Timber!

Every Memorial Day when I was young, McMumsy would bundle us all up in the car for the visiting of our own War Dead: all the Mcs who'd come before. The Irish side of my family has been in this country since at least the 1730’s, living in pretty much the same area, so there’s lots and lots of dead people. Lonely dead people, apparently. We brought some of them pots of geraniums. I felt bad for the ones that didn't get any so I'd pick the lilies of the valley that grew along the hill where all the poor people we buried and lay them on their headstones.

There were stories, passed on through the women in the family, of many of the dead. Like the ancestor who fell down the stairs in front of his house and died a short time later. Or the cousin who passed away as a tiny baby, long before I was born.

Or the one who died from wounds sustained after he chopped himself out of a tree. I do believe this was four generations prior, and it’s someone I am unfortunately directly descended from. One of my first cousins once removed actually lives in the house he did. The story goes that one sunny afternoon he was fixin’ to do some yardwork. He saw a branch in a big old tree that needed to come down. So he climbed up the tree and shimmied out on the branch and took out his saw and set to work.

Naturally he was sawing between himself and the tree’s trunk and before he knew it—WHAM!—the limb fell to the ground and so did he. He broke his leg. His wife was so pissed at him that she refused to take him to the doctor and he eventually went to the big elm tree in the sky.

Good times, good times.