Twenty minutes turned into an hour. I left with a full heart and a considerably colder lunch delivery schedule behind me.
One of my longer-standing Meals on Wheels clients, a genuinely lovely woman who I have gotten to know fairly well over the better part of two years delivering to her every week, asked me today, entirely out of nowhere, whether I might read her one of my own poems instead of simply dropping off her lunch and moving on to my next stop the way our visits usually go, a request that turned what was supposed to be a quick five-minute delivery into a genuinely wonderful hour-long conversation that ended up being, without much competition, the best part of my entire week.
I had mentioned, in some previous visit I honestly do not fully remember the specifics of, that I write poetry alongside the London-focused journalism that actually pays my bills, a small detail I did not expect her to hold onto given how much else we typically talk about during our regular visits, weather, her grandchildren, whatever specific piece of local news happens to be occupying her attention that particular week. She had, apparently, been thinking about it since, and today, finally, worked up the nerve to actually ask directly whether I would share something.
I read her the shorter of two poems I happened to have saved on my phone, a piece about my own grandmother that felt considerably safer to share aloud than the much longer, more personal piece I have been sitting on privately for months now, and watched her listen with a specific, focused attention that genuinely moved me, the kind of careful attention poetry rarely receives from an audience beyond other poets and the occasional patient family member being read to somewhat against their will.
Afterward, she told me a poem of her own, one she said she had written decades ago and never shared with anyone beyond her late husband, a short, genuinely beautiful piece about the specific view from her childhood bedroom window that she recited entirely from memory, without a single hesitation, despite claiming she had not thought about it properly in years. I asked if I could write it down, and she agreed, watching with visible, quiet pleasure as I carefully transcribed her own words back to her, a small act of preservation that felt, in the moment, genuinely significant beyond its modest scale.
This is, I think, exactly the kind of unexpected connection that makes both poetry and this specific volunteer work feel like they belong together in my own life rather than existing as two separate, unrelated pursuits I simply happen to do concurrently. Both require the same fundamental willingness to actually slow down and pay real attention to another person’s specific, particular experience, rather than rushing past it toward whatever comes next on an ordinary, busy schedule.
My delivery route ran considerably behind for the rest of the afternoon, and I ended up apologising to my next several stops for the delay, though I found I genuinely could not muster much regret about it once I explained, briefly, what had actually happened. Most of them, once they heard the story, seemed to understand completely, a few even mentioning poems or songs of their own I now have a small, growing list of promises to eventually ask about on some future visit, once today’s particular unexpected gift has had time to properly settle.
I have started thinking, driving home this evening considerably later than my schedule normally allows, about compiling some of these small, shared poems and stories from across my whole delivery route into something more permanent, a modest, informal collection that would exist purely for the specific community it came from rather than for any wider publication, a way of properly honouring exactly this kind of unexpected creative exchange that keeps happening, quietly, behind ordinary front doors most people never think to knock on with quite this much curiosity.
I do not know yet what that project would actually look like in practice, and I suspect it will take considerable time to gather enough material to feel like a genuine, coherent collection rather than a scattered handful of disconnected notes. But today’s hour, unexpected and considerably behind schedule as it left me for the rest of the afternoon, felt like exactly the kind of moment worth building something more lasting around, a small, real record of the poetry and stories quietly living inside a community most people, myself included until I started this specific route, rarely think to properly ask about.
For tonight, though, I am simply sitting with today’s specific gift, her poem carefully copied into my notebook alongside my own reading of mine, two small pieces of writing exchanged across a kitchen table on an entirely ordinary Tuesday that turned out to be anything but ordinary once we actually slowed down long enough to properly share them with each other.
I keep thinking, writing this entry hours later, about how close I came to simply dropping off the lunch and moving on the way I usually do, and how easily today’s entire exchange could have never happened at all had I been running even a few minutes more behind schedule than I already was. I do not know how many more of these small, waiting gifts exist quietly behind the other doors on my route, unasked for and unoffered simply because nobody has yet slowed down enough to invite them out into the open, and I intend to start asking, gently, considerably more often than I have been.
More from this author at Lotte Heidenreich, prat.uk.