God?

talked to my mother earlier this evening and asked how the ash scattering went. she said it was surprisingly upbeat, uplifting even. they all walked down to the creek where the big oak tree stands. everybody took turns and scattered a little bit of the ash. then they all joined hands and said a prayer. his name was morgan, the man who died. i've talked about his son, clay, a couple of times on here: he's the one who drank himself to death on the same farm last year when he was 39. they cremated him, too. it took the almost a year to scatter his ashes. all that time they kept the ashes in a box in the closet. his brother used to take the box out of the closet and say "think fast!" and toss it to his sister. she'd catch it because she felt she had to and then berate him for doing something so terrible. my mother seemed to be fascinated with morgan's ashes. they aren't like cigarette ashes - human ashes are heavy and gritty. maybe it comes from being distilled down to all of the minerals in your body - especially calcium. they want to put a plaque up for morgan down on the farm. in the farmhouse, i guess. i think it would be cool to put it on the oak tree. (it's a big tree, wide as a garage door.) in "as you like it," orlando would write poems to rosalind and hang them on the trees: O Rosalind! these trees shall be my books And in their barks my thoughts I'll character; That every eye which in this forest looks Shall see thy virtue witness'd every where. i still think it'd be better than a rock. lined up in a neat little line with the all the other rocks in their little fenced-in colony of the dead.