The boy stood at the top of the steep metal steps and said goodbye to the driver, Mr. Wilson, a white-haired old man almost too small to drive such a big bus. When the empty bus stopped, the boy stepped from the bus to the hot tar of the macadam road. He could smell the tar and his sneakers popped bubbles formed in the tar from the heat, from the direct full sun, and for a moment the boy thought of the California tar pits he had heard of and seen in National Geographic, and he thought of all the animals trapped there in the tar and dead and sunk for the ages. Sabretooth tigers and others.

He pulled his Pumas from the oil and walked those few strides to the mailbox under the white pine. The pine tree was dying from the road salt spread by the town in winter and he could hear his father complaining about it because he had planted that tree, and he was never afraid to speak up and the town spread too much salt and should change their god damned priorities. The mail was uninspiring, and the boy skipped lightly down the gravel incline from the town road to the lane.

The lane was straight and dirt and lined with a deep ditch grown in with day lilies and then above the ditch, hedges of various growth, and at this point the white farmhouse way down, due east, was hidden by locust trees and lilacs and maples.

He carried no books with him today, and after folding the mail into his back pocket both his hands were free while he walked, and he found that unusual as he always brought books home with him and he carried them on his right hip like he was in the habit of carrying most things. But not today, today he carried nothing, and it was as if he could feel his mind slowing down and his walk slowed down too; and after the diesel exhaust of the bus and the tar of the road, now he was away from the road and could begin to smell the mown hay his father had crimped near the small irrigation pond full of sunfish and frogs you could hear way in the upstairs bedroom at night. He saw the rows of silverish-green hay laid out in ribbons across the field and the red International was parked near the hay with an orange and rusted hay rake attached, waiting to rake the hay and dry the underside.

The boy was alone and that was fine as he knew how to enjoy solitude and often it was better, and he heard the sly catbird in the multiflora roses grown wild and invasive near the top hill in the lane, and then saw the catbird come from the bush where it no doubt had a nest. The catbird flew to the mown hay and made easy prey of a crimped insect injured in the hay. The sleek grey bird brought dinner home like a well-trained, immaculately dressed waiter in London, or New Orleans, he imagined.

After the roses, grew the elderberry bushes and the berries were well formed and still green but they brought to mind the thin man from the village who always wore a dark black coat and came for milk with a small pail, walking from the village, and asked his father for the berries, purple in the fall, from which he made wine, and when he talked of this wine his eyes would light up and his accent was central European, maybe Czechoslovakian, and once he brought a bottle of elderberry wine for the father and the father thanked him for the wine but never drank it. In fact, I think his name was Ellsberg. But it might just as well have been Kafka. No, it started with an E, for sure.

Between the dirt lane and the elderberry was a strip of grass, an odd sort of quarter mile long extension of the lawn which often was mown with the lawn mower when time allowed. But when not, it grew in, and the red dots the boy had seen a day ago now came into closer focus as he had more time and he stopped walking and looked at the wild strawberries he remembered grew there and picked some. He did not eat them individually but picked a hand full, then ate the whole at once. They were so tart and fresh and small but full of bright juice. It was something you could enjoy for just a day or two out of a whole year and it didn’t seem fair. The berries were surrounded by poison ivy vines and their reddish leaves were a warning not to pick the berries, but, unlike the rest of his family, the boy was not allergic, and it was as if the berries were protected and meant just for him.

Next came two ancient maples, the first more dead than the next, that had such historical stature they could not be cut down, one with a woodchuck living in a hole in the roots and the top rotted out and starlings living in those holes with the hay of their nests sticking out of the oval knots blowing in the breeze.

He could see the corner of the white house now, the north porch where Uncle Wink died of TB long before he was born, and as he traipsed on, now the lilacs were in seed. And in the flower garden, near the goldfish pool, he could see where his mother had stopped gardening and a small pile of pulled weeds was under her gardening gloves and trowel.

The boy entered the house through the front door nobody called the front door, and the house was empty, and the air came through the big outside screens he had helped put on the living room windows, and the house was empty and cool from the shade trees in the yard.

He sat in the crazy rocking chair that if you rocked too far it felt like you were going all the way over and he rocked in the chair, gently, near the big windows and the cast iron radiators, cold in the summer, and rocked in the chair, looking back up the lane he had just walked down, the house quiet except for hearing the breeze in the leaves, and he thought of what he might do next.