One-Match Fire

One-Match Fire is the story of love given and withheld among a grandfather, a father, and a grandson, and the Ozark cabin where they could usually find peace amid their struggles with each other. It is a saga of three generations. A late-in-life, reluctant father of an adoring son, learns he can atone for his own father's abandonment. A man who became a father far too young, adores his resistant son and feels inadequate in the role thrust upon him. A son distances from the father he has profoundly misjudged and hides a secret he fears to confess.

For three generations the family cabin had healed their hesitant hearts and subtly shaped their souls. It granted these men and boys a respite from the quarrels that pulled them apart, and gave them moments of unguarded love in many subtle guises. Their cabin had been a place of campfires and confidences, of stargazing and skinny-dipping, and of clandestine acts of love that echoed through lifetimes. A place of coming together and coming of age.

When their sanctuary must be sold to pay inescapable debts, each is certain this will fracture their brittle family forever. One-Match Fire is the story of relatable men living ordinary lives. But nothing feels ordinary to a man within his life.

This novel probes the extraordinary of the everyday. It is a story of three men who love each other but struggle to express it before it's too late. It is also a story of the redemption brought by family traditions, the woods, and a wisdom that grows from love.