And then, right at the bottom, in different ink, like she'd come back to it later: Anyway. I hope you are not still worrying about that thing.

She never said what the thing was. I have no memory of what the thing was. But I sat on the floor of the spare room for a good ten minutes with my coffee going cold, feeling completely, absurdly seen by a woman who has been dead for eleven years and who was mostly writing about a fence.

That's the thing letters do that almost nothing else does. She wasn't fixing my problem. She'd probably forgotten what it was by the time she licked the envelope. She just — knew it was there. And said so. And went back to the fence.

I've been thinking about that a lot — about how strange it is that we've ended up with a hundred ways to broadcast and almost no way to be quietly noticed by one person.

So I've put a box up.

If there's something you're tired of, or stuck on, or that you've been hauling around without ever quite saying out loud — you can write to me about it. It's called The Letter Box, because I couldn't think of anything cleverer, and honestly I'd have been suspicious of myself if I had.

I won't fix it. I have no framework, no five steps, and a to-do list of my own that is currently getting away from me. But I'll read it. And once a month, on a Saturday, I'll pick one and answer it properly — the way you'd answer someone who wrote to you. Which is to say slowly, and imperfectly, and with a fair amount about the fence.

Put your name on it or leave it off. If I answer yours here, nothing in it will point back to you. And if you'd rather it stayed between us, say so — I'll write back to you instead. Not quickly. But I will.