Script quote across a thigh

The relief boat came in on Tuesday with the paraffin, the tinned peaches you asked me not to eat, and your parcel, which I opened on the lamp room step with the wind trying to take the paper. The knitted cap fits. The cake lasted until Tuesday night, which Tom Hallam will tell you was my fault.

The sea has been unkind this month. On Thursday the swell came up over the landing and tore the tar barrel off its chain, and for two days I kept the log by candle because the glass had cracked in the gale. I wrote the weather down anyway, in pencil, the way Father taught us, and the lines came out crooked. Your card was tucked under the lid of the tea caddy where I keep the things I cannot throw away. The verse on it was the one Mother stitched above the range, and I had not thought of it in years until there it was in your careful hand: fearfully and wonderfully made, with the g curled like a fishhook.

I do not know what made me take the pencil to the inside of the lamp room door last night. Perhaps it was the quiet after the wind dropped. I wrote the words small and low down, where the keeper who comes after me will have to crouch to read them. He may think it a prayer or a grocery list. The light turns over the water every ten seconds, and each time it passes the door it lights the letters white for an instant, then lets them go dark again. Come out in the summer and see it. I will show you where.