It was 2:30 in the morning when he awoke in his favorite reading chair. The book he was reading had fallen to the floor. Earlier in the evening, anticipating a short nap just before midnight, he had turned off his reading lamp and all the Christmas lights, inside and out.

It was a restless awakening in the dark. Unsettling. Something foreboding. Perhaps it was something he had been reading about a man who deliberately vanishes. He was about to pick up the book, turn on the light, discover where he was in the story, but by now his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. The view from the window was pure winter light as he walked toward it and felt the
bitter cold out there the closer he moved toward the glass, staring at a setting he has lived amongst almost half a lifetime now, season to season.

Winter again. Had the window glass offered any reflection of the observer at the moment, it might have caught something close to smiling resignation.

There were the same old trees, the driveway, the bird feeder, the road and mailbox in the distance, the woods across the road. The branches reaching up to the skies. All of it touched tonight by bright moonlight, lending even more light to the snow upon the ground, resting, weighing heavily upon the broad branches of pine, and limning the most delicate branches of birch and maple their entire length..

If he looked long enough, hard enough, he might have caught a glimpse of his children, now grown and far away, playing in the snow. Or their mother, who once lived here, going to the mailbox. Or he himself, head bowed, walking toward the corner in a blizzard with his children to meet the school bus. Vanishing.

“But it was the light” (a line from Hemingway, coming from nowhere, burned in his psyche) that held him to the window. The light-and the delicate dark shadows of the branches of the trees as they fell upon the snow, unfurled before him in one piece of ancient, Japanese calligraphy, without beginning or end, suggesting all the things a man needed to know.

He put on his winter coat and boots, opened the door, and wandered out into the silent, bright winter darkness, to see what it had to say.