Dear Reader,
My friend Maeve lives in a run-down mill house with a creaky, uneven porch where she sits with her roommates on humid summer evenings, rolling cigarettes and listening to cicadas. On poker night friends gather at her kitchen table, and she deals cards featuring comical drawings of naked men. When I stop by in the afternoons, she serves me homemade kombucha and tells me to relax and take myself less seriously. One afternoon at her house, when I realized how late it had gotten, I apologized and said that I hoped I hadn’t kept her from other obligations. She shrugged off my concern. “I finished everything I had to do about twenty years ago,” she told me.
