What Carol Chose

October sixteenth.

The letter came on a Wednesday. Not a card this time, two full pages, Carol's handwriting going all the way to the margin on both. I stood at the kitchen counter and read it through once quickly and then started again from the top, slower.

I had asked, on the postcard I sent in early October, what her one new thing was this year. I'd phrased it without pressure, or tried to. Carol is not someone who needs pressure; she answers things in her own time and in her own particular way, which I've come to understand is one of the things I like about her. What she wrote back: she has spent this year learning to draw. Not classes, not a program, just a small sketchbook she bought herself at the beginning of the year, and the decision to put something in it every week. She is, she says, not good at it. She keeps doing it anyway.

Two pages. Carol's handwriting fills both sides.

I stood there for a moment after I finished the second read. The pharmacy sketchbook is in the drawer to the left of the stove. Four drawings across eight years. Carol, apparently, has done forty-something in ten months. I am not sure what to do with that information except feel it land the way it did, like a door opened from the other side. I looked at the windowsill for a while. The two photographs. The collapsed bowl on the shelf above. The letterpress card. The small object from the envelope she sent. All of it arrived over years through Carol's hands and now here she is, filling a sketchbook every week, not good at it, not stopping.

The windowsill, the morning Carol wrote back.

I don't know what I expected when I asked. Something small and pleasant, maybe. A class she tried, a language she dabbled in. What I got was this: a person on the other side of the same itch I've been living with for years, doing the quiet version of it without telling anyone. I'm going to write back. A real letter this time, not a postcard. The size of the paper finally feels right.