Family Projects
       

It's Day of the Dead Week at the middle school and they're doing projects
on family members who've died. What they liked. Five words
that describe them. A picture. And one of the kids wants to use a sibling
who died at birth, only there are no pictures, no five words, things
they liked. The teacher starts crying. So now the class is doing pets.
Luke son, Isaac, was crying last night, about Wesley, his grandparents' dog,
but Wesley's been dead over a year, and they only saw him
Christmas and summer. It's always about more than it's about,
as Eliot's at the kitchen counter, gluing a picture of our cat Chatty
to the info sheet. He's allergic to cats, we found out, and so after Chatty died,
we've gotten no more cats. The death of Chatty is the death of all cats,
the death of an idea. He asks if there's a way he might someday
no longer be allergic. He thinks about it a lot.

Thus ends my research for today. I want to go for a walk maybe,
take some pictures of the trees before the rusting colors of fall
are gone. We've one in our front yard, the one with the bird nest
that fell out, that I replaced. It has incredible bright red leaves
right now. But it's 34 degrees, so it's a quick photo and burst
back inside. Our house is almost a hundred years old, first one
on the block. It was on Main Street, then carted here
in the 40s by a veterinarian or pediatrician, to what then was "out of town."
Now there are neighborhoods another mile. We're the fourth owners
of this house. When we moved in, we brought a nurse's hat
we found on a shelf in a closet in our last house, even older, which
we were told was haunted, and placed it on a shelf in our new closet.

Haunted Mansion ride. October night.

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Copyright © 2022 John Gallaher All rights reserved
from River Styx
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission