Good morning.
It is Sunday.
There is a pumpkin on my desk. An actual one, this time. A baby pumpkin, small enough to sit in the palm of my hand, beside the microphone, being very orange at me.
The stem curls like it changed its mind halfway. I have been picking it up more than necessary. There are objects you look at. And then there are objects your hands keep returning to, because apparently looking was insufficient.
I wear a family ring. Gold, with a little row of diamonds across the top. Small ones. Minute, really. You would have to be sitting across a table from me to notice them. They catch the lamp anyway. They have never once apologized for their size.
I have been thinking about a day in Denver, a few weeks ago, a day I did almost nothing correctly. I missed a bus. Then another one. And I ended up exactly where I was supposed to be.
Lunch with someone who has become very important to the work. An afternoon around an old letterpress. A garden two new friends told me to see before the light went.
None of it was planned particularly well. Which may have been why I was actually there for it.
And this week, I did it again. A different bus. A different town. The same lesson. I think the lesson has been trying to get my attention.
So this morning is about one sentence. I found it at the bottom of a page I wrote for Elias, and I have not been able to leave it alone.
Let the beautiful thing stay its actual size.
I am capable of making a beautiful thing work very hard. Give me one lovely afternoon and by dinner I can have it applying for a position in the larger narrative. What does this mean? Where is this going? Should I write this down?
Naturally, I usually do write it down. Occupational hazard.
But lately I have been suspicious of the part that comes after noticing. The enlargement. A conversation becomes a friendship before the other person has finished their coffee. A room becomes home. A kindness becomes proof.
I know that machinery very well. It has made novels. It has also made a few situations considerably more complicated than they needed to be.
This week I took a day off the mountain. I don't drive, which you would think makes a day trip harder. It mostly makes it slower. Which turns out to be the point.
A bus down through the tunnel, the high country letting go of me a little at a time. And then a small town strung along a creek. A town I had passed for years in other people's cars, and never once walked.
So I walked it.
A coffee in my hand before I knew which way I was going. An iron footbridge over the water, the creek running white underneath it. A cottonwood on the far bank, going yellow at the edges, like it had not quite decided.
Old brick along the main street. Flowers in barrels by the doors. The sun coming through the clouds in long pieces and laying itself down on the sidewalk in front of me.
I didn't have a list. I didn't look anything up. I just let the street tell me where it went.
It was the best walk I have taken in a long time. And nothing happened on it. That is the whole review. Five stars. Nothing happened.
At the end of it there are hot springs that come up from inside the mountain. You go through a door, and down, and the rock closes in around you. It is dim. It is warm. The air is mostly steam.
And you get in.
Some of you have been with me long enough to remember the last time I talked about hot springs. It was not a simple story. I told you I first got sober at one, in Montana.
That I was there trying to survive myself, while other people came for the water to fix them. That I believed in places a lot, back then. The right town. The right room. The right mountain.
This time I didn't ask the water for anything. I didn't need it to heal me. I didn't need it to prove I have come a long way. Though I suppose I have.
It was warm. The rock was close. Somebody across the pool laughed at something I couldn't hear. The steam did what steam does. My shoulders came down from somewhere up near my ears, where they apparently live now.
That was it. That was its actual size.
And it was enormous.
I think that is the part I am learning. Actual size does not mean small. It means accurate. Sometimes the accurate size of a thing is very, very big. You just don't have to make it bigger.
I want to read you something. It belongs to something larger I am working on for Elias. I don't know exactly what yet. I like that. There are enough things in my life with names and dates and files.
This one is still allowed to be alive. This is Elias. And it is called, for now, Met Before the Introduction.
He missed the bus. Then he missed the next one. He stood there with a coffee in his hand. The right coffee.
He had made it with the cream already in, the way he liked it on a travel morning, and he had made it for himself with exactly the care he would have made it for a guest, and he was standing at the wrong end of a parking lot with it, watching the back of a bus go round the bend toward the interstate.
He laughed, a little, out loud. There was nobody to hear. The next bus came an hour later.
He watched it come, and he watched it stop, and he was, through a sequence of events he could not afterward reconstruct, on the other side of the lot when it left. The third one he got.
He took a window seat on the left side. He did not take out a notebook. He wanted that remembered, later, if he told it. He had a notebook in his bag. He always had a notebook in his bag. He left it there.
The day had stopped belonging to him somewhere around the second missed bus. He thought, afterward, that this was where it began.
The first person he saw when he stepped down in the city was the woman who reads the world on his behalf. They had lunch. He did not remember, afterward, very much of what they ate.
He remembered the light on the table, and her hands when she talked, and a particular feeling he had partway through, a loosening somewhere behind the breastbone, as if a belt he had been wearing for years had been let out a notch.
He understood, sitting there, what it was. She had already decided he was worth the trouble. She had decided it some time ago. She had done the reading, all of it, before she had ever said yes.
