Two-Hearted

Last winter, I returned to reading Hemingway. There, in the cold, hard silence of the north, I discovered him anew. My solitude and my stories intertwined. "The Big Two-Hearted River," Hemingway's stark and poignant tale, his "iceberg theory" of narration created, stayed with me. The tale which lingers on the surface, the true weight and worth hidden below.

When COVID held the world in its grip, I took refuge in the north woods, the familiar territory of my youth. I spent the spring and summer days there, wandering the wilderness, the beast and the birds for company. My camera attempted to capture their beauty.

It was there, in the silence of the woods, that a story took shape in my mind. A story of a widow, a woman who held onto a dream that she and her husband had shared for adventure.

Every weekend that I've devoted to crafting this tale, my heart ached with a longing for the woods again. A sense of place, of being, pervades the story, an echo of my own yearning. The wilderness, my muse, bled into the words, painting a picture of the widower's journey and my own.

With each word I penned, I hoped to share the beauty of the north woods. To echo the loneliness of the widower. To unravel the depth hidden beneath the surface. I aimed to offer a story that provokes thought and contemplation, a tale that offers much more than what floats on the surface.