Your Uncle Paul and Aunt Beth stayed Labor Day Weekend. They drove through fire to get here. There's video.
Your dad is always pleased when they leave. Not because your uncle and aunt are poor houseguests. But because your dad relishes the post-visit, sweeping through the house after the door has been shut and bolted once again out of earshot, replacing so many books on the dust-welcoming shelves, books that were referenced for ideas, books scanned for inspiration, books set aside for a lack of time or a predilection against spoiling too much. He slides books back into their columnar alcoves, extracting Post-It notes moonlighting as bookmarks, rejoining books with peers in memoir or historical, fiction or non-. Should books not be helter skelter after a visit, your dad would grow suspicious and not a little melancholy.
The four of them -- your uncle, aunt, dad, and mom -- climbed Roxy Ann's conical waistline, shoulders, and neck. The views are best at her equator, the trees sparse, the fisheye-lensed horizon a tear of Cascade hills in a scale of blues. The peak thrust up a radio tower and a concrete shelter proclaiming "Kurt + Amy" in yellowed letters, encircled with an oblong heart. A small, spraypainted "81" served as carbon dating. After the downhill climb, there was a little blood. Your mom and dad prayed. And you are still here.
That evening, warming their hands with hot chocolate, they watched Shakespeare's take on the swarthy, volatile Henry VIII. They clapped when the pageboy raised the green history flag, then raised his index and pinky finger in a "rock on" salute. They clapped when Queen Catherine thwarted the mumbling clergymen. They clapped -- they should've clapped more -- for the perfectly understated performance of a crestfallen Cardinal Wolsey. They left the theater, eyebrows knitted, reconciling Henry VIII's disappointment in having a female heir ... against her grandiose baptism in a Catholic church.
