Memorial

Memorial Day has come and gone, but I wanted to put up some pictures from the weekend before it was too much gone. I spent the four-day weekend with my brother Michael and his family at the summerhouse near Ocean City. We saw horseshoe crabs along the Delaware Bay, we looked up at kites whipping above the Wildwood boardwalk. We went to Revel. I started a new story, while Michael and my niece kayaked yards away from me in the lagoon. But maybe the most memorable part of the holiday was the most traumatic. We were in the house for all of two minutes when we saw three squirrels, dead obviously, on the living room floor. They looked so placid as to be dog toys. Later, Tillie, my brother's dog, would help to find the opening where they chewed through the drywall into the bedroom, but days later I'm still thinking about our reactions. Michael and Sandy started cleaning, with drawn faces; I wondered whether we should pray for the squirrels so that their confusion and suffering would not harm the mood of the house (this elicited eye rolls); Jordan started laughing and turning her horror into a kind a song. Later, she would go to You Tube and laugh at videos of dead squirrels as a way to deal. My guess is that she felt it more than any of us. But she wasn't afraid to stay in the house, while the adults went out for Thai food, nervously bringing up squirrels every so often at the dinner table, so as not to keep them buried down deep in our psyches.