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I paid three hundred and forty dollars to sit in a classroom where the instructor never once looked anyone over sixty-five in the eye. My name is Vivian Underwood, I am sixty-eight years old, and I want to tell the rest of you what I wish someone had told me before I wrote that check. I need to back up because this is going to sound like a small thing and it is not. I was the secretary at the same Methodist church in Springfield, Missouri for twenty-four years. I answered the phone. I typed the bulletin. I knew every family in the congregation by their handwriting on the envelope. When I retired four years ago I thought I would have all the time in the world for the things I had been putting off. My husband Hollis retired a year before me. He took up woodworking in the garage. I took up nothing, really. I read paperbacks. I watered the Boston fern. I tried to be the kind of grandmother my four grandchildren would remember. The one who lives furthest away is Della. She is fourteen and she lives in Portland, Oregon with my daughter. I see her twice a year if I am lucky. The other three are in town and that is a different kind of grandmothering. With Della I have to be the grandmother who reaches across two thousand miles, and I had been struggling to do it. A year and a half ago I decided what I needed was to learn photography. I had this notion that if I could send Della good pictures, real pictures, pictures that looked like the ones in magazines, then the distance would not matter so much. I wanted to take a photograph of our cottage from a beautiful angle, and the maple in the front yard, and the cardinals at the feeder, and the patch of irises along the side of the porch that my mother planted in 1971. I saw a flyer at the library for a class at the community college called Photography for Retirees. Three hundred and forty dollars for two Saturdays. I wrote the check on a Monday morning at the kitchen table. I will tell you about the class briefly because it is the foundation of everything that comes after. The instructor was a young man in a black t-shirt who spoke very quickly and used a great many words I did not know. He talked about aperture and shutter speed and dynamic range. He had a slide deck. He answered the questions of the three people in the room under fifty and he did not answer mine. Not once over two Saturdays did he look me in the eye, and I am telling you this not because I want sympathy but because I want you to understand what happened next. I drove home on the second Saturday in silence. I sat in the driveway for a few minutes before I went in. I did not tell Hollis the class had been bad. I told him it had been fine. I put the camera I had bought for the class in the hall closet on the shelf above the winter coats. The next morning I sat at the kitchen table and felt about as small as I have felt since I was a girl. Thanksgiving was a few months later. Della flew in with my daughter. After the pies, when most of the family had migrated to the living room and Hollis had fallen asleep in the recliner, Della came and sat next to me at the kitchen table. She is a quiet girl. She watches a long while before she speaks. She said, Grandma, can I tell you something honest. I said please do. She said, you do not need a class. You need a one-button drone. I laughed because I did not know what else to do. I said, sweetheart, your grandmother cannot operate the television remote. She said, Grandma, that is exactly the point. She showed me on her phone. A little folding thing the size of a sandwich. One button on the top. You press the button, she said, and it flies up. It films what you want filmed. It comes back. You do not steer it. There is no app. There is no joystick. There is one button. I told her I would think about it. I thought about it through the entire month of December. I thought about the three hundred and forty dollars. I thought about the camera on the shelf. I thought about the young man in the black t-shirt and the way his eyes slid past me. And mostly I thought about what Della said, which was that I did not need to learn anything at all. I just needed something built for somebody like me. She sent me the link the first week of January. Hollis was reading the paper. I sat at the kitchen table with my reading glasses on and I scrolled down to the price, and I want to tell you what I had braced for, because the bracing was half the story. I had braced for three hundred dollars at the low end and four hundred dollars at the high end. I had a number in my head and I had already decided I would pay it. The number on the screen was ninety-nine dollars. I sat at the kitchen table and I read it again. Then I read it a third time. I said out loud, to nobody, well. Hollis looked up from the paper and asked if I was alright. I said yes, I am ordering something for myself, and he went back to the sports page the way husbands of forty-seven years do. The package came on a Thursday in a brown mailer no thicker than a paperback. I opened it at the kitchen table with a mug of tea going cold beside me and my reading glasses pushed halfway down my nose. I lifted the drone out of the foam. It weighed less than a deck of cards. Four point two ounces, the manual said. It fit in my palm with room to spare. I turned it over slowly with my finger on the single button on top, and I sat there for the better part of an hour before I went outside. The truth is I was a little afraid of it. Hollis came in from the garage and saw me holding it. He said, well, are you going to fly it or admire it. I said both. I took it out to the back patio at golden hour. The light was the color of weak tea. The geese were going overhead the way they do in late January. I held the drone flat in my palm and I pressed the button. It lifted off my hand and I made a small sound I am not proud of. Not a scream. More like the sound you make when somebody surprises you in a kind way. It rose straight up about twenty feet and stopped. It hovered there. It made a soft sound, more like a sewing machine than anything else. It was already filming. I had not done anything. I had pressed a button one time with my thumb. It circled the yard once, slow as a thought, and then it came back down and landed in my open palm the way you might set down a wren. I stood there on the patio in my cardigan with the drone in my hand and I thought about that classroom and I started to cry. Not a hard cry. The quiet kind. The kind a woman my age has when she did not know she still had something to prove. That evening Hollis and I watched the footage on the television. The cottage from above. The maple. The irises along the porch that my mother planted in 1971. The two of us small on the patio looking up. He watched it twice and on the second time he reached over and took my hand the way he used to when we sat in the pickup at the drive-in in 1979. I sent the clip to Della that night. She wrote back GRANDMA in capital letters with three of her own exclamation points. I will not count those against my own promise to use none in this letter. I am writing this on a Wednesday morning at the same kitchen table. The drone is sitting beside the manual, still folded, still small enough to disappear in a sock drawer. I have flown it eleven times now. I sent Della a video of the cardinals at the feeder last week and she watched it on her phone in Portland and called me, which she does not do. I am not in the habit of recommending things. I was a church secretary. I typed up bulletins. But I spent three hundred and forty dollars on a classroom that made me feel like the smallest woman in the room, and I spent ninety-nine dollars on a small folded thing that made me feel like a grandmother who could finally reach across the country. I will leave the link below the way Della left it for me at the kitchen table. No pressure at all. I just thought a few of you might want to see it for yourselves.