Ada had kept every Christmas card she had received since 1971, in a series of shoeboxes under the side table, organized by year in the way that a former elementary school teacher organizes things: completely, with labeled tabs.
The shoeboxes went to me because, as Robert Fenn explained in the careful language of estate documents, the deceased had directed that they be given to a person who would understand that they represented the full record of a life’s significant relationships, and who would keep them.
I kept them.
I have not read all of them. I read through the 1971 box and the 1972 box and into the 1973 box before I understood that this was going to take much longer than an afternoon, and that it deserved more time than I was giving it.
I put them in the bookshelf in the order Ada had organized them and I read one year’s cards per week, which means I have been doing this for many months now and I have several more years ahead of me.
Every card tells me something about Ada that I did not know when she was alive.
The 1971 box contains a card from Gerald, the man before Leonard, with a short note inside that says: I hope you are happy. She had kept it fifty-three years.
Philip called me in December.
He had not called in the weeks after the funeral morning, which I had expected and which I understood.
He needed time with the letter and with Mr. Price and with the particular accounting that follows a conversation in which you discover that the story you had constructed about someone else was less accurate than the story they had constructed about you.
He called on a Sunday evening.
He said he was calling to apologize, and then he apologized, which are not always the same thing but in this case were: his apology was specific and acknowledged specific things, which is the only kind that does the work it is supposed to do.
He said he was sorry for how he had come to my door.
He said he was sorry for the things he had implied about Ada’s capacity.
He said he was sorry for not knowing about the fall in February.
He was quiet for a moment, and then he said: “She kept a water bill in her desk with your name on it. She could have put it anywhere. She kept it in her desk.”
“Yes,” I said.
“She wanted me to find it,” he said.
“I think she wanted you to understand what it was,” I said.
He thought about this.
“She wasn’t dependent on you,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“You were just present.”
“Yes.”
“That’s different.”
“Very different,” I said.
There was a pause.
“The Northline money,” he said. “I know I have to address that. Mr. Price has been very clear about it.”
“I imagine so,” I said.
“I’m going to repay the estate,” he said. “All of it. It’s going to take some time, but I’m going to repay it.”
“I think that’s the right thing to do,” I said.
“She said in the letter that the house would go to historical preservation.”
He paused. “I looked them up. The organization. They do good work. I’m going to volunteer with them this spring. Help with the restoration.”
I did not say anything immediately.
“She would have liked that,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I think that’s why she arranged it.”
After the call I sat in the front room for a while, in the chair that faces the window, with the street visible and the house next door visible and the bird feeder visible in the light from the porch.
The cardinal had been coming regularly since I started filling the feeder. Ada would have had something to say about this that combined superstition and botany in the way she combined most things.
I thought about what Philip had said: she wasn’t dependent on you. You were just present.
This is accurate and it matters.
There is a thing that people sometimes confuse, which is the difference between doing something for someone and doing something beside them.
What I did with Ada across six years was not provision and it was not charity, or it was not only those things: it was presence.
The bill was twenty-nine dollars a month, which is negligible. What it represented was a decision, made quietly and renewed monthly, to stay in the orbit of a person who was managing the last years of her life with dignity and stubbornness and occasional help and no drama about any of it.
She did not want to be helped.
She wanted to be accompanied.
I understood this because I had wanted the same thing in my own difficult years and had not always been able to say so, and when you have wanted something and found it hard to ask for, you recognize its absence in others more readily than you might otherwise.
The peppermint tin is on my mantel now.
It is a round red tin with a slightly dented lid, the kind you buy at a certain kind of pharmacy, nothing remarkable about it.
Ada kept it beside her front door because, she explained once, some people arrive carrying something that sits better with a little sweetness, and you should have something to offer them.
I have put peppermints in it.
I try to keep it full.
The Christmas cards from Ada’s shoeboxes are in my bookshelf in their labeled order. I am in the 1979 box now, which is the year Philip was born, and the cards that year have the particular warmth of cards sent to people who are in the middle of something significant: new baby, new family configuration, the world expanding rather than contracting.
Leonard’s handwriting appears in some of the cards, alongside Ada’s, signing jointly the way couples sign when they are still finding the grammar of their shared life.
Ada and Leonard. Ada and Leonard. Ada.
The progression is there in the boxes, in the handwriting, in the cards that stop being signed by two people and become signed by one, and then stop being signed at all and become only received, the collection continuing as the circle of senders narrowed.
She kept every one.
The last box is 2023, which is the year she died in October, and I have not opened it yet. I am not ready for the last box. There is time.
Philip sent a card at Christmas.
It came addressed to me with a Portland postmark, a plain card, the kind that is chosen with some care by someone who is not practiced at choosing them.
Inside, he had written: Thank you for what you were to her. I mean that plainly.
I put it in the shoebox I have started for 2024.
The historical preservation society contacted me in January about the Holloway house.
