Alanna arrived late for dinner last night. There is something of a saga herein.
It begins with my grandfather.
When the Old Man died, for some reason his oldest son, Hughie, Alanna’s father, decided that the thing to do was bring his ashes to Croagh Padraig, the Irish holy mountain, to spread his ashes. Grandpa was not a religious man. Why this was the appropriate thing to do, the family as a whole is not certain. Regardless, that’s what Hughie decided was the thing to do, and so he did it. Alanna went with him.
Croagh Padraig is not, so far as Alaskans are concerned, much of a mountain. It’s some 3,000 feet high, and it’s not like it snows on it or anything. A hundred thirty thousand tourists and pilgrims trek up it yearly, mostly in August. There is something that looks like a trail when you’re going up, but when you’re going down you realize it’s not a trail; it’s an old stream bed, and maybe a goat trail, and the wearing-down of a hundred thousand feet over decades. It is not, however, a real trail. Climbing it is a goodly hike. Hughie, rather like my sister, believed that mountains are for running up and down, so I expect Hughie and Alanna’s trip up the mountain was fairly speedy. Once there, they prepared to spread the Old Man’s ashes.
It was windy atop Croagh Padraig that day, as it usually is on mountaintops. Hughie flung the Old Man out into the wind, and the wind swept him up, gusted him around, and brought him right back into Alanna’s lungs.* To this day, when this topic arises, Alanna peels her lips back from her teeth and makes clicking smacking noises as she tries to get the memory of that flavor out of her mouth and mind.
So that’s our first experience with the spreading of ashes.
Now, Alanna’s mother, Aunt Chris, died about ten years ago. Her children were, understandably, not prepared to do anything withthe ashes immediately after the funeral. They gave them to my mother, who is reliable, and for the last decade or so, Aunt Chris has moved from one house to another, living (for some value of the word) in various closets and garages, waiting for her children to all be in the state at the same time so they could spread her ashes together.
In June, my mother moved to Ireland and bequeathed Aunt Chris to me. She’s been in our coat closet since then. Alanna brought this up Monday night when she dropped by to visit, and it led into a brief, animated discussion about the unusual literalness of skeletons in the closet. Before Alanna left that evening, I gave her her mother’s ashes.
So yesterday, Alanna went out to near Earthquake Park to spread her mother’s ashes, feeling that it was long past time this be done and that it was better to do it and risk her siblings’ wrath than to continue to put it off. (I’m assuming neither of said siblings read my journal, else this is going to come as something of a shock to them.)
It was, as I mentioned, very windy yesterday.
(At this point, I said, “Oh no,” although admittedly with a laugh.)
But Alanna did not inhale Chris. She merely got Chris in her shoes, her shirt, her hair and her eyes, and dumped rather a lot of her on the ground, because, as it turns out, urns are not particularly good things for shaking ashes from, and wind is unreliable stuff. Properly scattering the ashes required a fair bit of scooping handsful of ash up and tossing them into the wind, and prompted quite a lot of consideration as to what a superior method of ash-spreading might be. Alanna theorizes it involves a long-handled scoop and a brick wall between yourself and the other end of the scoop.
But Chris is safely scattered, and that is the story of why Alanna was late to dinner. :)
*I personally believe this is a family tradition that should be carried on. I think being brought up to Croagh Padraig and inhaled sounds like a pretty funny way to finish off my life. :)
Hmm, proper ash-spreader… That proably depends on the appropriate definition of “spread.”
My first two thoughts are a “broadcast spreader” (typically used for lawn care) or perhaps a snow blower.
Be warned that I’m from a part of the world where it doesn’t snow, as a rule, and so I’ve never seen a snow blower in the flesh.
Y’know, reading your family stories I’m not sure if you should have no imagination at all for anything fictional or if the reason your imagination is so expansive is because of how wild your real life gets. In any case, even if you cribbed from real life for every story you ever wrote, there’s enough magic in the way you tell it to make it fantasy anyway.
The idea of snow-blowing ashes is… very funny, Robert. :)
*beams at Crystal* Thank you. Although I must admit I don’t think of my life as being wild at all. *laugh* I guess it sort of sounds that way, though. :) Thank you!