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If she’d learned anything in her 85 years, it was that friendships forged in the fire were the hardest to extinguish. They were the ones seared into your being melded to your heart. A forever charred part of your soul and Judy had experienced that during the second world war, the most significant furnace of her life she wished it was something she could have taught her students as easily as she had taught them the physics of gravity. The richness of that kind of friendship, but at her age, she now understood the only way to truly know it was to experience it with another human being to walk the narrow path through the flames together, hold their hand to stop them from being consumed, as they Did the same for you, it was for that very reason. She had never given up hope through all these years, because her once a dearest friend was a part of her very being, and she knew, even in the many years of silence between them that she was part of hedys too drawn abruptly back from her reverie.

By a scattering of raindrops that splattered across the glass, Judy stared at the steady stream of rain, distorting the view of a sycamore tree, the mild snap of weather that had encouraged the first spring flowers from the ground had been replaced this morning by ominous grey rumbling Clouds and a vicious east wind that tossed the trees branches around as if it was juggling the leaves its violent blasts. Rattled, the sycamore wrenching tender new growth from its limbs turning them into dancing spirals that cavorted across the campus in wind, whipped, cartwheels accompanying the dramatic tumble of leaves tremendous gusts whistled through cracks in the sealed university windows, high, pitched, and urgent. Finding their way to Judy and chilling the back of her neck rubbing, gnarled arthritic fingers across her sagging skin and attempting to draw in the collar of her blouse Judy wished. She could be back in her room in front of her little electric fire in her comfortable beige cardigan above her. She could hear the excited jostle of an audience filling the room.

Everybody here to see her somehow seemed so ridiculous. She closed her eyes, reminding herself who she was doing this for there had been so much excitement at the announcement in the home and on the part of her caregiver Karen, as if it were a perfect bow to decorate the winter of her life. She hadn’t the heart to tell them all the awards and accolades meant little to the dying, the dying she let the words wash over her again. She was dying that reality was biting. It still felt raw and unreal to her even three months after the diagnosis being terminal, ill was so final she’d hoped to just die quietly in her sleep, but now there would be doctors and hospitals and pain.

At least it brought her some clarity in measuring her life. In days and weeks, maybe months if she was lucky, was an interesting experience with that kind of finality, everything became crystal clear, no more so than when she’d thrown out her most important exam results while doing her death cleaning the week before things that seemed so vital. Her earlier years were of no consequence now, all that remained were memories of love, the love she had shared throughout her life with Tom, the love she felt for her best friend, hedy too. Even, after all, this time, a bedraggled sparrow landed in the branches of the tree in front of her and stared at Judy. In desperation, its brown mottled feathers splayed like a fan buffeted by the wind and rain as she watched it, tuck itself under its wing for shelter.

The rhythm of the train lulled her and Judy’s eyes became heavy. This new medication seemed to make her drowsy all the time she would rest them just for a few seconds all at once. The presence of the sparrow brought something back to her and her eyes. Blinked open with the reminiscence, the nightingale, the sound of a nightingale, had woken her in the middle of the night from a dream about the war. She closed her eyes again scavenging through the corners of her hazy memory to retrieve the scraps of recollection.

She had been dreaming about the first time they had met. No, that wasn’t the first time they’d met Judy reminded herself, but that second meeting had stood out because it had been the first time. She’D met a real Hollywood movie star if she’d learned anything in…

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