And so, I want to make sure that when I'm dead, they know how to make themselves chicken dinners, and so rather than show them "here is Tops, buy a chicken", I overshoot all that and take them to learn how to raise and kill a chicken, just in case....as insane as that is, that's pretty much my mojo laid bare. I often feel as if I'm going to die, and my response is that I better get a lot done. I have always felt that way. Which is why they exist at all. Because I would die soon, so I better get some kids out of me. And now that they're all here, I squeeze them close and want them to know how to build shelter and kill chickens and whatnot for when I (me, being the world of course) am gone and they remain.
And don't forget to remember how fucking beautiful everything is.
And go to college here where I can send you, so at least I will have done that and you'll remember that.
On the way home, we saw this and stopped and I stood in the yard and imagined the chickens and the fruit trees I'd plant. When I was a kid, my grandparents had a cottage. It was sold for them to live on the money in Florida. It has been in my family for about 60 years, maybe longer. I've lived a lot places since, but there has been nowhere so much like homehome as that little shitbox place in Delevan WI, where every spring we'd open it and chase the nesting animals out and live the long summer season amidst the leaf mold smell. I'm starting to have lived just long enough to want to build things that'll be remembered as lifelong for grandchildren not yet born or married into or adopted - all the ones coming, hopefully, down the lines. Even if I'm not around, their parents could take them to "the house in the 'dacks", and then later when the grandchildren in their turn fell in love and lost their minds and got fired or in other ways inevitably lived and failed, they could go there and find some peace where the dishes were always those same old ones migrated there from everyone's kitchen upgrades over the years and years and years.
