He took me out of a deep reverie of contemplation in the process of writing up an opinion piece I meant to publish on one of my blog sites. Whenever my attention is taken elsewhere while I'm composing, it is by a prodigious effort required on my part to wrest my mind away from the matter at hand, and it takes a few seconds before I am able to give my full attention to the distraction.

In this instance, he had been struck a short while earlier, by an impulse-not-to-be-discarded, because it strikes so infrequently, to clear out some of his files. He had been rummaging through one such file when he came across two sheets of paper on which had been copied something that had years ago been published in the local newspaper. And it was those two sheets that he now thrust before me, a grin on his face. Of course that grin is not unusual; he usually does smile, when he's confronting me with his presence, a kind of distant hug, always comforting.

So I looked. At a picture of a woman I judged to be about in her late 50s, hair going grey, a pleasant smile on her face. I thought she looked familiar. But then, I also thought she looked somewhat like so many other people I'd seen in my life. Who she was I couldn't determine, and wasn't very interested in doing so, though I must have looked quizzically at my husband. His smile became broader. He urged me to look again.

Nothing clicked until he finally relented and said, 'It's you!', and I recalled many years ago, likely at least fifteen years back, having written an opinion piece and forwarded it to the newspaper. It was about my experiences over the years embarking on annual door-to-door canvasses to elicit donations from neighbours on my street for various charities. A piece that was published after the paper had sent a photographer along to our house to take a picture of the writer.