I was sitting in my back garden. Twice this week I had promised to cut the grass, but my mind was away with the fairies. Wishing I were young again, back on dad’s old farm.
Being midsummer, I wasn’t expecting a freak wind to be pulling at my clothes, tugging at my mind and urging me to find something new. As usual, I sat there and did nothing, telling myself I was too old for new adventures.
How many times had I said no to friends when they asked me to join them on some weekend trip? Even after all this time, I wondered what I might have missed.
Rising from my favourite deck chair, I dragged the mower out of the shed and started to cut the grass, knowing Jack would be pleased when he came home from his weekend away. Later that night, I put on the old wrap my mother had knitted, took a glass of wine and went out to the garden. I sat waiting for the sky to darken.
I watched as the new moon made an appearance, then the first star. The darker it became, the more stars I could see. I was picking out some of the constellations that I knew when I noticed a shooting star. I had forgotten that tonight was the time to see the Perseid meteor shower.
I lay there letting these falling stars take me on an adventure, places my physical body would never let me go. That night I travelled to exotic lands that my feet would never touch. Later, lying alone in our bed, I decided I was not too old to visit new places. Rome, the pyramids, even the Taj Mahal was on my list. I fell asleep thinking how surprised Jack would be when I told him. He had asked me so many times to go somewhere nice, that it would make a change from walking away on his own twice a month.
Jack never made it home that weekend. Someone hit his car, sending it off the road. All the things I wanted to tell him stuck like a knife in my heart. I had left it too late.
A year later I booked my first trip away to Rome, the first place Jack had wanted to take me. It was everything he said it would be and more, and as I felt his hand in mine, the knife in my heart fell away…
Anita Dawes 2018
Oh, how sad they couldn’t have made that trip earlier. I’m glad the knife finally fell away.
Well written story.
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I loved this one too, Anita loves doing Wordle!
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So much beauty and hope woven into sadness
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You have a poetic soul, Woebegone…
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Thank you
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