The Chair at the Kitchen Table

Evan Swensen
February 2, 2026

My mother sat at the kitchen table with a paring knife and an apple in her hands. She’d press the blade just beneath the skin and turn the apple slowly, her thumb guiding the knife in one continuous motion. The peel came away in a single ribbon—red darkening to white where it curled, spiraling down into the bowl on her lap. She never looked at her hands. She’d talk while she worked, her eyes on me or the window, the blade moving by memory, the ribbon growing longer until the whole skin hung in one unbroken coil.

I meant to ask her to teach me.

I believed there was time.

LeNora Conkle came to Alaska in 1946 with her husband Bud. Both in their mid-30s. They tried Fairbanks for a few years, then chose Tanada Lake in the Wrangell Mountains.

They built the lodge themselves. Bud would stand on the half-finished wall, arms extended, while LeNora guided the next log into place with a cant hook. They’d notch the corners with axes, chink the gaps with moss, and collapse at night on a canvas cot while sawdust settled in their hair. By the third summer, smoke rose from their own chimney.

They guided hunters for mountain goats in the Wrangells, brown bears on the Peninsula, polar bears in the Arctic. Clients came back year after year—not just for the trophies. They came to sit at LeNora’s table after a long stalk, boots drying by the stove, tin cups of coffee warming their hands while Bud told stories and the northern lights rippled green outside the window.

In the 1960s, they homesteaded 160 acres at Cobb Lakes. Named it Eagle Trail Ranch because the old telegraph line from Valdez to Eagle crossed their land. They kept twenty horses for guiding in the Wolf Lake country, north of the Nutzotins. Every morning, Bud walked to the fence line and whistled twice—the same two notes—and the horses came trotting through the meadow grass, breath steaming in the early cold.

Forty years they built that life. Forty years of ice breaking up in spring, clients arriving in fall, winters alone together when snow buried the trail and the only sounds were wind and woodstove and the scrape of Bud’s chair as he leaned back from the table.

Then one morning in February 1985, that chair didn’t move.

LeNora was 75. She sat at the table where they’d shared ten thousand meals and understood what only someone who has lost a partner understands: their life together now lived only inside her.

The two-note whistle for the horses. The way Bud squinted at the ridgeline to read tomorrow’s weather. The night the generator quit, and they played cards by candlelight—Bud dealing with one hand, holding a lantern with the other, laughing at a joke she couldn’t now recall, no matter how hard she reached for it.

If she didn’t write it down, it would vanish with her.

She spent the next ten winters writing. At her daughter’s kitchen table in Oregon. In a back bedroom prior to visiting grandchildren. At a desk by the window in North Pole, snow falling outside while she typed with two fingers, filling page after page. Five books. Not for fame. Not for money. For memory.

We published Hunting the Way It Was in 1997. She was 88. Bush Pilots Wives in 2000. She was 91.

LeNora lived to 103. She died at the Fairbanks Pioneers Home in February 2013—twenty-eight years after Bud, almost to the month.

Her books sit on shelves across Alaska. Strangers who never knew her read about the Tanada Lake Lodge, the horses at Eagle Trail Ranch, and the clients who became friends. And because she wrote, Bud is there too—his voice, his whistle, his stories—preserved in sentences she typed while the snow fell and the years ran out.

But here’s what haunts me.

LeNora waited ten years after Bud died to start writing. Ten winters. What slipped away in that decade? I picture her pausing mid-sentence, pen hovering, trying to recall a name that was right there a year ago. Staring at the wall, reaching for the shape of a story Bud told a hundred times, finding only silence where his voice used to be.

She wrote five books. She could have written ten. She had the years. She had the stories. What she didn’t have—what none of us have—is certainty about how much time remains.

You have a chair at your kitchen table where someone used to sit.

Maybe your grandfather sat there the night he told you about the winter the river froze solid—how the whole town walked across, and the Search and Rescue boy fell through, and your grandfather pulled him out by his coat collar while the ice cracked and groaned beneath. He told you once. Maybe twice. You were young. You thought you’d remember forever.

You’re fifty-three now. You remember the river. You remember the cold. But the Search and Rescue boy’s name? The words your grandfather said when they reached solid ground? Gone. Fading. A photograph left too long in the sun.

I’ve been in publishing for more than fifty years. I’ve stood in living rooms after funerals, watching children stack boxes of handwritten pages—letters, journals, half-finished manuscripts—and carry them to the curb. I’ve heard the words “We didn’t know what to do with it all.”

I’ve watched the chair empty and the memories scatter like ash.

Time is not waiting for you. It never was.

I’m not asking you to write a masterpiece. I’m asking you to write one thing you’re afraid of forgetting. Tonight. This week. Before another season turns.

Write it for the child who will someday sit at your table and wish they had asked.

Write it because you’re the only one left who remembers.

Write it because the chair is already empty—and someday, yours will be too.

That’s why you write. You write because some things must not be lost. And you’re the only one who can save them.

The Power of Authors began with this conviction: your words carry weight you may never measure. One sentence. One memory. One truth preserved. That’s enough. That’s everything. Start there.

The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose.

The book is available on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.