I work in a retail plant nursery or, if you prefer, a garden center. We sell plants, pots, rakes, shovels, dirt, mulch, etcetera. In the month of August, we are slow, since the daily temperature stays more or less fixed in the mid-nineties, and only the adamant or the ignorant garden
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I had ducked inside to cool down for a few minutes, and when I strolled back into the greenhouse, I spied at the far end of the nursery what looked like something straight out of an Arab souk. Attired in yards and yards of beige cloth were a group of women covered head to toe in full niqab. They were milling about, almost like a single entity, among the rows of gardenias. The effect was chilling. They looked like ghosts, or members of some kind of avant-garde performance troupe. One of the employees, a very "out" gay man, vocalized his acute discomfort to me and walked away quickly in the opposite direction.
They felt like an invading force, greater than the sum of their, admittedly small, number. I was afraid to approach them for fear of committing an insult. So sinister was their presence that I felt offended, a feeling that surprised me, their obscured appearance almost a provocation. I realize these women probably meant no such harm, and by the tenets of their religion, were only doing what they felt they must by covering themselves, but when you see it in person, it looks medieval and, to me, symbolizes absolute regression. In modern society, aside from outlaws and trick-or-treaters, people don't, and shouldn't, wear masks in public.
I firmly believe that these two worlds, the modern and the medieval, cannot for long coexist. What I do is choose modernity.
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