Wednesday, January 5, 2011

The Gray Ghost

I often think of my family, the sprawling branches that reach out to obscurity. Some I remember through the eyes of a child. I see them as they were when we were all a little younger and before so many of the good ones lay down for the last time. In my family it was my Great-grand Mother that held everyone together. She raised several generations by rubbing to nickels together to make a quarter. She left us almost ten years ago and since then we have lost others as well. But that is life. We come and we go. Some with a bang and others like a whisper.

My uncle is digging a hole in the Smokehouse
where the floor has rotted away.
He says its going to be a cellar, or a basement,
a place to keep things
like broken farm equipment
and pieces of his memory.
He is always starting projects like this now,
since my great-grandmother went on to rest atop the hill.
It is an attempt to keep the hands busy.
At seventy-three, with no one to share a life with,
it is important for the hands to work.
It is important to keep his mind from wandering too far back,
back to a time when she was still here.
Back when all he had to do was chop wood
and make sure the eggs were gathered in time for breakfast.

All the family makes fun of the way he copes with life,
mostly behind his back.
It is therapy, what he is doing.
It is the only kind of therapy we know.

As a blood-rule our family does not express emotions.
We understand all of us have them;
the grief, sense of loss, heartache
and those feelings that are too complex to have a name.

His intentions are honest
though they may not always be practical.
He is thinking,
thinking of ways his hands can work.

The garden is tilled, the seeds are sewn.
Rain has come and washed his work away
as is the nature of rain.
But he will do it all over again tomorrow,
to keep his hands busy and the heartache
at least six feet in the ground.