The house stood empty. Dad and I stood exhausted.

With our backs against our overloaded trucks, we stared at the home where time had knitted our family together since 1958. Mom was gone now, and we were packing up the house. Bright rectangles on the walls showed where hanging photographs had kept the world from fading. The house echoed and whispered with far off and long ago sounds, like a shell held to your ear, a gigantic shell where something wonderful used to live.

Dad looked down at his shoes. “I suppose we ought to leave,” he said, quietly.

Neither of us moved. This would be the last time. This would be forever. We would never leave this place again because we would never come back.

“Dad,” I finally said. “There’s more last thing we need to do. We need to go back to the Secret Place.”

Dad tipped his head, his eyes narrowing as he reached far back to a time when he had walked with his small son in the forest and discovered a secret place. I watched his eyes remember.

“Oh, Pete,” he said, despair touching the joy in his voice. “We’ll never find it.”

“Yes we will, Dad,” I said. “I have the key.”

Years earlier, I had sneaked off to the Secret Place during a family gathering. I had sat on the flat granite boulder that looked out over a swampy pond and let my mind wander back to distant years, to dad and I, together, making campfires, heating pots of tea, whittling sticks, listening to frogs, and talking.

Alone, I had tried to lift out of all those years the wonderful something that had made this place special, but I couldn’t do it. It felt like the world had a hole in it. I had picked up a sliver of granite that had cracked off the boulder, slipped it in my pocket, and left.

Now that sliver of granite was back in my pocket and Dad and I were thrashing through decades of brush.

I found the place first, ran ahead, and jumped up onto the boulder.

“This is it,” I said, spreading my arms wide.

Dad caught up and looked around.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It might be. But I don’t think we’ll ever be sure.”

I pulled the stone from my pocket.

“I took this from the Secret Place long ago,” I said.

Dad watched as I bent down and slid the stone key back into its void at the edge of the boulder, each corner, each crack, each notch and facet, lining up perfectly.

He turned and sat on the boulder and looked out over the old pond, and slowly an enormous smile broke across his face. I picked up the stone and sat next to him.

We sat shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, hip to hip, knee to knee, our shirts and jeans rustling together. We sat as if there were only one of us and we had never been apart; as if plain old living had never gotten in the way; as if time had waited for us; as if forty years ago was still yesterday.

The air filled with the quiet of time. We imagined that we smelled wood smoke, sensed the hot tingle of tea on our lips, felt pine shavings peeling out from under our pocketknives.

Dad looked down through his fingers, down through the leaves and soft earth, down through the layers of years to a time when a big man and a little boy sat here, sat on this very stone, sat with one pair of feet on the ground and one pair of feet dangling in the air.

“What was it about this place?” Dad finally asked. “What was it that made this place so special?”

I turned the sliver of stone over and over in my hands while I searched for a way to say it, for a way to tell Dad that when I had come here by myself I’d felt disconnected, and that now I knew why. I needed to tell him that it wasn’t this place that was special, but that it was us, that it was him and I, a father and son who shared so much more than molecules in their blood; that it was a love and a friendship so deep, so rich, so long, so steadfast that we had trouble believing it was true; a relationship so solid it made this granite bench seem like soft clay. I searched the quiet hole in the air for words.

“We were just together,” I finally whispered.

Leaves fluttered down from the autumn sky and we heard them tick against each other as they tumbled down.

“That’s right,” Dad said. “We were just together.”

We sat there together in the deep quiet of time.

We were the only two people in the world.

We didn’t need any more words.