Every Thursday a 93-year-old woman dressed in black waits with her cane in the lobby of her retirement home for a car ride to her destination - an empty sidewalk on the south end of the state Capitol Grounds next to traffic and Boulevard Avenue.

There, Ferne Orcutt will join others. From 12:30 to 1 p.m., they'll form a still and silent row of similarly dressed people who look like they've just left a funeral and are mourning at attention.

The 13 people don't smile. Some look down. Some stare straight out with sad eyes that look like windows with the shades pulled down: Shades of worry, shades of concern. It's hard to see into those eyes.

Hard to see out of - for Orcutt, who is legally blind. Things are fuzzy beyond 6 inches away. She also wears two hearing aids. And she has been feeling sick for more than a week.

"I feel sick at heart," Orcutt said in an interview at her home.

Orcutt is a member of "We in Black," a weekly peace vigil started in February. The idea stems from the Women in Black effort started in 1988 by Israeli and Palestinian women who were tired of violence and losing loved ones. Some "We in Black" participants explained after Thursday's vigil that their effort is a statement against all violence - not just against the current war.

As traffic flows by Bismarck's Boulevard Avenue, Orcutt, a retired teacher, leans on her cane for support to stand - and for support to leave. After 30 minutes of standing still, she has found that her first steps toward the car are shaky.

Like everyone else, Orcutt doesn't talk for those 30 minutes. She's thinking.

"I think about all the young men who have been killed in war. I think about that the families are going through what I went through in World War II, and I think about all the destruction that must be going on in Iraq," said the Michigan native, who moved to North Dakota about five years ago to be closer to her children.

She said she hates to think of the Iraqi children who must be so frightened, too frightened, probably, to be able to sleep.

She said she and her husband, Ralph Orcutt, staunch Republicans, conservatives always, began to question their views during Vietnam. When Ralph Orcutt retired in 1970 from his position as head of the Central Intelligence Agency's Chicago office, the couple attended a World Peacemakers meeting. At the meeting's end, people were asked what they got out of it.

Ralph Orcutt stood up.

"As long as I live, I'll never forget what he said," Ferne Orcutt said. "He said, 'I've decided to devote the rest of my life to peacemaking.'"

She said her husband started a peace group in their hometown of Traverse City, Mich., that has become a sizable organization. The couple participated in the 1982 Million Person March in New York City where people were marching in support of reversing the arms race and banning the testing, production and use of nuclear weapons. She participated in anti-war rallies against the Gulf War in her hometown of Traverse City, where she was harassed and yelled at. "It wasn't pleasant," she remembers.

Orcutt, 94 in April, a widow since 1987, gets news magazines on tape, and pays people $8 an hour to read to her so she can keep up with national news, foreign policy. But just keeping up isn't enough.

"This is one thing I can do," she said about her "We in Black" participation.

After Thursday's vigil she was ready to go home - away from the cold and a 20 mph wind that kept trying to push her over.

But she's no pushover.