Distant Country

Distant country The flat was on the third floor, flights of wooden stairs deep groves from generations of people going up and down in the living room, I sat down, had been away too long. The autumn wind blew, the house swayed and creaked like an old schooner meeting the Atlantic swells. The room was simple, a few pictures and an Amateur painting of a rowboat in a fiord, a boathouse and blue sky afar the silhouette of a mountain range, the painting was ominous by its deadness; got up went down the same stairs I entered; the past and those I knew had gone.