You set the enamel mug down on the wooden table and the table takes the small weight without sound. Steam climbs from the coffee in a thin grey ribbon and bends toward the window, where the cold draws it. The pine boards under your forearms are warm where the stove has reached them and cool further out. A single splinter of resin has risen on the nearest board, amber, the size of a grain of barley. Through the glass, snow comes down at the pace of patience, each flake taking its own slow line to the ground. You lift the mug again. The handle has the shape your hand has been making for years.
The wood stove ticks. It is the small clear sound iron makes when heat moves through it unevenly, a tap and then another tap further along the flue, as if the metal were settling into a posture it remembers from yesterday. Inside the firebox, a length of birch has fallen against a length of pine and the flame works at the joint between them. You can hear the fire only as a low breathing, more felt than listened to, a draw of air through the vent below the door. Now and then a knot in the wood gives way with a soft report and a thread of sparks lifts and falls behind the glass. The kettle on the hot plate is not boiling. It is making the sound water makes before it makes any sound, a held note inside the cast iron, almost nothing.
You turn your face to the window. The snow is falling against a background of dark spruce, and the dark gives each flake its outline for the second it takes to pass. Beyond the nearest trees there is only more snow and more trees, the wood going on in pale layers until it whitens out altogether. A red squirrel comes along a branch of the spruce at eye level, stops, sits up on its haunches. Its tail curls behind it like a question that has already been answered. It looks at the cabin without alarm and then turns its head, and a fall of snow slips from the branch above and dusts its back, and it shakes once, briskly, and goes on. The branch lifts a fraction when its weight leaves it. A few needles drift down with the snow.
The book is open on the table to your left, face down, its spine bent gently. You laid it there some time ago. The page you stopped at has gone slightly cool to the touch, the paper drinking the temperature of the room. You run a fingertip along the top edge of the pages where they fan out, and the feel of them is dry and slightly rough, like the surface of an old leaf. The cloth of the cover is worn at the corners to a paler shade of green, and a faint ring shows on the back where a cup once stood. You leave the book as it is. The coffee is the right temperature now, neither sharp with heat nor gone dull, and you take a longer drink. The bitterness sits on the centre of the tongue and then thins out toward the edges and is gone.
The cabin holds its smells in layers. Closest is the coffee, sharp and clean, with a darker note under it from the grounds in the small pot on the stove. Then the wood smoke, which is not smoke inside the room but the memory of smoke worked into the timbers, sweet from the birch and resinous from the pine, deepened by many winters. Then the wood itself, the walls, giving off the faint turpentine smell that pine gives in a warm room, more noticeable near the stove and fainter at the far wall. Beneath all of these is the cold coming in around the door frame, a thin clean smell with snow in it and the iron of the air outside. You breathe slowly and the layers separate and rejoin in no particular order.
Outside, a branch unloads. You hear it before you see it, a soft heavy sound like a folded cloth dropped onto a folded cloth, and then a small white burst at the edge of your vision where the snow falls past the window in a denser pour for a second and stops. The squirrel has gone. In its place a chickadee has come to the lower branch, no bigger than a closed hand, and it tilts its head and makes the two clear notes it makes, and then again, and is answered from somewhere deeper in the trees by the same two notes at a slightly different pitch. The kettle has begun, at last, the first murmur of true boiling, a rounder sound than before. You do not get up for it yet. The stove ticks again, twice, further down the pipe. A log shifts in the firebox and settles lower with a soft sigh of ash.
Light has been changing while you sat. The snow outside is thinning, or seems to be, the flakes coming down more widely spaced, and where the cloud is thinnest a pale brightness pools above the trees. The window frame casts a faint shadow now across the boards of the floor, where before there was none. The shadow is the colour of weak tea. It moves across a knot in the pine and the knot, dark as a coin, takes the shadow and seems for a moment to deepen. A square of light lies on the table beside your mug. You put your free hand into it and feel the small warmth on the back of your hand, less than the warmth of the mug, more than the warmth of the room. The light has come a long way to be that warm. You leave your hand there. The coffee in the mug has gone the colour of a wet stone where the light touches its surface.
You stand, finally, and cross the three steps to the stove. The floor gives slightly under your weight, a single board flexing where a nail has loosened over years, and returns. You lift the kettle by its wooden handle and tip a slow stream into the pot, and the grounds rise and turn over and settle, and the smell of the coffee blooms again, fuller now, with the steam. The kettle goes back on the hot plate but off the hottest part. You stand there a moment with one hand near the stove, the heat lifting along your forearm, and watch through the small mica window in the door as the fire works at what is left of the birch. The flame is blue at its base and yellow above and almost colourless at its tip. A piece of bark curls and blackens and lets go and is taken upward and out of sight.
Back at the table, you sit. The chair takes you with a small creak, a sound it has made before. You wrap both hands around the mug again and the warmth comes through the enamel into your palms and from your palms into your wrists. The chickadee calls once more from the spruce and is not answered this time. The snow has almost stopped. A last few flakes come down slantwise on a draught you cannot feel. The square of light on the table has lengthened and slid a finger's width toward the book. You watch it without watching it, the way you watch water. The stove ticks. The kettle is quiet again. The coffee in the mug holds its small dark circle of steam, thinner now, thinner, drifting sideways into the warmer air above the stove and losing itself there, and the spruce branch outside lifts and lowers once in a breath of wind, and the light goes on slowly across the wood of the table toward the edge of the open page, and somewhere further in the trees a bough lets down its load of snow with the soft sound of something being set down at last