The Route

For thirty-one years I had been proud of being the thread.

It took losing the job to teach me that the highest thing a thread can do is show a scattered people how to become a web, and then get out of the way.

I was the seeing when they couldn’t do it themselves.

And then I taught them, without meaning to, by falling on that kitchen floor of Emmitt’s and letting them all see how thin the thread had always been — and they wove themselves a net, and it will hold long after I’m gone, and that is a better monument than being irreplaceable ever could have been.

Chapter 12 — The Last Winter

That last winter on the route was the most beautiful of the thirty-one, because I got to watch a road full of people who’d been strangers to each other become, house by house, a community, and I got to know it was partly my doing.