Dead of winter is here. And it feels more alive than ever. Standing on the fireplace mantel is a small wooden amulet chipped at a corner and leaning against the plaster. Next to it is a bowl full of fruits, fresh bananas and oranges from the harvest season of a faraway land. The copper bowl holding them turned green at its edges as age and past left their unforgiving imprint.

The relaxed figure of Mr. H reading in his chair is not disturbed by the room around him. He’s edited out of it everything that he had to, that did not belong. The room was now perfect. The old rug under his feet belonged to his grandparents and still lived, stained with the footprints of their joyous dancing and stomped anger, floored by the careful tiptoeing during late parenting nights and plumped by the lovemaking rubs of their youthful life preceding it.

The wooden amulet was his daughter’s. Her active travels brought him constant worry and perpetual souvenirs. His wife, long gone, lived in the chair he sat in. He felt her womb that bore their children, and the comfort of her pleasant roundness gave him his peace, night after night. He was happy. Morbid, some called it when he tried to explain. I guess he did not explain it right. So he stopped.

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