A letter from Papaw — Friday. Cleared out the junk drawer in the kitchen, finally.

Found my time card from the mill in there. Don't know how it ended up in a kitchen drawer. It belongs in the shed if it belongs anywhere. But there it was, under a stack of expired coupons and a screwdriver I'd been looking for since March.

My name punched along the top in that old machine ink. Last shift, October '06.

I sat down with it.

I'll tell you something I've been turning over a long while and never said out loud. I almost left here. Not the Burnsville business — older than that. After Wendell. There was a stretch where I thought about going to Tennessee, to a cousin of mine who had a line on work at a plant outside Knoxville. I had the bag half packed. I drove down to Asheville one afternoon for parts and sat in the truck in the lot for an hour deciding.

I came home. Ruth didn't even know I'd thought about it. I never told her. I never told anybody.

I have made the Asheville run, what, four hundred times since. Five hundred. Every month for forty-some years. The Ford knows the road better than I do. There's a curve past the river where the tires go quiet for a second on the bridge and then come back loud on the asphalt, and I have heard that sound so many times it is part of how I know I'm alive.

Here's what I'll say plain, and I mean it the way you mean a thing at seventy-three with a time card in your hand. I could have gone to Tennessee. I could have gone to Burnsville. I could have gone anywhere. I would still be from this ridge. The gravel drive would still be the sound my tires made when they came home, even if home was somewhere else.

I put the time card back in the drawer. Wrong drawer, but it's where I found it.

Going to feed Hank.

Love,