Memento mori

Last week there was a sale at Opportunity (or Oppity-Tunery, as Henry says, which sounds straight out of Mary Poppins) House: Knick-knacks half price. I went off the rails and bought four little English cottages, 25 cents apiece. They are rather crude tourist items that pander to the most spoony Anglophilia and I am absurdly pleased with them. I put them on my dresser along with my perfume, the Korean marital ducks from Tommy, the Wandering Turtles from Carol commemorating the births of Henry and James, and the Bad Thoughts Monster Susan made me. (Because I believe a high dresser is a most important platform for maternal juju.)

This morning, Henry begged me to honor my promise to test them for lead ( and that's a whole other story) so that he could play with them. I did, and they passed, so I gave them to him to play with, carefully. He got in the crib, to protect himself from James's incursions, and laid them out this way and that, chattering.
"Here are the houses," he said. "By the cemetery."
They do look like houses that would sit by an age-old, elm-spread cemetery, but surely Henry doesn't have these associations?
"By the cemetery?" I asked.
"What is a cemetery, mama?"
"Oh, it's a place where people's bodies go after they die so the people who love them can go and be near them."
Henry began to look worried. "And then they get up?"
"Well, no, when people die they don't get up again."
Worry, worry, worry. And then he said, "But isn't Daddy old? My Dada?"
"Oh no, sweetheart, Daddy just likes to say he's an old man, when he's feeling tired, but he isn't at all. He's not old."
Which seemed to do the trick, for now.

They aren't just houses, they're finger puffets.