Okay, so it just hit me. Here’s who I want to be when I grow up:
Hermetta
The clean cut young pair with their black overcoats and black briefcases held immobile to their steady stride were already quite a distance from their car parked down the street when they approached her house. The front door was inaccessible, covered with a thorny tangle that even bereft of leaves in February was obviously a climbing rosebush left to its own path of decision. Only those considered friends would know enough to walk around and enter by the kitchen door, kept free of weeds and always left unlocked. This is where the Peapod driver knew to enter and leave her groceries on the counter, yell hello and smile and leave.
A younger pair of boys approached the visitors who now had stopped in careful consideration of their mission to spread the word. The kids were not a youthful mirror of their elders. They were a scruffy pair, and loud and might be rude. But they were mindful of certain manners, and wise in judging people, and so they stopped and offered their knowledgeable help.
“You don’t wanna go in there, mister. A crazy lady lives in there,” the bolder of the two obliged.
“I’m sure she isn’t crazy,” came the benign reply, “but why would you suggest that?”
“The only time you see her is in the summer in her garden out the back. Otherwise she don’t go out.”
“And she does witchcraft late at night,” the other boy threw in. He smirked at the reaction this produced from the two men. A barely perceptible raising of the eyebrows, which for them, meant extreme response indeed.
Encouraged by his friend and lacking any further verbal inquiry from the men, the bolder, older boy felt it his duty to explain.
(To be continued, as soon as I get a chance to write some more. This is just as it formed in words from a simple picture in my mind, so I don’t even know if it’s a life goal, or just a story in the making.)
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology