On August 7, and again the next day, my daughter and I spent three and a half hours each afternoon painting the Sweet Shop RIPPLE Station, opening to the public on August 23.

Green paint first by the Sweet Shop staff. Then white lettering by yours truly. Then—her favorite part—dozens of small dots along every edge, mimicking the candy lined up on the shop’s shelves.

For seven hours, we were preparing something to leave our hands.

I’ve watched the Ripple Station by my mailbox from our living room window seat. I’ve restocked it many times over the last year. Almost a thousand tokens have left that box, and I don’t know most of the hands that took them.

But I know the driveway. I know the neighbors who stop. I know how quickly the tokens disappear. I know what it looks like when this is working.

This one, I don’t get to watch.

The Sweet Shop sees more people in a Thursday than my mailbox sees in a month. That’s also the whole point.

The right side of the new station reads: HANDMADE TOKENS FOR EVERYDAY WORKERS. Once it’s out of my hands, that’s what I’m trusting people to understand: notice the person ringing you up, the one restocking the shelf, the one who’s been on their feet since seven, and give them something small that says, I saw you.

It’s why I’ve spent two weeks doing arithmetic on everything that could go wrong. A kid grabs a fistful because they’re free and shiny, not because they noticed anyone.

Someone photographs the station for a “cute local finds” post and never gets to the part about giving a token away, let alone whom to. Someone glances at it and thinks, Oh, one of those craft-table things, and keeps walking toward the candy.

Don’t get me wrong. I love hand-painted rocks and googly eyes glued onto anything that holds still. I’ve made plenty of things that would get filed under arts and crafts, no apology needed. But I built this practice to be about attention, not product.

And I know exactly how easily the first gets mistaken for the second when there’s no one standing there to say otherwise.

And then there is this other truth: Sandra, the Sweet Shop manager, has known me for all of two months. And she is making room in her world, in the shop she’s tended to every day for 18 years, for something I started on my own driveway.

That’s not a small thing to be handed. Eight years of doing this mostly alone, mostly unnoticed, and someone looked at it and said: Bring it here. Let more people find it.

The gratitude and the dread aren’t taking turns. They’re sitting in the same chair.

My daughter, asked at some point last Saturday: Will people think this is just another Little Free Library?

That’s the whole fear, really. I told her the truth: “I don’t know.”

She kept painting.

A reader gave me words for that uncertainty last month.

They were telling me why they’re here when they reached for an old text: you are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.

They connected it to the idea of tikkun olam: repairing the world in pieces, without ever getting to see the whole repair.

I don’t know if the Sweet Shop station will do what the one by my mailbox does. I don’t know if people will understand it. I don’t know if the tokens will leave in the hands of people looking for someone else to notice, or if the station will sit there being pretty, or if I’ll drive by in a week and find it untouched.

I’m not obligated to know that before August 23. I’m just not free to skip painting it because I don’t.

What happens when you let it leave your hands?

It’s been one year