It’s mid-June in my seventieth year, and I’m trying to write about fifty, sixty years ago, about the old lady who lived down the street in a tiny Cape Cod almost screened from the road by ancient elms, and suddenly realizing I know almost nothing. She was the Old Widow to us, Mrs. Freiczek to our parents, no first name, and I might be spelling it wrong. Now, guessing, she was a war widow who came from some anywhere in Europe, or not. We never saw visitors come and go, never saw her at church or in the butcher’s. I know we were all scared of her, hated when a bad swing lofted a ball into her yard, ending the game unless a bigger kid retrieved it, and yet I don’t recall her ever coming out to yell at us, cast the evil eye, or turn us into donkeys. With time the dirt road was paved, the ditches filled with concrete pipe and covered. The prairies we’d played in became fenced lots with houses while we were growing up and moving away with our lives. One time I came back to visit my folks and her house was gone, she was gone, nobody even sure what happened to her, and she faded away into an old man’s struggle to recall, like every era’s end.