Every morning at eight, Mrs. Hattie Crowe walked to the end of Sycamore Lane with her straw hat, her cane, and a hope she refused to let die. The postman would tip his hat, hand her a few bills or a flyer, and she’d glance through them quickly before asking, as always, “Anything from Jonah?”
And as always, the postman would smile, soft and sad. “Not today, Mrs. Crowe.”
Jonah had left five years ago. He was nineteen then, tall and restless, his sketchbook full of half-drawn cities and ocean horizons. He’d promised to send her postcards from everywhere he went—“One for every new sky I see, Mama,” he’d said. But not a single one ever came.
Still, every morning she waited.
It was late summer when something strange happened. The postman, Harold Jenkins, knocked on her door after hours, holding a bundle of cards bound in string.
“They came all at once,” he said, voice unsteady. “Postmarked from all over—Paris, Istanbul, Marrakesh. Every one addressed to you.”
Hattie’s hands shook as she took them. There must have been twenty, maybe more. Each card carried Jonah’s quick scrawl, familiar and alive.
“Mama, you’d love the markets here. Smells like cinnamon and salt.”
“The sea is green today, not blue. Never thought I’d see that.”
“Still drawing. Still wandering. Don’t worry.”
She read every word, tears spotting the edges until the ink blurred. Some cards were years old; others had no dates at all. One, from Spain, read simply: “Almost home.”
The next morning, Hattie did not go to the mailbox. Instead, she sat at her kitchen table, laid the postcards in neat rows, and traced the journey with her fingertip—from the rooftops of Italy to the coast of Portugal, then across the ocean back toward home. Each message was like a breadcrumb trail through time.
Weeks passed. People in town stopped seeing her at the end of Sycamore Lane. The postman knocked a few times, worried, but she’d only smile and wave from the window.
Then, one crisp October morning, he found an envelope in the outgoing mail slot—addressed to Jonah Crowe, wherever the wind carries you. Inside was a single sheet of paper, and all it said was:
My boy, the postcards finally found me. I’m ready to rest now. Come home if you can.
Harold didn’t know what to make of it. He mailed it anyway.
Two weeks later, as the sun set gold over the fields, a car rolled to a stop in front of the Crowe house. A man stepped out—older now, tired around the eyes but unmistakably Jonah. He stood for a long moment, staring at the little white house with the peeling blue shutters.
When he went inside, the kitchen table was set for two, the postcards still spread like a map between worlds.
No one knows how she’d known he was coming. But they say that after that night, no one saw Hattie at the mailbox again—and no one ever saw Jonah leave.