I've been a physical therapist in this logging town for thirty years. The commute is thirty miles one way.
Long enough that it became my only quiet hour. The coffee from the diner near the clinic, the loyalty card I've been punching for seven years, half-filled.
This morning, my rideshare driver pulled over on the logging road, turned off the engine, and said, 'This is my last ride. I'm done.'
He was a retired logger with bad knees. I'd been his passenger for months. We talked about the town, how it used to be, how kids leave.
He dropped me off, waved through the window, and drove away in a car he'd been paying off for years.
I stood in the clinic parking lot, holding the coffee card. It only had four punches left to a free one.
I realized I'd never have that ride again. That beginning of my day, that silence before the pain and the exercises, was gone.
And I thought about all the beginnings I'd let slip past without noticing. The first time I was alone in a room as a kid. The first patient who trusted me.
That quiet hour was a beginning too. I just didn't know it was ending.