Porch Blog 9 -Spring Cycles | amberdextrous's Blog

Pale skeins of writhing steam drift up from sunlit roadways, following another unseasonal shower. They lift and swirl with thermal currents, veiling the trunks of the eucalypts at the bottom of the hill.
 
The land exhales, sending light white puffs of condensed breath upward, stark against the dark-bellied rainclouds overhead.
 
High winds spin tufts of cottonwool clouds across a patch of perfect blue. The edges of the clouds are ragged, teased and tangled by the struggle between updraught and downshear.
 
Mr Good Morning strides by in his customary pale blue shirt, dark pants, white court shoes, floppy cream hat. He walks the circuit past my house perhaps a dozen times a day, morning and afternoon, always passing left to right. He looks towards me and smiles and lifts his rolled umbrella to show he is prepared.
 
“Good idea!” I call.
 
He winks and gives me the thumbs up and in two dozen strides is gone from my view. For now. I expect he will be back in ten minutes or so, having completed another lap of the block, like a clockwork locomotive on a model track. He will glance my way again and if our eyes meet –if I am not bent, intent on writing- there will be an awkwardness between us, as though our vocabulary of interactions was already exhausted in his previous promenading.
 
We say “Good Morning” (hence my name for him) or “lovely day” or “rain again” –and that is our limit, long-established as the convention of our relationship, such as it is. In truth, we are only tiny tangents to the arcs of each other’s lives; we touch and go.
 
He has just gone by again, while my head was bent over the notebook. I didn’t notice him until he’d passed the flowering gumtree, when he struck my peripheral vision. And by the time I looked up, I was out of his eyeline, so that awkward moment was avoided.
 
A Lear jet sears the sky, banking loud and low beneath the clouds, heading for the crosswind strip at the airport south of the river. The people aboard have also touched my life, tangentially, though they were unaware of my existence on this little porch so far beneath them. Their jet’s engine noise is cause for resentment as it echoes back and forth between the clouds and the earth.
 
I watch the patch of blue closed over by the next cloud-front and think of people with whom my life’s course has intersected... how many thousands?
 
And Mr Good Morning strides by again. We meet each other’s eyes again this time around, and exchange smiles. And it doesn’t feel awkward at all.