The letter from my mother arrived eleven days after I sent mine.
I knew it was from her before I opened it. Her handwriting on the front, the particular way she formed the letters of my name, unhurried and deliberate, the way she did everything. I sat on the edge of my bed with it in my hands for a moment before I broke the seal.
She wrote that she had read my letter four times.
She wrote that my father had read it twice and then folded it and put it in his jacket pocket and she had not asked him about it because she knew him well enough to know that was how he carried things that mattered.
She wrote that they were well. That the pack had continued in its ordinary way, which was what packs did. That the garden was coming in better than expected this season. Small things, real things, t
