The Mountain

I hiked alone in the Smokies the summer I turned sixty. My wife had passed the previous winter and I did not know who I was without her. I climbed to a ridge at sunrise and sat for a long time in the quiet. At some point — I cannot say exactly when — the grief that had been sitting on my chest since January lifted. Not entirely, not permanently, but enough to breathe. I felt her in that silence. Not like a ghost, not frightening — just her presence, warm and familiar, the way you feel someone you love in a room before you see them. I came down the mountain still sad but no longer lost.