I Wrote It Down.

Most of what's in the book started the way everything here starts: as a letter. I write them the way other people keep a ledger — the well got fixed, so I wrote the well down. The kitchen came back to life by degrees, so I wrote the kitchen down. The barn that every sensible person told me to tear down is still standing, holding books now, and there is a chapter that explains itself for that one.

Somewhere along the way the letters got long. Then they got longer than letters are supposed to be, and started referring to each other, the way the rooms of a house do. A neighbor — the kind who says a true thing once and then goes back to her tomatoes — read one and said, that's not a letter, that's a chapter. She was right, and I resented it for a while, which is usually how I respond to true things.

A book, it turns out, is just what letters become if you keep writing them and something in you refuses to stop.

Sixteen chapters. The well, the hill nobody planted, the kitchen that remembered how to be warm, the blackbirds that named the place. Repair, mostly. Patience, where I could manage it, and honest accounting where I couldn't.

It is a thin book — fifty-seven pages. The Hollow does not pad a thing out, and I wasn't going to start on its behalf. It is not a how-to. It is not quite a memoir either. There are things it doesn't say, and that's not an oversight; some doors on this farm stay closed, and the book respects the ones that do.

The book lives where books live now: the paperback is twelve dollars and change, and there is a Kindle version for five, for people who read in the dark next to someone asleep. I understand both kinds of readers and pass no judgment, but I'll say plainly that the paperback is the right way to read this one. It is the kind of book that wants to be left on a kitchen table, face up, slowly acquiring rings from coffee cups.

If you read it and it lands somewhere, write to me. That's how this whole thing started, and I see no reason to stop now.

I carried the first copy out to the fence line this morning, because it seemed only right that they see it first. They looked at it the way they look at everything I do out there: briefly, from a post, entirely unimpressed.

That feels correct. The farm does not need the book. The well doesn't run any better for being written about, and the hill nobody planted will bloom again next spring whether anyone reads chapter nine or not. The book isn't for the farm. It's for whoever is standing where I was standing a few years ago — boxes not unpacked, a place that needs more than they know how to give it — so they can hear it from someone on the far side: it mends. Slowly, and not all the way, and that turns out to be enough.

The blackbirds sang all through the writing of it. They're singing now. Some things don't change when you write them down, and I'm learning to be glad about that.