The four o’clock light.

A hermit’s wordless honey.

A child racing a mail truck up a driveway, small enough one year to need lifting to the mailbox, tall enough a few years later to reach it herself, and the whole of a childhood contained in the distance between.

I spent thirty-one years thinking these were the incidental texture of a job whose real point was the mail, and I had it exactly backward: the small things were the point, were the whole harvest, and the mail was the least of what I carried.

Nobody writes the small things down.

There’s no form for them, no column, no monument.