The road is cracked and narrow, running alongside a sleepy canal outside Luxor, where date palms stretch into the pale morning sky and the Nile is just a few bends away. The dust is fine, the air smells of sweet clover and animals, and the sound of hooves is steady, unhurried.
An old cart rolls by.
Its wheels creak softly beneath the weight of bundled greens—okra, molokhia, fresh onions still trailing soil. A thin blanket covers a sack of flour, tied down with a faded rope. At the front of the cart, holding the reins with calloused hands, sits an old man with sun-darkened skin and a long white galabeya flapping at his ankles. His feet rest bare on the wooden footboard.
Beside him, his wife rides high on folded cloth, wrapped in a navy blue abaya, a scarf tied loosely around her silver hair. She holds a tin cup of tea in one hand and a string bag filled with eggs in the other. Her eyes squint in the sun, but the lines in her face break open now and then into a smile—crooked, half-hidden, full of memory.
They don’t speak much as the cart moves. But there’s no need.
They’ve driven this road together for forty years—since before mobile towers, before paved roads, before their sons left for Cairo, and their daughters married into far villages. The mule knows the route. The dust knows their names.
They stop at the edge of a village where the weekly market is already humming—kids shouting, vendors chopping herbs, chickens skittering through feet. The old man climbs down first, his knees stiff, and holds out a hand to help her descend. She waves him off, but he waits anyway. She takes it.
Together they begin to unload—slow, careful, practiced. She handles the eggs, he lifts the greens. A younger man offers to help; she thanks him and declines. This is their cart. Their work. Their rhythm.
They are not rich, and their lives have never been easy. The land gave and took in equal measure—floods, dry seasons, endless taxes. But the cart has carried them through all of it. Mile by mile. Year by year.
By midday, the sun blazes, the mule rests in shade, and the cart is nearly empty.
They sit together again, side by side, sipping tea and watching the road.
It’s a small life.
But it is full.
And for them, it is enough.