Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

“Come down at one,” said my son.

“Make it eleven,” he said on the phone that evening.

“As close to eight as you can,” said the text that woke me in the middle of the night.

“Zzzz,” said my son through his bedroom door. By nine I had all his housework done and meals prepared. My own had been abandoned in favour of scraping the ice from the car; the first frost of autumn had been a hard one and would doubtless have been harder still without the fog that blanketed the morning with ephemeral gold.

Even the kites had not taken to the skies when I left, yet the day before I had counted twenty-one of them wheeling above the house and raiding a local bird table. By the time I reached my son’s home through the interminable queues of traffic, the fish in the pond were awake and…