The Monkey House

 I fear that I've become addicted to browsing houses on the internet.  To the point that I get daily emails from one of the realty sites.  

In a perfect world, there is a town in the deep, deep south -that you may know from television, the only reason I know it - where we could sell everything and live like KINGS.  We would only have to trade our state with all of the safety nets to the state that is in the lowest rankings for everything. But I could have a pool.

I think I mentioned that as I've been browsing, I've thought "Oh, I've been in that house before" or "I've always wondered what that looked like inside"  I found the tilt-shift version of my own house.  I've seen childhood homes of friends/neighbors.  It's been a ride, for sure.

Today I looked at the email as I always do.  There was a house for sale out by my parents' old house.  Out of curiosity, I clicked through to see which house it was.  

It was the Monkey House.

Again, you shouldn't know what that is.  As a child, there was a house across the lake from my parent's house that had a monkey for a PET.  It had an enclosure on the deck so with binoculars you could sometimes see it in the enclosure. 

I don't know what happened to the monkey and I've no one to ask now.  But it was funny/weird to click on the photo and just know that it was the monkey house.  I kind of want to email the realtor and say "Did you know that there used to be a monkey living at that house?"  But I don't have any details beyond that and imagine getting that call.  It wouldn't come off as crazy At All.

Edith

 TW: child death

Remember when we went to the cemetery on Father's Day and we ended up cleaning a few graves?  Kevin asked me to clean off the one next to his brother because it clearly hadn't been attended in quite a while...

I wanted to look her up but promptly forgot her surname.  Because it was bothering me, I went back to look today.  Then I came home and did some research on ancestry.

Edith Leonora Wolf.  She was only 7 mos. old and it looks like she was a SIDS death. (I will not go into the details from the death certificate)   She had a brother and a sister, one before and one after. Leonora was her mother's middle name.

Odd thing is about 10 years later, my father-in-law's parents lived a few blocks down from this family's house on the same street.

Then I discovered that the baby on the other side of Kevin's brother is a distant cousin; the niece of Kevin's uncle  (married to my father-in-law's sister) Second cousin? I think, if I understood it correctly.  They have a distinctive last name so it caught my eye immediately.  

The plan is when I/we go back up to the cemetery, we will take time to - at the very least - brush and rinse off the markers in his section.  It was originally called Babyland and now is The Angel Garden. As heartbreaking as Babyland is, I think I prefer it.

It looks like most of the markers are older so other children must be in the regular sections of the cemetery.  I feel compelled to take care of those more than any others, for some reason.  Most of the markers look like Edith's.  It's metal and social media has entire pages of symbolism of markers. Lambs usually indicate babies.

  Those pages also have directions of how to properly clean markers.  I think I'm going to stick with brushes and water for now.  I already felt the ocd start to creep in when I spent some time brushing off other markers when I went this time.

Anyway, now we know who she is and who Thomas's neighbors are.  Apt examples of small towns and rural counties.

(I swear I will have happier topics soon)

July