I have no desire to write the backstory . . . this begins where that would end.

All that year then when neither staying nor leaving seemed possible, spring, summer and fall I gathered the storm-snapped limbs, deadfall, trimmings and prunings, leaves and the leavings the wind dropped against the fence-line, and carried them to a corner of the pasture where rain runoff had gullied it and nothing grew.  Near dusk on  nights when there were no stars or moon and no wind I’d stack all the dry little deaths into a pyre and set it afire, sending my sparks of light into the empty sky, creating my own nameless constellations, and thinking I had come to a reconciliation, made both an ending and a beginning, a fitting sacrament of one grateful for the love at least and at last of his land.

                        pine cones for kindling

                        and when the fire is embers

                        needles for incense

And next spring, as I brought new offerings to the scorched sacred place I had made, there was a single sunflower struggling to stand in that ground where nothing had grown, where my fires had leached it of all that it seemed might have sustained it, and yet it dared, and endured.  And I realized that there was the hard truth of it, the blackened circle of earth turning to another season, its one story becoming another that was mine, a way of deciding and of going on from there:  to put down roots wherever I would come to find myself, to know nothing ends but begins again.

                        under the old pine

                        nudging the needles aside

                        another pine tree