Post No.6. Sunday

June Oakcrest. Sunday—the drawer that won't open. 

Dear Mom,

I woke up this morning with one thing on my mind. Finding answers. After making coffee, I went through the house, not snooping but trying to channel the observant energy of Sherlock—or better yet, Enola Holmes.  

But it was the study at the back—the one with the window looking directly out at the oak—that pulled me in first. 

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The door opened, and the scent reached me before I'd even stepped all the way inside. Lavender and honeysuckle. I realized then why the scent had been haunting me—it was the first fragrance I'd smelled the very first day I walked into the house, the one that seemed to linger in every single room. And it was the notes of the first perfumes you ever gave me, for my tenth birthday. Underneath it lay something papery and old. It was the smell of a room where someone had been working for a long time. The smell of pages turned slowly. Of things being kept safe. I stood in the doorway for a moment, just breathing it in. 

There was a wooden chest under the desk. I'd taken it for mere storage when I first arrived, but when I opened it, I found notebooks. Twelve of them. All in your handwriting. All dated. The earliest was five years ago; the most recent was from six months ago.

Six months ago, Mom.

I pulled them out slowly and sat on the floor in your coat, the coffee cooling beside me as I read. Not all of them, but enough. Enough to understand what you had been doing up there, alone, all these years. 

Green whispering. The history of it, the method, the practice. It was written the way you always wrote—careful and urgent at once, like you were trying to get it all down before you ran out of time. 

"The first rule of green whispering is stillness. Not the stillness of waiting—the stillness of arriving. You have to put everything down first. Like taking off a coat. 

You do not go to the plant or the tree with a question. You go with an offering— something small and sincere. A song, sometimes. Water. Honey. The intention of a friendship, nothing more. You arrive the way you would arrive at someone's door for the first time: openly, without demands. 

What comes back is not always words. Sometimes it is a feeling in the body. Sometimes a direction. A leaning. The way a branch leans toward light without deciding to. 

The forest around this house has been speaking for longer than there has been anyone to listen. I did not teach it to speak. I only learned, very slowly, to be quiet enough to hear."

I read this passage three times. My hand was flat on the page, your handwriting under my fingers, the texture of the paper worn soft from being read many times before. And I thought : I was already listening. In the forest, on the trail, with my hand on the oak—I was already doing this without knowing I was doing it. I think maybe that's the only way it works.

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Throughout it all, a squirrel sat on the windowsill. He didn't move once. When I finally looked up at him, he was watching me with an expression that mirrored your writing: patient and urgent all at one.

I stood up and walked to the bookshelves. Your books. Nature guides, mostly—plants, birds, trees, the old-growth ecosystems of the northeastern United States. All the passages were annotated in your small, careful handwriting. Passages underlined. Questions scribbled in the margins. Drawings of specific leaves, specific flowers. A conversation between you and the world, written across pages and pages. 

I ran my fingers along the spines. The carpet under my feet was worn in certain places—where you had walked most often, turned most often. The desk was worn, too. Carved wood, the kind that's been touched so many times that the edges have been smoothed by human hands.

Your hands. Touching this wood every day for years. I sat in your chair. It still held the shape of you. 

And then I noticed the other books. Different books. Environmental law. Land protection. Conservation easements. Books with titles like defending what remains and the rights of wild places.I reached for one. My hand stopped on the spine. 

The spines were cracked from heavy use. Your handwriting was everywhere here, too—margins full, passages circled, dates written in the corners. 

I pulled one down at random. Inside, a name I didn't recognize was underlined and circled in your heavy hand.  A date was written next to it: three years ago. My chest went cold.

Not metaphorically, it was the kind of cold that means you've found something you weren't supposed to find. I didn't understand what I was looking at yet, but I understood, in my body, that it mattered. 

You had been afraid of something.

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There was a small drawer in the desk, its brass handle worn smooth from use. Locked. I looked for the key everywhere—the windowsill, the kitchen, the little dish by the front door where spare keys live. Nothing. 

The drawer didn't feel empty. I don't know how I knew that, I just did. It felt like it was holding something. Waiting. 

I asked the house about it out loud, because apparently that's something I do now.

Where's the key? I said to the study, to the walls, to the oak visible through the window. 

The house didn't answer. Not in words. But the cold that had been spreading through my chest began to warm, slowly. It felt as though something large and calm had heard me and was moving closer, settling around me like a blanket. Like something saying: Not yet. Not this one. Not yet. I'm keeping it safe. I'm keeping you safe. The warmth moved from my chest outward until my fingertips stopped aching. I understood perfectly: not yet.

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I sat on the floor in your study for a long time after that, the notebooks spread around me, the locked drawer in front of me, the oak watching through the window. 

Because I know now that you weren't just living on this hill. You were doing something. Fighting for something. Protecting something. And six months ago, mid-sentence, you stopped.

The last entry in the most recent notebook ends right here. "If something happens before June—…"

That's where it stops.

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Everyone in this town is kind to me in the specific way people are kind when they feel they owe you something. When they're protecting a secret that's too big to name. The seedling woman gave me plants… Dot knew your face in mine before I said a word. Miss Dahlia went still at the sight of your journal like someone hearing news they'd been dreading. Even Matteo—warm, attentive— has something careful behind his eyes when I mention the hill.

You've disappeared before. Research trips, months abroad, long silences. I never questioned it because I told myself that's just who you are.

But this time the notebooks stop mid-sentence. The drawer is locked. There are books about defending things, written in your hand like you were preparing for a war.  

Mom– Where are you? What were you preparing for? What happened on this hill?

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I'm not leaving. I'm not going back to my flat and my spreadsheets and my ordinary life. I'm going to find Edmund. I'm going to understand what these books mean—what you meant. I'm going to sit in front of him until someone tells me something true.

The house can say not yet all it wants.

I'm staying. Still here. Still listening. Coat on.