Memories are made of these

The Eagle has landed
“I’ve found it I’ve found it!” She squealed, as her aunt Joan met her outside Acton Station and her bursting with excitement at her earlier success with the newspaper archives at Colindale.
“Hi, that’s good, but get in and close the door, Esther, it’s freezing in here. You’ve had a good day then, let’s get you home and you can tell me all about it, don’t forget your seatbelt!” So she had gone through lights on green and amber and stood her ground when a white van driver with his ear clamped to a mobile phone failed to intimidate her as they sat there in a bottle neck and there seeming to be no way out for either of them whilst the summer rain splattered her car with gadgets many, as a plane flew low in the distance with it banking then tilting before dropping like a lead balloon out of site into Heathrow.
Then they sat together at the zebra on the main road before turning left into her cosmopolitan world. There on the crossing was a blind man with a stick and she said he lived quite close-by and seemed confident with what he was doing and they both probably thought of James-Jim to her and that was where the connection as well as the division of over forty years- from such different worlds - was the bridge too unstable to cross, oh how Esther hoped that this wasn’t so, as they drove along. She wanted to know so much about her dad, like why was he blind, what school did he go to, what was he like as a person, did he have a sense of humor and was he quirky like her and was his blindness genetic?
“Do you know,” she said as they drove and parked outside her large terrace house, “he would know the number of the buses by the sound of the engines? And he was never phased about the under-ground and always just with a white stick!”
Then they both got out of the car and headed towards her house and somehow everything then felt just right, and this was the continuation of that special friendship that went beyond her being an auntie and she definitely wasn’t what she had earlier expected. She seemed to enjoy cooking, and said how maybe she took after her own lovely mum as she reached into cupboards below her for a microwave dish and into a fridge concealed behind a cupboard door for her Soya milk. Mum was a master baker; that was something Esther didn’t know. Yet how could she know anything about her Nan, for the last time she had seen her was the day after her dad had died over half a lifetime since, yet of course she had thought about her from time to time as the years and understanding had flown and grown.
It was as important that she understood her aunt Joan, as Joan understood her. So she talked at length about Joe and how she loved her mum in spite of everything and how she treasured the memories of her dad, and was thankful for those first eight solid years of her life when she knew who she was as well as her place in the world just as she knew about love, not knowing as she talked if she was twittering on a bit too much about things and how bad they were and how much she had lost faith, and her belief in life all around her, but still she talked and stiller too her auntie listened and nodded and said she understood about loss.
“My Dad, your grandfather of course, was such a kind and a gentle and loving man, and I only a girl in my early teens when he died and I can’t believe where those years have gone.”
All Esther wanted to do was understand them and know where she came from and the roots broken in two all those years since and then it didn’t seem appropriate to say why that happened or look for blame, although Esther couldn’t forgive Joe or forget all the cruelty that lay in the back of her mind like a thick undercoat of paint that the mind wouldn’t or couldn’t let go of.
She gradually relaxed on her comfy chair opposite the open French window’s and her natural cottage garden shooing a grey squirrel off from her bird table, and lifting her fork of pasta and reaching for her glass of white wine with an American crime series playing quietly in the background, and Esther apologizing if she didn’t give her much eye contact, sometimes she still failed at when uncertain. At the end of that weekend she hugged her as she clambered out of her car back at the mainline station, now knowing so much more about her past, including where her Nan and Granddad were buried in Coventry, and so that would be her next planned journey. Esther turned briefly to wave to Joan as her car took the second exit on the little roundabout and Esther walked into the station, hoping her underground ticket was still there in the bag besides her brush knickers and take-a-break magazine, hoping she would get her connection later at St Pancras Station.