A letter from Papaw — Before light. Drizzle on the porch rail, house quiet.

Went hunting a flashlight in the cabinet under the TV last night and put my hand on Ruth's church directory from '02. Hadn't seen it in twenty years.

She'd made little marks by names. A cross by the sick ones. A star by the ones she liked. And by mine — her own husband — she'd drawn a plain circle and written stubborn, means well in her handwriting.

I sat down in her chair — still angled at the TV the way she left it — and laughed out loud. Then I didn't.

Forty-one years she listened to me say things sideways when I meant them straight, and gruff when I meant them soft, and she wrote means well in the margin and kept on. That circle in pencil is the whole of being married to somebody: they hear how you say it, and they stay anyway.

Fell asleep in her chair with the directory on my knees. Woke up when the news had gone to static.

Going to put it back where she had it. Not the drawer. The shelf by her chair, where her hand would've reached.

Love,