The Lavender Post Office
At the soft edge of a lavender field, where the wind walks slowly because it has nowhere to be, there stands a small wooden post office with a crooked chimney and a lantern that hums.
The postmaster is a fox named Pim.
Pim has russet ears, a white-tipped tail, and a habit of forgetting things. He forgets where he put his spectacles (on his head). He forgets the names of the days (so he calls them by their weather). He forgets why he walked into the kitchen, and stays there anyway, because the kettle is kind company.
But Pim never, never, forgets a letter.
The post office is a quiet place. Few visitors come. The bell above the door tinkles only when a moth nudges it, or when the lavender leans in to say good evening.
Mostly, what arrives are the unsent letters.
They slip through the brass slot at twilight: letters written and never posted, words folded into envelopes and then tucked into drawers, into books, into coat pockets that went to the wash. Letters that wandered off from the people who wrote them and found their way, somehow, to Pim.
I’m sorry. I miss you. I should have said. Goodnight, wherever you are.
Pim does not read them. He would never. A letter is a private little house, and he is only the keeper of the street.
Instead, he sorts them by smell.
He lifts each envelope to his small black nose and breathes, very gently, the way you breathe on a window to see if it will fog. And the letter tells him, in its own quiet way, what kind of memory it holds.
Some smell of rain on warm stones. Some smell of a grandmother’s kitchen — flour, and butter, and patience. Some smell of the sea at the end of a summer. Some smell of a bedroom at six in the morning, when someone you love is still asleep and the light is the color of milk.
Pim sniffs, and nods, and murmurs, “Ah. The blue drawer for you,” or, “You belong with the others who smell of apples.”
Behind the counter, the wall is nothing but drawers. Hundreds of them. Each one is lined in velvet — moss-green, plum, dove-gray, the soft pink of the inside of a shell. Pim sewed the linings himself, on slow afternoons, with thread he kept forgetting in his pocket.
Into the right drawer goes each letter, to sleep.
“Dream well,” Pim whispers, sliding the drawer shut. “You’ll be needed when you’re needed.”
This is the secret of the lavender post office: a letter is not late just because it has not arrived. Some letters are simply waiting for their reader to be ready.
A child who is too small for the words. A heart that is too sore. A person who has not yet learned the language of forgiveness, or of staying, or of letting go.
The drawers hum softly through the years. The velvet keeps the letters warm. And the lavender outside the window breathes its long purple breath in, and out, and in, and out, and the letters dream of the hands that will one day open them.
On this particular evening — a slow, blue evening at the longest day of the year — Pim is tidying up.
He has forgotten his tea (it is on the windowsill). He has forgotten to wind the clock (it does not mind; it has been on its own time for years). He is just about to forget to blow out the lantern, when he notices a small envelope on the counter that he does not remember sorting.
It is cream-colored, with no address.
Pim lifts it to his nose.
It smells of clean sheets, and a small lamp, and someone reading aloud. It smells of being tucked in. It smells of almost asleep.
Pim smiles. He knows this one.
He pads, on quiet paws, to the very lowest drawer — the one closest to the floor, lined in velvet the color of the night sky just before the stars. He slides it open. Inside is a soft, waiting darkness.
“There,” he says, settling the letter gently in. “You rest here. Your reader is almost ready.”
He closes the drawer.
Outside, the lavender field has turned the color of a held breath. The first stars are stepping out, one by careful one. Pim climbs onto his little stool behind the counter, rests his chin on his paws, and yawns a small fox yawn.
He forgets, as he always does, what he meant to do next.
He remembers, as he always does, that it does not matter.
The lantern hums. The drawers hum. The lavender hums. Somewhere in the velvet dark, a letter that smells of almost asleep is dreaming its slow, patient dream — and so, now, are you.
Goodnight, little reader.
Goodnight, Pim.
Goodnight, lavender, and lantern, and all the quiet drawers full of waiting love.