But I was not hiding.

I was drowning, in that house without Virgil, and what pulled me out was not a self I found within; it was Emmitt’s box needing emptied and the Petersen kids waiting at the road and a hermit’s honey in September.

The need was a rope thrown to me across forty-two miles of gravel, and I held it, morning after morning, and it held me, and it pulled me back to shore so slowly I didn’t feel it happening.

There is a kind of person the modern world has no good advice for — the one for whom being useful is not an escape from living but the very thing that makes living bearable — and I am that kind, and the route knew it before I did.

I gave those ninety people a witness, every day, for thirty-one years.

What they never knew is that they gave me one back.