Warm yellow light fills windows along these streets she knows so well, emphasizing the night’s damp chill. She rarely thinks of her age; when she does, she isn’t old. Perhaps most people are the same, seeing themselves as young, enthusiastic, but captured in a mature body. Still vivid, are things long gone: the scent of summer sun on reeds and sedges, the hot tang of melting tar, the early morning whistle of a vanished factory, the thud of oars on a rowboat’s bottom, the wheedling of a long-dead dog.

            She can still hear leaves rustling on the scrawny birch in her former backyard. How she’d loved that feeble thing, daring to put down roots in a poor neighbourhood of parched grass and oil-stained driveways. Trees didn’t belong there; they only had to right to grow lush in the gardens of the rich. The birch seemed to sense that in its thin-branched fearful way. It knew it was doomed. How, axe in hand, Don Ried had laughed when it lay on its hacked defeated side. If she had feared that man before, her hatred of him was now complete.

            She slips her key into the lock of her front door. Without turning on a lamp, she goes to sit in the main room of her home. Her home? Even in the dark, she can sense more than see the red brocade, the heavy curtains, the waxy shine on old hardwood floors, the shadows of furniture handed down from one generation to the next. How is this her home? Has she changed one thing? Eliminated one oil painting, one pretty watercolour? Has she added a decorative crock? Or has she been nothing but a shadow in a deceased man’s world?

            She pushes questions aside. She has made her mark elsewhere: why fret? She has managed to turn fate around, make her life positive. She is grateful; she likes herself, is proud of herself.

            No, it is anticipation and not a little misgiving that has brought on doubts. More than that: it’s pure anguish. Tomorrow she’ll make a grab for the past, snatch at the great love that has eluded her. But what if she has got it all wrong?

 

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