Memories...

The bus slowed to a stop and as passengers climbed off, Sarah turned her head and looked out of the window and gasped.

They had stopped outside her old home—the cottage she’d sold twenty years ago.

As the bus pulled away, memories came flooding back, one in particular above all the others.

She’d had been sitting on the worn stone steps leading to the front door of her cottage. It was the first home that had truly been her own - the little house she’d bought after her husband died.

The step had felt cold and rough beneath her hands, the opposite feeling she experienced when she stepped inside. Then, she was gathered into the warm embrace of a seventeenth-century cottage whose ancient walls seemed to wrap themselves around her, sheltering her from whatever the world chose to throw at her.

Sitting on those steps, she had listened to the bells of St Mary’s ringing across the town. To Sarah, they were the sound of England. They summoned memories of Sunday roast beef, family teas, her great-aunt’s ginger cat asleep by the fire, and crisp winter walks across snowy paddocks to feed the ponies.

Her thoughts had wandered to the many people who’d lived in the cottage before her. They would have risen each morning to the same light filtering through the windows, gone about their work, fallen in love, raised children and grieved their losses. One of them had planted the dark red rose that climbed over the porch. Its rich perfume filled the evening air with the scent of love and romance, and for a fleeting moment she’d imagined herself standing beneath its arch, her husband pulling her close for a kiss.

But then the dream had dissolved and with a jolt she’d remembered he was gone.

She was alone in her beautiful old cottage, surrounded by centuries of other people’s lives, quietly beginning the next chapter of her own.

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