She sorted the correspondence into three piles. Bills, personal, everything else.
Tuesdays were for clearing.
She’d done it for eleven years, since the year she fell behind on everything — taxes, birthday cards, a subscription she’d meant to cancel in February. The system wasn’t complicated. Bills went left. Personal went right. Everything else went in the middle, which was always the tallest pile, because most of what arrived was neither obligation nor connection. Catalogs. Voter guides. Coupons clipped to postcards from dentists she’d never visited.
The middle pile she handled first. It was satisfying in a way the others weren’t — each piece discarded without consequence. A catalog of patio furniture. Recycled. A credit card offer with her name misspelled. Recycled. A newsletter from a nonprofit she’d donated to once, seven years ago. She paused on that one. Not because she wanted to read it. Because she remembered writing the check.
Bills she handled second. Electricity, water, the mortgage on a house she’d paid half of for twelve years before it became fully hers. She opened each envelope with a letter opener her father had given her — a brass thing shaped like a sword, kept in the drawer with the stamps. She never tore envelopes. The sound bothered her.
The personal pile she saved for last.
It was usually small. A card from her sister. Occasionally a letter from her college roommate who still wrote by hand on stationery with wildflowers pressed into the margins. Once, years ago, a postcard from someone she’d dated briefly who’d moved to Portugal and sent her a photograph of an aqueduct with no note on the back except her address.
This Tuesday the personal pile had one item.
She didn’t recognize the handwriting. The return address was local — a street she drove past on her way to the grocery store. The envelope was plain white, business-sized, sealed with tape instead of the adhesive strip.
She opened it with the brass sword.
Inside was a photograph of her front door. Taken from the sidewalk, during the day, when the light caught the wreath she’d hung in March and forgotten to take down. On the back, in the same careful handwriting: I walk past your house every morning. The wreath is still beautiful. I thought you should know.
She set the photograph on the table.
She looked at the three piles. Bills dealt with, everything else recycled, personal consisting now of one photograph and the space it had opened.
She went to the front door and looked at the wreath. Dried lavender, bound with twine. The purple had faded to grey. Two springs and a summer had passed through it.
She brought it inside and set it on the kitchen table next to the photograph.
Tuesday was for clearing, and she’d cleared everything except the thing that didn’t fit. So she made a new pile. A pile of one. The wreath on top of the photograph, left where she’d find it Wednesday morning, when clearing was over and she could stop sorting and just look.