PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

The boy felt strangely familiar to her even though they had only just met. When her son asked if he could bring home a friend at the end of the school year she was overjoyed. Robert was quite a shy child and she worried how he would adjust to life away at boarding school. The pair got on splendidly, she had never seen her son so at ease, so happy. They even looked alike, same height and gangliness, same ivy league haircut, mussed and mousy brown. They even had the same eyes, in both shape and color, a faded shade of evergreen. They could have been twins, at least fraternal, if not identical. They shared the same sensibilities as well - a fondness for chess, classical music, drawing. They spent evenings in her late husband's extensive library reading to one another from books on a variety of subjects. During the day they roamed the grounds of the estate often gone from sun-up to sun-down, returning at the last of dusk's waning glow, lanterns in hand, covered in mud and brambles. By the end of August that first Summer they had built an entire treehouse, shuttling planks piecemeal from the abandoned stables to the nearby woods. She could hear them from her balcony, hammering and sawing, discussing the engineering complexities of assembling an arboreal shelter, occasional outbursts of raucous laughter.

William was polite and extremely bright, possessing an intelligence and poise beyond what one would expect from a youth his age. When it came time for the boys to depart and return to school for Fall term, he thanked her munificently for allowing him to visit and reserved, with modest respect, kissed her hand, an action one was unlikely to ever witness from a 13-year-old lad.