The front of my house

This guy showed up on top of our mailbox a day or so ago. In all likelihood, some neighborhood kid dropped it in front of our house and someone else, assuming it belonged to this household, put it on top of our mailbox so that the owners could reclaim it.

I’m opting to believe something less likely. I can choose to believe that someone out there knew of Colin’s brief obsession – none of his obsessions really got to play out, to be honest – with “Ninjago.” If I’m not very much mistaken, these are the bad guys from season 1, the snakes. It was one of the few shows Colin would watch happily during the two months he was at home on the feeding tube, which was critical, since we had to more or less immobilize him in front of the TV while the food was going in. In one of those “I can’t believe this is a problem moments,” he first became obsessed with season 1 and then with only a few select episodes of that season, leaving me there to watch with him, wishing – on top of my wishes that the cancer would go away or that the nursing company would turn competent – that we could just get to season 2 so I could see how the story went on, or at least see a new episode, with new material and jokes, as repetitive as they might be from episode to episode and season to season.

Suffice to say, I got to know the snakes very well. But, since we watched most of season 1 out of order, it took a very long time until I sorted out why there were so many different ones, which was the real problem, why some of them had legs, etc. etc. It was a way to pass the time during those two months of worrying, not eating and wondering if he was really going to die.

And then one of the snakes appears on our mailbox and, why not let it be a kind memory of someone thinking about Colin? Why let it be as mundane as a dropped toy?

For a year and a half now, I’ve sat in this den facing the street, doing my day job while we all wonder when we’re ever going to get back to the office regularly. I must admit, my goal is to never go to the office, but that’s a different story. And I sit here, looking out onto the street and have become pretty familiar with which neighbors jog and which neighbors walk dogs and which kids come by regularly and even which one has a unicycle. I’ve noticed of late that people seem to be stopping in front of the house and pointing. Christina will probably obsess that our front yard is so ugly it’s making people stop and point, but I would submit there’s at least one yard on our street uglier, so I don’t think that’s it. What it is, I have no idea. A part of me fears that it’s children and parents stopping to point at the house of the dead child. More than once I’ve thought about popping out front and just asking “What are you talking about? What is so interesting that you’re stopping and pointing?”

I don’t really believe they’re talking about Colin. Just like I don’t really believe some kid sacrificed his Lego toy as a memorial to Colin. But I also don’t mind a world where people offer up a toy to remember Colin every now and then. It might be the best version of the world I can summon up these days.