wizened neighbour from the woods

I have here this neighbour whose skin is dark and seamy and white hairs sprout from him like surprise. He is beautiful, he sits quietly, often under a tree in his back yard on the besser block low wall with sometimes a friend sitting by him, sometimes a fat swollen silver bladder of wine from a box of wine lying between them quietly. They are talking and their voices rumble and I had an operation recently, quite recently, which involved a scary general anaesthetic and I remember thinking, when I woke up that morning and the light had sliced the curtains open: if I could do this procedure just lying on his chest, I would feel safe, I would be sure I would survive it.

I survived it. The man who is my neighbour downhill has survived much more, maybe forty years more than I. He likes his tree. He likes the day. He accepts it I think. I like when his eyes rest on me and he lets me rest his eyes on him and as I pass, trotting down the hill carrying my milk can or that is, my empty coffee mug with curling horns of handles, he says always the same thing every day, slowly: “You should be running down that hill!” When I come back leaning into the slope my coffee steaming in one hand and face gazing down into the asphalt of our very steep hill he says, squeezing a wheezing laugh, “It’s all very well coming down the hill…” Every time I answer him the same. “I should be somersaulting!” “Yeah, it’s the climbing that’s hard.” He said to me one morning, “Girl, what you eating there?” and I opened my hand to show him, crossing the road, holding them out pink and stainy: “Lillypilly. Would you like some?” But the little fruits are gone now, partly because season and partly because greedy girl moved in to the house on the high hill and has had a feed of them, every morning, on her way to buy caffeine.