Shadwwulf at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, is really not much help to the keeper as he—the keeper, works at divesting himself of the items from his long “collector” life by passing off the treasures/junk to his heirs: Which one, for example, gets the skeleton deer skulls from his office wall, and who can use the antique sheep shearing tool or the wire chicken catcher or the caponizing tool or the half dozen old books about outhouses?
The keeper is reminded that divestiture is a generational thing as he recalls how his father endured the obvious emotional pain of parting with his beloved team of work horses when the time came, and was then left with a set of horse harnesses which Dad carefully oiled and hung in a shed until such time as they might be passed on to one of his heirs.
Since neither the keeper nor his sister or brother had work horses in their lives when distribution of Dad’s “treasures” was called for years later, the harnesses, by then a mass of useless dried leather, went out with the trash.
There is a painful verity that the keeper refuses to acknowledge: He simply cannot believe that the symbolic items from his many years will end up on the junk pile, or that he himself—by dint of life’s ultimate divestiture, faces the same destiny.
Carpe diem!
