I just drive the forty-two miles, once in a while, on a slow afternoon, the way you visit a grave or an old friend, and I look at the boxes standing empty of their old purpose at the ends of the driveways, and I remember who is behind each one.

People ask me if I miss it, and it’s the wrong question, or I don’t have a right answer to it.

I don’t miss the mail.

Nobody misses the mail.

What I had for thirty-one years was not a mail route; it was a front-row seat to ninety-some human lives, a daily standing invitation into the quiet middle of other people’s existence, an unearned and unrepeatable intimacy with a whole scattered corner of the world that trusted me, without ever discussing it, to be the one who came.

That is not a job.