Today I translated a 17th-century receipt and it felt like home

A client sent me a scanned page of a 1650s apothecary ledger — weights, tinctures, a woman's name in the margin. I spent the morning sitting with the ambiguity instead of resolving it: is that 'sal ammoniac' or a corrupted spelling of something local? The gaps in the source text used to be the obstacle. Lately I catch myself treating them as the point, and I'm not sure if that's craftsmanship or just hiding where the work feels safe.