These, My Dead and Beloved Ancestors

It's the Day of the Dead so I'm thinking about my ancestors (though a few in this picture are still here, most of them have passed through the veil between the living and the dead which is very thin this time of year).

My imagination lives in log cabins in northern woodland and wetland and red pintos with the hatchback raised at flea markets in Florida.  These images come to me through long handwritten, photocopied letters that start: "Dearly Beloved," and through half-heard encounters seen and heard through the register in the floorboards.  

Some of these faces belong to people I never met and most belong to the people that loved me first.  All of them together feel like the best and wildest and most dangerous dream.  

The past is a magnificent wilderness and memory an unfaithful beauty.  Is it just me?  Or do we all love and loathe them in equal measure?  These unsturdy stilts upon which the stage of our lives are built? The creaks in the floorboards of our every step...