Unspoken

I don't know what he was watching. Perhaps the cars on the morning street, almost soft and vast in the newness of the day, cars driven with an absence of haste. an enjoyment of the road and an abandonment of destination. Perhaps there was a butterfly, a small one, the buttery yellow kind that have appeared lately and are barely noticeable at all until they take quick and jittery flutters from one patch of browning clover to another. Perhaps it was the mouse which sometimes scurries along the edge of the patio, attracting the attention of the cats, who sit in a row, their tails jerking without any conceivable rhythm as they watch it climb up one side of the grill and down the other. Perhaps it does not matter what he was watching, only that something in his eyes, something far away, reminded me of my grandfather, of a photograph I'd taken in the last year of his life. We'd been sitting on his patio, enclosed and bigger than the one Duncan and I sat on this morning. Grandpa and I were alone and he'd just fallen silent after talking about the cancer he knew would take him. He turned away and looked long and hard past the pine tree he'd planted when I was six, which towered over the yard, now far too tall to jump over as I'd done the first year it had been in the ground. He gazed out the window at the street and the old school on the other side of it. He did not say anything and I did not ask, but took a picture instead and every time I've looked at it for the past eight years my heart has ached for not asking, for never being able to know what that beautiful, quiet moment held for him. Duncan is not my grandfather, did not even have the joy of meeting him, but the way they looked so intently out into world was startlingly similar, with thoughts never to be spoken, held silent like a love poem to life.