, and I am drawn to her like I am to water.
"The boys think your a hero or something. We all think what your doing is so amazing. They want to know if you'd sign autographs for them?" Ellen has said several sentences, but they all come out as one. She is smiling hard, but she is serious, anxious, confident, radiant. Ellen is alive, and all that she want to spill out can not be kept neatly in the language of mere words alone.

"It really was so sweet of you to have been so generous to me. Thank you." I extend my hand toward Ellen, although it feels odd as I do it. This woman would not settle for something so stowic as a handshake, but my hand is already out there, as silly and empty as a paper plate.

Ellen pulls out a larger smile if that is possible, as she steps closer to me. "I don't want to shake your hand." Before I can adjust my own smile, Ellen's curls are soft against my face. I allow my body to be soft. No, I tell my body to be soft so that Ellen's life sinks into me. Now Ellen is taller than I am, as I look out from inside myself. Ellen is a tree that I am standing beneath. The cool warmth lingers in the busy room, that for a second is not as loud, then she is fingers on my arm. Ellen laughs delicately back toward her resemblence of modesty as I hand her my card. Her eyes twinkle like the stars nearest the moon, and she is out the door.

The sky has become large islands of blue after countless days of soot gray. The sky is a woman that smiles at me, and absolutely everything she said is forgiven, as well as forgotten. She is ageless, and she does not ease into the room. She moves into the falling leaves, she is up against the glass of the store fronts. She is moving the back of her hand against my face, and she doesn't care who sees. I have not thought well of her in weeks, and now... now I am ashamed. She forgives the soil, and the farmer in the spring.