Smoke and Light

The old smell of wood smoke wraps me up and carries me away as soon as I get out of the van. It pulls me down a trail I can’t remember, to a cabin I haven’t seen in over a decade. He whispers my name before he opens the door a crack, worried about a dog bursting into his world of cats.

There is chowder on the stove, merlot and the memories of hot chocolate past. The cabin is the same, every detail made lovingly of eternally bright spruce. He shows me a picture of a stripper he loved back in the seventies, tells me stories of the new cats. I tell him about reaching the end of co-dependence in the desert and suggest that the cat is sitting in his thought field.

The chowder is good. It has seven spices and halibut in it, and he says he makes five gourmet recipes now. He gets up to make tea, drags a match through a rut worn in the stove to make flame. I was an exotic, mysterious child, he says, setting the tea in front of me. There is cream and sugar, but I take it straight up and hot. My name means fire.

His outhouse is down a trail, over a long narrow bridge. I secretly pee in a hollow in the trail and pack snow over it rather than sending my pee down the long mysterious hole. Coming back over the bridge in the dark his cabin is straight off a greeting card, a cliche of cozy logs and candle light that he built in a time before there were such cliches.

Between woodstove and table he reads stories about beautiful places and a porn store mafioso. Every sentence is a work of art, and I realize that he has been writing in this cabin, on that typewriter, through the dark of twenty winters. I read him a poem about geese and he (he, the original writer) says it’s good.

We’ll write, of course. Some day I’ll be in Montana or Virginia or New Mexico and there’ll be a letter from him. It will be long and sweetly crafted. I’ll open it in the back of the van, sitting in front of my bookshelves, Bro watching from the front seat. The words will wrap me in smoke from the arctic, carrying me home.