Richard Wagamese

My wife and I went deep into the mountains for our winter wood this fall. It took some doing to find an active logging road and that’s good news. It means they’re running out of forest to destroy. We prefer to find downed trees or sometimes we’ll drop a standing dead one but mostly we get our winter wood from the leftovers. We found a logging road with a lot of fresh slash piles and we set to cutting our winter wood.

We meet a varied assortment of people in our time here on Earth. Some come and go almost casually and leave little behind but small pools of recollection. Others walk into our lives boldly, trumpeting great things that maybe shake us to our cores and change things so that our lives are never the same again. Still others arrive elegantly, their energy a smooth confluence with our own, like the meeting of streams.

There’s a star I used to look for in the night sky. It wasn’t Venus. I was enough of an astronomy nut back then to know that the one glittering cosmic unit I sought out as the darkness fell was not a planet nor was it a familiar, named star.
Instead, this was a star that had seemed to call to me for as long as I can remember.
When I was a small boy in the northern Ontario bush, there’d been a connection between us. I could feel it back then, just as I could feel it as a young man.

Soon I will be fifty-five years old. That means a lot to me. There were times in my younger life, living through desperate times that were largely self-inflicted, that I doubted that I would ever see thirty. So a full quarter century beyond that speculation is a nice place to be. This age feels good. I can look back and see the experience of living with the framework of six decades on this planet. It doesn’t make me feel old. Just experienced.

There’s charm to a fire first thing in the morning. I generally rise well before first light and now that the first snow has appeared on the mountaintop across the lake there’s a need for a good fire to chase away the morning chill. Sitting there, watching the flicker of the flames throw shadows around the room is comforting. It’s easy to get reflective and I allow myself that gift.
There’s nothing moving when I get up. Silence rules. Some days I swear I can hear the rustle of the trees when the first light breaks and it takes me back to an amazing array of memory.