Charring Light

The expectant feeling of the past few hours resolved itself with a late, humid rain. I came upstairs to the landing, heard the steady pattering through the open bedroom windows, and was immediately soothed. I sat on the windowsill, inhaling the fresh damp air, comforted by the rhythm of dripping summer leaves and the sight of tiny twigs flowing in frenzied curbside currents. 

Jim followed upstairs with the pup. “Mad dogs and Englishmen,” he proclaimed as he walked past the bedroom door. I smiled at the pleasure of living with someone who would quote bits of song verse while going about evening rituals. Someone who would write a poem, send it to my printer as a surprise, and call out that he needed me to bring him the “report.” Someone who would knead his hands into a peasant’s dough, stretch and smear it with homemade marinara, decorate it with basil leaves and orbs of mozzarella, step back to admire the pie’s rusticity, and then call out from the kitchen: “Do you want to see a thing of beauty?” His callings out were declarations of joy.  

I heard Jim rummage in the guest room closet to fetch a sweater. “‘Gunga Din,’ written in 1890,” he called out, in a new stream of thought. A moment later, he reappeared in the doorway, leaned against the frame, and began to read the poem aloud to me from his phone. He had an intensely involved expression as if he needed to transmit the importance of this work, or this ordinary moment, to the deepest part of my transcendent memory. “Din! Din! Din!” 

When he finished the first stanza, Jim looked up to see if I was still paying attention. He smiled at me with tiny amused glints, then pattered back downstairs. The pup followed behind with her little jangling of tags and nails clicking on the wooden steps. I heard the front door open and close. He’d be out there on the porch, igniting his hand-carved pipe from a birding trip to Scotland with the chrome lighter I gave him for Christmas. He’d take a few short puffs until the bowl glowed, then settle back on the bench and turn his gaze upward to the moon or perhaps to the top of the plum tree, sensing the presence or shape of an owl. He’d fold his left arm across his chest, holding the pipe in his right. The rain would be dripping from the eaves, hitting the rhododendron bush. Soft tendrils of smoke would weave themselves into his woollen sleeves. 

Dusk melted to a shadowy blue, and clouds drifted, occasionally revealing the moon, casting pale ribbons of light on the plaster walls. I stayed perched on the windowsill, transfixed, watching the plum tree branches come alive in the night wind. I didn’t understand their ghostly dance, what they were trying to tell and show me—that one night, after Jim was gone, I’d be sitting on that bench in that smoky wool sweater, inhaling the sweet fading scent of tobacco from its sleeves, touching tiny, crystallized tears on his glasses, glinting under the moon, feeling the pup’s gentle leaning, and pressing his binoculars to my eyes, trying to find the barred owl calling out from the tree. 

Karin Hedetniemi photographs and writes from Vancouver Island, Canada. Her place-inspired creative work is published or forthcoming in The MacGuffin, Grain, Lunch Ticket, Reed Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her at agoldenhour.com. 

This essay first appeared in Capsule Stories (Spring 2020).