A woman in Ann Arbor has, for the past nine years, been quietly writing weekly letters to the specific version of her mother that her mother’s dementia has taken. Her mother is still alive. She has never given her a single letter. Approximately 470 letters. She keeps them in the specific room her mother used to sit in.
A woman in Duluth has, for the past seventeen years, been quietly maintaining her late brother’s small woodworking shop in the garage of the house she inherited from their parents. She has not, in the seventeen years, made anything in it. She has, in the past year, begun to understand what she has been doing.
A woman in Nashville has spent nine months trying to understand why her grandmother, in forty-one annual will updates, left her the same specific unremarkable kitchen item every time. The item is a small wooden lemon reamer. The woman does not, and never has, made lemonade. She thinks she has, in the past month, begun to understand.