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place permanently preserved in those pictures.
     
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    CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    The next morning I shouldered my backpack and came downstairs.  Although back in the familiarity of my childhood bedroom and not huddled inside my dad’s deer shanty, I hadn’t gotten much sleep.  I wondered if I’d ever be able to sleep soundly again.
    Downstairs, my grandma, who usually woke up earlier than the rest of the house, was drinking coffee at the kitchen table and reading a newspaper that was practically two years old.  She read that paper every morning as if she expected the news to have changed since the day before.  I would be surprised if she hadn’t memorized the entire paper by now.
    “Morning,” I greeted.
    She looked up from her reading and smiled.  Her aged face softened with a warm glow.  “Morning, Sam.  There’s coffee in the kettle on the woodstove,” she said, nodding in the direction of the potbellied stove. “I also made some cinnamon buns if you’re interested.”
    “I wondered what smelled so good.”
    Her smile drooped at its edges.  “I’m sorry it’s not more.  I wanted to make us one last big breakfast before we left, but those bandits really cleaned us out,” she said, shaking her head.  “There was just enough sugar and flour in the dry cellar for the buns.”
    I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat.  Those bandits had stolen so much more than the food in our pantry.
     
     
    My grandma went back to her reading and I grabbed a plate and a coffee mug from one of the cabinets.  I poured myself a steaming cup of black coffee from the copper kettle that sat atop the woodstove.  I wrapped my hands around the mug and breathed in the rich aroma.  Normally I preferred my coffee with tons of cream and sugar, but I’d acquired a taste for black coffee because of the need to ration.  We had run out of dairy products over a year ago and now used a non-dairy powdered creamer for anything that called for milk or butter.
    My grandma had baked the cinnamon buns in a cast iron dutch oven using wood coals from the fire.  It was a neat trick she’d taught my mother and me, shoveling out the red-hot coals onto the stone hearth to cook or bake on.  For things like bread or large pieces of meat that needed heat from the top and the bottom, we used a dutch oven with an inverted lid.  The top had a beveled lip high enough so coals could go on top.  When whatever had been baking was finished, you used a long fire poker with a hook at one end and fished around in the now grey ash for a solid ring that would let you lift the lid from the oven without spilling the ashes into the food inside. 
    It was a lot harder to do than it looked.  It was solid cast iron, so it was heavy and awkward, and if the weight of the coals on top of the lid wasn’t evenly distributed or you tried to move too quickly, you could very easily tip the lid and all the coals would get into your food.  I’d spoiled a few loaves of bread that way, but you learned quickly from your mistakes or else you got accustomed to the taste of wood ash in your food.
    I sat at the table with my grandma and stared at my plate.  The cinnamon buns were warm and decadent, but they were such a lavish departure from my usual breakfast of coffee and plain oatmeal that I couldn’t help but feel like an inmate on Death Row having my Last Supper.
    I didn’t look up when I heard my father’s heavy footsteps come into the room.  I heard, rather than saw, the sounds of him opening and closing cabinets.  I kept my eyes trained on my uneaten breakfast when he sat down beside me and the legs of his chair squeaked noisily against the linoleum.
    “Morning,” he grunted.
    “Morning,” I echoed back, still not looking away from my plate.
    He immediately tucked into the oversized cinnamon buns on his plate.  He only paused to