My friend Shingo has worked for a moving company in Tokyo for twenty-four years. His specialty is the hardest kind of move: Japanese families coming home after years in America. He's unpacked more than two thousand of them. He says he can tell exactly where in America a family lived by one thing. What they refuse to let him throw away. Kansas. A rescue dog named Daisy. Every afternoon at 3:10, she sits by the front door and waits for a yellow school bus. There are no yellow school buses in Tokyo. The family hasn't told her. Georgia. A spiral-bound church cookbook. 212 recipes, every one with the name of the woman who made it. Nine of them are for the same casserole. All nine are slightly different. All nine are signed like legal documents. Alabama. A piece of plywood the neighborhood kids painted for the family's last day: "WE'LL MISS Y'ALL, MIZUNOS!" It hangs in their kitchen now. The paint is peeling. Nobody is allowed to touch it. Oklahoma. A full-size American flag. The family's ten-year-old folds it every night on their little balcony in Kawasaki, exactly the way the retired Marine next door taught him. Thirteen folds. He does not let anyone help. Then there's the family from Kentucky, in 2017. At the bottom of their very last box, under the bubble wrap, Shingo found an envelope. It was addressed in thick black marker: "TO THE MOVERS IN JAPAN" Inside, on a piece of notebook paper: "To whoever unpacks this on the other side of the world. Take care of this family. They were good neighbors. The little one cried when we took her bike apart, so please put it back together first. — Darnell, Boone & the boys, Bowling Green, KY P.S. The red dresser is heavier than it looks. Don't be a hero." Shingo doesn't read much English. He read it with a dictionary on the floor of an empty apartment, and then he put the bike together first. That letter has been taped inside his locker for nine years. And since then, every box his crew packs for a family moving to America has a note at the bottom. In English he had to learn for it. "To the movers in America. Take care of this family. They are good neighbors. — Shingo & the boys, Tokyo." Last spring, a reply came back. From Indiana. "Got your note. Family's doing great. The dresser was heavy. We were not heroes. — Skeeter & the guys" People keep telling me America isn't the country it used to be. Maybe. But for a long time now, Americans have been leaving notes at the bottom of the box for people they'll never meet. We're still finding them.