Grandfather Clock

My wife and I were driving along a country road with wide open fields on either side. It was late in the evening and there was a storm in the distance. A fog hung over the landscape diffusing the lightning as it flashed in shades of blue and gold along the edges of the horizon and cracked between the dark bruises where the cloud banks were thicker. We drove for miles and miles along this road, passing nothing but the telephone poles planted every twenty feet or so along the side of the road carrying their sagging lengths of wire from pole to pole into the black distance like an endless relay race headed off into oblivion.

Finally we came to a house, the only house along the road. It was a tall, dark blue house with black shutters. It was nestled fairly close to the road, given the vast amount of land available all around it. There was a white mailbox on a white wooden post sitting down by the roadside with the flap left hanging open, like someone had forgotten to shut it in the wake of receiving some bad news. There was a little neglected patch of flowers planted around the foot of this post, some of the petals still showing their colors among the dried and cracked leaves.

We pulled into the driveway. There were no other cars. All the windows of the house were dark. It didn’t look like anyone was home or even lived there. The front door was unlocked, and it opened directly onto a dark kitchen. There was a living room off the kitchen on the right, and there was a rocking chair there beside the window, still rocking just a tiny bit, as though someone had just gotten up out of it. There was a grandfather clock in the corner of the living room. My wife brushed the dust aside and opened the glass door of the case and set the gears to turning again. The night outside began to clear, and as she fastened the door back, I could see the crescent moon reflected in the glass with a few thin clouds sailing across the face of it.

With the ticking of the clock breaking the stillness that had settled over the house, the night passed and the daylight began to show in the front windows. In a back room of the house we found a nursery with a crib and a playpen. The shades were drawn, and we huddled there together in the doorway, thinking of the baby that would nap soundly in the dim room, thinking of the town and the schools and the stores nearby, thinking of all the seasons that would pass and come again, thinking of the life we’d make, settled here among strangers.