Orla Merrin’s Wishing Line Log -- Entry #224
Date: August (sunny but windy)
Location of Find: Bench outside the Weaver’s Cottage
Ribbon: None -- folded inside a square of red upholstery fabric
Note: “May the weight of what I carried rest in the wood, not in me."
Houtman's story captures the raw solitude of grief, where silence fills the house and memory becomes both comfort and burden. A widower navigates casseroles, paperwork, and well meaning strangers while clinging to photo albums, whiskey, and the echo of love now gone. The writing is spare but deeply evocative, each detail, an old wristwatch, a worn floorboard, a muted TV, carrying the ache of absence. Poised between despair and fragile belief, An Empty Chair reflects on time, loss, and the stubborn endurance of memory.
The chair sat in the front parlour for years, half in shadow. The seat had a dip on the left side, as if someone always sat a little off-centre. Maerla dusted it every Thursday but never sat in it herself.
When the lining came loose, she took needle and thread to mend it. But before she stitched it shut, she slid out an envelope flattened into the padding. The paper was soft with time, ink blurred at the edges as though it had been read again and again.
No name on the front. No address. But Orla recognised the handwriting-sharp at the tops of the t's, a gentle hook on the g's. She says it matched the lighthouse keeper's wife, the one who vanished after the summer floods.
Maerla didn't open it. She tucked it into her apron, stitched the lining back tight, and set the chair against the wall again.
Some evenings, the cushion is warm when no one has sat there. Once, when the wind slipped through the east gable, the room filled with the scent of oranges.
Orla's written in her ribbon catalogue, beside a swatch of red cloth:
“This one hums when you leave the door ajar. Listen close."