And so there was nothing for him to perform across that table. There was no version of himself he needed to make readable for her. She had already read him, and she had come anyway, and she kept coming.
He did not know what to do with that, except to say thank you. And to try to go on being the person she had said yes to.
The people who had come to matter to him lately were the ones who had met him before the introduction. Before he had prepared the room. The couple he was going to see that afternoon had met him that way.
He did not like to say where. It did not matter where. It had been one of the places where his ordinary life happens, and he had been working, moving, carrying things, thinking about six things at once and finishing four of them.
There would have been coffee somewhere. There usually was. And he had not been introducing himself. There was no card on a stand. There was no story about the book or the little press upstairs. He was just doing the day. And they had watched.
Not in any strange way. They had simply noticed. The way he moved through a room full of people. The things he cared about. The fact that if somebody near him looked uncertain, he was usually already moving to make the uncertainty smaller.
They had seen him while his attention was pointed somewhere else.
They kept a stationery shop in the city. Inside it smelled of paper. Good paper, the heavy kind, cotton and something faintly sweet.
There were cards in rows and envelopes in colors he did not have names for and a long table of pens, and the husband was behind the counter, and the wife came out from the back with her hands already reaching for his, and it was as if he had come to this door a dozen times before.
She was a letterpress, and she had been born in 1933. She was enormous. Black iron, worn wood, belts and gears and a great flywheel, all of it gloriously unconcerned with being sleek.
She had a woman's name, painted somewhere on her by a previous owner, and she stood in the back room in a square of light from the high window like an old aunt who has outlived everyone who ever told her to sit up straight.
The great wheel turned. The ink spread across the disk in a thin bright film.
The bed came forward and the paper went in white and came out, pressed so deeply you could have read it with your eyes closed.
Faintly imperfect at the edge, where the old wood had worn.
Near the end of the afternoon the husband showed him the wood. It was kept in shallow drawers, in an old cabinet against the wall, dozens of drawers, each one full of letters carved in wood and darkened by ink and years.
The husband lifted one out and set it in Elias's palm. It was a single letter, backwards, worn soft at the corners. By itself it said nothing at all. It was a small dark block of wood that smelled faintly of oil.
"You set them," the husband said. "One at a time. Backwards. And then you lock them up in the frame, tight, so nothing moves." He took a second letter from the drawer and set it beside the first in Elias's hand.
"And then it says something." Elias stood holding the two letters for a long time. People were like that. He thought it there in the back room with the press ticking as it cooled. Lives were like that. A coffee cup.
A boy on a bicycle on a red dirt road in Georgia. A song. A room. A person you knew for three months. A person you have known for thirty years. A sentence somebody said to you once and forgot entirely.
By themselves, they are pieces of wood. Backwards. Worn at the corners. And then one day you look at the whole arrangement locked tight in the frame and you see: oh.
That spells me.
He gave the two letters back. The husband put them in the drawer exactly where they had come from, without looking, and slid it shut.
"You have time before your bus," the wife said, near five. "Go to the gardens." "Go," the husband said. "Before the light goes." So he went to the gardens.
He walked in through the gate and something in him knew, almost at once, that he would come back. There was water. Stone. Trees that had been given room. Paths that bent just enough that you could never quite see where they finished.
Little changes in height. Little rooms made without any walls. The city went on somewhere beyond all of it, still being the city, and inside the garden people grew quieter without anyone asking them to. He loved it when a place did that.
Did not command quiet. Earned it.
He caught the last bus home. He caught it.
He was early for it, in fact, and stood at the right end of the platform with nothing in his hands, and when it pulled out the city went gold behind it, and then blue, and then it was only lights, and then the dark of the foothills, and the climb.
He did not reach for the notebook. But there was a cost to being so good at being readable. Sooner or later you begin to wonder whether people like you or the version of you that you made easy to like.
And every so often, life answers that question without being asked. A woman who has done the reading. A couple in a stationery shop who saw you in the middle of an ordinary day, and decided that was enough to come back for.
A press born in 1933. A garden. Some people did, he thought. Some people welcomed the man who had not prepared the room.
That night, at the desk, with the lamp on and the microphone on its stand at the corner, he opened the ledger. He had a long list of things he could have written. The three buses. The woman who did the reading. The press.
The garden. He looked at all of it and wrote none of it. The ledger was not for the thing that happened. It was for the thing you wanted to keep. He wrote:
Met before the introduction. Came back anyway.
And then, under it, smaller, because it was the thing he most wanted to remember and the thing he was most likely to forget:
Let the beautiful thing stay its actual size.
He capped the pen. The radiator under the library window ticked once, and then twice. Upstairs the house was asleep.
And somewhere far below the mountains, in a back room in the city, in the dark, an old press with a woman's name stood waiting in her square of window, cooling, patient, with the letters in their drawers beside her, each one small and dark and backwards and saying nothing at all, until someone set them side by side.
