The House On the Hill

He remembers their first time, in the evening chill near to the cornfield behind the house on the hill. Where the old folks live who are lost behind its door and don’t know where, or who they are any more. He visits her most days, she often doesn’t know who he is at the house on the hill, where she now needs to live. Sometimes she looks at him with a certain look in her eye and he knows that look and he tries hard not to cry. He wonders if somewhere behind those troubled eyes the woman he loved so much somehow still survives. And just occasionally in a moment of lucid thought she remembers the times when her life was less fraught. The time they were young lovers, passionate and free and so happy to be married in the spring of fifty three. The children they raised and all their cute little ways and the sounds of Sinatra and Minnelli, on the airwaves. He sits in his chair gazing through the window each night up to the house on the hill, until the last moment of light. Wondering if she looks down at the place she called home and if she really knows he still lives there, all alone.