A Dying Winter

It was a harsh, hard going season. “It’s a dying winter, lad,” he said, crunching words around, a gnawed pipe stem. Briefly embers sought a place to disappear. Cinder gray eyes, set deep into the crumpled grit of age. A wry off-set smile. Then one day he went back up the clinker graveled path to his small, low-roofed cottage, with its squat, darkly puffing chimney, oily cans, coal dusted kettles, the fumy, over-stuffed parlor, with its feet-warming, black, fire-baked grate, and one sooty cat. Never to be seen again.