The organization is called the Parcel Street Heritage Project, which is specific to this street because the street has a history that makes it worth preserving:
it was developed in the 1890s and most of the original houses are still standing and occupied by people who have been here for decades and who have the particular attachment to a specific place that accumulates over time into something that functions like memory for a neighborhood.
The director of the project is a woman named Diane who has been doing this work for twenty years and who came to see the Holloway house in February with the focused attention of someone who knows what she is looking at.
She went through every room and made notes and asked questions and at the end she stood in the front room and looked at the mantel where the ugly pottery bowl Leonard had made was still sitting, because Ada had directed that it remain in the house, and Diane looked at it for a long moment.
“That’s original to the owner,” she said.
“Leonard Holloway made it in 1975,” I said. “Ada kept it because it was his.”
Diane wrote something in her notebook.
“We’re going to keep it,” she said. “The house is going to become what we call a living history site. Some of the personal objects stay as context.”
“Ada would have approved,” I said.
“You knew her well?” Diane asked.
I thought about the six years.
The mailbox conversations. The detective shows. The cheating at cards, which I had discovered when Ada taught me to play gin rummy in the winter of 2020 and I had watched her draw from the discard pile at a moment when the discard pile contained nothing she logically needed, and she had met my eyes with an expression of perfect innocence.
The fall in February, the forty minutes, the kitchen floor. The October afternoon when she had handed me the envelope with the quiet precision of someone completing a task she had given herself.
“I knew her as a neighbor,” I said. “Which is its own kind of knowing.”
Diane nodded.
“Philip Holloway called us,” she said. “He’s going to volunteer this spring. He said his mother arranged for the house to come to us.”
“Yes,” I said.
“He said she was thorough,” Diane said.
“She was,” I said.
“He seemed.” Diane paused, looking for the word. “Humbled.”
“It’s a good thing to be,” I said.
Diane smiled.
“Would you be willing to be involved?” she said. “In the project. You knew her and you knew the house and we try to have people connected to the history. It doesn’t have to be formal.”
I looked around the front room.
The mantel with the pottery bowl. The window with its view of the yard where the bird feeder stood.
The stairs that led to the bedroom where Ada had slept since 1972, in the bed she had shared with Leonard and then occupied alone.
“Yes,” I said. “I think I would.”
The spring came.
Philip came in April, as he had said he would, and worked two Saturdays with the restoration crew on the exterior of the house: the porch steps that had been sagging for years, the gutter on the east side, the trim around the upstairs windows.
He was not a skilled carpenter but he was a willing one, and Diane told me he had spent the lunch breaks asking questions about the house’s history that she had not expected him to know to ask.
I saw him from my yard on the second Saturday, working on the porch railing.
He saw me.
He raised his hand.
I raised mine.
We did not speak. We did not need to.
There was a conversation available between us that neither of us was ready for in that specific moment, and we both understood this, and we both understood that the moment would come eventually and that there was no urgency.
Ada had left us both with something that required some time to properly receive.
In the evening, after Philip’s car had left and the restoration crew had packed up, I filled the bird feeder and stood in Ada’s yard for a moment.
The shutters were still blue.
They had been repainted in March, the same blue, the same color Leonard had chosen on the March weekend in 1988.
Diane had been meticulous about this: the historical record showed the color and the color was maintained.
The cardinal came, as he usually did in the evening.
He landed on the feeder with the confident ease of a bird who considers a particular feeder his, which this one now was, which Ada would have approved.
I stood there until the light changed.
Then I went home to the house with the yellow door, and I made dinner, and afterward I sat in the front room with the 1979 shoebox and read the cards from the year Philip was born, in Ada’s voice and Leonard’s voice and the voices of thirty years of friends and family members and the full accumulated warmth of a life being actively lived.
On the table beside my chair was the peppermint tin with its slightly dented lid.
I keep it full.
Some people arrive carrying something that sits better with a little sweetness.
Ada knew this better than most.
I am trying to learn it from her.
I want to tell you about the October afternoon.
It was the third week of October, about two weeks before Ada died, on a day that had the specific quality that good October days have here: the air cold enough to be honest about the season but the sun still strong enough to make sitting outside worthwhile.
Ada had been on her porch when I came home from the grocery store, which was unusual enough that I had stopped and looked, because Ada’s porch time had diminished significantly in the preceding months and I had learned to note its presence and absence the way you learn to note the details of any situation you are paying close attention to.
She was in the old wicker chair with the cushion she had been meaning to replace for three years, and she had her good coat on, the gray wool one she reserved for church and doctors’ appointments and apparently for whatever this afternoon was.
“Sit with me,” she said.
I sat on the porch step.
We were quiet for a while, which was something we had both learned to do well.
Ada had taught me most of what I know about comfortable silence: that it is not the absence of conversation but its own form of it, that two people can be together without speaking and the together-ness is the thing rather than an interruption of something else.
“I have something for you to hold,” she said.
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