Time in a Pipe of Mist

The old pipe on my desk always glows with a warm luster in the twilight. Its bamboo stem, polished smooth by years of touch, and the brass bowl, edged with fine dents like marks gnawed by time, once belonged to my grandfather. Now it rests by my hand, a tenon linking two eras.

When grandfather used it, he’d always move a rattan chair to the courtyard after dinner. The tobacco was home-dried, golden and tangled with the scent of sunlight. He’d pinch a handful into the bowl; a match would “crack” alight, its orange flame licking the leaves, curling the first wisp of blue smoke. It wasn’t harsh, but mixed with the fragrance of plants, drifting slowly through his gray beard. He rarely spoke, just squinted to watch smoke rings rise into the night sky, merging softly with the stars. Sometimes, when the tobacco burned out, he’d tap the bowl with his knuckles, and ash would sift onto the brick floor—like a faint postmark stamped on the day.

I later realized: the pipe was the echo of his silence. During spring planting, he’d squat on the ridge, pipe tilted in his mouth, the lingering warmth of tobacco heating the coolness in his fingers. After autumn harvests, he’d sit by the grain piles, the bowl flickering like a star, drawing a year’s toil into his lungs, then breathing it out as gentle rings. All the unspoken hope and quiet regret hid in the crackle of burning leaves.

Now I sometimes pack it with tobacco too, but never capture his flavor. Maybe a pipe was never just an object, but a vessel for time—it held the wind from the fields, the warmth of the kitchen stove, an old man’s softest gaze on the years. When the tobacco burns down, I almost hear it again: his knuckles tapping the bowl, echoing softly through time. Once, then again.https://moritic.org/