Last spring, while clearing out an old wooden box in the attic, I found a letter my grandmother wrote to me when I was seven. I do not remember receiving it. The envelope had never been opened. I sat down on the dusty floor and read it slowly, twice.
Her handwriting was small and careful, the way people wrote when a letter was an important thing. She told me about her garden — the tomatoes that had failed that summer, the new lemon tree she had just planted, the cat that liked to sleep on the warm path between them. She told me about her old neighbor who had died the week before, and how strange the house next door now looked with no light in the kitchen window. And then, near the end, she wrote a single sentence that I still think about: "Most of life happens in the small things, so try not to miss them."
My grandmother died when I was sixteen. By then I had stopped paying attention to the kind of details she cared about. I was busy with friends, with school, with all the loud, urgent business of being a teenager. I do not think I ever properly thanked her for the way she noticed things. Reading her letter now, almost twenty years late, felt like she was giving me one more gentle reminder. Lemon tree, sleeping cat, dark kitchen window — small things, all of them. I went outside and stood in my own garden for a long time.