Scheherazade – IX — Ephemera

A vast outer space of feeling, the vacuum of gain and loss, the breathtaking cosmos of memory and all of its twinkling stars of ephemera.

There’s a photograph of me that week I spent in the Maine house dividing up the family photos into two piles, a week spent working my way through our vast collection, trying to be fair in my brother’s absence, to be a good umpire, an honest judge, a wise Solomon splitting our pictorial inheritance down the middle, one nice picture for this pile, one nice picture for that pile.

After a few years of worrying about it at 3AM I finally got myself out to the East Coast to split everything up – like Voldemort distributing his soul into horcruxes, backing everything up for the Apocalypse. My thinking on the split was that there’s no way both our houses are going to burn down the same day and, counting on the reasonable interval between inevitable disasters, my brother and I could always just keep dividing and photocopying what we’ve got, cutting our past lives in half and letting the memories grow back like cemetery earthworms.

This nightmare of a New England barn fire consuming our family pho…