For Jesús
Token Tales — Reflections on invisibility, presence, kindness, and what it means to be noticed through small handmade notes.
There’s a plant outside my living room window that I've looked at every day for 14 years. Through deadlines and dinners, before my daughter’s birth and through her entire childhood, through every season of light that window has held — it has been there. Steady and unremarkable.
I did a Google image search. It took seconds to learn what had been right in front of me all along: a dwarf umbrella tree. And suddenly, it was no longer just a plant. It was a thing with lineage, a thing that belongs, a thing that has a place in the world — not just a presence in mine.
14 years of looking, and I had never once seen it. Not really. Not the way you see something that has a name or a lineage.
I’ve built an entire practice around noticing. And there it was — proof of how much I still walk past, two feet from where I sit every morning.
Which brings me to our UPS driver.
For years, he has been part of our daily landscape. The “UPS!” he calls out when he leaves a package at our door. The wave from his truck when he passes us on our neighborhood walks. Familiar the way the plant was familiar: seen every day, known not at all.
One afternoon, I asked him his name.
“Jesús,” he said — and his eyes went wide, as if in all the years of driving this route, no one had thought to ask.
I told him how much I appreciated him. How he always noticed us.
The next time he swung by, I was ready: a handpainted token and a chocolate, both with his name on them. Not "our UPS driver."
“For Jesús.”
We talked at length about his shift, his commute, gas prices, what his off days look like. Just as two people would.
I keep thinking about how long we can look at something — someone — without seeing them. 14 years, in the case of my plant. Who knows how many, in the case of the people who carry our days?
Now when I hear “UPS!” from the driveway, it isn't a delivery announcement anymore.
It’s Jesús, saying hello.
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