I watched you from across the street before you saw me. I watched you through your kitchen window, moving around. You looked like someone who was tired but who was not giving in to it. I have known some people like that. Estelle was like that. It is a quality I respect.
I cannot repay you for the soup and the blanket and the porch. Those things cannot be repaid in kind. But I can tell you what the key is for.
Before Estelle died, we had a storage unit. I kept paying for it after she passed because I was not ready to go through what was in it. In eight months of moving I have kept paying for it, which has cost me more than it should, but I was not ready. Last night, sitting on your porch listening to the rain, I became ready.
I am not going to the unit. There is nothing in there I need. But there is something in there that might be useful to someone, and you are the kind of person I want to give it to, because you were kind without knowing anything about me, which is the only kind of kindness that is entirely real.
In the small box on the bottom shelf, there is a leather notebook. Estelle kept it for forty years. She called it the recipe book but it was not only recipes. It was everything she knew about making something from nothing, because she had done it her whole life and she wanted to write it down. Recipes are in there, yes. But also: how she saved, how she stretched, what she did when things were hard, what she told herself when she didn’t know how to keep going. I always meant to do something with it. I never did.
If you have a daughter, she might want it someday.
The unit is paid through the end of the year. You can let it lapse after that if you don’t want to keep it. Everything else in there you can do with as you like. None of it is worth very much except to someone who might need it.
You were kind to me. The soup was the best thing I had eaten in months, and I have eaten some soup. But the kindness was more than the soup.
I hope your worries get smaller.
