📗 PART 10 – “The Warmth That Stayed”
Spring came slow to Ridge Hollow.
The thaw arrived in drips—
first the icicles on the well pump,
then the snow sliding from the tin roof in long sighs,
and finally, the soft green shoots pressing through dead leaves outside the cabin window.
Agnes noticed it all, even when she didn’t speak of it.
She watched it the way only old folks do—
not with wonder, but with recognition.
“You made it,” she whispered to no one in particular.
“Another year on the hill.”
Echo had grown.
Not much taller, but sturdier.
His legs stopped tangling beneath him, and his eyes lost the wild panic of newness.
He followed Agnes everywhere now—
from the henhouse to the mailbox,
from the porch swing to the foot of her bed.
But more than that, he waited.
He had learned patience, the kind that comes from listening to grief breathe in a room.
Agnes never told him to sit.
He just knew.
Some days, she talked to Bear.
Not out loud—not always.
Sometimes just in her thoughts, while stirring stew or patching the elbow of her flannel coat.
“You’d like him, Bear.
He trips on stairs but he waits for me at the top.
He watches the woods.
Just like you.”
She didn’t cry anymore.
Or if she did, it wasn’t from sadness.
It was from something gentler.
Something like gratitude.
One morning, as dew clung to the porch rail, Agnes stepped outside and sat on the rocker with her coffee.
Echo laid at her feet, chin resting on her slipper.
She reached down and scratched the space behind his ear.
“You stayin’ a while?” she asked.
He thumped his tail once, twice.
Then the breeze shifted—carrying the smell of cedar and rain.
It moved through the trees, into her hair, past the rocker…
and settled like a memory against her shoulder.
Agnes looked out across the hollow.
The old oak swayed in the distance, guarding Bear’s place beneath the hill.
And just as the sun broke clean over the ridge, she felt something she hadn’t felt in months.
Not the ache in her knees.
Not the silence in the house.
But the warmth that stayed.
The kind that doesn’t come from fire or sunlight,
but from having loved something good and brave and true—
and being lucky enough to love again.
She looked down at Echo.
“Come on, boy. Let’s go feed the hens.”
He rose without a sound, brushed his side against her leg, and walked beside her down the steps.
One pawprint old.
One pawprint new.
The trail between them
—forever shared.