Friday, June 23, 2006

Family Secrets 

It rained earlier, and it's getting dark. The roads teem with toads washed from flooded lairs; it's like a horror movie, almost, and they're unavoidable. Back home, the summer's first fireflies have begun their nightly flit and flicker.

I'm on my way back from a quaint town in Connecticut, all tobacco farms and rustic clapboard malls that spell their name with extra letters just to fit in. My mother's sister lives there, just an hour fifteen as the crow flies; it seemed so close, I felt bad sending Aunt Lil down on the bus.

I stayed a half hour, maybe. Was polite, talked teacher's unions, grandchildren and weather, drank rapidly a glass of water. Things were just starting to get comfortable after years without contact when I made my excuses.

So much unbloggable in the last few days. Sometimes, I wish I didn't know so much about other people's secrets. It would make blogging easier, anyway.

It was a hundred times more lonely coming back without Lil in the car.

But those who hope to keep their friends and relatives close must cultivate trust. It seems loneliness and silence are the sun and soil of any good blogger who hopes to keep his family secrets. And thus we give our selves family, though it costs us our diaries, leaves us only poetry, and the facts of the matter.

Round the corners, then, and around the dark roads with the brights on. Light tunnels into fog, the recursive world comes at you out of the darkness, and you deal with it as it comes, just to survive.

posted by boyhowdy | 9:20 PM |

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