The Versions We Keep.

There is pumpkin bread cooling when this one starts, and a letter on the desk. My first from a listener. I do not read it aloud; it belongs first to the person who sent it. But somewhere around the second reading it occurred to me that the letter is another version of me. Somebody formed an Avery in their mind and wrote to him. He is me. He is not all of me. The first time I learned that another person could keep a different version of someone I loved, I was ten, and it was a small black notebook that did not belong to me. This episode goes back to that notebook, and to a boy on a bicycle who was my best friend in the whole wide world and could also be horrible, and to the thing those two taught me between them: that seeing and loving are not opposites, and that seeing is not ownership either. Also in this one: why people want a bad guy, and why my life keeps wandering out of position for a victim story. The difference between vindication and authorship. Wednesday and Friday, and why I will not let Friday revise Wednesday. The people who become structural, living on in the way I make coffee or notice the quiet person at a table. The question that has followed me most of my life, did it reach you, and what happens when love is given a job. And the sentence I have been turning over all day, which sounds colder than I mean it: I will love you until I don't. Past tense is not an accusation. It is tense. There is a recipe, because there always is. The house pumpkin bread, written for nine thousand feet with the sea level numbers beside it, and one rule: do not open the oven door. Good Little Innkeeper is finished and looking for representation. Still, by Design. is where the stillness lives. Every episode is also a film, with the words arriving on screen the moment they are spoken. The score is original, written in the house for this episode and owned by it. Nothing under these words is borrowed. (00:00) - The note at the door (01:41) - The letter, another version of me (02:19) - A small black notebook (03:59) - At ten, a version was danger (05:11) - The boy on the bicycle (06:48) - People want a bad guy (08:24) - Flourishing, and authorship (10:42) - The beautiful pieces of people (12:20) - I will love you until I don't (13:28) - People become structural (15:01) - Did it reach you (17:09) - Giving is not surrender (19:47) - The thread wrote back (21:05) - Galena House tonight is this room (22:44) - A beautiful afternoon is not a contract (24:28) - Same house, different rooms (26:51) - We are larger than the versions (27:50) - The pumpkin bread (29:06) - Thanks for listening The recipe: https://averylanemaxwell.com/kitchen/the-pumpkin-bread/ Listen, watch, and read: https://averylanemaxwell.com/podcast The books: https://averylanemaxwell.com The letters, on Substack: https://averylanemaxwell.substack.com The Patron Circle, monthly: https://www.patreon.com/c/AveryLaneMaxwell Keep the lamp on, once: https://square.link/u/fDE6uq6o The Galena House playlist, the episodes among the songs they sit with: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/55wkYr82P02Tsr4zgKZubw Write to the house: [email protected] Made at Galena House, in Frisco, Colorado.