The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My brother and I are about to make a long road trip back to Northern Maine where our family is from up next to the Canadian border. We’ll have our parents’ ashes in a couple of matching urns which we’ll have interred in the graveyard a block away from where our Old Man was born, not exactly a homecoming but a full circle nevertheless. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, clichéd or not. Our mother’s family graveyard is 7 miles north up Highway 1, not more than a quarter mile from where she was born at the farm nearby. She died a few years ago and the Old Man died a month ago. Time to make the journey back, I guess.

Those cemeteries go back to the early 1800’s. A lot of relatives buried there the past few centuries, two more on the way, but I doubt my brother and I will be buying plots for ourselves. Don’t think because we’re burying our parents back there we have plans to join them. Or the rest of the clan. We’re just honoring their wishes. I suppose the only requiem, the only memorial, if we can call it either, will be a weeklong reminiscence between just the two of us.

After Dad died, folks asked if I was okay. Sure, I said, the man was 100 years old, had a good life, survived World War Two, had a very successful career in the Forest Service, lived alone until a couple of years ago and still drove, still cooked for himself, wasn’t in any pain at the end, died in his sleep, an easy exit. What, I should want him to last a few more years, become a vegetable? He got to die with dignity, nothing to be sad about. We should all be so lucky…. Our mother, not so much. And still, not that bad either.

There was a poet, a guy named Bly back in Minnesota, who started some drug circle thing, men getting in touch with their inner selves, who claimed a man could never truly be a man until his father died. What a cart of horseshit! My brother and I took weeks off most years to boat down the Mississippi in houseboats, up the Suwanee and St. John’s Rivers in Florida, into Canada for fishing trip, camping up the eastern seaboard, listening to the Old Man’s life. We’d let him skipper the boats, sometimes to our peril. Great trips. All of them. We’ll take one last one together. Coming home it’ll be just us boys.

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