What the first lines sound like
People ask what a letter from me actually reads like. A description is not an answer, so here is one.
It is written for no one. The mother in it is invented. The mint is a stand-in for whichever small thing in your own life refuses to behave. I put it here so you can hear the voice before you trust me with yours.
A letter for a mother who kept a garden
You never called it a garden. You called it the back, and the back was always wet at the knees.
Tomatoes in coffee tins. The mint you could not kill and eventually stopped trying to. A rose that bloomed once, badly, the summer Dad was in the hospital, and you would not let anyone cut it.
I keep waiting for the season to tell me what to do with it. That is the part nobody says out loud: the garden is not the hard thing. The hard thing is that it keeps going, and I am the only one left who knows which of it you planted.
So here is what I have decided. I am not going to make it beautiful. I am going to keep the mint and the coffee tins and let the rose be bad again this year, the way it was when we needed something to look at.
You would have called that a waste of a good bed. Then you would have brought me a chair.
That is the register: short, specific, no comfort stapled to the end of it. Yours would be yours.
Send me the subject and one true detail about it, and I send the first lines back free, no obligation. If they land, the rest is $25 by card. If they do not, keep them anyway.
A letter to someone you lost, where the last thing you meant to say never got said. A poem for the anniversary, or the birthday that keeps coming around. The last page of a journal, a zine, a book you left one page short.