Every family has one. Every inn has one, and every office with a coffee pot that is somehow always full. The person who notices the room is cold before anyone says so. The one who sets a second cup without being asked, and stays up a little later than everyone else so the house is ready in the morning.
I have kept front desks for nine years. I know that person from the inside, and I know the strange thing about them: they are almost never the one who gets kept.
The keeper's book
Come In. It's Already Warm. is a book for them. It is a large hardcover, eight and a half by eleven, the kind you set on a table rather than a shelf. It carries hand-drawn topographic maps of the country around the house, seventeen plates drawn in the maps' own hand, the views as they stood, and the recipes I make for other people and almost never sit down to eat.
It follows Elias, a keeper and a storyteller, which turn out to be nearly the same work. Both make room. What he has never quite learned is how to be the one who comes in.
Why it works as a gift
Most gifts for the people who keep us are small thanks: a candle, a card, a nice bottle. This one says something harder to say out loud. I see what you do. Sit down in some of it.
It arrives on Thanksgiving Day, which felt right. It is the one day the keepers of the world are busiest, and the day they are thanked least.
Signed, from the house
Signed pre-orders are open now at the house's own register, $79, and every copy is signed at the front desk and sent the week the books arrive. Shipping in the United States is the house's gift. Any bookshop can also order it by name, or by ISBN 979-8-218-84471-4.
If you want to hear the voice behind it first, the readings are on the podcast, Avery Lane Maxwell., in my own voice. Start with Still Here., No. 1.