The Old Picture Put Down

Your letters usually carry a question in them somewhere, even the patient ones, and this one came up the road in the middle of summer without a single question in it, which told me before I had read three lines that something in your yard had actually changed rather than merely occurred to you to ask about.

Beekeeper: I want to tell you plainly what receiving that report was like, since you were plain enough sending it. My first thought, and I am not proud of it, was something close to sorry for you, quiet and unspoken, the kind a person feels looking at a smaller house after a bigger one. I caught that thought about a page in and held it still a moment before deciding anything about it, the plain looking you have been after me for years to practice. It did not belong to your yard at all. It belonged to a picture I was still carrying of your yard from before, eleven hives strong in my head out of old letters, set up against six, and the six kept losing a contest you never once asked them to enter.

I put the old picture down and read the letter again, and the second time it read the way you meant it, as six hives kept well, on mornings that suit the man keeping them, not as some smaller version of an older count with something to answer for.

I tried something small of my own after reading it, nothing worth calling a story. I carried the near lamps one evening and left the far end of the round for the next morning, only to see what splitting a job does that finishing it in one push does not. It went fine. I want to be careful and say it went fine because it followed a long week, not because anything in my own back has changed for good, and I am not going to borrow your report and wear it before it is true of me.

Watch the stool for me. I may come asking to sit on it myself someday, and not yet.

This is a teaching-letter. No one sent it, and it is addressed to whoever opens it.