The Bench

There's this bench right outside of the home. It's just your basic wooden bench. It looks like it should really be in a park somewhere, but instead it's been placed right there on a single section of sidewalk overlooking the road. It's a lonely bench, sitting there all by itself with no other benches around. I think that whoever designed the bench layout did that on purpose, though. It's a big enough bench to seat about three people comfortably, but it's a small enough bench to allow one person to sit and avoid having other random people sit down. Sort of like those awkward blocks of three seats on trains and buses. If you sit on one end, someone can sit down in the other empty end seat without intruding on your space. However, if you sit in the middle seat, most people will choose to sit elsewhere because taking either end seat would be cramping your space.
Irma is a huge fan of the bench for this reason. She heads out around the same time every day. She usually plops herself down at about four o'clock in the afternoon and sits there for a good hour until dinnertime. I get the feeling sometimes that she used to arrive at the bench at exactly four o'clock on the dot every day before I started coming around. I can tell because she glances at her watch a couple times before we go outside and sometimes she'll look down at it at exactly 3:59 and then look at me to see if I noticed the time. If it looks like I know what time it is, she'll start to fiddle around with things or pretend to tidy up her room for a couple of minutes. Then she'll casually walk out and I'll follow her outside and we may arrive at the bench at 4:02 or sometimes 4:08 if she's really feeling aloof.
Once we get to the bench she sits down in what would be the "middle seat" and proceeds to spread out all of her belongings so that the rest of the bench is basically taken up. She doesn't even have that much stuff with her usually, just her bag and maybe a sweater or an umbrella sometimes, but somehow she manages to position everything just right so that no one else can sit without feeling crowded. That includes me.
I usually just sit down on the grass or lean against a lamp post. I don't really mind. It's actually a pretty pleasant hour out of my day. Irma never talks to me in a conversational way when she's sitting on the bench. She mostly just sits there and watches the road. Occasionally she'll close her eyes for a few minutes but when she opens them, she's always staring straight ahead at the road. I tend to spend the time getting lost in thought. I don't really know what she thinks about.
It's hard to tell with older people, sometimes. I've heard people compare the elderly to infants, exemplifying some sort of circle of life, and it does make me wonder. Does she think the same thoughts that I would think? Does she ever wonder how many more calories you would burn if you chose to skip instead of walk for the rest of your life? Does that voice of thought in her head sound any different than it did when she was my age?
Does she sit there and ponder the meaning of life, or does she spend her hour trying to guess what they'll serve for dinner?