A letter from Papaw — First light. Screen door hanging quiet — no breeze yet to catch it.

The spring on the screen door's still loose. Been loose since before Ruth got sick. I could fix it in ten minutes. I've had ten minutes every day for years and I've spent them on other things.

Truck pulled up the gravel drive yesterday afternoon. Didn't know it. Man got out I'd never seen — mid-thirties maybe, ball cap, walked up like he'd been here before. Said he'd taken a wrong turn off the county road hunting a piece of property up past the ridge. Had a map on his phone that quit on him where the trees close in.

I told him where to go. Then I told him again, slower, because the road forks twice and the second fork isn't marked. He wrote it down on the back of a receipt. Thanked me and stood there another minute like he was working up to something. Said his daddy used to fish a creek somewhere out this way when he was a boy and he'd been trying to find it for a year.

I walked him around back and pointed down through the pines. Told him the creek runs down there and it's been running there longer than either of us. Told him he was welcome to walk it. He looked at me a beat too long and said thank you, sir, and I could hear his daddy in him saying it.

After he drove off I went out to the shed. Wendell's old tackle box is still in the corner where I put it in '78, and I don't open it, but I stood a minute looking at it. Deer came up to the tree line at dusk the way they do. Three of them. I watched till they went back in.

I'm telling you the truth — I treated that man like I'd known him coming up the drive, and it cost me nothing, and I don't know his name. That's what a stranger is. Somebody you haven't found the handle on yet. You put a hand out anyway.

Screen door still loose. Going to leave it. I know where the screwdriver is if I change my mind.

Love,