Once past the pang of handing in her keys, she met none of the miseries foretold for the retired. Those bus-stop waits in the cold were well lost, and she slept the sleep of peace alarmless. What dawned slowly was a dulled or loosened hold on morning’s luxuries— the moon, a sliced pearl set in lapis skies diamonded by one planet, with the gold- red band of sunrise chasing her. ………………………………………And she thought then of an older loss: when her last child had learned to sleep till daylight, and her lulled limbs fled communion with the monk, the night- watcher, the graveyard shift, as she became an outcast from the house of two a.m.