A letter from Papaw — Before light. Kitchen dark, the click again.

I'm going to say this plain and I'm only going to say it the once.

The coffee maker clicked before it brewed this morning. Always has. It's the sound the machine makes getting ready to do the thing it does. I stood in the kitchen in the dark and listened to it click, and I thought — that's a machine, and it knows to stop between one thing and the next. Just for a second. Just long enough.

I didn't, for a long time. Worked at the mill from nineteen till they closed it, and I have got a drawer full of years I don't remember because I was already thinking about the next shift while I was in the middle of the one I was on. Came home tired, went to bed tired, woke up tired, and called it work. Told myself the job needed doing. It did. It also would've been there in the morning.

My hands drop things now. A spoon this week. A jar last month. They drop things because I used them for fifty years without setting them down, and now they set themselves down whether I ask them to or not. That is what happens. The body puts the tool down for you eventually, and it don't ask what you were in the middle of.

Here's what I want to say, and don't argue with me about it. Go to bed. Whatever it is, whatever fire feels like it'll go out if a man walks away from it — the fire will still be there. The mill still stands. It closed in '06 and it stands there yet, and every shift I ever worked past what I should have is just sawdust on the floor of a building nobody's been in for twenty years. The work outlasts you. Your hands don't.

Do like the coffee maker. Click once. Stop for a second. Then start.

The refrigerator's humming. Same hum it's had since '92. I'm going to pour a cup and sit with Hank a while before the day gets started.

Love,