I dug through the garage. Found rusty tools and kitchen items I’d never seen before. 40 years old, at least, does this cut dough to make pasta? What is this weird fork thing poking out in all directions. Cigar boxes with old fuses. Fruit cake tins full of nails. An old scale crying rust. I hope the push mower works, but I’ve been told the blade isn’t sharp.
I dug into the yard, years of overgrowth and needle sharp bushes. This place is already inside me. It’s pricked its plant green blood and transfered it over.
I unearthed a farm of rolly-pollies, the ground moved, their little legs spinning. I gave the bushes a bad hair cut like a mother. it will grow back.
“Look at us,” Pat said as he hung the hammock, power tools in his hands. “We’re doing stuff!”
A wounded grackle sat in the grass next to me. Blinking. A few flies landed on his body, but they were too early. And as pat picked him up with his new yard gloves, the bird gasped for air, but couldn’t move. He let Pat take him wherever he was to go and shooed the flies away.
He died that night in a blue spruce in private. We can’t control the ways of the world, who lives and who dies, but we can make them comfortable and we can be kind.
Our house is alive and breathing.
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