The Winter Road

There was a man who kept a lamp burning in the window whenever his children were away. He had done it for thirty years without explaining why. His wife asked once, early in their marriage, and he said only: it is something my father did.

When the children were grown and had houses of their own, they did not keep lamps. Oil cost something, and the road was known, and nothing had gone wrong in years.

One autumn, the youngest daughter traveled to a market three valleys distant. Coming home in the evening, a fog came down over the pass and took the path from her. She walked for a long time in no direction. Then she saw a light in a window of a farmhouse she did not know, and walked toward it, and found the road again.

When she came home and told her father, he was quiet for a while. Then he said: I kept the lamp because once, when I was a boy, I was lost in a storm. I walked toward the light in a window and it brought me home. My father had kept that lamp. I never asked him why. I only knew that he kept it, and that it saved me.

The daughter kept the lamp after that. She told her children the story — the father, the grandfather, the fog. They listened. They understood.

But their children did not keep it. They had heard the story so many times it had become legend, and legend is not instruction. They said: there are more roads now. They said: we know the way. They were not wrong. And one winter, a grandchild came home in the dark.