There are moments that arrive without warning and refuse to leave—moments that etch themselves into memory not for their grandeur, but for their quiet insistence. One such moment, for me, was an evening walk with my mother one mid-autumn night, at a time when I was close to collapse under overwhelming stress and frustration on several fronts. The sky seemed darker then, the air heavier, the pathways misted, leading nowhere. I was lost and wandering.

After hearing me sigh again and again and seeing me spend days sunk in silence and dejection, my mother suggested that we take an evening walk after dinner. Consumed by helplessness, I remained seated, shaking my head slightly. I said nothing.

She placed her hands on my shoulders and urged me again in a soothing, coaxing voice.

“What is there to lose anyway? It’s just a walk.”

I said nothing.

“Come on. It’s been so long since we took a walk together.”

Again, I shook my head.

“Next time you return from overseas—who knows when that will be? And if your immigration application to K-country goes through next year, the chances of us having an after-dinner walk together will be even slimmer. Let’s make some memories together while we still have the chance…”

I was slightly moved. I thought of those evening walks when I was a teenager, when we still lived in our hometown, when our puppy would trot along behind us, when late-summer dusks were dotted with fireflies and mid-autumn nights carried the fragrance of sweet olive blossoms.

And I found myself getting up from my chair.

The moon was full, the air still, and the world seemed to hold its breath as we set out together—she leading, I following, the memory of our puppy lingering somewhere behind us.

It was less a walk together than an old woman leading a discouraged young man, a full head taller than herself, down the path. With each stride she took, a voice-activated roadside lamp flickered on ahead of us. Stooped and diminished by age, she nevertheless held my hand firmly and warmly. Now and then she tightened her fingers around mine—not hard, but deliberately, as if to remind me that she was still there. Then, as though that small reminder had done its work, she kept moving, drawing me farther along the lane and into the moonlit open space near our compound.

The darkness and tranquility of the evening seemed to conceal her wrinkles and her years. Yet the full moon and the faint glow of the roadside lamps caught the silver strands in her loosely tied hair.

“If nothing can be done to help, at least we can take a step back and smile.”

“You have many years ahead of you. Cheer up. What a loss for a young man to look so blue.”

I remained silent, but I began to keep pace with her.

Knowing that I was not in the mood to talk that evening, she said no more. She simply kept walking in long, steady strides, her fingers laced with mine.

Our shadows—mother and son, hand in hand, one following the other—overlapped and trailed behind us, gradually moving from a slow rhythm to a brisker one. The roadside lamps receded one after another. So did the bushes of lilyturf, blooming in full white, serene beneath the steady, unmoving moon.

That mid-autumn, the sweet olive had not bloomed in time. Yet as we walked, I seemed to smell the fragrance of the past and see again the summer fireflies, long since vanished.

I knew that someday, somewhere, I would see their flickering light again.

And when I did, the memory would return: her hand, warm and firm, pressing mine; her silver hair catching the moonlight; and her leading me onward through the evening shadows, beneath a full moon.