The morning had barely settled over Martinsburg when I first saw her, a small, determined figure walking along the side of the road. It was the kind of sight that makes your foot ease off the gas without thinking. Cars rushed past me, but something about her posture, the quiet persistence in the way she moved, tugged at me. I drove by at first, convincing myself she was fine, but a few seconds later my gut tugged harder. Turn back. So I did.
I slowed beside her, rolled down my window, and asked gently, “Ma’am, are you okay?”
She did not answer. She just looked at me for a moment, then kept walking, step after steady step. The silence unsettled me. Worried, I called 911. The dispatcher told me others had called too and that the police had spoken with her. She had said she was going to the store.
But I stared down the road in the direction she was heading. There were no stores. Not for miles.
So I waited.
Eventually she crossed the street, her pace slow but unbroken, and I pulled up again.
“Are you sure you are all right?” I asked.
This time she answered. “I am walking to the store,” she repeated, just as the dispatcher had said. But I pressed gently, “Which store exactly?”
“The bank and the store,” she said.
I asked where the store was.
“Hedgesville.”
I blinked. Hedgesville was ten minutes away by car.
She leaned slightly on my window, and in the pause that followed something fragile flickered across her face. I asked why she was walking, and she told me, her voice soft and her eyes glistening, that she was from Hedgesville. Her son had died, and she had been moved to Martinsburg, far from the place she knew and far from the land her memories lived on.
“So I am walking,” she whispered, a tear slipping down her cheek.
That was it for me.
“Come on,” I said gently. “Let me give you a ride. I will take you wherever you need to go and I will make sure you get home safely.”
She hesitated, puzzled, as if unsure whether kindness like that could really be meant for her. But she got in.
Her name was Isabelle. Ninety three years old. A full blooded Indian woman with a voice like worn satin and a memory that stretched across nearly a century. The moment we started driving, her world opened up.
She pointed to the mountain where she was born, her finger tracing a place that had shaped her entire childhood. She told me how the smooth pavement we drove on had once been nothing but dirt roads, roads she walked every day as a young girl. She talked about her five husbands, about being married for the first time at just thirteen. She spoke of Pearl Harbor and the Hindenburg as if they were chapters she had lived, not just read. Her laughter filled the car, warm and unbroken.
When we reached the Food Lion, the store she wanted, I told her I would wait for her. She nodded and shuffled inside. A little while later, she came back out with a single small bag. Inside it was only a container of instant coffee.
She saw me and smiled.
When she got back into the car, she chuckled and asked, “Do you know where I am going? Because I do not.”
I laughed with her. “I will take you home,” I promised.
She studied me for a moment and asked, almost childlike, “Do you know where I live?”
“I do not,” I said, “but you will remember as we go. We will figure it out together.”
And so we drove through the streets of Martinsburg as she pieced her memories back together. Along the way, she told me about her family, how they kept it in the family, how her children grew up, and how the land itself held their stories. She pointed to buildings and lots and fields, telling me what used to stand there, what had disappeared, what had changed. She showed me where the hospital now sat, a place where an orchard once bloomed, the orchard she worked at when she was twelve. She told me about her first love, a farmhand she adored but could never be with because she was a red girl.
By the time we found her home, the sun had shifted in the sky. We sat there for a moment. She looked at me with tired eyes softened by gratitude.
“Thank you,” she said, simple and sincere.
I handed her a small card with my name and number. “If you ever need a ride,” I told her, “please call me.”
She held the card, confused again, and murmured, “I do not know where you came from, but thank you.”
I do not know if I will ever hear from Isabelle again. I do not know if I will ever see her. But in the span of one unexpected morning, she gave me something remarkable, a miniature journey back through time, through love and loss and resilience, through a life lived fully.
And she reminded me of something simple but powerful:
If your gut ever tells you to reach out, do it.
Credit: Tara Murphy
