just_writing | Day Three: The tree and the star

I had planted it when we first moved into the house, at the age of four years old. My mother had given me a sweet and juicy Stanley plum and I remember vividly the silky purple skin that I had plunged my teeth into. It was the single best plum I have ever had and just this thought makes my mouth water. It was a brilliant day of sunshine and I planted that seed in the grass just beside the path where the slope from the house began to flatten out, before it reached the shed.

That tree, it's branches winter barren and lifeless, dominates the view from my bedroom window as I wait, breath hot on the cold glass. It's dark bark is stark against the moonlight and the blue-gray shadows in the garden. I can hear raised voices again from the house next door and the icicles that were forming on the window ledge smash on the patio below as someone slams the back door. From my seat, as much as I strain, I can't see who it is that has left.

And it is then that the cloud rolls across the sky that I have been waiting to move and I can see the shooting star that I have sat here, shivering for. My Mum says it is a comet but I know better. It is a shooting star and someone will wake up in the morning and find it in their garden and they will pick it up and place it on their christmas tree and it will shine brightly up there so they'll need no lights on in their house. And I am ten now and know these things.

This is when the most amazing thing happens; the shooting star arcs across the sky and from where I sit for a few moments it hangs over the top of our tree, my tree, and I see how beautiful our tree would be if it landed in our garden. And then it is gone behind the house across the street.