She watched again. The boy opened the gate, his dog guarding the newspapers, eyes alert, ears keen, listening, looking, waiting for any trouble. The cat was nonchalantly sitting, cleaning her paws in the middle of the road, the morning sun catching her almost orange fur in a glow of incandescence.
He sauntered up the garden path, skipped across the broken paving stones and launched the Daily Mail like a missile through the letter box onto the tiled entrance floor. It skidded across the tiles and ended up, as nearly every morning, tucked and wedged under the clock cabinet just outside of the living room door.
She heard the ‘thunk’ of the closed letter box and his whistle as he slammed the front gate, picked up the cart pulling rope and pulled his load up the hill.
It was all so predictable, familiar-and this morning especially so, as she noticed George opening his door opposite.
He was earlier today, she thought, as she watched him reverse his motorised wheel chair down the temporary-now permanent - wooden ramp and along the straightened garden path to turn and meet the boy.
‘Not unhandsome,’ she thought to herself again, as not for the first time, she looked closely at his ragged beard, his greying hair, the purposeful look in his eye and the upper body muscles that strained beneath the familiar ragged and ripped blue T shirt.
She noticed the cut off paint flecked Jeans, his boots with laces hanging to the floor. He looked as ever familiar. Too familiar somehow as if she had always known him. A feeling she had had often when looking across the gulf of years and the width of the avenue between them.
She suddenly felt alarm. In her stomach. In a rush of emptiness that left her head and made her gasp involuntarily out loud.
Even the way she pulled back the curtains further and lifted up the net curtain to see the steep incline more clearly felt…repeated.
Again the tingle. This time up her spine and down her legs.
A yearning. For what she didn’t know.
And then she did.
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