The water in the sink was too hot, but I kept my hands in it anyway. Across the asphalt of Oak Lane, Barbara was dragging a heavy black contractor bag down her driveway with the slow, deliberate care of a woman moving a sleeping child.
Anna stood beside me with the linen dish towel, her eyes fixed on the glass. She tucked a strand of hair behind her left ear, a habit from her three decades in the middle school library when a student approached her desk with a late book.
“It is only Tuesday,” I said, looking at the gray sky over the Ridge. “Garbage collection is not until Thursday morning.”
“Perhaps she is clearing out her garage,” Anna said, her voice quiet and soft-spoken. “People often use the transition of the seasons to put their houses in order, Robert. As the poet says, there is a time to keep and a time to cast away.”
I pulled my hands from the soapy water and reached for the dry towel. Barbara had stopped at the edge of her lawn, her black leather boots sunk slightly into the wet grass where the damp maple leaves had begun to turn brown.
Through the windowpane, I watched her lift a thin hand to her neck. She adjusted the heavy green silk scarf tied tight around her throat, though the thermometer on our porch read fifty-eight degrees.
She handled that heavy plastic bag as if it were spun glass. She did not drop it or let it slide against the gravel, but lowered it inch by inch until it sat perfectly upright beside her green plastic recycling bin.
“A person does not treat grass clippings with that much reverence,” I said.
I pulled my wire-rimmed glasses off and used the hem of my red flannel shirt to polish the lenses. The habit was old, something I did at the post office when the mail sorting machines clogged or a carrier came in late with a full satchel of undelivered circulars. I liked things in their proper slots, sorted by route and ZIP code, with nothing left hanging.
