These Things Happen

The Victorian style houses on Rosy Hill Street, adorned earlier in the year with roses, hydrangeas, and ornamental grasses, were now festooned with glowing Christmas light bulbs. Passers-by would also behold Santas, reindeer, snowmen, candy canes, nutcrackers, candles, and festive garlands and wreaths. Looking inside, they could catch a glimpse of the stir of Christmas morning. Except at the Arts and Crafts Victorian house near the top of Rosy Hill Street. The Healey family – Tom, Cheri and their two young children, Alan and Angeline – was five hundred miles away at the bedside of Donna, Tom’s sister.

Seeing in New Light

“From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”

What Remains?

“There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day