Member-only story
Hearts and Habits
One love, through life
My love for this little park has become bitter-sweet since Joan was called home last autumn. I still walk around here every Sunday, just as we did for sixty-four years, but the colours have seemed more muted these last twelve months.
I live in the sure and certain hope that a park just like this one exists in a better place, where Joan and I will walk together in eternity… although recently, one circuit of this mundane path seems to take an eternity of its own. My knees no longer enjoy walking, and I must see my GP soon, because today my arthritis appears to have migrated and taken up residence in my left arm. Pain is a thief of breath, and I have too much of one and barely enough of the other to shuffle between one bench and the next. But I shall persist, because traditions matter. Memories, too.
When we first bought our little house on the square, almost directly opposite the monkey puzzle tree, we were impossibly young— I was twenty-three; Joan, nineteen — and we might stroll twice around the park in twenty minutes. But we were newlyweds, and there were large rhododendron bushes at the south end in those days, so one circuit was just as likely to take a blissful, daring hour.
Considering how often Joan would return home from our walks with her face the same shade as the rhododendron blooms, it is…
