She slept in the day because she worked most of the night, but always with the awareness that daylight was outside and no amount of curtain-pulling or eye-shading could produce the necessary trickery.

She lived in a house, not over-small, yet unmistakably the dwelling place of a single person, with its aura of disuse and newness. Certain rooms always surprised her--where did all this space come from?

The house was about forty years old, upscale then and overlooked now, but still nice. Single persons had the flexibility to catch house bargains on the quick.

There was plenty of room for her plants.

When she remembered them.

The stereo, which sounded good in the last house, felt as if it filtered in from the neighbor's place now.

What she saw ten years from now seemed immeasurably further than twenty years in the other direction.

Her walls supported numerous frames of prints she collected in various places on her travels and residences elsewhere. There was a certain shelf-life to a new print or even a new frame, and she was about to nail down the formula any day now.