Room With a View

There were three of them, giggly girls, playing in her yard. Well, not technically her yard, but close enough, within her direct view, all of them dressed in too short shorts, short shorts with filmy tops and barefoot, not a shoe between them. What about nails, rusty nails, tetanus?And where were their parents? She frowned at the spectacle she was witnessing, was forced to witness.

    Because they were there, and she was inside, in the house, of course, waiting for the mail. The letter carrier would have to weave through the girls, but Mildred knew she (she! the letter carrier a woman delivering the mail!) could do it, given the way she skipped down the street with those US Mail bags hanging off her shoulder.

    Well, life is change, which is what she used to say to Albert when he sank into one of his grumble fits. "Life is change," she would trill, because she knew it irritated him. "A little irritation is good....keeps your whistle clean."

    That always made him laugh, and once he even launched into a monologue on the whistle as produced by the human body.

    Well, now she was irritated alone, alone, cranky, and vexed while the three spindly girls mucked around in her yard. She rapped on the window to get their attention, because....because....because they....then she stopped just as she realized there was no reasonable explanation in the phrase she was forming in her brain, which made her laugh.

~

    The three of them now were looking right at her, or so it seemed, until the youngest, or, at least the smallest, snapped off the stringiest daisy on the boulevard, a volunteer flower Mildred had meant to get rid of, and ran back to her friends, then up Mildred's walkway to her door, pressed the doorbell three times, bowed, dropped the flower and dashed back to the other girls who had swiveled as gracefully as ballerinas during her dash, and then the three of them ran off together, in perfect harmony.

    They were gone before Mildred could get the door open, and a foot on her porch, but the peal of their joy carried her through the rest of that long day.