My dear girl,

I have found your permission slips.

You left them everywhere.

For decades, you kept them—little quotations, photographs of memes, verses of Scripture, scraps of encouragement saved at peculiar hours and on otherwise ordinary days. Once, we might have folded such things into a keepsake box: old letters tied with ribbon, pressed flowers, photographs with curled edges, perhaps a note whose importance no one else would understand.

We do not keep quite the same boxes anymore.

Somewhere along the way, the keepsake box became something we carry with us.

And there they were.

For years, I thought you were collecting words.

I see now you were collecting permission.

Permission to change. To fail. To begin again. To be misunderstood. Permission, perhaps, simply to trust that one difficult moment did not have the authority to decide everything that came after it.

You gathered reassurance with the industriousness of a Victorian woman preparing for a very long winter.

And, my dear, you packed heavily.

Among your collection was one particularly inelegant bit of wisdom concerning a motorcar and an unfortunate tire:

“Giving up because of a setback is like slashing your other 3 tires because you got a flat.”

Hardly the sort of counsel one expects embroidered upon a lady’s handkerchief.

And yet, you saved it.

I suspect I know precisely why.

There were times when one disappointment felt terribly convincing.

But the little message made an argument so simple that even worry had difficulty disputing it.

Only one tire required repair.

Giving up would not have repaired it. It would merely have surrendered everything still working.

Looking through these old keepsakes, I cannot bring myself to laugh at you—not entirely, anyway.

I am rather fond of the woman who saved them.

Perhaps those quotations were never things you intended to tell the world. Perhaps some were simply things you needed someone to tell you.

So you kept them.

Like pressed flowers between the pages of a book.

Like letters addressed to a woman you had not yet met.

Me.

So I have found all your little permission slips.

I don’t believe we need them anymore.

But I think I’ll keep them.

After all, some things still belong in a keepsake box.