kindness of strangers
summer treat
![summer treat](https://i0.wp.com/houseoflovers.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/35943676_10157520266999745_7085849083734130688_n.jpg?fit=768%2C1024&ssl=1)
The woman behind me at the supermarket checkout had a little pile of five caramel bars, two gossip magazines of the trashiest kind, the ones with really flimsy rattling paper, and a tub of flavoured yoghurt. She saw me looking and her brow contracted. When I said, “I’m so happy for you,” which in German is said, I rejoice myself for you, “that looks so delightful,” her whole face relaxed.
“Ja,” she said, and picked up the stack of caramel bars and hugged them. “It looks really great, doesn’t it.”
“It really, really does,” I said. When I reached my bike in the row of bikes out front someone had dropped a leaflet in its basket to advertise a yoga retreat on Corfu. It is colder today and the summer, only two days old, feels already threatened.
Whenever I read your work it’s as though i’m tucked into a corner of you, seeing and feeling what you are. Reader as companion creature; a symbiosis.
I feel the cosiness and poetry of your remarks, Alison, thank you very much. It’s as though we are tucked up on a swaying bough together, musing on the thoughts.