The White Cedars (May 6th, 1991) The white cedar remembers this land before my grandfather's Axe. Hallowed. The lands he once tread. Hollowed. The grave on his land. Haunted. The heart in his chest Harrowed. My memories of him. From howling wind to his last breath. The fragrant timber falling into thawing moss. The wrinkles around his eyes absorbed private tears of loss. I am nothing as he was. I shared my thoughts with none. My memory carries only landscapes My endeavors shared with no one. The white cedar remembers a solitary figure lost in the fog. Hallowed The land I tread. Hollowed The life I lived. Haunted The heart in my chest Haunted… So none will mourn me, whether I'm delivered or damned. As I respire into finality none shall hold my hand No grieving tears staining wind burned cheeks No wails of sorrow echoing into the bleak. Just the memory of the white cedars standing in the mist. After the Fire (November 20th, 1923) It wasn't abnormal for there to be wildfires up in the far reaches of the Arrowhead region. In May, as the last patches of snow melted in the woods, the sun would come out and dry out the forest. On those dry days, the sun was just tempting a spark to dance with high winds and spread to the skeletons of dead firs in the woodlands. Those blighted trees had been left to petrify, until their long-awaited infernal climax would dispatch them. One such spring day, the high winds blew across a campsite fire, spreading flames through the underbrush, inching towards a stretch of mixed boreal forest where he often wandered. It’s a great corridor of 300-year-old cedars spackled in moss, typically framed on both sides by running waters. It was like something from a fairytale his mother had read to him. But a dry season exposed a vulnerability, leaving the door open for eventual disaster. The fire engulfed the neighboring woods, fanned by a roaring north wind. It burned and smoldered, ever encroaching on the woods he held dear. Its threats continued to prove false, like a bluffing gambler, just waiting for his luck to turn up. As a relatively dry summer came to pass, the fire smoldered under sporadic rains, never quite extinguishing. Ebbing and flowing, it polluted the summer sky with the scent of woodsmoke. It was one of the most tense times of his young life. This was his one place of peace and respite, away from the hissing of saw blades, crashing lumber, and his father's moody demands. Any time a warm, dry breeze would kick up, his anxiety would spike. Somehow, eventually, autumn’s leaves began to turn. And the old cedars still stood. After the false hope of cool autumn air rushed in, a dry spell arrived as the birch leaves fell. These leaves were pale and fragile, unlike most autumns’ vibrant hues. It finally happened. Glowing embers kicked up in a gust of high wind and the reinvigorated flames spread directly into those sacred halls of ancient cedars. The fire jumped from leaf to leaf like some doomed line of dominoes, setting alight one after the other. The forest was engulfed, save for the pockets of bog land and swamp. The inferno raged until the first snow. He never saw the blaze. He would lay awake in the night, imagining the worst but hoping some bits had remained. His father had forbidden him to survey the damage until he was sure it was safe and early November snowstorms had blanketed the area in white. There could be pits of embers smoldering beneath the piles of brush and char. It didn't look so bad in the snow, the stark black char against bright white. Sure, it wasn't the same. But it still created that magical sense of space; he could see the snow clinging to charred and cracked branches. He noticed fine white powder adorning the piles of fallen timber like piles of unfolded laundry on the cabin floor. When spring came, his heart broke. The snow melted to reveal the true depth of the damage: charred black spires, barren earth, and boulders. What once was an evergreen fairytale was now nothing but an empty, hollow place draped in soot and sorrow. Lifeless and devoid of any color, its true face was revealed by the very warmth that had once allowed it to grow. Sometimes in life the sweeping away of brush reveals more ugliness than before we were swept clean.