This might have been a dream about the farm, again. I’m resolved that I’ll never stop dreaming of that place, now eradicated. I could have survived knowing it was sold and some other farmer’s cows were in the fields, out by the scary snake infested ponds, but it’s not like that. It’s not like anything it was now. Maybe it’s a lament for a world that I’m sure once existed. I’m told it’s dangerous to look back in time through the lens of nostalgia, and I don’t argue that, but there are some things worth the pain of missing them.

The boy runs through the frosted muck, the color of semi-sweet chocolate, frozen and swollen up so the ice has been forced out the top of each dollop, and crunches under his boots. He whips and whirls his way through a suddenly dense thicket. Brambles and thorns cut into the skin, and slap his face as he tries to outrun the enveloping darkness.

October has slammed closed like a great wooden door on summer and the failing light and cold of November bites with a bitter wind. He runs faster, but his destination continues to pull away, until at last he crests the big hill and sees the light glowing over the edge.

Breathless and writhing and finally over the top, the boy’s feet slipping on the frozen snow dusting, he falls. Dropping to the ground in an icy belly flop, pillars of dancing flame reach up near the stars and outwash the moonlight.

Face down and hiding in the weeds and frozen muck, he sees it all engulfed, but not consumed, just perpetually burning. The barn and the old farmhouse and the toolshed howl in the darkness, releasing the souls and memories trapped within its walls and the searing heat burns his face.

Powerless and hopeless, he watched it all burn. The rage of the fire changes, perhaps fed by the wind or far too many recollections. The souls that called this place home are freed and before his eyes it all collapses into rubble and ruin and the monster fire, no longer content to tease, consumes it all to the last stick and nail and abandoned cup and old shoe left in that mudroom off the kitchen.

He watched it burn with a young boy’s eyes, and an old man’s aching heart and he fell asleep in the frost and the mire and when he woke, he looked around and it was as if it had never existed it all.

And the boy lost sight of his ground and station and place. Not homeless, but without a home, he never woke again.