Gerald Foss is eighty-one years old. He and his wife Margaret lived across the street from us from 1984 until Margaret passed in 2019. They didn’t have children of their own. I used to take them food when Margaret’s health was bad in those last couple of years, and Gerald would sit at the kitchen table and we’d drink coffee and not always talk that much, which was fine.

He moved to Sycamore Glen, the assisted living place out on County Road 7, about two years after she was gone. His nephew handles his house, which has been empty since then.

Gerald and Donald used to sit on that swing together every summer Sunday after church while I made lunch. That’s not something I think about very often because it’s one of those memories that’s nice and painful at the same exact time. They’d sit out there for an hour sometimes, just talking quietly about whatever men their age talked about. Baseball maybe. I’d hear them laughing sometimes from the kitchen and I’d think, okay, this is a good life.

Here is what I have been trying to think through since I came inside and changed out of my wet coat. Gerald Foss is eighty-one and he lives at Sycamore Glen, which is a twelve-minute drive from my house. Every Good Friday for fourteen years, he has arranged to get himself a can of paint, get out to my house, set up a ladder, protect my hydrangeas, and repaint a swing that his friend built. He would have been sixty-seven the first time he did it. He never said anything. Not once. Not a Christmas card, not a phone call, not a word when I brought food to his house all those years ago.

I pray for Gerald every night. He’s on my list of people whose health I ask God to look after. I have been praying for the person who painted that swing for fourteen years without knowing those were the same prayer.

I called Sycamore Glen after I changed my clothes. The woman who answered said Gerald was at dinner and asked if I wanted to leave a message. I said no, I’d call back. Then I sat in Donald’s chair in the living room and looked out the window at my half-painted porch swing in the rain and thought about what I was going to say when I did call back.

I still haven’t figured it out. What do you say to someone who has been quietly, anonymously keeping a piece of your grief alive and glossy for fourteen years? Thank you seems like too small a word. And I’m also a little worried that if I say anything at all, something about it will change. He’ll feel seen in a way he maybe didn’t want to be seen, and I’ll have taken something from him that he gave freely without needing credit.