Mailbag: Room to Walk Around

from where i stopped.

Two letters this week, and a phone message I am counting as a letter because the caller spelled out the punctuation.

"There is a lantern beside the footpath down to the landing, on the left going down, sitting in the grass, lit. It has been there since Friday. Nobody has touched it. Everybody who uses that path now goes around it on the right, through the wet part, and comes out the bottom with one muddy shoe. My husband says three feet is plenty. My mother says it is not, and goes around through the ditch."

"Ours is by a set of steps in town I will not tell you, on the second step from the bottom. The man who brings the boxes leaves them on the sidewalk now. He does not knock. He calls from the truck to say they are at the bottom, and then he goes, and he is a man who used to come in for coffee."

The phone message said only this: "Nobody is moving them. Nobody is going to. Tell people to give them room."

I went to look at the first one. I looked from the path. It is an ordinary lantern of the old kind, the kind you have seen on a porch rail in this basin your whole life, and it was lit in the middle of a weekday afternoon with the sun on it, which is the detail I keep turning over. Nobody lights a lantern at two in the afternoon. Somebody lit that one, or nobody did, and I do not like either answer.

So here is my instruction, and it is the one the town already came up with on its own: give them room. What I said last month still holds. Do not fill them.

I relay. You decide.

In Truth and Terror.
— Beau