The Outhouse

I need to go to the outhouse.

Put on your shoes, it's raining.

The girl, a skinny ten year old country girl, slipped on a pair of hand me down shoes, and left through the side door, the door from the kitchen to the yard and the stable of the old farm. She covered the thirty or so yards to the outhouse running and - as children often do - ducking in the rain, as if ducking will somehow get you less wet.

There was no electricity in the outhouse, so she left the door slightly ajar to get some of the moonlight to illuminate the stack of torn up newspapers recycled as toilet paper.

She heard the low familiar hum above in the dark.

The next thing she heard was the voice of a stranger: She is waking up.

At least that's what she remembered of the night in the Fall of 1944.

The night that put her into a wheelchair for the rest of her life, both legs gone from about one third of the thighs down.

The doctors in the small town hospital where they took her, really not expecting to see her live, had managed to save her at the cost of cutting off the mangled legs. The Catholic sisters who ran the hospital said something about prayers answered, talked about her being a child one moment and waking up as an adult.

She was there as the lives of her siblings unfolded, as they finished school, got married, as some moved away. She was extremely nice to the children of her siblings when they were introduced to her for the first time, standing by the wheelchair, wondering.

She died several years ago.

Why remember her now?

Maybe because it is Fall, the nights are getting awfully long up here at 50+ degrees north. They are the kind of nights on which news reports about bombs and bullets killing children in countries around the world may seem more immediate and significant.

Why her story and not any other? From a more recent war, from a bombed school, from....?

A bomb left over from a bombing run, dropped on what was the way home for the planes.

On an outhouse.

I think, I may have seen a hint of the mischievous ten year old in the eyes of the old woman in the wheelchair.

Or it may have been my imagination running wild.

The Day of the Dead is coming up. 

This atheist will raucously celebrate Halloween and silently commemorate the dead.