The house stood empty. Dad and I stood exhausted.

With our backs against our overloaded trucks we stared at the home where time had knitted our family together since 1960. Mom was gone now, and we were packing up. Bright rectangles on the walls showed where hanging photographs had kept the world from fading. The house echoed and whispered with far off and long ago sounds, like a shell held to your ear, a gigantic shell where something wonderful used to live.

Dad looked down at his shoes. “I suppose we ought to leave,” he said, quietly.

Neither of us moved. This would be the last time. This would be forever. We would never leave this place again because we would never come back.

“Dad,” I finally said. “There’s one last thing we need to do. We need to go back to the Secret Place.”

Dad tipped his head, his eyes narrowing as he reached far back to a time when he had walked with his small son in the forest and discovered a precious place. I watched his eyes remember.

“Oh, Pete,” he said, despair and joy mingling in his voice. “We’ll never find it.”

“Yes we will, Dad,” I said. “I have the key.”

Years earlier, I had snuck off to the Secret Place during a family gathering. I had sat on the flat granite boulder that looked out over a swampy pond and let my mind wander back to the distant years, to dad and I together, making campfires and brewing pots of tea, whittling sticks, listening to frogs, and talking.

Alone, I tried to lift out of all those years the wonderful something that had made this place special, but I couldn’t do it. It felt like the world had a hole in it. I picked up a sliver of granite that had cracked off the boulder, slipped it in my pocket, and left.

Now that sliver of stone was back in my pocket and Dad and I were thrashing through decades of brush.

I found the place first, ran ahead, and jumped up onto the boulder.

“This is it,” I said, spreading my arms wide.

Dad caught up and looked around.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It might be. But I don’t think we’ll ever be sure.”

I pulled the sliver of stone from my pocket.

“I took this from the Secret Place a long time ago,” I said.

Dad watched in wonder as I bent down and slid the stone key back into its void at the edge of the boulder, each corner, each crack, each notch and facet lining up perfectly.

He turned and sat on the boulder and looked out over the old pond, and slowly an enormous smile broke across his face. I picked up the sliver of stone and sat next to him.

We sat shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, hip to hip, knee to knee, our shirts and jeans rustling together. We sat as if there were only one of us and we had never been apart. As if plain old living had never gotten in the way. As if time had waited for us. As if forty years ago was still yesterday.

The air filled with the quiet of time and the silent memories welled up. We imagined that we smelled wood smoke, sensed the hot tingle of tea on our lips, felt pine shavings peeling out from under our pocketknives.

Dad looked down through his fingers, down even through the leaves and soft earth, down through the layers of years to a time when a big man and a little boy sat here, sat on this very stone, sat with one pair of feet on the ground and one pair of feet dangling in the air.

“What was it about this place?” Dad finally asked. “What was it that made this place so special?”

I turned the sliver of stone over and over in my hands while I searched for a way to say it, for a way to tell Dad that when I had come here by myself years before I’d felt disconnected and disjointed, and that now I knew why. I needed to tell him that it wasn’t this place that was special, but that it was us, that it was him and I, a father and son who shared so much more than molecules in their blood; that it was a love and a friendship so deep, so rich, so long, so steadfast that sometimes we had trouble believing it was true; a relationship more solid than the rock upon which we both now sat. I searched the quiet hole in the air for words.

“We were just together,” I finally whispered, barely able to get the words out.

For a few precious moments dad said nothing. Just sat there looking down through his old fingers.

Leaves fluttered down from the autumn sky and we heard them tick against each other as they tumbled.

“That’s right,” Dad finally said, looking up at me with glistening eyes. “We were just together.”

And so a father and son sat side by side in the deep quiet of time, the only two people in the world.

And they didn’t need any more words.


My dad died on Christmas morning. He was 90. I still have that sliver of stone.