The moving truck across the street

The quiet hum of the cul-de-sac was broken this morning by the groan of a large truck. It was one of those big moving vans, the kind that swallows up furniture and lives and spits them out somewhere new. Its sheer size felt like an intrusion on our neatly trimmed street, parked directly across from our house.

I watched it from the kitchen window, sipping my coffee, the mug warm in my hands. Lenae was still asleep upstairs, the house holding its breath in the early light. A moving truck; it had been years since anyone new had arrived on our little loop, and a strange ripple went through the usual calm, a tiny tremor hinting at change I hadn't expected.

First glimpses of the new neighbors