Songbird silhouette with white floral detail

The bird came back to the windowsill this morning, the same black thing with the cut-paper flowers worked into its wings, and I swear it looked at me the way you used to look at the kitchen clock when the kettle was taking too long. I have decided it is your mother's songbird, the one she had painted on the tin she kept her buttons in. You will tell me I am being fanciful. You are allowed to. I am eighty-one and permitted a little fancy before the doctor takes the rest.

I went through the shed on Tuesday, the way you asked me not to. Under the potting bench there was a box of the old scroll stencils your father cut for the garden gate, the ones with the curled tendrils that looked like bindweed if you squinted. Every one had the same small hole worked into the centre of the curl, and I think he did that so the light would come through and make a pattern on the path. I put the stencils in my apron pocket and walked them down the lane to the church bench, and I sat there with them on my knee until the light went orange and the rooks started their nonsense in the elms.

So I have decided to plant the rest of the bulbs along the north wall, where the frost sits longest. Nothing will grow there in March, so the bed will look like a promise nobody has kept, which suits me. The bird can keep an eye on it. He has the look of a creature who has been waiting a long while for someone to notice his legs.

Come Sunday if the buses behave. Bring the good scissors.

All my love, Ivy