What You Can, With What You Have

There's a night in every long season when Workhorse sits down on the porch and can't remember the last time he finished something. The list is longer than it was in the morning. The money is a little shorter. Somewhere along the way, doing his best started to feel like never doing enough.

The Zookeeper doesn't tell him to cheer up. The Zookeeper sits down next to him and waits, the way you wait for a kettle.

"When I first came here," the Zookeeper says after a while, "I didn't speak the language. I didn't know how anything worked. I kept thinking that one day I'd wake up and finally belong, all at once."

Workhorse looks over. He'd always assumed the Zookeeper had simply arrived knowing everything.

"It never happened all at once. It happened in small pieces. A neighbor who learned my name. A recipe someone asked me to teach them. A day I helped someone else find their way. Belonging wasn't a door I walked through. It was a house I built, one board at a time, with whatever wood I had."

Workhorse thinks about his list. About the things he'll never get to and the things he did today that nobody saw: the lunches packed, the chair fixed, the calm voice he used when he didn't feel calm at all.

"So I should do more?" he asks.

"No," the Zookeeper says. "You should count what you did. Then rest. Then tomorrow, do what you can with what you have. That has always been enough to build a home."

Out in the dark, the Zoo is asleep: the panda who came from the mountains, the owl from the forest, the little lion from the grasslands. All from different places. All under one roof. None of them arrived knowing how to be a family. They built it, one ordinary day at a time.

Workhorse stays on the porch a little longer. For the first time in weeks, the list can wait.