The Art of Noticing

She told me her name was Rosemary. We were tucked between two overflowing bookshelves when I noticed her veined, wrinkled hands clutching a book on dahlias — my favourite flower. She explained it was a Christmas gift for her gardening society friends. When I offered to help her find another copy, she smiled, shaking her head. “I have to find them myself,” she insisted.

She told me about her grandson’s art, the last lecture she’d attended (it had been “dreadfully boring,” she admitted with a dramatic roll of her ‘r’s), and how she’d first fallen in love with gardening as a child on her family’s farm. I could almost picture her as a toddler, tiny fingers buried in the soil, discovering the world right from the roots and seeds.

Then she pointed out a young man she had run into earlier on the street, so absorbed in his phone that he hadn’t seen her waiting to pass. She explained how being trapped by “those little screens” makes people miss out on the world. She pulled up her gallery, scrolling through pictures of things she'd noticed—a building with coloured windows reflecting onto the sidewalk like a kaleidoscope, a baby cardinal perched by cherry blossoms.

“First day out of the nest, and he didn’t want to return!” she said, eyes twinkling.

Last winter, she told me, she’d been so ill no one thought she’d make it, but she was there to welcome in the spring. Rosemary had a way of looking at the world with such intentional joy, savouring each detail, determined not to let life slip past unnoticed.

After we parted, I kept my phone tucked away. I looked around, trying to see the world as she might. I saw things I’d have never noticed before, a tiny bird hopping onto the sidewalk just as the light turned green, a fence of native plants labelled with nameplates, and a bright pink sign advertising tarot readings. I drank in the warmth of the late afternoon sun, the last few golden days before winter drowned everything in dull grey. I found myself smiling, for no reason other than the simple one Rosemary had reminded me of: I was alive.

And there was a whole world to drink in.