- The Fire Tower Road in Summer
- The ice went out on Shagawa Lake on the nineteenth of April—three weeks earlier than the thirty-year average, according to the old-timers who gathered around the wood stove every morning to argue about lake levels and smelt runs.
- The air smelled of wet earth, rotting cedar needles, and the sweet, resinous sap of maples waking up from their winter sleep.
- Harold didn’t walk out to the fire tower road anymore—the doctors at the Manor told him his hips weren’t built for gravel tracks, even with a walker—so I drove him out there myself on a Sunday afternoon when the diner was closed.
- We parked the truck right where the rescue team had pulled in that freezing November night. The ditch was green now, filled with wild ferns uncurling their fronds like tiny green fists reaching for the sun.
- Duchess bounded out of the passenger door the second I popped the latch, barking once at a red squirrel before tearing off down the trail toward the creek where she had kept Harold warm for forty-eight hours.
- Harold sat in the passenger seat for a long moment, looking out through the dusty windshield at the cabin in the clearing.
- “You know,” he said, his voice raspy but clear, “I never thought I’d see this place when the leaves were on the trees again.”
- “You’re too stubborn to quit, Harold,” I said, reaching over to help him unbuckle his seatbelt. “Same chin. Same face.”
- He chuckled—a dry, rattling sound that ended in a short cough—and let me take his arm as he stepped down onto the gravel.
- We walked slow, the two of us, side by side down the two-track road with Duchess ranging ahead like a golden scout. The sun filtered through the high canopy of white pines, casting dappled shadows across our shoulders.
- Up ahead, the fire tower rose above the tree line, its steel girders rusted a dull red against the bright spring sky, standing guard over the millions of acres of forest and lake that stretched all the way up to the Canadian border.
- “Your dad would have liked it here in the summer,” Harold said, stopping to catch his breath by a cluster of bloodroot pushing up through the black leaf mold. “He always hated the cold. Said the only good thing about a Minnesota winter was that it kept the mosquitoes from carrying you off.”
- “He was wrong about that,” I said. “The mosquitoes are just as bad once they thaw out.”
- Harold laughed—a real, full-chested laugh that made the chickadees scatter from the lower branches of a nearby birch.
- “Yeah,” he smiled, looking out over the endless green expanse of the North Woods. “He usually was.”
- The Tuesday Tradition
- By the time summer settled into its heavy, humid stride—the kind of July heat that makes the screen doors stick and the tourists crowd into the diner for homemade strawberry rhubarb pie—the routine at Callahan’s was as fixed as the North Star.
- Every Tuesday at eight o’clock sharp, Rudy pulled his station wagon up to the curb. Harold walked in with his aluminum walker, his hair neatly combed, wearing his wool vest even when the temperature hit eighty.
- He took the corner booth. Clara poured the black coffee. I brought the two eggs over easy, with a side of toast and a small, separate saucer of plain scrambled eggs for Duchess, who never missed a Tuesday.
- The town had changed around us, as towns always do. A new outfitter opened across the street selling titanium camping gear to folks from Chicago; the old lumber yard was turned into a boutique bed-and-breakfast; and the price of a cup of coffee crept up from a dollar fifty to two dollars even.
- Some things, though, stayed right where you put them.
- My father’s pocketknife sat in the wooden cigar box on my desk in the back room, right next to the ledger where I kept track of the diner’s weekly flour and sugar orders. Harold’s notebooks sat on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in the living room, right beside the worn copy of The Old Man and the Sea that Ed had read until the binding fell apart.
- And every morning at 6:40, long before the sun cleared the roof of the hardware store across the street, Duchess sat by the cash register, her tail giving a slow, steady thump against the linoleum floor, waiting for the world to wake up.
