I LEARNED HOW to build a fire from watching you. Thirteen years ago, in the living room of the Denver Catholic Worker on Welton Street, you’d fill the wood stove with kindling, loosely rolled newspaper, a few logs. Along with a carefully scaffolded collection of the right materials leaning on each other, you also needed patience. You needed to be calm. Steady.
It’s almost one year since your death. At a writing residency in the Adirondacks, I remember how the fire kept you busy. Another writer pauses from her work, carefully places a couple of logs into the fireplace; soon the flames swell, flicker.
Michelle, was tending the fire a distraction from the silence—or from the internal noise, the fire raging inside of you? I have so many questions I never got to ask—questions I likely never would have asked when you were alive. I never knew what hidden wound I might be pressing on with them.
Instead, I’ve been looking through the letters you sent me over the years.
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