At 69, I sold my house to travel around the world despite my children’s protests — in Australia, a man invited me to his home for coffee, but when I walked into his living room, I froze.

And in 1965 she sent a photograph of us all in the back garden, so that he would know who his letters came from.

That is the photograph over his fireplace. It has been on a wall in Australia for sixty years.

The letter.

And then there is the letter, and this is where it stops being a lovely coincidence.

The letters stopped in 1974.

I always understood that my mother had simply let it go — that he had grown up, that he was twenty, that these things end.

That is not what happened.

In the March of 1974 I was eighteen, and I was sitting at that kitchen table while my mother did the letter, and I said something.

I can remember the shape of my own mouth saying it.

I said that she had been doing it for eleven years and he never asked after any of us, that it was all one way, that she could not afford the postal orders, and that it was embarrassing — that was my word — to keep writing to a grown man in Australia who sent four lines back twice a year.