He lived in the heart of the woods. You wouldn’t know how to get there, if you’d never been before. I was lead by a familiar friend, though I can’t remember whom. He claimed he was taken there by his uncle in much earlier years. I wondered how he could remember the direction from 20 years pass, yet afterwards I understood. It was a path that no one could ever forget.
Needless to say, when we got there, I had no idea what we were doing. He told me he was taking me somewhere to cheer me up. I was still sad about the death of my mother. She’d died of cancer. Didn’t last very long. Regardless, I thought we were going hiking. Just to “get my mind off things,” but no, my friend had something much more significant up his sleeve.
When we reached our destination, it seemed we had stumbled upon it by accident. An accident, yes, but completely purposeful at the same time. There was a hump in the land. A large mound of dirt. It stuck out from the rest. Yet no different in size, or color, or position from the other large mounds, something about it called us.
Even to look back now, I can’t remember hearing a distinction between the old man’s voice and the howl of the wind through the trees. Maybe he was telling us where he was, or maybe the earth just wanted us to know.
We climbed the mound and approached the door on the opposing side. It was small and wooden. It creaked upon opening and revealed the dark dirt that composed it’s entirety. There were four wooden chairs poorly crafted out of a cutdown tree somewhere in the distance. There was a small fire pit in the center of the circle with a tunnel vent above. Other than a pile of some animal furs, which seemed to form a cot on the cold dirt ground, there was nothing else in the small chamber.
When the man shut the door behind us, the fire seemed to brighten its glow on his face and simultaneously pierce my eyes. His eyes were a dark shade, blackness in the fire light. His hair was semi-long, yet he seemed finely groomed. It was gray and white and it grew into his beard in the most perfect of ways. His skin was leathery and wrinkled, and it held less color than his hair.
He offered us seats and then a silence grew. An eternity of silence. My friend looked back and forth between me and the old man. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. I was extremely nervous and even more so after everything was silent. I had decided to say something, anything, to keep myself from exploding. I said, “um, this is a nice little place you’ve got here.” Thinking about it only after I’d said it, I realized it was a dumb thing to say, yet the man understood. He seemed to expect it. His reply was, “yes, I’ve grown to love it more and more as the seasons pass.” I remember trying to think of how long that man had been there, what he was doing, why he was so far out in the middle of nowhere. My friend spoke up in the midst of my meandering thoughts. He said my name. I started to panic again at that moment. My panic had resulted in a loss of hearing that faded back in when my mother’s name was spoken. I realized that he was telling the story of my mother’s death.
Time had passed and the fire seemed to have a violent glow up until the climax of the story: the death of my mother. At that point, the fire and I were one. It felt the sorrow and longing. It spoke to me in whispers as it dulled and the room grew colder.
The man added more wood to the fire, which had seemed lifeless from that point on out. The old man spoke for the rest of the time. His words flowed in through my ears. They didn’t seem to leave though. They hung around, like the blanket of smoke that covered my mother’s house. It clung to the curtains, to my clothes, to my hair. It clung to her lungs, to her hair that was long gone, to her cancerous limbs that they amputated. A blanket of smoke that only amplified so much pain and suffering. A blanket that tried to cover the fire and put it out, the fire in her eyes, the strength to go on. His words set a blanket over my mind, and with it the one of my mother’s began to unravel.
The fire grew brighter than I had seen it before with a brightness that refused to leave my eyes.

I blinked back to reality where I was laying in my mother’s cold lifeless room. Her locket was loosely grasped in my palm. The sun was beginning to rise with a bright pink and orange glow. A ray of it was coming straight through the window and reflecting off the locket into my face. I closed my hand and thought about my mother. I thought about the old man and how at ease he was.
The thought of him, and his sensible voice soothed me. Somewhere in me his fire was still burning. It burned in my mind, with the smoke still lingering. And somehow, when the memories of my mother came back, I was content.