This morning, I sat in my car, waiting for caffeine at a drive-thru. Wearing crumpled pajamas, and trying to soothe a braying Bear in the backseat (he gets wiggly when the car doesn’t move for a few minutes), I watched an elderly couple cross the parking lot, coffees in hand.

They were holding hands. The woman was tiny, teeny-tiny, diminutive, and she was walking carefully, tottering in high heels–very high heels for a woman of her age. She wore the sweetest raincoat over her dress; it almost looked like a pinafore, and even from across the parking lot, I could tell it had been carefully starched. Her hair was arranged carefully in a bun. The husband, well dressed and wet-hair combed, motioned for his wife to wait at the curb while he pulled their car out of its space…a nod to chivalry? A concern for her walking on those too-high heels?…and he backed their enormous white car out. She carefully lowered herself into the car, balancing her coffee, and she reached out almost too far to shut the car door.

The sweetness of this scene just flooded over me, and there was something else, too. Maybe a nostalgia for something I haven’t known; days in which women didn’t hop in their cars to go to the Starbucks drive-thru without even brushing their hair or changing out of their pajamas. I thought of my own grandmother, and her refusal to capitulate to demands that she stop wearing heels, even when her ankles were swollen with age, and the risk of falling was very real.

The rain started to fall as they drove out of the parking lot. I watched their taillights disappear and pulled forward, hand outstretched, waiting to start my day.