thisnewday

In the basement, folding laundry this morning, I wished for a moment that there was someone I could talk to. Just to say something like, "Hey, I'm getting some stuff done" and, simple as it is, little enough to ask, to know that they would understand. "They," after a moment, becoming my old man. His connection to all those generations of those who labored at simple things in order to keep life going for themselves and their families.

Sometimes when I'm down there, I talk to them. The ones who are dead. Not my own, necessarily, because they're hundreds of miles from here in that rugged little cemetary at McLane, Pennsylvania. But there's a feeling that maybe the ones that I talk to talk to them. Because, I dunno, they share the same strata just below the one where the rest of us still live.

But this morning the thought of it made me tear up, which it usually doesn't, because, like I said, the ones that are here aren't really mine. But there's still that feeling of being part of the same and also that they seem to like it when I come and talk to them. Like someone stopping by when all the doors and windows are closed against the winter and you don't hear the sounds from outside anymore.

Even if it's someone who doesn't have any news, really, who just wanted to stay in touch, to feel assured that, whatever else was happening behind those doors or outside of them, the connection between themselves and those on the other side was nevertheless intact...

LPK
LiveJournal
10.1.2012