ScarecrowFather

He’d sit with me on the porch early fall days because I made him. Not made as in compelled him to. Rather, I created him, stuffed the straw bone of him into a wide flannel shirt and smooth, sky-blue jeans. I created the scarecrow, but he was my father. I could tell by our pumpkin face and the soft, glove-skinned hands and the silence others mistook for dumbness. It was an anxious silence in me, but it made my scarecrow father look wise, methodic. I don’t remember what happened to him or why I only think of him on such blustery days. Did he fly to pieces in a cold storm or gradually sink into ground? When I come undone, may it be in a great wind. May my children gather me in their hands.