Another brief installation from "Under One Roof." His mother has passed away and Worth has returned to the family home (arriving in the middle of the night). He is just coming downstairs in the morning to see his siblings for the first time in a while, surreptitiously observing them from the next room:

I lurk there in the dining room and regard my siblings with the remove of a museum curator mulling over a diorama of a threatened tribe of Amazonian Indians. I enjoy watching them from here in the shadows, picture framed, as they are, by the pass-through casing, a motley suburban tableau. I love these bewildering creatures – more than I can possibly say – and this is why I hesitate. Their existence in this familiar, and comforting, habitat appears ridiculously fragile and I fear my arrival will only serve to stir up the pot, churning the harsh sediment of grief back up to the surface.

So I study them instead. 

I have a keen eye, honed by many years of scrutinizing trivial architectural details, so I’ve noticed certain things about them, things that they probably don’t even know about themselves. I know that Mason, whenever he’s bewildered, sticks both his hands deep into his front pants pockets as if searching for the answer inside, squinting his eyes and jingling coins and other pocket debris. I know that whenever Jules steps outside into the open air, she always looks straight up into the sky for a few seconds, as if anticipating the return of the Mother Ship. Bridge, who was struck by a car as a teenager and has endured a lifetime of agonizing surgeries, never crosses a street (or a driveway, for that matter) without checking three times in each direction in rapid, alternating succession. And I know that Had, before he puts his shoes on, reflexively taps them together and shakes them out up-side-down, because when he was eight a bee wandered into his sneaker and stung him on the sole of his foot. Such are my lifelong gleanings of the idiosyncratic nature of my tribe. What good this monitoring does me in my own critical self-evaluation I can’t say, for I believe I know much more about them than I do about myself. I’m chock-full of trivial snap shots and arcane observations, but I fear I’m bereft of any genuine insight. My camera only faces in one direction – outward.

Random Picture Alert: Terri, Jill, Patrick, Erin and Sam from our Going Away Party shortly before moving from Chicago to Oregon (Hi Jill -- great to hear from you!)