Preserving One’s Legacy

When I think of him,
I see a road holding winter,
snow not fresh,
but packed by years of passing.

Lodgepole Pines stand like witnesses,
their shadows longer than memory,
pine scent clinging to the air
the way his presence still clings to mine.

He moved through the world as if careful not to waste it.

Even now, the ground asks questions.
Stones shift beneath my feet the way doubt shifts beneath belief.
Old ruts fill with rain,
reflecting a sky I’m not sure how to read.
I hear his voice in the pause before misstep,
in the quiet urging to slow,
to look down,
to notice what impatience ruins.

The trail narrows inside me.
Breath shortens, not from height, but from history.
Muscles remember effort they never made.
The air grows thin with unsaid things,
with gratitude tangled in grief.

Above the treeline,
the sky does not promise,
it only allows,
and somehow that is enough.

What he left was not direction,
but permission.

Frozen impressions linger,
not to follow exactly,
but to feel where weight once mattered.
I walk when I’m ready,
listening for what still holds when the snow begins to melt.

Legacy, I’ve learned,
is the courage to keep stepping

into the silent moments of life