why this struck me

Now Gertrude the Grizzled had had a life of high adventure not the least because she chose it but more that it chose her and she had lived in squalor and in splendour and in places far and wide. She had loved a few men here and there but she would always have to leave because adventure chose her or perhaps it was because she could not make breakfast even one more time without wanting to throw the eggs onto the tile floors.
Or she could not bear their grand stupidity about Pericles influence during the Golden Age of Athens or how milk is good for cucumbers. Sometimes these men, they understood this about her. Sometimes they didn’t.
But she loved her children wisely and madly and loyally and she loved the little animals she fed when she would wander across the street from the Old Folks Home to the empty lot to sit on the rock there. She dragged out her tobacco and her rollies to reminisce. She did all three things, feeding, smoking and remembering in synchronicity with the wind that ruffled the tops of the sky-scratching trees.

https://off-guardian.org/2024/07/05/story-time-at-the-old-folks-home/

seems to fit the times