The winter of 1994 nearly broke us. The crop had failed, my husband Earl was sick, and we were two months behind on everything. I remember praying at the kitchen window, not even sure what I was asking for anymore, just that we not lose the farm that had been in Earl’s family for generations.
A few days before Christmas, I went out to the mailbox and found a plain white envelope with no stamp and no writing on it. Inside was cash — more than I’d seen in one place in a year. No note, no name, nothing. Just enough, almost to the dollar, to catch us up and keep the bank away.
I cried right there at the mailbox. We never found out who left it. I asked around as carefully as I could, not wanting to embarrass anyone, but no one ever came forward. I decided it was simply an act of God and did my best to be worthy of it.
But here is the thing. The next December, it came again. And the December after that. Every single year, a plain envelope with cash, always appearing sometime in the week before Christmas. In good years it was small, almost symbolic. In the hard years, somehow, it was always more.
For thirty years this went on. Earl passed, the children grew and left, and still every Christmas the envelope came. It became the great mystery and the great comfort of my life. Last December, at eighty-three, I decided I had to know. So I sat by the front window every evening in the cold, watching the mailbox.
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