“The can was just sitting there on the steps, lid off, brush balanced across the rim like whoever it was had only just stepped away.”

I stood on the front walk and looked at it for probably a full minute before my brain caught up to what I was seeing.

The ladder was still leaning against the porch post. The drop cloth was tucked around my hydrangeas the exact same careful way Donald used to do it when he was painting anything near the garden. He always said you had to treat the flowers like they were sleeping. You worked around them quiet.

I don’t know why that’s the detail that got me. The drop cloth. But it did.

Let me back up a little. Donald built that porch swing in the spring of 1981, the year after we moved into this house. I remember watching him work from the kitchen window while I was canning tomatoes. He had this way of measuring twice and then measuring a third time just to be sure, and I used to tease him about it. He’d laugh and say he’d rather be slow and right than fast and wrong. That was just who he was about everything, not just woodwork.

He passed in the spring of 2011. Heart attack. One of those things that happens fast and leaves you standing in a hospital hallway trying to figure out why the fluorescent lights are so loud all of a sudden. We had been married thirty-one years.

The first Good Friday after he was gone, I came home from the noon service at First Lutheran and the swing was freshly painted. Glossy white, still faintly tacky at the armrests. I remember pressing my finger to it just to confirm it was real. I thought maybe one of our sons had done it, but when I called Thomas he said it wasn’t him, and our younger one, Ray, was living in Colorado by then. I asked around a little. Nobody admitted to anything.

So it just became a thing that happened. Every year on Good Friday, I’d walk to the noon service and come home to a freshly painted swing. For a while I tried to stay home and watch for who it was, but that felt wrong somehow. Like if I caught them, they’d stop. And I didn’t want it to stop. I needed it, honestly. More than I could explain to anybody without sounding a little unhinged.

I’ve tried to describe to my friend Paulette what it felt like coming home to that swing every year. She’s a good listener but I could tell she thought I was maybe reading too much into it. She’d say things like, oh, what a sweet neighbor, and I’d say yes but also I haven’t been able to figure out which neighbor for going on a decade now. And she’d get a little quiet after that.