Sometimes a meaningful life moment steals into our lives and we don’t even know it has happened.

            Returning from my paper route on a chilly April morning, I climbed the eleven steps to my house on the hilly side of Church Avenue. I caught a flicker of something dash into the storage shelter, under the porch.

            I peeked, stooping at the entrance for several moments, peering inside. I smelled a whiff of musty newspapers but I could see nothing in the dark. A shiver ran through me. Wind whipped a tree branch against the house, but I heard nothing from within. So I hightailed away; paid it no further mind whatsoever; wrote it off as my imagination.

            On my way to school, I played the incident back in my head. That’s when I remembered leaving my prize possession, my Roberto Clemente model baseball glove, under the porch. My parents bought it for me last year when I made the junior high school team. I’d be really pissed if that was stolen. I should have checked more thoroughly, got a flashlight, inspected every nook and cranny.

            Before now, I never thought twice about leaving stuff under there, even though the entrance had no door. Our house was up and away from the street. The porch ran its entire front length and the space underneath did too, paved in concrete with a door to the basement. That, we always locked from the inside.

            I thought of ‘Under the Porch’ as my space. Mom and Dad stored things there, old papers for pick-up, outdoor tools for gardening and grass cutting. But it was special to me, my safe place, where I went to be alone.

            But an interloper may have intruded. I think that flicker was a flash of a face.