Bus ride.

Late afternoon, another lonely Sunday. I got off the bus, empty now apart from the driver, and faced the long road up a gradual hill that rose away from the bay, with the lowering sun to the right of picture. The silence hummed. Ten minutes’ walk past houses where nobody stirred, or that were long vacant, the difference to me immaterial, then a right turn and left again where the hill rose even steeper. The house is at the top, and if it were of two storeys, you could see the bay. There is no fence, just an upstretch of what was once lawn from the road to the house. Now it was a field of weeds to the path that runs along the front of the house connecting the unmade driveway to the porch, and the front door.

I unlocked the sliding door and rumbled it open, and moved around raising blinds and looking for whatever you look for when you open up a long-unoccupied house. Years ago I’d left it for a couple of months and when I’d next visited a young Spring-born bird had somehow entered through an eave, and lived for a time. Its  droppings were scattered on walls and tables and beds and sinks and I’d found its feathered rotting little body under a curtain near a window against which it had battered itself to death trying to get out. I’d somehow felt a disproportionate sense of sadness as I cleaned up its mess.