My parents abandoned me at Grandpa’s house when I was five and never came back. The morning after his funeral, they showed up with a moving truck. My sister stepped inside, looked around the house, and casually said, “I’ll take the master bedroom.”

By May, the mountain had forgotten the sound of the moving truck.

The house had shed its funeral lilies and damp autumn chill. The high double-hung windows were thrown open to the mountain breeze, letting in the sharp, sweet scent of cedar, damp river stone, and the clover blooming thick across the pasture.

I had hired two young men from the local vocational school—boys who had grown up three miles down the river and whose grandfathers had worked the green chain at George’s mill—to help me clear out the old carriage house.

We didn't turn it into an estate cottage. We turned it into an apprentice shop.

Grandpa had left behind five decades of hand-forged chisels, drawknives, broadaxes, and Japanese water stones, all oiled and arranged in walnut cabinets he had built with his own hands. On Saturday mornings, the sound of steel striking timber and the high, sweet whine of the planer drifted down the lane once more. Three teenagers from the county foster program came up twice a week to learn how to fit a mortise and tenon from Arthur Vance and me.

Arthur came by every Tuesday and Thursday.

He didn't bring legal documents anymore. He brought a box of lemon scones from the bakery in town and his old fishing rod, spending his afternoons sitting on the gravel bank below the millpond, watching the red-winged blackbirds dart through the cattails.

One afternoon, after the apprentices had gone home and the tools were wiped down with camellia oil, I walked back up to the main house.

I stopped at the bottom of the porch steps—the same steps where I had sat with my threadbare blue rabbit seventeen years ago, and the same steps where Eleanor had dropped her contractor bags into the mud.

The front door was open.

Inside, on the side table in the foyer, sat a photograph of Grandpa George taken when he was forty-five years old, standing on the boom of a log raft in the middle of the river, his axe resting across his shoulder, his face turned toward the sun with a fierce, quiet grin.

I climbed the steps, my work boots coming down solid and sure on the heart-pine floorboards.

I didn't wear designer sunglasses. I didn't have a moving truck full of borrowed furniture.

I wore my grandfather’s flannel shirt, its sleeves rolled up to my forearms, my hands calloused from the drawknife, my hair tied back with a strip of rawhide.

I walked down the hall, stopped at the door of the study, and turned the brass knob.

The room smelled of old paper, leather, and that faint, indelible trace of latakia pipe tobacco that time would never truly wash away.

I sat down in the high-backed leather swivel chair behind the green blotter. I switched on the brass lamp. Its warm, amber light flooded the desk, illuminating the ledger where George had recorded sixty years of honest labor, the names of his friends, and the date when a five-year-old girl had come home for good.

I opened the drawer, pulled out a fresh sheet of bond paper, and dipped Grandpa’s old steel fountain pen into the black inkwell.

At the top of the page, I wrote the date.

And beneath it, in the steady, even hand he had spent twelve years teaching me how to write, I set down the first entry of the new season:

*May 14. The timber is standing tall. The river is running clear. The house is full of work, and the doors are unlocked.*

I set the pen down, leaned back in the chair, and looked out the high window at the sun sinking behind the western ridge, painting the tops of the Douglas firs in gold.