That second sentence is for me. I know it is, because I don't particularly like it. The useful sentences tend to be irritating that way.
When something beautiful enters my life, I can see everything it might become. That is one of the great pleasures of being a writer.
It is also why a normal person can say, you should go to this garden, and I can be halfway through constructing a philosophy of providence before the Uber arrives.
Give me warmth and I begin checking the foundation. Give me belonging and I start wondering where the books will go. Give me recognition, and some ancient little clerk inside me stamps the document. Permanent.
That clerk has been reassigned. He was exhausted.
I keep thinking about those wooden letters. One by itself means almost nothing. A little block. Backward. Worn. You need the others. We keep wanting the single event to explain everything. This person changed me. This place saved me.
Perhaps. But probably not alone. Maybe a life is hundreds of little pieces that say almost nothing, until enough of them have been placed beside one another.
A kitchen in Georgia. A red dirt road. A bus I missed, and the one I caught. A card a stranger handed a bartender at Mammoth, that he kept. A woman in Gardiner who took me in the way a grandmother does.
A reader, almost seventy, running out into the rain. A woman across a lunch table who had already done the reading. Two people in a stationery shop who saw me while I was busy doing something else. A machine from 1933.
A room above a lake in Dillon, and the people who opened its doors last night and let me in. A footbridge over a creek in a town I had never walked. Warm water, in the dark, asking nothing.
And the people I haven't met yet. The ones I meet on Monday. The ones who will come and sit with me on Thursday. The ones in a town I can't see from here. They are already in the drawer. I just haven't held them yet.
Then one day you look at the arrangement and think, oh.
That spells me.
Not forever. Just so far. There is still room in the frame. I love that.
And nobody in any of it needed to become more important in order to matter. The woman at lunch does not have to become a symbol. The garden does not need to become my next address. The water does not need to have healed me.
The delight remains. Reducing the demand does not reduce the beauty. It protects it.
One more thing, because it has been the week for it. People keep telling me, kindly, that a door has closed. I understand what they mean. I just don't believe that doors close forever.
A door is a door. A wall is a wall.
A wall is the thing you cannot walk through. A door is only a wall that has decided, for now, to be shut. You can knock on it later. Somebody can open it from the other side. The weather changes. People do.
Some of the doors in my life are shut right now. I am not going to stand in the hall and call them walls. That would be making them bigger than they are.
Actual size. A door is a door.
And that brings me to you. Because Sunday cannot only be me handing you finished meanings. I want something back. Not content. Not confession. Something much smaller. Here is the Sunday question.
What beautiful thing in your life are you asking to become bigger than it needs to be? A friendship you have just begun. A trip. A job. A room you love. A door you have already decided is a wall.
What if you did not shrink it, and did not dismiss it? What if you let it stay exactly as beautiful as it already is? Tell me the thing. And then tell me its actual size. One line is enough.
If you want it kept between us, say that. If you are willing for me to bring it back, without your name, into a future Sunday Room, tell me. Nothing becomes part of Galena House without your permission.
And because it is Sunday, we need something from the kitchen. The essay has already decided what. Pumpkin. Obviously. Nothing requiring an inheritance narrative. Just something small enough to stay its actual size. Sunday pumpkin butter toast.
You need a thick piece of good bread. Butter. Pumpkin puree. Brown sugar, cinnamon, a little salt. And cream cheese, if you have it. Toast the bread properly. Not warmed. Toast. There should be an edge to it.
While it is still hot, butter it. If you have cream cheese, put a thin layer down. Mix a spoonful or two of pumpkin with a little brown sugar, cinnamon, and the smallest pinch of salt, and spread that over the top.
If you want to be excessive, which I support selectively, put a little coarse sugar on top and send it under the broiler for less time than you think. Stay there. This is not the moment to answer an email.
When the sugar catches and the edges darken, take it out. Coffee beside it. That's breakfast. No mythology required. The pumpkin does not need to become a pie.
I am looking at the little pumpkin again. No label. No explanation. No note telling me what the season was supposed to become. Just the thing itself. I think that may be what I want more of. Not less meaning. Less forcing.
Miss the bus. Take the third one. Walk the town you have only ever driven past. Get in the water. Keep the small thing where you can see it. Let the afternoon finish before asking it what it plans to do with the rest of your life.
There will be time to understand it. There always is. Wednesday understands Tuesday. The writer eventually catches up. But the man gets to live first. I am trying to give him that. I am trying to give myself that too.
If this room has kept you company, the Patron Circle is how the lamp stays on. It's at averylanemaxwell.com. And if it hasn't, come back anyway. The door is a door.
Met before the introduction. Came back anyway. Let the beautiful thing stay its actual size.
I'm Avery Lane Maxwell. This is Galena House Audio. The Sunday Room.
There is coffee. There is pumpkin toast. There are a few very small diamonds catching the lamp. And for once, nothing in this room is required to become anything else.
Come in.