A dying breed

I saw the archetypical elderly Austrian woman while waiting for my train.

She is clad in stout gray woolen skirt and blazer accented with forest green collar and carved horn buttons, the accoutrements of Styrian Tracht, the native costume. Her spindly legs are covered in thick stockings and she shuffles up the stairs and onto the platform in sturdy, sensible black patent leather shoes. Her shockingly white hair is pulled back with a series of old-fashioned hair combs and coiled at the nape of her neck. A brimmed gray felt hat crowns her head, disguising the pink patches of scalp that shine through her thinning hair.

A closer look reveals a collared, checkered shirt and a thick hand-knit cardigan under the blazer, on a day when everyone around her has shed jackets and long-sleeves in favor of T-shirts and tanks and the air, even now after the sun has acquiesced to the night, holds a breath of comfortable warmth. Her outfit is one of propriety and tradition, old farmers' wisdom dictating that winter maintains its grip on the land until well into May and one should dress appropriately, prepared for that last lingering late April snowfall -- never mind that this unseasonably warm winter has long since banished the possibility of snow.

Yet no trace of overheating shows on her lined face, which could belong to a woman of 70 or even 80, though her twinkling blue eyes belie the mask of age foisted upon her by her wrinkles and white hair. She carefully removes the wicker basket from the crook of her arm and deposits it on an empty bench, but the leather straps of her weathered brown canvas rucksack remain on her shoulders as she slowly paces up and down the platform, stooped forward under its boxy weight. A curiousity, this aimless wandering along the near-empty platform, a good ten minutes before the train's arrival. Perhaps another dictum of traditional wisdom? One should stretch one's legs as much as possible before a journey by train?

As the train arrives, there is a flurry of action, a clamoring for the train portals, and the passengers follow an unwritten code and defer to the old woman, to allow her to be the first on the steep metal stairs to the interior, but with an even older unwritten code of etiquette she smiles and twinkles and insists that those before her gain first entry, waving them merrily up onto the train.

She is lost to me among the crowded compartments, and I am filled with a sense of melancholy. I know the generation that comes after her, and the one after that, and their eagerness to break with tradition and embrace the cultural conglomeration of the modern era. Denim and jersey cotton replaces Tracht. They regard her and her ways with the fondness one holds for grandmothers, a protective instinct bordering on patronizing. But do they value her? Will they follow in the footstpes of her clunky black shoes?

She is Austria, full of innocence and regalness, centuries of history and tradition, mountains and forests, snowy slopes and warm chalets, jaunty accordian polkas and the warm, slow burn of homemade schnapps. I fear she is a dying breed.