it was not our house. it belonged to a woman our mother called your great-aunt, though we were never told the precise nature of the relation. she lived in a stone house at the end of a road that ended at her gate. we visited for an afternoon, every august, on the third sunday, until we did not.
we knew it by its smells: the cold smell of the hall, which had been a dairy; the wax smell of the parlour, where we sat. she gave us each a glass of squash and a biscuit, and she asked us, in a careful order, what we had done in the year between. she remembered what we had said the year before. we did not always remember, and were embarrassed.
she died in a year we cannot now place, between visits. our mother did not tell us until the august after. by then the house had been emptied and the gate had been locked and the road went, as before, to her gate; only the gate went, now, to nothing. we drove past the turning that year. we did not slow down. it would have been, our mother said, an unkindness.